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As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.
— Foxconn chairman Terry Guo about workers from factories he manages.
(Source: blogs.reuters.com)
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No matter how monolithic they may seem, most companies are really engaged in three kinds of businesses. One business attracts customers. Another develops products. The third oversees operations. Although organizationally intertwined, these businesses have conflicting characteristics. It takes a big investment to find and develop a relationship with a customer, so profitability hinges on achieving economies of scope. But speed, not scope, drives the economics of product innovation. And the high fixed costs of capital-intensive infrastructure businesses require economies of scale. Scope, speed, and scale can’t be optimized simultaneously, so trade-offs have to be made when the three businesses are bundled into one corporation. Historically, they have been bundled because the interaction costs — the friction — incurred by separating them were too high. But we are on the verge of a worldwide reduction in interaction costs, as electronic networks drive down the costs of communicating and of exchanging data. Activities that companies have always believed were central to their businesses will suddenly be offered by new, specialized competitors that won’t have to make trade-offs. Ultimately, traditional businesses will unbundle and then rebundle into large infrastructure and customer-relationship businesses and small, nimble product innovation companies. And executives in many industries will be forced to ask the most basic question about their companies: What business are we really in? Their answer will determine their fate in an increasingly frictionless economy.
— Unbundling the Corporation, by John Hagel, Marc Singer
Source: Harvard Business Review
Publication date: Mar 01, 1999.
posted 1 month ago and tagged as business marketing sales product development operations scope speed scale corporation
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Most popular web-based businesses are deflationary. They substitute expensive forms of content consumption for cheap ones, they make it logistically easier to deliver discounts to people who will respond to them, and they create numerous financially cheap forms of social status. As more activity moves on to the web, the main effect on the economy will be broadly lower prices and less need for employment.
— The Growth of the Internet and the Happy Recession
(Source: digital-dd.com)
slide to unlock - Apple patent #1964022
The blood and sweat behind Labor Day →
To most Americans, the first Monday in September means a three-day weekend and the last hurrah of summer, a final outing at the shore before school begins, a family picnic.
But Labor Day was born in a time when work was no picnic. As America was moving from farms to factories in the Industrial Age, there was a long, violent, often-deadly struggle for fundamental workers’ rights, a struggle that in many ways was America’s “other civil war.”
It was a war fought when 12-hour days and six-day weeks were routine. Wages were low; there were no sick days, pensions or holidays. There was certainly no unemployment insurance. Any attempts at organizing were met by the combined wrath of business and government. The business of America was business.
That conflict, a period in which thousands of workers died in America’s unsafe and unsanitary factories and mines, and hundreds more died in riots and pitched battles over workers’ rights, is the little-noted history behind this holiday.
Imagine life without Unions. Union gains have permeated the entire job market, whether your profession has a union or not.
(via tanya77)
(Source: azspot)
Sometimes, you need to write up a bill for bullshit. When a client has been particularly bad, and you’ve run out of options for reconciliation, you’ve got to send them one of these. Bill them for all of the binged moonshine before that last conference call — or for that personal trainer that you had to hire after you were forced to eat six comfort pizzas. Whatever you’re billing them for, do it in style with our letterpressed day-ruining invoices from the Clients From Hell Store.
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I am, frankly, a mixture of disappointed and sad that after Yahoo! shut down Geocities, Briefcase, Content Match, Mash, RSS Advertising, Yahoo! Live, Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Pets, Yahoo Publisher, Yahoo! Podcasts, Yahoo! Music Store, Yahoo Photos, Yahoo! Design, Yahoo Auctions, Farechase, Yahoo Kickstart, MyWeb, WebJay, Yahoo! Directory France, Yahoo! Directory Spain, Yahoo! Directory Germany, Yahoo! Directory Italy, the enterprise business division, Inktomi, SpotM, Maven Networks, Direct Media Exchange, The All Seeing Eye, Yahoo! Tech, Paid Inclusion, Brickhouse, PayDirect, SearchMonkey, and Yahoo! Go!… there are still people out there going “Well, Yahoo certainly will never shut down Flickr, because _______________” where ______ is the sound of donkeys.
What, because they take your money? Because they’re so big? Because so many people use it and like it? Because it works well? Because it would make Yahoo! look bad? Go ahead, give me some more reasons. Flickr allows you great ability to export all your data. Get used to using it regularly.
— Jason Scott on Yahoo!locaust
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Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.
— ascribed to President Theodore Roosevelt
(Source: cryptome.org)
posted 1 year ago and tagged as government allegiance responsibility people corruption business politics
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