Category Archives: Management

All the talk of Carly

Posted on by under Management

Can we all agree on a few of things:

1. There was alot of talk when Carly Fiorina took over HP. She was the first women to take over a company of that size and HP was the first tech company. It was a first and firsts are always big.

2. The board brought her in because they thought things had to change. The way HP was working was perceived not to be working. The Compaq deal was the change she thought needs to take place. Lots of people disagreed, but she got the deal done. I think you can judge her performance after being there four years.

3. Her firing is as big as her hiring. This was a matter of time. She didn’t fit with The HP Way. She didn’t seem to get it. Again there is going to be lots of talk. The stories were already written. She was helping write some of them. I mean look at Fortune last week.

When I think open source business…

Posted on by under Management, Open Source

When I think of transparency and operating as an open source business, I think of what BzzAgent is doing with their blog.

The latest example is the post asking where they ask their stakeholders “Who Would You Hire?” They provided descriptions of the two finalists’ backgrounds and looked to readers for their feedback. This week Bzzagent announced the person they hired and gave reasons for the decision.

Back in May, they shared an internal memo that included their cash burn rate and plans for obtaining additional capital.

I think what they are doing is bold.

Beer.

Posted on by under Management, Personal

When I am offered a “cocktail”, beer is my drink of choice. I came of age during the microbrew renaissance. I was drawn into the newness and the variety craft brews offered. When I visit a city, I always find the microbrewery/restaurant. Almost without exception, you find great beer and really good food. When I was in San Francisco at BlogOn, I visited three such establishments.

I have taken my interest to the next level and started doing some homebrewing. For those who haven’t, it is easy to do. You can be brewing with a $50 investment in equipment. The ingredients for a 5 gallon batch (~50 bottles) cost about $25. It takes six to eight weeks from start to drink. I just started drinking my second batch and it has turned out really good. My two recommendations are (1) buying a copy of Homebrewing for Dummies and (2) visiting the website of Midwest Homebrewing Supplies.

This whole entry was inspired by two beer business articles I ran across on Friday. The first was in the October 18th edition of Fortune. The New King of Beers is a profile of Europe’s InBev. You may not have heard of the company, but you definitely know their brands – Bass, Beck’s, Labatt’s, Rolling Rock, Skol, and Stella Artois. The surprise for me was that they are the world’s largest beer producer (161 million barrels to No. 2 Anheuser-Busch’s 130 million). AB usually gets the nod as the world’s biggest, because their revenues are larger ($13.8 billion to InBev’s $11.3 billion).

The second article was a book excerpt that I found in the Wall Street Journal [sub. needed]. The book is called Travels with Barley: A Journey through Beer Culture in America by Ken Wells (Free Press, Oct. 2004). I liked his stories of visiting Memphis to find out what Elvis drank and visiting Woody’s, “an extremely famous beer joint in the town of Caruthersville [Missouri]. The main reason it was famous…was that Woody’s had a firm policy of not serving beer in bottles because bottles, well, are just too hard on the human head.” I have added this one to my Christmas list.

Trump Math

Posted on by under Management

The WSJ reports today that reality show use to be the cheap way to program a network. That is changing quickly.

Before Donald Trump agreed to tape a second season of his hit reality show “The Apprentice,” he says he told NBC he’d need a few things. More creative control would be nice, and perhaps flashier living quarters for the contestants. And how about a personal publicist?

Then Mr. Trump took out his calculator. NBC paid him about $50,000 an episode the first season. But with his show winning huge ratings, Mr. Trump wanted a fat raise. He heard the six actors on the hit comedy “Friends” each took home about $1.5 million an episode so, as the sole star of “The Apprentice,” he figured he should get $9 million per show. Still, his program ran an hour and “Friends” just 30 minutes. Mr. Trump bumped the figure to $18 million. “That seemed fair,” he says in an interview. “I’m not being totally facetious.”

I think the lesson here is know what you are worth.

Kindred Spirits

Posted on by under Management, Marketing

I haven’t done a post lately on new blogs I am reading. If you read the biz blogs, you have probably already since these. I have linked to many of them over the past couple of months.

There is another reason I am listing them. RSS is going to make blogrolls less revalant . People reading your feed aren’t going to see who else you like. I am trying one solution today – post an entry with your new links.

With further ado:

There are more I want to share. I’ll put another post up later in the week.

Bob Wright in Fortune

Posted on by under Management

Bob Wright has taken NBC from a single public network to a media powerhouse. In the last issue of Fortune (5/31/04), they showed a graph showing how ad-based revenues will go from 95% to 50% with the Vivendi Universal merger.

In this issue (6/14/04), there is a Q&A with the GE vice-chairman. Most of the questions are about how hard life is going with [insert VU merger, endings of Friends/Fraiser, cost of Law & Order]. The only two questions that told you anything were:

Q:Is there one non-NBC show you wish you had?
A: 24

Q:Did you learn anything from the Donald by watching NBC’s hit The Apprentice?
A:[Laughs]It reinforced my view that you should be confident and be bold.

Karaoke Capitalism II

Posted on by under Management

I have talked about Swedish authors Jonas Ridderstrle and Kjell Nordstrm a number of times, (here, here, and here). They wrote Funky Business and more recently Karaoke Capitalism.

I still get search hits for Karaoke Capitalism. I wanted to let you know that you can get the new book at 800-CEO-READ. I talked about it on their blog early this week.

Updating Your Values

Posted on by under Management

I wrote about Jack Welch’s editorial in the 1/23/04 edition of WSJ. The values Jack always pushed were the 4 E’s – energy, energize, edge, and execute.

The annual report for General Electric came out last week. In the Letter to Stakeholders, Jeff Immelt announced a reshaping of the company’s values around four actions – Imagine, Solve, Build, and Lead.

From the report:

Imagine at GE is the freedom to dream and the power to make it real. This requires the values of passion and curiosity. Solve reflects GE’s unique ability to tackle the world’s toughest problems and expresses our values of resourcefulness and accountability. Build requires a preformance culture that creates customer and shareowner value, and the word captures our values of teamwork and commitment. Lead reflects our spirit of optimism that embraces change, and our values of openness and energy; what it will take to win.

It mentioned in the letter that executive development classes suggested the change to “capture the spirit of GE as a growth company”.

What do you think of GE’s reformulated values?