Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Strategy is not just about the moves you make it's about the signals you send" David Yoffe
David Yoffe gave a wonderful class on "Bitter Sweet competition" the story of Nutasweet and Equal and the fight for market share. A fight which eventually led to both companies exiting the space. Accomodating a competitor is sometimes a better strategy.
Rupert Murdoch and My Space .....Linked in. ...The value of 'Network effects"
A fascinating discussion regarding the social networking space and how linked in fits in.
My space did not feature but i asked David Yoffe how News corp had gone with my space.
The answer appeared to be that News may have missed its chance to make a large return on this investment.
"Do you measure something that's easy to measure or important to measure" Ashish Nanda
Ashish Nanda provided there lectures on leadership.
He is from the Law School, but teaches on the "leading professional services firms"
He gave everyone a chance to reflect on the personal leadership and insights into opportunities to be more valuable.
Some of his other quotes included
"What stays undone is the Elephant under the carpet"
"Feedback on the run is better than none"
We all have personal opportunities to use his learnings.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Authority is much more ambiguous in government"Paul Bremer
Ambassador Paul Bremer gave insightful comments on leadership in the context of his role as head of the Iraqi provisional authority.
His quote above, was in the context of business people not understanding politics. He stands out as a patriotic American despite recent comments by Bush and Rumsfield.
As an aside, he expects President Obama to be returned.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
What has Soy Sauce got to do with accounting?
The case of Kikkoman, the Japanese Soy Sauce company with one of the oldest brands in the world (1838); (presented by Rohit Deshpande) was extremely illuminating on many levels.
How could a Japanese company enter the USA market in the 1950's, shortly after the war? In addition, with a product of which 95 per cent of Americans were not consumers.
It was the first Japanese company to do this and by all accounts has been a role model for the Japanese car companies and others that have followed.
The case is well worth a read, but for me, with our new office in Auckland, it was incredibly useful to understand how Kikkoman worked out the USA market and subsequently learnt from the that market to reinvigorate their business in Japan.
I will be sending David Webb (who is heading up our NZ business), a full page of notes on this.
(THE Name Kikkoman roughly means the Tortoise that lives 10,000 years)
How could a Japanese company enter the USA market in the 1950's, shortly after the war? In addition, with a product of which 95 per cent of Americans were not consumers.
It was the first Japanese company to do this and by all accounts has been a role model for the Japanese car companies and others that have followed.
The case is well worth a read, but for me, with our new office in Auckland, it was incredibly useful to understand how Kikkoman worked out the USA market and subsequently learnt from the that market to reinvigorate their business in Japan.
I will be sending David Webb (who is heading up our NZ business), a full page of notes on this.
(THE Name Kikkoman roughly means the Tortoise that lives 10,000 years)
Why does Nigeria Matter and why would they teach it at Harvard?
One could be excused for asking why Harvard would teach about Nigeria.
Very interesting facts, including that in 10 years they have gone from 7oo,ooo cell phones to 110 million, in a population of 150 million!
The fact that most of the population does not have power, but the government run power industry is about to be privatised.
The most compelling part of the case for me was the fact that Nations such as Nigeria that have massive oil revenue, can become too dependant on that revenue, their currency can rise, damagong most other exports and local industry, leaving the country with what's called the Dutch Disease" The same thing happenned to Holland with the North Sea oil in the 80's .
One can only think that Australia is at risk now with massive iron ore and coal exports and already a high dollar with many industries suffering, such as tourism.
Very interesting facts, including that in 10 years they have gone from 7oo,ooo cell phones to 110 million, in a population of 150 million!
The fact that most of the population does not have power, but the government run power industry is about to be privatised.
The most compelling part of the case for me was the fact that Nations such as Nigeria that have massive oil revenue, can become too dependant on that revenue, their currency can rise, damagong most other exports and local industry, leaving the country with what's called the Dutch Disease" The same thing happenned to Holland with the North Sea oil in the 80's .
One can only think that Australia is at risk now with massive iron ore and coal exports and already a high dollar with many industries suffering, such as tourism.
And we thought AFL was VIolent
A group of us went to the Ice Hockey, Boston Gruens vs the Dallas Stars. Within the first three seconds a Boston player punched a Dallas player in the face, there was literally blood all over the Ice! The crowd went wild, they wanted more blood!
So they got it, three more serious fights in three minutes. Not great role models for the thousands of kids in the audience.
It is such a fast game with incredible speed and skills.
Boston won six three.
Why A students become academics and C students become billionaire donors
Larry Summers vs. the Tiger Mom
A live debate with Amy Chua: Why A students become academics and C students become billionaire donors
By GERARD BAKER
Philip Larkin might have had a thing or two to say about the Tiger Mother. The English poet had a famously mordant view of parenting and the long-term psychological impact on its victims:
They f— you up your mum and dad
They do not mean to but they do
Larry Summers and Amy Chua exchanged views on parenting styles in Davos this week.
We can only guess what he would have made of the phenomenon that is Amy Chua, the Yale law professor who was once merely a trenchant commentator on globalization but is now, thanks to a sensational new book, the world's most admired, feared, loved and loathed mother. Larkin's pop psychology would surely have made hay with the story of how Ms. Chua once forced her daughter to go without food and drink until she had learned how to play a tune on the piano.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra just for you
Sadly, Prof. Larkin, from whose own turbulent life—if he's right—we must infer quite a bit about his parents, is no longer with us. So instead this week it fell to another academic to critique the Chinese way of parenting.
In one of the most entertaining of the sessions at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, the organizers pitted Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, Harvard president and recently departed Obama administration chief economic adviser, against Prof. Chua. Harvard vs. Yale, West vs. East, Economist vs. Lawyer, Permissive Postmodern Parent vs. Dictatorial Disciplinarian of Daughters.
Of course it wasn't quite like that.
Earlier
• Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior
Prof. Summers, for a start, is evidently no pushover parent himself. At the meeting, organized by the Global Agenda Councils, he instantly acknowledged that he bears no resemblance to the indulgent, indolent Western stereotype Ms. Chua excoriates in her book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," first excerpted in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month.
In fact, he noted, in Larkinesque language, that his own reputation—at home as much as in his professional life—was as something of a "hard-ass."
His audience, a select group of Davos participants, business leaders, policymakers, journalists and professors themselves, probably needed no reminding of his tumultuous stint as Harvard president, which ended after multiple clashes with the faculty.
But he recalled anyway some of his more turbulent exchanges there, like the time he once told puzzled faculty members: "I think you have to decide whether achievement is the route to self-esteem or whether self-esteem is the route to achievement. I think you guys think self-esteem is the route to achievement, and I think you're wrong."
And yet even the stern intendant of traditional academic values couldn't quite bring himself to endorse the hard-ass Asian mothering style. Surprisingly for an academic who has won almost all the glittering prizes, he challenged the idea—cherished by Ms. Chua and her admirers—that academic success as a route to a rewarding career should be the sum of a child's ambitions.
"Which two freshmen at Harvard have arguably been most transformative of the world in the last 25 years?" he asked. "You can make a reasonable case for Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, neither of whom graduated." If they had been the product of a Tiger Mom upbringing, he added, their mothers would probably have been none too pleased with their performance.
The A, B and C alums at Harvard in fact could be broadly characterized thus, he said:
That's a good point. Some ethnic immigrant groups clearly perform better in certain academic and professional fields than others—why, for example, should more than 50% of Berkeley's computer-science students be Asian-born?
And differences in the immigrant experience around the world also suggest that the heavily beaten path to academic and professional success is not a universally shared goal. Europe, for example, is haunted by immigrant groups that are not socially and economically integrated—though that probably has more to do with the fundamental economic difference between the U.S. and Europe. Immigrants to European states with a large social welfare net are likely to have somewhat different motivations from those who venture to an enterprise economy such as America's.
In any case, Mr. Summers mused, perhaps we ought to agree that happiness is truly the greatest virtue, and unraveling the mysteries of the origins of happiness is really the key to the most successful parenting. "People on average live a quarter of their lives as children. That's a lot," Mr. Summers said. "It's important that they be as happy as possible during those 18 years. That counts too."
If the audience had been expecting to be terrorized by the daunting Ms. Chua into immediately performing a quick sonata, translating the dinner menu into perfect Mandarin or reciting pi to 25 decimal places, they would have been pleasantly surprised. In person, as in her book, she is more identifiably maternal than tigerish.
She recounted how the book actually documents a more nuanced parenting style. Her daughter's reaction to an accumulation of some of her more extreme measures led her to a change of heart. The book, in fact, is self-mocking in part, and though she winds up extolling the virtues of tough love, she actually makes a case for a kind of synthesis of East and West—in parenting as in much else.
All of which sounds rather disappointing. What started out as a bracing cold shower of tough traditionalism risks ending in a soft warm bubble bath of multiculturalism, where everyone simply gets along swimmingly. That said, the Chua manifesto, even in slightly diluted form, will continue to resonate. It is already a publishing phenomenon.
In Davos this week, Ms. Chua shuttled busily from one klieg-lit event to another, as much in media demand as any penurious head of state or gauzy movie star. A separate publishing phenomenon might explore the reasons her thesis has chimed so loudly with Americans. My own theory is simple. The engaging Ms. Chua has captured in perfect synthesis the two things middle-age Americans now fear most—China, and their own children.
Write to Gerard Baker at Gerard.Baker@wsj.com
A live debate with Amy Chua: Why A students become academics and C students become billionaire donors
By GERARD BAKER
Philip Larkin might have had a thing or two to say about the Tiger Mother. The English poet had a famously mordant view of parenting and the long-term psychological impact on its victims:
They f— you up your mum and dad
They do not mean to but they do
Larry Summers and Amy Chua exchanged views on parenting styles in Davos this week.
We can only guess what he would have made of the phenomenon that is Amy Chua, the Yale law professor who was once merely a trenchant commentator on globalization but is now, thanks to a sensational new book, the world's most admired, feared, loved and loathed mother. Larkin's pop psychology would surely have made hay with the story of how Ms. Chua once forced her daughter to go without food and drink until she had learned how to play a tune on the piano.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra just for you
Sadly, Prof. Larkin, from whose own turbulent life—if he's right—we must infer quite a bit about his parents, is no longer with us. So instead this week it fell to another academic to critique the Chinese way of parenting.
In one of the most entertaining of the sessions at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, the organizers pitted Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, Harvard president and recently departed Obama administration chief economic adviser, against Prof. Chua. Harvard vs. Yale, West vs. East, Economist vs. Lawyer, Permissive Postmodern Parent vs. Dictatorial Disciplinarian of Daughters.
Of course it wasn't quite like that.
Earlier
• Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior
Prof. Summers, for a start, is evidently no pushover parent himself. At the meeting, organized by the Global Agenda Councils, he instantly acknowledged that he bears no resemblance to the indulgent, indolent Western stereotype Ms. Chua excoriates in her book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," first excerpted in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month.
In fact, he noted, in Larkinesque language, that his own reputation—at home as much as in his professional life—was as something of a "hard-ass."
His audience, a select group of Davos participants, business leaders, policymakers, journalists and professors themselves, probably needed no reminding of his tumultuous stint as Harvard president, which ended after multiple clashes with the faculty.
But he recalled anyway some of his more turbulent exchanges there, like the time he once told puzzled faculty members: "I think you have to decide whether achievement is the route to self-esteem or whether self-esteem is the route to achievement. I think you guys think self-esteem is the route to achievement, and I think you're wrong."
And yet even the stern intendant of traditional academic values couldn't quite bring himself to endorse the hard-ass Asian mothering style. Surprisingly for an academic who has won almost all the glittering prizes, he challenged the idea—cherished by Ms. Chua and her admirers—that academic success as a route to a rewarding career should be the sum of a child's ambitions.
"Which two freshmen at Harvard have arguably been most transformative of the world in the last 25 years?" he asked. "You can make a reasonable case for Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, neither of whom graduated." If they had been the product of a Tiger Mom upbringing, he added, their mothers would probably have been none too pleased with their performance.
The A, B and C alums at Harvard in fact could be broadly characterized thus, he said:
The A students became academics, B students spent their time trying to get their children into the university as legacies, and the C students—the ones who had made the money—sat on the fund-raising committee.And while Ms. Chua and Mr. Summers agree that the immigrant's special aspirations apply not just to Chinese mothers—surely many Eastern Europeans, Africans or Latin Americans recognize their own families' histories in Ms Chua's narrative of extreme parenting—Mr. Summers argued that these aspirations cannot explain all.
That's a good point. Some ethnic immigrant groups clearly perform better in certain academic and professional fields than others—why, for example, should more than 50% of Berkeley's computer-science students be Asian-born?
And differences in the immigrant experience around the world also suggest that the heavily beaten path to academic and professional success is not a universally shared goal. Europe, for example, is haunted by immigrant groups that are not socially and economically integrated—though that probably has more to do with the fundamental economic difference between the U.S. and Europe. Immigrants to European states with a large social welfare net are likely to have somewhat different motivations from those who venture to an enterprise economy such as America's.
In any case, Mr. Summers mused, perhaps we ought to agree that happiness is truly the greatest virtue, and unraveling the mysteries of the origins of happiness is really the key to the most successful parenting. "People on average live a quarter of their lives as children. That's a lot," Mr. Summers said. "It's important that they be as happy as possible during those 18 years. That counts too."
If the audience had been expecting to be terrorized by the daunting Ms. Chua into immediately performing a quick sonata, translating the dinner menu into perfect Mandarin or reciting pi to 25 decimal places, they would have been pleasantly surprised. In person, as in her book, she is more identifiably maternal than tigerish.
She recounted how the book actually documents a more nuanced parenting style. Her daughter's reaction to an accumulation of some of her more extreme measures led her to a change of heart. The book, in fact, is self-mocking in part, and though she winds up extolling the virtues of tough love, she actually makes a case for a kind of synthesis of East and West—in parenting as in much else.
All of which sounds rather disappointing. What started out as a bracing cold shower of tough traditionalism risks ending in a soft warm bubble bath of multiculturalism, where everyone simply gets along swimmingly. That said, the Chua manifesto, even in slightly diluted form, will continue to resonate. It is already a publishing phenomenon.
In Davos this week, Ms. Chua shuttled busily from one klieg-lit event to another, as much in media demand as any penurious head of state or gauzy movie star. A separate publishing phenomenon might explore the reasons her thesis has chimed so loudly with Americans. My own theory is simple. The engaging Ms. Chua has captured in perfect synthesis the two things middle-age Americans now fear most—China, and their own children.
Write to Gerard Baker at Gerard.Baker@wsj.com
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Boston is Very Cold
Its been well below freezing and 60 centimeters is in the process of falling!
Todays classes focussed on how Brands can give a competitive advantage and increase customer loyalty. VJ told us , "What gets measured, gets managed"
Harvards tunnels system means you do not have to get rugged up!
Quote of the day David Yoffie "Strategy is best learned by digging Deep"
First Day, no rest for the wicked.
The major focus for the students after catching up on all our news is the Egypt situation. Many are concerned about the potential for the middle East to unravel.
Classes on the first day focussed on performance management systems, Apple strategy and whether the iphone is a sustainable product, David Yoffie raised concerns about Apple being overly reliant on Steve Jobs.
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