Google Book Search sells books

Boing Boing: Google Book Search sells books:

Publishers attending the Frankfurt Book Fair this week have gone on record thanking Google for its controversial Google Book Search program, which makes searachable indices of millions of books available online. They say that making their books visible to Internet users searching for answers converts these searchers into customers. They also say that Amazon's likewise controversial Look Inside program has been good for sales (duh -- Amazon isn't interested in programs that reduce sales of books).

'Google Book Search has helped us turn searchers into consumers,' said Colleen Scollans, the director of online sales for Oxford University Press...

'When we looked at the first six months of stats, we saw that 30 percent of Google Book Search clicks went directly to our site, while roughly 40 percent went to Amazon,' said William Shepherd, Osprey's managing director.

'Our sales through the Web are steadily increasing in proportion to our total sales, and we're confident that Google Book Search will accelerate this growth.'

Walter de Gruyter/Mouton-De Gruyter, a German publisher, said its encyclopaedia of fairy tales has been viewed 471 times since appearing in the program, with 44 percent of them clicking on the 'buy this book' Google link.

One of its many scientific titles, 'Principles of Visual Anthropology', has seen about one-quarter of the 1,206 views click on 'buy this book'.

Link"

Time zone is a competitive advantage

In article about Chicago, and the role of 24 hour derivative exchange and the wealth it has brought to the city, this paragraph caught my eye..

The two executives’ travel plans in September reflect how the introspection has been reversed to leverage the demands for 24-hour global trading, using Chicago’s advantage of a time zone capturing parts of the business day in Asia and Europe as its hub.

...Chicago may have lost its mantle as manufacturing capital of the world, but has been honest and nimble enough to groom itself as the pre-eminent derivatives centre”.

The link

And then there is the infrastructure business

The Link to the FT Story - Engines of globalisation: the story of Maersk:

In fact, Maersk reveals little more about its activities than the minimum required by the Copenhagen Stock Exchange and says almost nothing about its corporate strategy. But the Copenhagen-based group’s $38bn annual revenues last year make it not much smaller than Microsoft, the software giant.
...
As the largest company in the sector, Maersk is a key driver of the reduction of the costs of ocean shipping that has been under way since the container was invented in 1956. The process has been crucial to making globalisation possible and has driven costs down so far that it often now costs more to ship a container by road 100 miles from a port to its final destination than it does to move the container by sea from China to Europe.

When it costs less to move a container across the ocean than 100 miles inland, what does that do to the definition of space?

The most important goal they identify is that Maersk should control as many as possible of the companies that influence its containers’ movement from country to country. The other is to pursue scale – both in the size of the company’s main businesses and in its ships.

The company can be single-minded in pursuit of these objectives because it is largely immune from short-term shareholder pressure. The founding McKinney-Møller family holds 55 per cent of the shares and 75 per cent of voting stock, with 49.8 per cent of the shares all held by a single family charitable trust.

When a private company can be this successful, what does that mean for the comparative advantage of a public corporation?

"Image" = Brand? = Trust = Sales?

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: How Bad Is Wal-Mart's Image?:

"How Bad Is Wal-Mart's Image?

Well, the big retailer’s image is better than President Bush’s, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s, Vice President Dick Cheney’s, but not as good as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s.

Here’s what the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found when it asked respondents to “rate your feelings” toward the following.
Very or somewhat positive Very or somewhat negative
Wal-Mart 45% 31%
Rumsfeld 31% 43%
Bush 42% 49%
Cheney 43% 50%
Rice 55% 28%

And for comparison…

Target 51% 10%

(Rows don’t add to 100 because remainder were neutral or weren’t sure.)"

Ads Coming to Texbooks?

Ads Coming to Texbooks - New York Times:
"By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: August 15, 2006

Textbook prices are soaring into the hundreds of dollars, but in some courses this fall, students won't pay a dime. The catch: Their textbooks will have ads for companies including FedEx Kinko's and Pura Vida coffee.

Selling ad space keeps newspapers, magazines, Web sites and television either cheap or free. But so far, the model hasn't spread to college textbooks -- partly for fear that faculty would consider ads undignified. The upshot is that textbooks now cost students, according to various studies, about $900 per year."

Textbooks are a model waiting to be broken. So... suppose the Open Source community has a way to monetize efforts that don't need the publishers?

This may not be the winning model, but textbook delivery is broken and outmoded. Sooner or later the system is going to change. This may the disruptive innovation that moves it to tip.

Wal Mart and Politics

Some have suggested that in the developing global economy, nation states will be joined by global corporations as political actors. The following longish article from Today's FT may be a description of how this can happen on the ground.

FT is subscription only, so I've pasted the full article below:

Wal-Mart takes the fight to its critics

By Jonathan Birchall and Holly Yeager

Published: August 16 2006 19:40 | Last updated: August 16 2006 19:40

John Edwards, Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 2004, was in Pittsburgh this month doing his bit for the party ahead of November’s midterm elections to the US Congress. His agenda included addressing a rally against the shortcomings not of the Bush administration but of Wal-Mart, the country’s biggest retailer and largest private-sector employer.

“Wal-Mart needs to be a more responsible employer, by offering decent wages,” Mr Edwards told a crowd who had turned out to support Wake Up Wal-Mart, a campaigning group funded by the UFCW grocery workers’ union that, along with others, the company staunchly refuses to recognise. Mr Edwards also attacked the company’s record on health benefits, arguing that the dependence of some Wal-Mart employees on state-funded Medicare programmes meant the chain was being unfairly subsidised.

ADVERTISEMENT

“Every consumer should know when they walk into Wal-Mart their tax dollars are going to provide healthcare for Wal-Mart workers...while the people who own Wal-Mart are making billions of dollars,” he proclaimed. The retailer struck back immediately. A Wal-Mart official denounced the Pittsburgh event as part of “a union-funded publicity stunt that’s more about politics than anything else”.

Then Working Families for Wal-Mart, officially a non-profit lobbying group, hit even harder, pointing out that the former senator’s family had previously held Wal-Mart shares. “Now he and other political candidates are telling working men and women that they can’t save money or take jobs at Wal-Mart? This is all about special-interest politics. And that’s sad,” said a spokeswoman for Working Families.

This is the world of Wal-Mart, the political retailer.

Under Lee Scott, chief executive, the company has in the past year expanded beyond the usual realm of corporate lobbying to wage a fully-fledged campaign in the mainstream of American politics. “When a company is as large as ours, we’re certainly going to have a lot of interaction with both politics and government,” says Bob McAdam, vice-president of corporate affairs.

On Tuesday it sent 18,000 “voter education” letters to its employees in Iowa, pointing out what it said were factual errors made by politicians who had attacked the company. The group is to despatch similar letters to its staff in other states.

But Wal-Mart’s embrace of some of the darker arts of US politics – it has set up a campaign-style “war room” at its Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters – also attests to the success its critics have had in turning the “big-box” retailer into a political issue at local, state and, increasingly, national level.

In January, Maryland passed a law aimed at making Wal-Mart increase the amount it spends on its workers’ health benefits – a move that has led to similar legislation being proposed elsewhere. In July, in an initiative aimed at large national retailers including Wal-Mart, Chicago’s city council passed an ordinance intended to raise the minimum wage for retail workers.

John Kerry, to whom Mr Edwards was running-mate, cited Wal-Mart and the family of founder Sam Walton in a speech this month on the failings of the US healthcare system. “It’s unconscionable and it is unacceptable that five of the 10 richest people in America are Wal-Mart stockholders from the same family – worth double-digit billions each – but they can’t find the money to secure health coverage for their own workers and their families,” he complained.

Senator Byron Dorgan in his new book, Take This Job and Ship It , uses the company to illustrate what he sees as bad consequences of globalisation. He devotes a chapter to Wal-Mart’s business practices in China, which he calls “the most obvious example of what has gone terribly amiss on the way to a healthy and truly free market”.

For Wal-Mart, all this raises an unwelcome possibility – that it will become a focus of debate during the 2008 presidential election campaign as well, something that its union critics are eager to bring about. “It’s going to be so important in the presidential cycle,” says Chris Kofinis, of the Wake Up Wal-Mart campaign. “Everyone is going to talk about this issue . . . about where you stand on corporations that make $11bn a year in profits and say they can’t afford to pay for healthcare for their workers.”

Wal-Mart’s evolving political strategy, shaped with advice and support from Edelman, the public relations consultancy, has been twofold. First, it has attacked its critics – arguing that it is the victim of an unholy alliance between Democrat lawmakers and the unions they rely on to deliver votes and campaign financing. Second, it is seeking to make the argument that the company is good for America.

It is doing this by mobilising its own political constituency, seeking alliances with local community leaders and businesses – in particular, black and Hispanic groups – that accept Wal-Mart’s argument that the company helps low-income Americans by offering low prices and jobs with the prospect of advancement.

Working Families for Wal-Mart, funded mainly by the retailer, is part of both strategies. Operating with more personal animosity than might be appropriate from the company itself, it is attacking the store chain’s critics. For instance, it has just launched a website called PaidCritics.com, aimed at exposing what it says are special-interest links between the anti-Wal-Mart campaign, the unions and politicians in the Democratic party (Wake Up Wal-Mart struck back with its own site – Abunch­ofgreedyrightwingliarswhoworkforwalmart.com).

Working Families has also set out to mobilise support. It is chaired by Andrew Young, the pro-business former mayor of Atlanta who served as the first black US ambassador to the United Nations. Its board includes Hispanic business figures, while its recently created state organising groups include leading black clergy.

“There’s a large majority of people out there who support Wal-Mart and who have had no vehicle to voice their opinions on what they see as Wal-Mart’s positive impact on their lives and on the economy,” says Kevin Sheridan, Working Families campaign director and a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee.

At the same time, Wal-Mart has reorganised its own community relations operations and has announced plans for “Wal-Mart jobs and opportunity zones” in inner-city areas, aimed in part at encouraging businesses owned by people from ethnic minorities.

In an indication of the strategy’s potential, the black caucus on Chicago’s city council was evenly split on the move to set a minimum wage for workers in the city’s big stores – with opponents saying depressed inner-city areas needed Wal-Mart’s investment and tax revenues.

The vote in Chicago also highlights the risk to the Democrats of trying to use Wal-Mart’s record to galvanise support in the run-up to 2008. While Mr Kerry and Mr Edwards might see Wal-Mart’s low-paying jobs and healthcare record as a rallying point for voters who feel left out of the American dream, other elements of the party will take a different view – including New York’s Senator Hillary Clinton, who in 1986-92 served on the board of the retailer based in Arkansas, her home state.

John Zogby, the pollster, argues that focusing too much on Wal-Mart “means no net gain”, because union voters already favour the Democrats and the party must seek other support if it is to recapture the White House in 2008. “When are the Democrats going to talk to Wal-Mart shoppers?” he asks (see below left). Mr Zogby, who has done some polling work for Wake Up Wal-Mart, says Democrats still lack “a strategy that deals with Joe and Mary Middle America – and Joe and Mary Middle America are at Wal-Mart”.

Polling shows that people who shop at Wal-Mart do care about human rights and worker healthcare, he adds. Democrats therefore need a more subtle message “about trouble in paradise, without carpet-bombing paradise. There are too many people who shop there”.

Mr McAdam counters that the recent criticisms from the Democrats are instead tied to the party’s own battles in the primaries. To win union support, candidates are prepared to deliver an anti-Wal-Mart message that will often not be carried through in the coming midterm campaign.

“There’s abundant survey data that says that attacking Wal-Mart for the population as a whole is detrimental,” he argues. “So if they persist in doing this as the general election approaches, they may find themselves doing more harm than good.”

Wal-Mart is meanwhile taking no chances. It is pursuing a broad effort to enhance its public image, including its record on environmental sustainability. That might drive a wedge in an alliance between its union critics and environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, which have faulted the company on issues ranging from waste water management to its stores’ impact on urban sprawl.

In a sign that political Wal-Mart is here to stay, Leslie Dach, a former political adviser to Al Gore’s failed 2000 presidential campaign, this month becomes head of its government relations and corporate communications. Mr Dach, who will serve on the company’s powerful executive committee, joins Wal-Mart from Edelman, where he became the retailer’s top politics tutor.

His appointment shows just how far the chain has come, with its small army of consultants and political advisers, from the days when Sam Walton argued that if you gave the customers low prices and good service, everything else would look after itself.

Mr McAdam, who will work for Mr Dach, argues that the retailer had no choice. “I think any company that is faced by the kind of campaign-style attacks would be naive not to respond in kind. It became clear to us that, to maintain our ability to do our business, we needed to have a similar style of response.”

But here's the kicker...

A purchase on psephology

By Holly Yeager

Published: August 17 2006 03:00 | Last updated: August 17 2006 03:00

What does where you shop say about how you vote? In the case of Wal-Mart, John Zogby, the highly regarded pollster, thinks it says a lot.

As he reviewed data from the 2004 US presidential election,

ADVERTISEMENT

Mr Zogby noticed something unusual: a strong correlation between how often people shop at Wal-Mart and how conservative they are.

The figures are stark: 76 per cent of voters who shopped at Wal-Mart every week voted for George W. Bush, while 23 per cent voted for John Kerry. By contrast, 80 per cent of those who never shopped there supported Mr Kerry, while just 18 per cent voted for Mr Bush.

"Wal-Mart is more than retail. I think it has become a culture unto itself," says Mr Zogby, who is writing a book about what he calls "the new American consumer". That culture is seen in the books and magazines the retailer puts on its shelves and those it keeps off. "You walk into a Wal-Mart and you're walking into the moral equivalent of a spiritual revival tent for born-again Christians."

Just as "soccer moms" and "Nascar dads" drew the scrutiny of pollsters in past elections, Mr Zogby is now paying close attention to weekly Wal-Mart shoppers.

African-Americans and Hispanics who shop there frequently are significantly more conservative than their cohorts who do not, he says. And he knew that Mr Bush was in deep trouble with the public when the president's standing slipped among weekly Wal-Mart shoppers, who had been among his strongest supporters.

Mr Zogby has placed other US retailers on the political spectrum. Firmly on the left are Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale's and Macy's. Target, he says, is near the centre, "a hair to the left", and in the centre-right are Sears and JC Penney.

But none are as strong a predictor. "Wal-Mart's pattern is just incredible."

Costco can...Wallmart Can't

The Neighborhood Retail Alliance: Chicago: Up Against the Wal Mother...:

"In a striking decision that is certain to reverberate throughout the country, the city of Chicago ordered 'big box' stores to raise the wages of their employees by the year 2010. As the NY Times reports this morning, 'The ordinance, imposing the requirement on stores that occupy more than 90,000 square feet and are part of companies grossing more than $1 billion annually, would be the first in the country to single out large retailers for wage rules.'

The response from the Walmonster: 'It means that Chicago is closed for business.' Yet it seems that the onerous requirements are not barriers for Costco, a box store that currently offers wages and benefits that exceed those of Chicago's statute."

Earthdance: Chapter 20 - Sustainable Society:

"In this light it is interesting to consider historian Arnold Toynbee's observation, after studying twenty-one collapsed civilizations, that what they had in common was inflexibility under stress and the concentration of wealth into few hands. We cannot deny the current stress. Will we remain inflexible in maintaining a system that concentrates wealth to the increasing detriment of most humans?"

But the logic of successful global business suggests that the requirement for sustainability might also be the requrement for global business success.

And from the Huffington Post

Hooman Majd: The End of Empire | The Huffington Post:

Hooman Majd is a writer based in New York. He is a contributing editor at Cargo magazine (Conde Nast), has written for GQ (Conde Nast), the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New York Observer.

Hooman Majd has had a long career as an executive in the music and film businesses. He was Executive VP of Island Records, where he worked with a diverse group of artists including U2, The Cranberries, Tricky and Melissa Etheridge; and Head of Film and Music at Palm Pictures, where he executive-produced James Toback’s “Black and White” and Khyentse Norbu’s “The Cup” (Cannes 1999).

"September 2005: the end of Empire. It matters not who or what is to blame other than nature’s ugly daughter Katrina, one war of retribution, and another of pre-emption. What matters is that the United States of America, the richest and most powerful superpower of all time is no longer particularly super.
Not in the eyes of our enemies, not in the eyes of our friends. Is Sri Lanka mocking us with an offer of 25 grand in aid? Surely not. Or is Nigeria, with her offer of a cool mil? What about Iran, ready to airlift aid workers and ship five tanker-loads of oil; is she mocking the ‘Great Satan’? Fidel Castro wants to send doctors; maybe they can bring us some cigars. And Hugo Chavez? Good thing the CIA didn’t listen to Pat Robertson, for dead men can’t offer aid.

The Empire accepts the offer of aid from the U.N., yes, the U.N., where John Bolton was just rolling up his sleeves. Lop off how many stories of the U.N. Secretariat building and it wouldn’t matter? Perhaps not, Mr. Ambassador, the floors where aid is decided and dispatched.

Iran rejects the latest European demands they cease uranium conversion just as National Guard troops are flown from the Persians’ gulf to ours. Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? We are in shock, the world watches in awe. There is no spectacle quite like the spectacle of an empire on her knees. And Caesar can do nothing but fiddle."

TomPaine.com - That End-Of-Empire Feeling:
"That End-Of-Empire Feeling
David Corn
December 07, 2005

David Corn writes The Loyal Opposition twice a month for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers). Read his blog at http://www.davidcorn.com.

Is the United States in the last throes of empire? That sounds like an ideologically loaded, fatalistic and defeatist question. But it's what I've been wondering about at the start of this holiday season. Might future historians look back at the Bush II days and ask if this was the point when the country started slipping? Might the war in Iraq be regarded as a desperate act of a superpower that had already peaked? Will economists of the latter 21st century examine our economic decisions and say, 'What were they thinking?' Or has the Grinch gotten to me?"

Google-Mart and the End of Empire?

Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of twelve books, including Human Scale, The Conquest of Paradise, Rebels Against the Future, and The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream.

All empires collapse eventually: Akkad, Sumeria, Babylonia, Ninevah, Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Mali, Songhai, Mongonl, Tokugawaw, Gupta, Khmer, Hapbsburg, Inca, Aztec, Spanish, Dutch, Ottoman, Austrian, French, British, Soviet, you name them, they all fell, and most within a few hundred years. The reasons are not really complex. An empire is a kind of state system that inevitably makes the same mistakes simply by the nature of its imperial structure and inevitably fails because of its size, complexity, territorial reach, stratification, heterogeneity, domination, hierarchy, and inequalities.....

In my reading of the history of empires, I have come up with four reasons that almost always explain their collapse. (Jared Diamond's new book Collapse also has a list of reasons for societal collapse, slightly overlapping, but he is talking about systems other than empires.) Let me set them out, largely in reference to the present American empire....

First, environmental degradation. Empires always end by destroying the lands and waters they depend upon for survival, largely because they build and farm and grow without limits, and ours is no exception, even if we have yet to experience the worst of our assault on nature....

Second, economic meltdown. Empires always depend on excessive resource exploitation, usually derived from colonies farther and farther away from the center, and eventually fall when the resources are exhausted or become too expensive for all but the elite....

Third, military overstretch. Empires, because they are by definition colonizers, are always forced to extend their military reach farther and farther, and enlarge it against unwilling colonies more and more, until coffers are exhausted, communication lines are overextended, troops are unreliable, and the periphery resists and ultimately revolts....

Finally, domestic dissent and upheaval. Traditional empires end up collapsing from within as well as often being attacked from without, and so far the level of dissent within the U.S. has not reached the point of rebellion or secession-thanks both to the increasing repression of dissent and escalation of fear in the name of "homeland security" and to the success of our modern version of bread and circuses, a unique combination of entertainment, sports, television, internet sex and games, consumption, drugs, liquor, and religion that effectively deadens the general public into stupor....

Jared Diamond's recent book detailing the ways societies collapse suggests that American society, or industrial civilization as a whole, once it is aware of the dangers of its current course, can learn from the failures of the past and avoid their fates. But it will never happen, and for a reason Diamond himself understands.

As he says, in his analysis of the doomed Norse society on Greenland that collapsed in the early 15th century: "The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity." If this is so, and his examples would seem to prove it, then we can isolate the values of American society that have been responsible for its greatest triumphs and know that we will cling to them no matter what. They are, in one rough mixture, capitalism, individualism, nationalism, technophilia, and humanism (as the dominance of humans over nature). There is no chance whatever, no matter how grave and obvious the threat, that as a society that we will abandon those.

The experience of the UK is not mentioned. They seem to have made the transition form empire to non empire rather well. While no longer a world power supported by their military might, they continue to deliver a decent citizen experience to those lucky enough to be within their borders. Whether this is enabled by their reliance on the American military adventure or there are other more replicable reasons, it is a history worth understanding.

Google the Government in 2008

Tapscott's Copy Desk:

"U.S. Senators Tom Coburn, M.D., R-OK, Barack Obama, D-IL, John McCain, R-AZ, and Tom Carper, D-DE, today urged the full Senate to pass S. 2590, the 'Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act,' a bill that will create a Google-like search engine and database to track approximately $1 trillion in federal grants, contracts, earmarks and loans. The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs approved S. 2590 unanimously today. The House has already passed similar legislation that is limited to grant disclosure only.

'Passing this bill will help end the culture of secrecy in Washington and restore some measure of the public's confidence in government. Technology has made it possible, like never before, to fulfill our founders' vision of enabling all citizens to understand our nation's finances, investigate abuses and hold elected officials accountable,' Dr. Coburn said, adding that a hearing being held today in the House Government Reform Committee on abuses in homeland security contracting highlights the urgent need to include contracts in the database.

'All Americans deserve to know where their money is being spent. 'Googling' the government will not only help expose and eliminate waste, but dispel misconceptions about the scope of our commitments. Many Americans, for example, assume we are spending a large percentage of our budget on foreign assistance when we are not. Whether you're on the left or right, there is no worthy argument against transparency,' Obama said."

War in the GoogleMart Economy

Hezbollah - Lebanon - Israel - Middle East - New York Times:

"The United States and Israel have each fought conventional armies of nation-states and shadowy terror organizations. But Hezbollah, with the sophistication of a national army (it almost sank an Israeli warship with a cruise missile) and the lethal invisibility of a guerrilla army, is a hybrid. Old labels, and old planning, do not apply. Certainly its style of 21st-century combat is known — on paper. The style even has its own labels, including network warfare, or net war, and fourth-generation warfare, although many in the military don’t care for such titles. But the battlefields of south Lebanon prove that it is here, and sooner than expected. And the American national security establishment is struggling to adapt.

“We are now into the first great war between nations and networks,” said John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, and a leading analyst of net warfare. “This proves the growing strength of networks as a threat to American national security.”

In a talk that Mr. Arquilla calls Net Warfare 101, he describes how traditional militaries are organized in a strict hierarchy, from generals down to privates. In contrast, networks flatten the command structure. They are distributed, dispersed, agile, mobile, improvisational. This makes them effective, and hard to track and target.

A net war differs from all previous wars, which were about brute confrontation of forces, mass on mass — what Matthew Arnold called bloody contests of “ignorant armies” meeting on the “darkling plain.”

Net war is the battle of the many, organized in small units, against conventional militaries that organize their many into large units. These network forces are not ignorant. They are computer literate, propaganda and Internet savvy, and capable of firing complicated weapons to great effect.

“The pooling of information is certainly a characteristic of these kinds of insurgencies,” said Daniel Benjamin, who served on the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton before joining the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “In Iraq, for example, the lessons on how to build and place I.E.D.’s have spread and been assimilated in record time. There is certain to be the insurgent equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation on Hezbollah’s successes that will make the rounds of the insurgent and terrorist Web sites.”

and... at the end of the column, the most prescient quote:

“Most critically, we have to get better at — it’s such a cliché — winning hearts and minds,” said a military officer working on counterinsurgency issues. “That is influencing neutral populations toward supporting us and not supporting our terrorist and insurgent enemies.”

"Winning hearts and minds" is also the central business problem of customer facing business in the GME.

The Old is News

Join Wawa!:

"Simplifying our customers' daily lives

Wawa's vision is 'to simplify our customers' daily lives.'

To achieve this, we hire the best people, build world-class facilities and provide an overpowering offer.

Now, while all of these things are important to our success, the number one reason our customers 'gottahava Wawa' is the special relationship our associates have with our customers. A relationship built on the 'Wawa Values' each associate lives every day. Our values are: Value People, Delight Customers, Embrace Change, Do Things Right, Do the Right Thing and Passion for Winning.

At Wawa, every customer is a valued friend who is always welcomed back with a warm smile and a friendly greeting.

When we talk to our customers, they tell us they like to shop at Wawa because our associates like each other and work together as a team and because our associates always include them as part of our store family.
The 'Cheers' of Convenience Stores

Wawa has been called the 'Cheers' of convenience stores by our loyal customers -because we are a friendly neighborhood store where everybody knows your name. A place where you can see familiar faces, a place where you can leave your worries behind for a few minutes each day.

We all live in a hectic world - too much to do - not enough time - Our associates attempt to simplify our customers' life and make their day just a little bit better, from a fresh cup of coffee - to a great tasting hoagie ....to a friendly smile .... to making a new friend - the effort and personal connection with our customers is what makes Wawa so special.

No matter what an associate's job at Wawa is, the number one goal will always be the same, to simplify our customer's life by fulfilling this goal, each and every day, creating an atmosphere of trust, friendship and brand loyalty that few companies can match.

To our customers, our associates are Wawa."

Is this the disruptive innovation for automobilles

Electric sports car packs a punch, but will it sell? | CNET News.com:

"Asked about the EV1, a General Electric electric car that was summarily shut down, Musk said the car's short life wasn't likely the result of a conspiracy between car manufacturers and oil companies. Instead, he said, the car probably failed because of big-company inertia.

'Don't explain...by conspiracy what you can explain by incompetence,' he said."

In the GME ..state boundaries change their meanings

Ballots and Bullets - New York Times:

"The fact that Hamas and Hezbollah pursue democratic legitimacy within the state while also employing violence on their own marks a watershed in Middle Eastern politics. For one thing, the boundary between state and nonstate violence has essentially been erased. Has the Palestinian government demanded an exchange of prisoners with Israel, or has the Hamas militia? Israel has been acting as if it were at war with Lebanon — its targets have included a Lebanese Air Force base and Beirut's international airport - but Hezbollah began the hostilities, not the Lebanese government."

It's Not Personal or Political, It's Business

It's now become pretty clear that the US political system is dysfunctional. Many are involved in trying to figure out how to fix it. Perhaps it's so difficult because people are using the wrong language, combined into an inappropriate narrative, to shoe horn the new reality into the conventional wisdom.

Red state, blue state, moderates, left, right, middle, extremes, base, conservative, liberal are all word concepts that are based on a world is disappearing.

Maybe a more useful narrative comes from the world of the net and business. In the GME all businesses are moving to understand that success comes from focusing on the transaction. Success comes from making the transactions easier, faster, simpler, and standards based. The web has demonstrated that brand loyalty and the customer purchases that derive from them can all be thought of as transactions. And every touchpoint has to deliver value to the customer.

Creating more time by eliminating unnecessary, unprofitable activites seems to be the key to sustainable efficiency. Eliminating anything that does not directly contribute to an improved customer experience is the key to an expanding profitable market position.

And so with politics in the US.

Consider the poltical industry using the terms that are commonly used to think about the auto industry. Let's say the GM is the Democrats and Ford are the Republicans.

General Motors (The Democrats) are presently trying to stay alive. Management has blamed everyone else for their persistant failures. It's the legacy expenses, it's global competition, it's the high cost of labor, it's the union. (In politics, it's the ruthless, unfair competition from the Reupblicans).

In fact, the real problem was that they were unable to produce a product that people wanted to buy.

Just to continue the metaphor....

The internet removed information advantage. Few people buy a car without searching the web for price, feature comparisons. The traditional channel model had to be changed very quickly. Then competition for market share, for GM and Ford (the only American competition), increasingly depended on massive advertising. To make matters even worse the "advertising" was mostly in the form of rebates and should have been seen for what it was - lowering prices.

GM management focus was on their most profitable item, SUV's, innovating around emission requirements by calling their SUV's trucks. In retrospect for management,this was clearly unsustainable as everyone understood that energy efficiency was the wave of the future. But it produce some profit for the quarterly reports, and so the reality of secular trends was ignored.

Top managment was focused on the stock price, the quarterly profits,and somehow keeping the whole thing going. My guess is they defined "insuring access to oil" as the most serious challenge of the 21st century. From their limited narrative it's only common sense.

But if management was focused on that, they didn't focus on the central problem-
make a product that people wanted to buy.

Toyota is the counter example. They didn't have to resort to rebates (lowering prices). They seem to be doing just fine, opening plants, creating jobs in America and all over the world. Increasing market share through internal growth, not purchases.

The GM management lived in a pretty protected world. No matter how much they failed, as long as they were able to hold onto their jobs, their comp didn't go down. Until private capital came into the game. It's likely that after Kerkorian finishes with these folks, they're going to be working for Renault/Nissan.

How might this narrative apply to politics?
The traditional political business is essentially no growth. Based on the number of people who regularly participate, it seems the entire industry has about a 25% market share (that's the number that typically vote in a non presidential election.

The industry is managed by professionals who are relatively insulated from risk, as long as they stay in the game. Even if one loses a particular election, the career benefits of having been an elected or non elected player are high. There is a very complex supply chain for the industry that has been growing quickly as the political parties have become revenue generators that keeps everyone satisfied with the status quo.

An innovative way for winning elections started being developed in the late 70's. It was an incremental improvement, but seems to have lead for predictable results for the Republicans. Use any means necessary to get customers loyal to your brand to vote (the central transaction), and do everything you can to keep the other brands loyalist from voting. Being able to consistently win, is a very effective revenue generating tool. Much easier to raise money, if you can offer a reasonable certainty that the money will be well spent.

This was an incremental improvement as this has been the way the industry has worked for a long time, perhaps since it's inception. The first innovation was the insight that in a stable market, you can consistently win elections by motivating a very,very small number of voters. The second innovation was the willingness to use any means to get those small number of brand loyalists to vote. Not surprisingly, an appeal to fear and greed can be very effective. The use of the best technology was not really an innovation, just a normal practice of a good technician. Technology is hardly ever a sustainable advantage. But it does give a major first mover advantage.

These incremental innovations have now become the primary technique of both the Democratics and Republicans, as rebates were the primary technique of the traditional Auto industry. They will continue to be the primary technique, because in a stable, almost niche, market, it works time after time. It delivers the "quarterly results". It is very difficult, as we can see from GM. Toyota was spared the problem. Probably becuase they decided at their founding that they could only become a global powerhouse by building a better product at a competitive price. (A similar situation to many big businesses now growing in India,Korea and China and other developing economies.)

The fact that the unintended consequences might lead to wholesale taking of power from top management was hard to see when all time and mangement focus is devoted to doing the wrong thing, faster and cheaper. But, once the information advantage was taken away and the industry was exposed to true global competition, most interested, but even casual observers saw the coming problem pretty clearly.

And, for the auto industry, when one person, with the resources and interest, believed that the risk of unlocking the underlying value of the enterprise was worth it, he joined the game. ( Perhaps this is analgous to Bloomberg, Cosine and other billionaires who have recently joined the political game.)

The immediate result is that the top management no longer lives in a risk free environment. The possible end result is the disappearance of GM as an entity, becoming instead a subsidiary of some network driven by Nissan/Renault.

If this analysis makes sense, the way to fix politics, might come from a truly disruptive innovation, that expands the market in internet time.

It's likely that from the conversations taking place on the web coupled with the wide access to communication tools, and the now impossible to ignore dysfunctionality of the present system, a truly disruptive innovation is already in formation.

It's always important to remember that Google was started and grew from 2 graduate students - albeit very, very talented - at Stanford.

Sooner or later, a team, a group, a person, will build a functionality that delivers the appropriate customer experience for the non consumers of politics. It will probably be based on delivering useful (that is understandable) information, within an actionable time frame. It will probably focus on real things - how much money am I spending, who benefits from that money, and am I getting value received for the money I'm spending. It's essentially IAI, instantly accessible information.

And it will not be as simple as a rebate. It's clear that people understand and value, perhaps even more than money, a lowering of risk and a increase in their individual possibility of pursuing happiness. In an information scarce society, the underlying expectation was that no one would willingly agree to spend money on making the society as a whole a better place. In an information rich society, there is enough evidence that voluntary giving, at all income levels, is a natural human impulse. The outpourring of money and time after Katrina or the Tsunami are the most recent examples.

As in business, so in politics.

Love the customer, trust the customer, do everything you can to make sure the customer is getting value at every touch point. Management in business has already seen the long term advantages to them of this approach. Sooner or later, professional politicians will probably get it, or a new management team will be brought in to unlock the value in the American enterprise.

IAI is moving from the economy to the society

Instantly Accessible Information (IAI) is a central feature of the Google-Mart Economy. As Toffler points out in Revolutionary Wealth, the society's relationship to time is changing in a fundamental way.

Time delay has always been a central strategy of maintaining the information advantage. Decisions have to be made in real time. Information delivered too late to inform a decision is no longer useful information. As the expectation of IAI becomes mainstream, it will become much more difficult to claim authority merely by claiming to have access to better information.

We saw it first in the financial industries, where time is most clearly related to money. It is now moving quickly through retail, service and manufacturing industries. The wave is just now starting to reach some of civil society's central institutions - education and government.

The enterprises in these sectors are particularly vulernable. They were formed in information scarce environments, and many have based their value creation on their information advantage. As that advantage slips away, the very basis of their power and authority will inevitably be redefined in fundamental ways.

They will be forced to innovate to maintain their position. As in business, so in education and government, flawless execution and information based decisions will be increasingly demanded by the customer.

The story is starting to appear in the mainstream media.

On Higher Ed:
Which colleges are really delivering $30,000 per year of value?

Panel's Draft Report Calls for an Overhaul of Higher Education Nationwide - New York Times:

"Nearly every aspect of higher education in America needs fixing, according to a draft report of a national commission that calls for an overhaul of the student financial aid system, better cost controls by colleges and universities and more proof of results, including testing.

The report by the panel appointed last year by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings was highly critical of the nation's institutions of higher education. It said there was a lack of accountability to show that students were learning, that college costs have risen too high, and that 'unacceptable numbers of college graduates' were entering the workforce without skills that employers say they need.

In addition, the draft said, 'rising costs, combined with a confusing, inadequate financial aid system, leave some students struggling to pay for education that, paradoxically, is of uneven and at times dubious quality.'"

And in government
Here is an issue on which both left and right agree. There are no cultural divides. It is only the professional politicians who have problems with it.

But what will happen to a political system where many of the primary incentives are based on the power to control resource allocation, with almost no personal accountability?

On Right and Left, a Push for Government Openness - New York Times:
By JASON DePARLE

Published: July 3, 2006

WASHINGTON, July 2 — Exasperated by his party's failure to cut government spending, Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, is seeking cyberhelp.

Jamie Rose for The New York Times

Mark Tapscott of The Washington Examiner has promoted the spending database in that newspaper and on his blog, Tapscott's Copy Desk.

Mr. Coburn wants to create a public database, searchable over the Internet, that would list most government contracts and grants — exposing hundreds of billions in annual spending to instant desktop view

Type in 'Halliburton,' the military contractor, or 'Sierra Club,' the environmental group, for example, and a search engine would show all the federal money they receive. "

Buffet to give nearly $31 billion to Gates foundation

Buffet to give nearly $31 billion to Gates foundation:

"In an interview with Fortune magazine, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett announced he will give nearly $31 billion -- most of his wealth -- to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

As the world moves from an information scarce to an information rich environment, the concepts that organized 20th century reality become a little less useful.

When Bill Gates and his foundation will control $60 billion dollars in the service of fixing the world's health and education problems, what does that potentially do to the common wisdom of nation states and big NGO's as the only formal networks capable of focusing on the big issues?

Letter: Not a better mousetrap

Letter: Not a better mousetrap:

"In regard to your editorial (“Closed primary means low turnout,” The Daily Astorian, May 25) you correctly point out that there are a number of reasons for low voter participation in the primaries. Your solution is to allow the independent voters to participate in the partisan political process. Unfortunately, this defeats the purpose of primary elections.

They were originally set up to allow party members full participation in their party’s selection as opposed to the decisions of a few powerful men in a smoke-filled room. This has generally been successful. Yes, it does exclude the uncommitted independent, but then this was also true under the old system. Should Oregon institute open primaries, I will not vote in them, since they no longer serve the purpose for which they were intended."

C'mon.. most of the folks who are "independents" are not consumers or fans of the political industry. They don't vote because they don't care. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing can be legitimately argued, but a mediocre product, with a terrible customer experience, will not attract grow it's market. even with huge infusions of cash.

The Morning News :: Opinion Page

The Morning News :: Opinion Page:

"Election day will come, and it won't matter how many people rallied in the park.

Springdale saw 5,000 people in the park in April. Another large rally for immigrants' rights took place in May. Then a couple of months passed. Thursday, Republican party nominee for governor Asa Hutchinson came to Springdale to announce how he'd curb illegal immigration."

Tougher laws in Arkansas won't slow immigration to the United States but could divert it to other states. That's victory enough for many. My problem is this: There is no way to be tough on immigrants who arrived today and not be tough on immigrants who arrived years ago.

The people who arrived years ago broke our laws too. However, we showed little interest in enforcing our laws until this election year. Even the most ardent anti-immigration forces acknowledge that. It's a sore point with them.

As long as the election system is based on the niche market that votes, it doesn't supply a very sustainable incentive structure for finding the best solution for the most people.

And it's NOT the politicians fault. What would you do in the same position. If you don't get elected, it doesn't matter what you believe.

International IDEA | Electoral System Design

International IDEA | Electoral System Design:

"The choice of electoral system is one of the most important institutional decisions for any democracy. Electoral systems define and structure the rules of the political game; they help determine who is elected, how a campaign is fought, the role of political parties, and most importantly, who governs. "

It's the rules that create the strategies that win. Within our rules and history. MVC has been the best strategy to win.

International IDEA | Voter Turnout

International IDEA | Voter Turnout

And here's a place to find international stats, that are not about winning elections, but about using participation rates to say something about the political industry.

NOW with Bill Moyers. Politics & Economy. Election 2004 — America Votes | PBS

NOW with Bill Moyers. Politics & Economy. Election 2004 — America Votes | PBS

A great resource for why people do or don't vote. But still it concentrates only on the cost of voting. Not the benefit that is received.

According to NOW, America participation in elections has rarely reached 50% in the US.

SpringerLink - Article

SpringerLink - Article:

"

Like other administrative reforms designed to make voting easier, postal voting has the potential to increase turnout. However, the expanded pool of voters will be limited most likely to those already inclined to vote but find it inconvenient to go to the polling place. This conclusion is consistent with the growing body of research that suggests that relaxing administrative requirements is not likely to be the panacea for low turnout among the disenfranchised."

You can lower the cost of playing to almost zero, but if the product still stinks, nobody is going to play.

Pasadena Star-News - Draw California voters back to the polls

Pasadena Star-News - Draw California voters back to the polls:

"IN the recent election, voters were asked to cast ballots in a statewide primary election. Less than a third of registered voters cast ballots.

This was one of the lowest turnout gubernatorial primary elections in California's history.

Why were most voters no-shows?

It is hard to know what was driving such miserably low levels of voter participation. But a few hypotheses are floating around that merit research in coming months.

First, low voter participation in statewide primaries is not a new phenomenon. In fact, as I've written recently, since California's experiment with the 'blanket primary,' voter interest in statewide primaries has dropped considerably.

In 1998, when the state used the blanket primary in a gubernatorial primary, 42.5percent of registered voters participated. But in the 1994 and 2002 primaries, with more restrictive participation rules like those used in the recent primary, voter participation was 35 percent or less.

So one important explanation for low voter turnout in our recent primary is how participation is restricted for primary-election voters. If voters can't cast meaningful ballots, they don't turn out to vote.

Second, for many registered voters in the state, given the rules restricting which primary they could cast ballots in, there was little on the ballot to drive them to the polls. Republicans (making up around a third of registered voters statewide) had few choices to make on the ballot. So, after the final tallies are completed, we'll likely find that participation by registered Republicans was slight.

Third, registered Democrats (and the 'decline-to-state' votes who could cast ballots in the Democratic primary if they wanted) had important choices to make in a number of statewide races. But in general, unless they were political junkies, it was impossible for them to figure out which Democratic candidate might be best suited for a particular statewide seat, as there are few differences between most Democratic candidates in California.

Further, the campaigns that Democrats ran didn't help. Even though many millions were spent in the Democratic contests on candidate advertising, little of it was informative. Instead of informative campaign communications, the advertising blitz was mainly mudslinging. It's also worth noting that a lot of the campaign money was spent on uninformative mailers and those idiotic recorded telephone messages that turn voters off."

So how much does this sound like a "blame the customer" excuse of a failed marketing campaign?

It's hard to acquire customers, when your product is sub optimal and your process is broken. It's very hard to grow a market, when customer acquisition costs go through the roof to try to make up for a bad customer experience.

FedSmith.com News Articles: Readers Identify Issues, Preferences for Upcoming Elections

FedSmith.com News Articles: Readers Identify Issues, Preferences for Upcoming Elections

Here's the outlook for the folks who actually do the work of government. FedSmith is an information website for federal employees.

The Smoky Mountain News

The Smoky Mountain News

One of the best descriptions i've ever read of life on the ground for state legislators. It's no wonder it's so hard to get it right!

Lebanon Daily News - Update from the 48th District campaign trail

Lebanon Daily News - Update from the 48th District campaign trail:

"Out on the campaign trail, there has been a significant change to Folmer’s staff. Joe Sterns, a political consultant for West Lawn Graphics, has taken over as Folmer’s press secretary and spokesman, replacing Laurel Lynn Petolicchio of Mt. Gretna.

Petolicchio and husband Louis are close friends of Folmer and with him founded the Constitutional Organization of Lebanon political-action committee last year. Folmer said the couple played a key role in convincing him to run, and then in organizing his campaign.

It was a mutual decision for Laurel Lynn Petolicchio to step aside.

“They are dear friends of mine, and they have a life to get back to,” Folmer said.

Sterns began working for Folmer during the primary. Although just 31, he brings a wealth of political experience to the campaign.

He worked four years for the state House Republican Caucus as a speech writer and was campaign spokesman for Pat Toomey during his unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate against incumbent Arlen Specter in 2004. He is a director on the board of the Schuylkill County Young Republicans and a former chairman of the Pennsylvania Young Republicans. He also currently serves as the vice chairman of grass-roots coordination for Young Conservatives of Pennsylvania.

While Petolicchio was no political novice on the local level, Sterns said his experience in handling a major campaign should help Folmer, whose political experience is limited.

“It is important to have somebody with experience in dealing with the media these days,” he said. “You need a full-time professional to help a candidate manage his time.”"

So a relatively unknown mounts a grass roots campaign and scores a stunning upset..And then fires the manager who got him there and hires a "Professional".

When will people learn that professionals can do the wrong thing for years, and call it experience?

Professionals trained in 20th century forms, are usually exactly the wrong folks to lead a 21st century enterprise.

The Norman Transcript - Illegal aliens, family values featured on campaign trail

The Norman Transcript - Illegal aliens, family values featured on campaign trail:

"For Republicans, the goal is be as conservative as possible — think Ronald Reagan. “Republican themes will hit on immigration, tax cuts and Christian values,” said Don Hoover, a campaign consultant. “They will play as far to the right as possible.”

For Democrats, the goal is outreach and the middle ground — a replay of Bill Clinton. “Democrats want to talk about investing in the future and, to a lesser degree, bipartisanship,” he said.

The goal, Hoover said, is to get the undecided voter to pay attention. And those voters are only about half-listening. “Right now the undecided voter isn’t too focused on the campaign — yet. But, slowly, they are beginning to pay attention.”

To turn those heads, candidates will need money — lots and lots of money. “It takes resources to campaign,” he said. “Especially on a statewide level.”"

"Independent voters" are more accurately thought of as non consumers of the poltical product. Getting their "attention" is non trivail because the product is sub standard. It's a normal business problem in the GME.

Cantwell's lead over McGavick nearly gone

Cantwell's lead over McGavick nearly gone: "Dwindling voter support for U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell's re-election bid has put her in a statistical toss-up with her Republican opponent, according to a new poll announced Wednesday.

Rasmussen Reports, an independent national polling firm, said a survey of 500 likely Washington voters June 13 showed the Democratic incumbent leading challenger Mike McGavick 44 percent to 40 percent. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.5 percentage points."


So if the general picture is correct that politics has about a 20% penetration of the market. Then 50% of 20% is 10%.. so Senator Cnatwell's future is in the hands of 10% of eligible voters.

Politics is a tough business.

Internet-Based Software Helps Political Candidates to Get Out the Vote and Cut Campaign Costs by 80 Percent

Internet-Based Software Helps Political Candidates to Get Out the Vote and Cut Campaign Costs by 80 Percent: "According to Voter Lists co-founder Donald Quaid, 'GOTVoters Online levels the political playing field. Even independent candidates on limited budgets can use it to get elected. Our advanced filtering of voter information enables political campaigns to target voters based on their specific concerns and interests. This is considerably more effective than targeting all voters on all issues. In a primary, a candidate can focus on just the 20% of voters who always turn out, saving money and more efficiently utilizing their time."


Go for the most valued customer. Based on this story the stable customer base for politics is about 20% of the potential market.

You would think that 80% of the population would qualify as underserved market that could possibly be a site for explosive growth.

Internet-Based Software Helps Political Candidates to Get Out the Vote and Cut Campaign Costs by 80 Percent

Internet-Based Software Helps Political Candidates to Get Out the Vote and Cut Campaign Costs by 80 Percent: "Voter Lists LLC announced a new Internet-based service today called GOTVoters Online(TM) that helps political candidates to Get Out The Vote (GOTV) on Election Day. GOTVoters Online(TM) cleverly combines state-supplied registered voter records with Internet-based software developed by Voter Lists LLC.

Brunswick, ME (PRWEB via PR Web Direct) June 22, 2006 -- Voter Lists LLC announced a new Internet-based service today called GOTVoters Online(TM) that helps political candidates to Get Out The Vote (GOTV) on Election Day. GOTVoters Online(TM) cleverly combines state-supplied registered voter records with Internet-based software developed by Voter Lists LLC.

Public voter data and our GOTV Internet software make it even more critical for voters to vote often. Political campaigns are evolving to target only those who vote regularly and to safely ignore those who do not vote. Only the interests of frequent voters, not those of the general population, will be represented by elected officials.
GOTVoters Online(TM) allows political campaigns to manage voter information online. Campaign managers can filter voters by gender, ethnicity, age, and other criteria and assign them to campaign volunteers, who gather voter opinions on key issues. Candidates then use the data to get only their supporters to the polls on Election Day.

Online at http://www.voter-lists.com, the new service cuts political campaign costs by allowing political campaign workers to use their own computers, Internet connections, and phones. GOTVoters Online(TM) eliminates the need for large campaign offices with dozens of phones and computers. GOTVoters Online(TM) works with any computer through any Internet browser.

GOTVoters Online(TM) targets candidates with 5,000 to 200,000 voters. Those mid-sized political campaigns have never before had access to advanced Internet-based technology. Typical costs, which include both the Internet-based software and many states' voter lists, are about $1,600 for a small mayoral campaign with 5,000 voters or $5,500 for a large judicial campaign with 200,000 voters."


And the marketplace will supply the technology to get to most valuable customers, better, faster, cheaper.

RIC - News and Events

RIC - News and Events:

"Cranston Mayor Steven Laffey is in a virtual tie with U. S. Senator Lincoln Chafee for the party’s nomination for Senate in the September Republican primary, according to a new statewide survey of 256 likely Republican primary voters conducted by the Bureau of Government Research and Services at Rhode Island College. If the September primary for the U.S. Senate election were held today, 39 percent of voters would support Chafee while 38 percent would back Laffey, if half of those voting in the primary are Republicans and the other half unaffiliated voters. One in four likely primary voters say they are undecided.

Among men, Laffey leads Chafee by 44 to 34 percent, while Chafee’s lead among women is only 37 to 35 percent. Regionally, Chafee appears to be strongest in Providence (73 to 27 percent), western Rhode Island (43 to 21 percent), and in the East Bay (44 to 33 percent). Laffey is strongest in Blackstone Valley (50 to 40 percent), Newport County (46 to 23 percent), and in the Providence suburbs south of the city (39 to 31 percent). Among age groupings, Chafee is strongest with voters older than 64 (49 to 37 percent), while Laffey’s greatest strength comes from voters 39 or younger (55 to 33).

According to the survey, the key to the primary outcome will be the number of unaffiliated and Republican voters coming out on election day. "


In a protected low growth market, you have to focus on your most valued customer. Every smart business knows that.

Multinational Corporation Out - GIE In

IBM chief calls for end to colonial companies:

When the Chairman of IBM, invests $6billion in India, then announces that IBM is not a multi national corporation, but a global intetgrated enterprise, something is going on. It might just be spin, but it could be something a lot more important.
From yesterdays, FT.com,

"Sam Palmisano, head of IBM, on Monday called on multinationals to evolve into a new type of corporation if they are to avoid an anti-globalisation backlash that leads to the election of governments hostile to the interests of big business."

He says traditional multi-national companies were designed to deal with the “protection and nationalism” that held sway in the 20th century. The modern company, Mr Palmisano writes, is a “globally integrated enterprise”, which spreads its strategies, production capacity and management around the world in order to be close to markets and customers.

“The globally integrated enterprise is an inherently better and more profitable way to organise business activities – and it can deliver enormous economic benefits to both developed and developing nations,” he writes.

In the GME the most valuable commodity is time. The most dysfunctional aspect of the multi national "colonial corporation" is that it's not built for speed, but for risk management. Perhaps the GIE (global intergretated enterprise) can solve that problem for business. And has implications for the rest of us.

The issues raised have been articulated at least 15 years ago. In 1991 Robert Reich, in The Work of Nations said

In the United States and probably in Canada as well, there is the supposition that national competitiveness is tantamount to the profitability or world market share of the nation’s major corporations. That is no longer the case. Corporations head quartered in whatever nation are rapidly going global and employing large numbers of non-nationals, often to do complicated work. To the extent that a corporation is profitable or enjoys a large world market share, the citizens of that nation may or may not benefit. Perhaps some of them will benefit by having larger dividends, but they may not be getting the best jobs or the most important experience. The “us” is the nation’s people and their intellectual capacities.

If Mr. Palmisan is correct, maybe the implications for the welfare of national populations of GIE's are more promising than within the context of Multinationals.
According to him, the model is no longer, keep the high paying jobs here, and the low paying jobs there, but rather level the playing field. Jobs are located where they create the most value, the customer defines the value created, and the challenge is to deliver value at a profit.

In the GME, the only valuable commodity is time

FT.com / World - US workers challenge value of being overworked:

And now the workers, and their lawyers confirm it.

by Patti Waldmeir in Washington
Published: June 8 2006 18:29 | Last updated: June 8 2006 22:49

"Increasingly, US workers are banding together to demand payment for all the hours they work, including unpaid overtime, work done during meals and time spent walking around on the job. Collective lawsuits involving wages and hours are growing exponentially, according to a recent study by the law firm Seyfarth Shaw, which found that mass litigation over pay and working hours outnumbered any other kind of workplace class action last year, including gender and other job discrimination lawsuits."

“Certainly this kind of suit is not as glitzy or sexy as some other kind of claims,” he says, but adds that entrepreneurial plaintiffs’ attorneys have discovered that such suits can be very lucrative. Many legal experts say plaintiffs’ attorneys are driving the rise in litigation, because they can earn large settlement fees.

But worker advocates disagree, saying that as employers try to cut labour costs, they are increasingly violating the law, while state and federal agencies charged with enforcing it are not doing so aggressively. “There’s been a decline in enforcement actions by the public agencies . . . and the private bar has stepped in and taken over the responsibility of enforcing the laws,” says Cathy Ruckelshaus of the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for low-wage workers.

“....We want people to be eager beavers, so it goes against the grain to say ‘work to rule’: but if he doesn’t sue you, somebody else might!” says Mr McCormick. The same is true of the secretary who answers phone calls on her lunch break, or reads a book while waiting for dictation.

Every day, the rules of the game change. The incentives for independent contractors working by project, rather than by hours has just increased.

Supply Chains in the GME

From the FT.. Mastering Risk - Coping with complexity and chaos:

"Achieving supply chain resilience
Because even the best-managed supply chains will hit unexpected turbulence or be affected by events that are impossible to forecast, it is critical that resilience be built into them. Resilience implies the ability of a system to return to its original or desired state after being disturbed. Resilient processes are flexible and agile and are able to change quickly. Supply chain resilience also requires at those critical points that can be adversely affected by changes in the rate of flow.Supply chain resilience depends on rapid access to information about changed conditions. Through collaborative working with partners, this information can be converted into supply chain intelligence. Because networks have become more complex, they will rapidly descend into chaos unless they can be connected through shared information and knowledge. The aim is to create a supply chain community where there is a greater visibility of upstream and downstream risk and a shared commitment to mitigate and manage those risks.Ultimately, it may be necessary for companies to re-engineer their supply chains not, as in the past, with cost minimisation in mind but to maximise their flexibility and agility. Today's changed conditions are forcing companies to question past decisions on sourcing, outsourcing and the pursuit of Clean solutions. Responsiveness and resilience must be the twin goals of supply chain design and management."

In the rush to cut costs, the risks are often overlooked. In the GME, risk management has to be an essential part of logistic excellence. It has to be faster AND better. Better means safer.

Google-Mart in the Print Industry

Dr. Joe Webb is one of the few in the print industry that seems to consistently get it right.

I spent 30 years on the ground in that industry before going into education and consulting. It's a great context to watch the play of GME forces.

Printing always been one of the largest manufacturing industries in the US. Yet, it has always been organized in a small units - average size, at least until recently, of about 20 people per location. As other industries are now trying to grow models of networked production, the print industry historically has always thrived with a connective tissue of job brokering, dynamic specialization, and local customer focused small enterprises.

The industry is now moving from a customized manufacturing system held together by managing client risk through trust built on reputation and customer loyalty. But risk has been mitigated by constant improvements in technology. Once the value added of risk management is taken away, margins have eroded. Add to this the crisis in advertising, information management, and marketing, and it really gets interesting.

Another factor is that print might be an industry that partially shielded from global outsourcing because of the time requirements and the need to deliver physical product.

Reading Dr. Joe's updates with fact based research and at the same time watching the common wisdom move to and fro is a great learning experience. It's a perfect place to see the GME wave hitting the ground and how small manufacturing business units are responding to it.

From PrintForecast Perspective Archives

It was recently announced that data base provider Harte- Hanks purchased a digital printing business, PrintSmart, located in Southeastern Massachusetts. For all of the talk about printers getting into the data base business, this is a data base business getting into printing.....

And after a discussion of the benfits of outsourcing, he gives the following advice to printing companies, his primary audience.

This brings out the most important and unrenewable management resource: time. Time cannot be replaced. Outsourcing implementation tasks creates time for corporate management because they can apply their managerial time elsewhere, and access expertise in implementation that they could not acquire personally or would have to hire at great cost.

Printing companies have significant opportunities to lift burdens and create time for their clients. Knowing how their clients use print, or would use print if they could, and what other information distribution methods they need to tie into, has been hard for many printers to understand. It's essential to focus not on getting ink onto paper, but on translating client ideas into actions. It will be quite interesting to see how (or if) Harte-Hanks expands their services in this way. It will be also interesting to see how many printers also view this as a core strategy for their own businesses. There are hurdles: clients typically do not think of their printers in this way.

Which printers will hear this clear and good adivce?

My own instinct is that most won't or can't. Only a few printers have the culture to recognize that a potentially huge source of value creation might come from knowing their customers - not in the sense of "owning" the relationship - but the granular knowledge of their customers' business problems and systems. Printers' problem is not having the time or capabilty to leverage that asset.

The most likely mix is that some printing companies will get it, while others will build on network partnerships, and many will do neither. Most printers' core skill is printing stuff. There are many other centers of expertise that will face the customer to create value and print will continue to be hidden from view in the middle of the value chain.

This is not bad news for any particular printer.

In fact, those that concentrate on dynamic specialization ( as described in The Only Sustainable Edge and www.edgeperspectives.com ) have the opportunity to do better than ever.

Even the big companies can get it right.

Andrew Ward, FT May 30.":

"One evening last October, an empty freight trailer was stolen from a truck park in Stockholm, Sweden, and driven north towards the border with Finland. Within two days, the vehicle was in Vyborg, Russia, more than 1,000 miles away.
...By the time the theft was reported, the trailer was in Russia. But TIP was able to use the tracking device to guide Russian police to the freight yard where the vehicle was parked. Within hours, the trailer was recovered and the thieves arrested.
... TIP is the European trailer-leasing business of General Electric. Many of its vehicles, including the one in Stockholm, are fitted with a satellite tracking system, developed by GE's equipment services division.

GE continues to change and seems to be getting it right. In addition to heavily investing in "green" initiatives, Jeff Immelt is changing the corporate culture. The basic insights of the GME seem to be consistent with his decisions.

More from Mr. Ward's article..
GE's lead in such a promising but unproved market is a symbol of how the group has become more innovative and daring since Jeff Immelt replaced Jack Welch as chief executive nearly five years ago. During Mr Welch's 20-year reign, GE was famous for its laser-like focus on growth and ruthless intolerance of failing managers. The approach made GE one of the most disciplined and reliable performers in corporate America. But critics believe it also spread a fear of failure that stifled risk-taking.

Mr Immelt has sought to inject a more adventurous spirit by increasing investment in research and development and linking management bonuses to innovation. Shortly after taking charge, he challenged senior executives to generate three new business ideas a year, each with the potential to deliver at least $100m (£54m) in annual revenues. VeriWise, developed entirely by GE scientists at the group's main R&D centre in Niskayuna, New York, provides some of the clearest evidence to date that Mr Immelt's cultural revolution is bearing fruit.

"It is an example of the imagination breakthroughs happening across GE," says Thomas Konditi, president of asset intelligence for GE Equipment Services. "In the past, going into a new technology such as this would have been seen as risky. People would have said, 'Let's not take too big a swing.' But we have proved that we can be a leader rather than a follower in innovation and we can move fast."

They had the customer relationship, gave their top people an incentive to think about what the customer needed, invented a solution that played to GE's core strength both in technology and relationships, and implemented a solution that increases transparency,accountability and takes friction out of a logistic chain.

Barcodes to Amazon via Mobile Phones.

FT.com/ Marketers stealth on web will not pay for long:

By Ben Richards and Faris Yakob, in today's FT

"In an age of unprecedented access to information, attempting to deceive consumers is more dangerous than ever before. Rather than trying to dupe consumers into receiving their messages by stealth, brands should do the reverse: to strike an open and honest bargain with the consumer, providing content, tools and experiences in return for engaging with their brand.Smart companies understand that today's web-savvy consumers can be as stealthy as brands.

"These stealth consumers set their web browsers to block advertisements; they use Epinions to find them the best products; they use Kelkoo to find the best prices. If a brand does not deliver, they use the web to air their grievances.

And here's the punch line...

"..It is the brands that embrace this stealth consumer that will thrive. Take Amazon in Japan. If you have a web-enabled camera phone (and almost everyone in Japan does), you can take a picture of a barcode on any product and send it to Amazon.co.jp. Amazon compares the code with its online database, and if it stocks the item, it will send you back the price, which is typically lower than the in-store one, and offer you the chance to place an order."

So... does it really make sense to spend advertising dollars on advertising, or maybe it makes more sense to spend the money on making a truly great product and delivering it with the minimum of hassle?

How can you recognize a tipping point?

Advertisers are struggling to reach webwise teens

Money talks, .......everything else follows.

Aline van Duyn, reports in the May 23 FT.
"A key moment of realisation for the industry came last year when Mr Murdoch grasped how dramatically the internet was changing the media business. Since his very public damascene conversion, embracing digital media has become a priority for all News Corp’s businesses, from television to newspapers to movies. The media mogul has spent around $1.5bn on acquiring internet companies.

On the same page, Richard Waters asks from San Fransciso...
"Are the drab text advertisements that appear on internet search engines a harbinger of what lies ahead for the entire $600bn global advertising industry? "

“...When people look back at search, it will be seen as one of the pivotal things that shifted how people think about advertising,” says Mr Armstrong.

"...Google has experimented with buying advertisements in print publications on behalf of its customers. This year, it bought a company that places advertisements on radio stations – a highly fragmented, difficult-to-reach market that in some ways resembles the search engine world."

And now for some of the Google- Mart implications. Same article,

"...Led by Wal-Mart, a group of advertisers under the auspices of the Association of National Advertisers this month set out to raise $50m for a pilot project to launch their own joint market for television time."

"...In a world where advertisers are used to buying in online auctions, things should be different. Media buyers such as Publicis, however, respond that advertising space is not a commodity and advertisers still want control over where their messages appear."

No doubt that advertisers want control over where their messages appear, but exactly why is advertising space not a commodity? Aside from the fact that the revenue stream for media buyers comes from their superior information about the marketplace.

"...Whether the traditional advertising industry is ready for the greater level of efficiency and accountability this implies is another matter. There is a general perception, says Mr Armstrong, that the industry “is overweight and a bit mushy. We’re replacing fat with muscle”.

So, maybe in the long, or maybe not so long, run, advertising dollars will be put into enhancing the customer experience. Making it better, faster, cheaper, more elegant, easier to use, taking less time and hassle.

The GME threatens any industry that is based on a control of information. We've been hearing the rumbles for the last few years, but it sure feels like the fault lines are going to erupt pretty soon.

Straight from Google's CEO

FT.com / Eric Schmidt, CEO Google- Let more of the world access the internet

Eric Shmidt talks about access in the FT. He says, "The democratisation of information has empowered us all as individuals. We no longer have to take what business, the media or indeed politicians say at face value. Where once people waited to be told what the news was, they can now decide what news matters to them, and increasing numbers are actually commenting on events themselves – creating blogs every second of every day."

And later in the column, "But people in general are extremely adept at telling the difference between products that are good or bad – or information that is right or wrong. Indeed it is the liberation of end users that has made the internet the success it is today."

And has created the threat to any enterprise that depends on an information advantage for it's success.

If you're not selling to consumers, you're selling dog food.

FT.com / By industry / Consumer industries - P&G upbeat over Wal-Mart strategy

Sorry but the FT only lets you read the first graph for free

The dog food business is a catch phrase for business that have revenue streams that are not connected to the value of their product to the consumer.

Some dog food businesses are very profitable, and have been very stable. But in an era of rapid change, they have a special problem. Like any well run business, dog food businesses (most of the B to B market) will be pushed to innovate primarily to better serve their customers. If their customers are not consumers, they are locked into the level of innovation demanded by their organizational customers.

The problem is that they are then dependent on sometimes a very slow moving intermediary. A good example in the automative space might be Delphi. Locked into GM, they are now being penalized for that symbiotic relationship. Perhaps they would have been better off if they were part of the Toyota value chain.

The printing industry has a similar problem. Some publishers get it, many don't. But if you're customer is a publisher, the only responsible thing to do is to produce what the publisher is asking for. The problem arises when the publishing business model changes.

Wal-Mart and P&G are more exposed to the consumer market than most businesses. They both are driven towards ever imporving efficiencies, by competing in an open, transparent marketplace.

In The GME, business models that make their money from consumers are most incented to sustainable innovation..

Make things people want, and make it fun to buy it.

Let them eat bread.

Panera Bread, one of the leading "fast casual" restaurant chains in the US, will on Friday unveil plans for 25 per cent long-term earnings growth, marking the first time it has committed to such a target since going public in 1991.

...Its business model is based on growing demand for “speciality” or “artisan” breads, for which it can charge a premium price as consumers increasingly trade up from cheaper chains.

Panera bakes all of its bread at each of its almost 900 stores, which the company claims have more average sales per unit than Starbucks or dining chains such as Outback Steakhouse.

They place to watch for leading developments in the GME are the companies whose primary revenue source is consumers.

They have to satisfy the folks who are suppying the revenue stream. Those that find or create a profitable niche will do just fine.

World's Simplest Marketing Plan

Guy Kawasaki nails this. Note: This is a link to an MS-Word document.

Supply-chain and stock price

Interesting blog post from Christopher Koch about how investment analysts are taking a closer look at operational effectiveness. This post focuses on supply chain, but we expect to see this touch all industries, including financial services. Managing logistics (a la Wal-Mart) is a key locus of institutional value.

The Ultimate Question

Always insightful blog Adventures in Capitalism blogged a review of Fred Reichhold's new book "The Ulimate Question." It's a good summary and worth checking out. Essentially, it says the best metric for any business is the percentage of customers that would recommend it to a friend.

Reducing customer service costs through product focus and simplicity

The NYT had an interesting article today about GetHuman.com a website that publishes the secret codes that get you out of a phone tree and to an actual operator when you call big companies. A great example of the transparency of information in the GME. But even more interesting where these to quotes in the article from a Customer Service expert and a Banker:

'The reason people are dialing the 1-800 number is that they're having a bad experience in some other channel,' said Mark Hurst, founder and president of Creative Good, a consulting firm that advises companies on how to improve the customer experience. He is amazed, he said, at how difficult it remains on most Web sites for customers to do little things like revise an order or track a shipment. 'If e-commerce were much, much simpler,' he said, 'a huge percentage of these calls would never be made.'

JIM KELLY, chief customer service officer at ING Direct, the online bank with 3.5 million customers and deposits of nearly $40 billion, takes the case for simplicity a step further. ING Direct keeps its entire product line simple. It offers a small number of easy-to-understand products such as savings accounts, certificates of deposit and no-frills mortgages. The savings programs entail no annual fees or account minimums.

As a result, the average ING Direct customer calls the bank only 1.6 times a year. The calls that do come in are answered by full-time employees who don't rely on scripted answers and don't work under strict time limits.

'The key word for us is simplicity,' Mr. Kelly said. 'If you eliminate service charges and hidden fees, you eliminate most of the problems and complaints. Then the only reason for people to call is to do business. And those are calls you're eager to take.'

So, if your product is not confusing, people won't call with dumb questions. Sounds good to us!

Information Disadvantage and Value Added

Any part of any business that is based on information disadvantge is threatened. That includes both the large and small. Textbook publishers, traditional education delivery systems - including Universities, Colleges, Community Colleges and K-12, and of course newspapers are in danger of radical transformation.

Clay Christiansen,et al. outline a theory and strategy for thinking about sources of innovation, in Seeing What's Next. The chapters on the health and education business are particularly interesting.

So...business has to figure out how to "add value". Sometimes this concept becomes unduly complicated. "Value creation" is actually pretty straightforward. What can your business do for $x, that people will gladly pay $(x+y)?

The basic rule is that "better, faster, cheaper" always wins. But, as Apple has shown with the iPod, and that Starbucks has shown with their coffee, "cheaper" can be a very complex concept.

In the GME, in the developed world, people will gladly part with $, in order to pay for an experience they want.
And in the developing world, P&G has shown that you can make lots of money by selling single use shampoo in China for 2 cents.

The right product, for the right person, at the right time for the right price - produced and delivered at a profit.

The end of information disadvantage business models

Real estate agents, like travel agents before them, are under seige. As the Freakonomics guys pointed out in their book, real estate agents take advantage of their control over information (buying and selling prices in a particular area) to encourage their clients to sell as quickly as possible.

However, check out Zillow.com, which is seeking to end this monopoly.

The age of the knowledge-hoarder is over. Agents of all kinds must focus on services and other value adds...