Recruiting Animal

Myth of US Decline

From: Myth of Decline, Danny Gross, Newsweek, Apr 30, 2012 (edited)

In the fall of 2008, the US suffered its deepest longest economic contraction in 80 years. Its markets were cut in half.

The numbers: Annual deficits over $1 trillion, 8.75 million jobs lost, $4-per-gallon gasoline.

Declinism quickly emerged as the chic intellectual pose.

All agreed that the U.S. had a very slim hope of recovering from  self-inflicted blows.

In fact, March 2009 marked the beginning of a recovery.

Pick Your Market Wisely

From: GlobalPost - Google scared this 27-year-old entrepreneur - Matt Lynley March 28, 2012 (edited)

Aaron Lavie, CEO of Box:

In 2004, there were no adequate sharing and storage solutions on the web.

That's why we started Box. It was meant for all use cases and completely all purpose.

It was meant to serve everything from a student to a consumer and for enterprise. We launched the company, we started to get traction.

And then the industry and the market changed.

Rumours of Google Drive started to pop up. It had just been rumored but we realized that these bigger companies could subsidize online storage for consumers to the point it would be free.

That makes sense. If Apple is selling devices, having information stored online makes it easier to sell devices to access it.

With all this competition in the consumer space, it was going to be too difficult for us to differentiate.

But in the enterprise space, competition and customers are sort of defined a little more differently.

There is a much deeper value for innovative solutions, a much larger budget for innovative solutions.

Enterprises want more agnostic systems that work across all platforms and we frankly thought we could build a better collaboration and content management offering.

So we decided to focus our entire company, all our marketing and sales, on the enterprise space.

Even if Google hadn't been getting into online storage, we would have gone into enterprise around the same time anyway.

The market sizes are dramatically different, consumers spend a fraction of a fraction of enterprise spending on software.

If you think about the spend difference and the size of market difference, then enterprise is a really attractive market.

 

Big Box Stores Kaput

Source: Big-box retail in mid-life crisis, National Post, March 31, 2012

Best Buy is closing 50 big stores and opening 100 smaller stores.

Meaning: the era of big-box retail dominance is coming to an end. Here's why:

1. Boomers no longer have kids at home - don't need to stock up on food and packaged goods.

Their kids are marrying later and delaying having their own children.

Meaning: fewer are buying houses that need to be updated and furnished.

2. Shoppers are buying online.

Amazon.com is grabbing market share from Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target.

 

New Era In Oil Coming

From: A world awash in Oil - Lawrence Solomon, National Post (edited)

The Middle East will attract scant attention in the future because the rest of the world will also be awash in oil.

Until recently, many thought the West was running out of gas. Then new technologies emerged to extract gas from shale and other rock formations.

Thanks to fracking, the US has become the world's largest producer of natural gas, creating a massive glut that has more than halved the price of natural gas.

The oil story is following a script. The US has the world's largest store of shale oil and it will soon be self-sufficient in oil.

Although shale oil technology is still in its infancy, much of the US shale oil can be developed inexpensively.

Israel has 250-billion barrels in one basin near Jerusalem alone. This is an amount comparable to Saudi Arabia's reserves. It expects to develop its oil at a cost of US$35 to US$40 per barrel.

Should the world price of oil drop to this level today's Middle East energy exporters will have been bankrupted and their autocrats ousted.

 

Fracking Will Change World Economy

From: The Financial Post - Vladimir the Great by Lawrence Solomon (edited)

Until recently, the US was the world’s largest importer of natural gas.

It is now becoming a major natural gas exporter, thanks to new gas fracking technology that has unearthed vast new supplies.

The US remains the world’s largest importer of oil.

It may soon become an exporter of oil, thanks to oil fracking technology that could make the U.S. the world’s largest oil producer.

China, now a major importer of oil and gas, has the world’s second largest known potential for frackable hydrocarbons, which it is now developing.

Poland, Ukraine and Great Britain also have vast reserves of frackable hydrocarbons.

This will give Europe self sufficiency in energy.

Also, European countries on the Mediterranean have only begun to exploit the vast deposits of conventional oil and gas that lie beneath the sea bed.

These immense new sources of oil and gas would flood international markets as would major new finds of conventional oil and gas in Africa and South America.

 

Sports Teams Depend on Talented Individuals

Source: Simon Barnes, Times Online. (edited)

When a real empire declines, historians look for sweeping, unstoppable trends that changed things forever.

But when a sporting empire falls the reasons are much simpler.

Australian cricket has not slumped because the system failed. Australia failed because two of the finest cricketers that ever drew breath have retired.

The problem is not about systems, it is about people. The problem is that extreme talent is very, very rare in any walk of life.

Australia has for years had a considerable number of very fine players. But in Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne they had the difference between very good and absolutely remarkable.

That’s why the decline began with their retirement. For that matter, the turning point of the Ashes series of 2005 came when McGrath turned his ankle on a stray cricket ball while sodding about playing rugby before the second Test: for want of a man to do the tidying up, the series was lost.

That’s what happens. Time after time, in sport after sport, when empires decline and fall, it generally comes down not to larger trends, but to the loss of exceptional individuals.

It also suggests that in team sports, truly exceptional players make all the other players perform better.

This is not due only to their moral example and inspirational powers but because genuinely remarkable players create the time and space in which others can also excel.

The ultimate achievement in team sport is to create a dynasty. That's why every great team must look not only for excellence but for succession.

Pleasing the Market

If Jerry Seinfeld tries every joke in his repertoire and the audience doesn’t laugh, is it Seinfeld’s fault?

-- 24 Hours Vancouver.

Asymmetric Parterships

Does a non creative partner earn his keep?.

In the Southpark's head office, the less creative partner plays an important role. Trey Parker writes most of the South Park episodes and does most of the voices. But Matt Stone gets equal billing as an executive producer. Is it unfair? Apparently not. The episodes have to be written quickly so Parker doesn't have time for anything else. Stone coordinates the elements of production to make sure the episodes are delivered on time and under budget.

He also handles the people side of the business. Parker is anti-social, deliberately irritating and provocative and can't manage conflict well. So, Stone handles battles over censorship and the media.

Seinfeld played the same role in his partnership with cranky Larry David. Apparently, this kind of parent-child partnership is fairly common and rewarding.

Foresight Is Difficult

Guy Kawasaki says it is impossible to have seen that Facebook, Google or Yahoo would have been good investments. -- Source: Jeremiah Owyang

One of his first assignments in his first job out of business school was to go to Seattle, take a peek at some java joints, and suggest whether his company should be involved in Starbucks’s 1992 initial public offering.

My friend duly entered a Starbucks and felt as if he were in a kind of weird living room where hippies who’d suddenly made money had bought too much furniture or something. “I didn’t like the look of the place,” he told me, “and I didn’t like the look of the people hanging around in there, and I bought a cup of coffee — which was $1.60, and that galled me — and I didn’t like the coffee.”

A McDonald’s was down the street. My friend bought a coffee there for 25 cents. “Then,” he said, “I went back to the Starbucks and sat down with the two paper cups. The McDonald’s coffee was better. I wrote a memo: ‘This will never fly.’”

PJ O'Rourke, NYT

Divide and Conquer

Make nice with some enemies to destroy others.

A number of popular books try to apply the strategies of war to business. So why not learn something from Mao? Here's a start. This week, a representative of the Maoist party of Nepal spoke frankly about the strategy of his party which recently agreed to lay down its arms and participate in a democratic parliament.

He stated quite openly that the decision to participate in the parliamentary process was not an abandonment of the 'armed struggle', but the opening up of a new front.

He admitted (or rather boasted) that the aim of parliamentary participation was to sow chaos and division. He then outlined some bills his party had introduced for the purely strategic reason of dividing the other parties.

He claimed that a revolution requires a "dynamic situation" which presents opportunities to exploit in furtherance of the revolution, and that negotiations and compromise cause the opposite effect.

He kept repeating like a mad mantra "the enemy of your enemy is your temporary friend".

Source: Harry's Place (the quotation has been edited)

I guess what intrigues me about this is that an enemy can pledge himself to reconciliation when, in fact, this is merely part of a strategic policy to divide and conquer. You join a community only to divide it and in doing so reduce your enemies to a size you can more easily destroy.