Category: Management

Monty Python Success Arose from Freedom, Not Plans

Pythons1969.jpg“The unusual suspects, 1969: top row from left, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam; bottom row from left, Terry Jones, John Cleese and Michael Palin.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 24) “A lot of contemporary comedy seems self-conscious,” Mr. Palin said. “It’s almost documentary, like ‘The Office.’ That’s a very funny show, but you’re looking at the human condition under stress. The Pythons made the human condition seem like fun.”

He added: “I’m proud to be a Python. It’s a badge of silliness, which is quite important. I was the gay lumberjack, I was the Spanish Inquisition, I was one-half of the fish-slapping dance. I look at myself and think that may be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”
Mr. Cleese and Mr. Jones, in rare agreement, both suggested that one reason the Pythons have never been successfully imitated is that television executives nowadays would never let anyone get away with putting together a show like theirs. When they began, they didn’t have an idea what the show should be about or even a title for it. The BBC gave them some money, and then, Mr. Cleese joked, the executives hurried off to the bar.
“The great thing was that in the beginning we had such a low profile,” he said. “We went on at different times, and some weeks we didn’t go on at all, because there might be a show-jumping competition. But that was the key to our feeling of freedom. We didn’t know what the viewing figures were, and we didn’t care. What has happened now is the complete reverse. Even the BBC is obsessed with the numbers.”
So obsessed, Bill Jones pointed out, that in the case of “Monty Python: Almost the Truth” some people encouraged the documentarians to see if they couldn’t squeeze the six hours down to one.

For the full story, see:
CHARLES McGRATH. “Television; On Comedy’s Flying Trapeze.” The New York Times, Arts & Leisure Section (Sun., October 4, 2009): 1 & 24.
(Note: ellipses added.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated September 30, (sic) 2009.)

PythonsPremeireSpamalot2009-10-23.jpg“Above from left, Mr. Jones, Mr. Gilliam, Mr. Cleese, Mr. Idle and Mr. Palin at the premiere of “Spamalot.”” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Justice Department is Creating Barriers to Companies Trying to Create New Technologies

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Intel CEO Craig Barrett. Source of caricature: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A9) Craig Barrett is spending the last days of his tenure as Intel chairman the same way he spent his previous 35 years at the corporation: moving at a superhuman pace that leaves exhausted subordinates in his wake.

Mr. Barrett has maintained this lifestyle since he replaced Andrew Grove as CEO of Intel in 1998. “Was it hard to follow a legend?” he asks himself in his typical blunt way, adding, “What do you think?” Mr. Barrett barely broke pace when he became chairman in 2005, and shows no sign of slowing even now, at age 69, as he faces retirement.
. . .
The latest thing that has him animated is the record $1.45 billion antitrust fine levied against Intel by the European Union this week. Mr. Barrett shakes his head and says, “The antitrust rules and regulations seem designed for a different era. When you look at high-tech companies, with the high R&D budgets, specialization and market creation they need to hold their big market shares, it’s so very different from the old world of oil companies and auto makers that the antitrust regulations were designed for. They are out of sync with reality.
“And how do you reconcile European regulators, who don’t believe that any company should have more than 50% market share — even a market that company created — with the way we operate here? Of course, now it seems as if our Justice Department is preparing to march in lock-step behind Europe. In the end, all they are going to do is create barriers to companies growing, entering into new markets, and bringing new technologies into those markets. And when we stop being the land of opportunity, all of those smart immigrant kids getting their Ph.D.s here are going to start heading home after they graduate. Then watch what happens to our competitiveness.”

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL S. MALONE. “OPINION: THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with Craig Barrett; From Moore’s Law to Barrett’s Rules; Intel’s chairman on antitrust silliness and the secrets of high-tech success.” Wall Street Journal (Sat., MARCH 16, 2009): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Berkshire BYD Technology Bet Based on Munger’s View of BYD Manager

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“BOOK VALUE: Berkshire Hathaway’s Charles Munger reads businesses well — and, as a bibliophile, he goes through several books a week.” Source of caricature and caption: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

At a Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting a few years ago, I remember hearing Warren Buffett say that he stays away from technology stocks because he does not know how to judge which technologies are likely to succeed in the long-run. So I was a bit puzzled by the news that Berkshire Hathaway was investing in BYD, a Chinese company producing an electric car.
The passages quoted below may partially solve the puzzle: the investment in BYD was pushed by Charlie Munger and David Sokol, and was based more on a judgment about the quality of BYD’s management, than the prospects for BYD’s technology.

(p. C1) Mr. Munger’s views have pushed Berkshire into some surprising directions. Several years ago, Mr. Munger learned of an obscure Chinese maker of batteries and automobiles called BYD Inc., which hopes to create a cheap, functional electric car.

A Chinese tech company is nothing like the shoe and underwear makers Berkshire had been buying. But Mr. Munger was enthusiastic, less about the technology than about Wang Chuanfu, who runs BYD. Mr. Wang, Mr. Munger says, is “likely to be one of the most important business people who ever lived.”
Mr. Buffett was skeptical at first. But Mr. Munger persisted. David Sokol, chairman of Berkshire utility MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., paid a visit to BYD’s factory in China and agreed with Mr. Munger’s assessment. Last year, MidAmerican paid $230 million for a 10% stake in BYD.
“BYD was Charlie’s idea,” Mr. Buffett said. “When he encounters genius and sees it operating in a practical way, he gets blown away.”

For the full story, see:

SCOTT PATTERSON. “Here’s the Story on Berkshire’s Munger.” Wall Street Journal (Fri., MAY 1, 2009): C1 & C3.

“Every Organization Has Too Many Meetings”

HastieReidMeetings2009-05-15.jpg“Reid Hastie, a professor at the University of Chicago, contends that “every organization has too many meetings, and far too many poorly designed ones.” ” Source of photo and caption: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

The author of the following wise words is a Professor of Behavioral Science at the School of Business at the University of Chicago. One of the main points of the commentary, in the language of economics, is that meeting planners often fail to consider the opportunity cost of attendees’ time:

(p. 2) As a general rule, meetings make individuals perform below their capacity and skill levels.

This doesn’t mean we should always avoid face-to-face meetings — but it is certain that every organization has too many meetings, and far too many poorly designed ones.
The main reason we don’t make meetings more productive is that we don’t value our time properly. The people who call meetings and those who attend them are not thinking about time as their most valuable resource.
. . .
Probably most important, we are blind to lost time opportunities. When we choose where to invest our time, as opposed to where to invest money, we are more likely to neglect what else we could have done with it.

For the full commentary, see:
REID HASTIE. “Preoccupations – Meetings Are a Matter of Precious Time.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., January 18, 2009): 2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Steuben Saw “The Genius of this Nation”

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“German soldier of fortune and American ally Baron von Steuben (1730-94)” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. W9) The essence of Steuben’s achievement was his modification of the brutal, robotic precision of the Prussian system to fit American conditions. He was able to do this because he was one of the first foreign observers, military or civilian, to grasp an essential strain of the American character. “The genius of this nation,” he wrote a European friend, “is not in the least to be compared with that of the Prussians, Austrians or French. You say to your soldier, ‘Do this,’ and he doeth it. I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that,’ and then he does it.”
. . .
While Mr. Lockhart tends to soft-pedal some of Steuben’s more dubious deeds — ignoring, for instance, his attempt to interest Prince Henry of Prussia, Frederick the Great’s younger brother, in becoming king of the independent colonies before the adoption of the Constitution — the author generally treats his subject with balance, understanding and great good humor, aptly concluding that, “although he blurred a few details of the past in order to seek preferment in the United States, somewhere between his arrival and the achievement of American independence, the Baron became something very much like the man he had pretended to be.”

For the full review, see:
ARAM BAKSHIAN JR. “BOOKS; Revolutionary Scamp.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., NOVEMBER 8, 2008): W9.
The reference to the book under review is:
Lockhart, Paul. The Drillmaster of Valley Forge. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.

DrillmasterOfValleyForgeBK.jpg

Source of book image: http://robertos-book-picks.blogspot.com/2008/11/drillmaster-of-valley-forge-baron-de.html

New Business Model for Promoting Disruptive Innovation

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“Clayton M. Christensen” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ interview quoted and cited below.

(p. R2) BUSINESS INSIGHT: . . . There must be, . . . , cases where concerns about the market cause companies to abandon their plans for new products or really retrench. Or do you see that happening less these days as companies realize the importance of keeping up with changing markets?
DR. CHRISTENSEN: In the next two years, I think the answer will hinge quite a bit on the role that hedge funds play in driving stock prices. By now, 95% of all trades on the stock exchange are executed by hedge funds, mutual funds or pension funds that you could not call shareholders. They’re share owners, but they don’t even hold the shares long enough, on average, to vote the proxy. And long-term shareholders are always better for innovation than the short-term people are.
BUSINESS INSIGHT: So we might see innovation more from private companies?
DR. CHRISTENSEN: Absolutely right. And there’s another business model toward which more and more companies need to move. It’s a business model you see with Li & Fung in Hong Kong, Tata Sons in India, and Cox Enterprises in Atlanta. In this model, the holding company is privately held, and then certain of the subsidiary companies that have the right characteristics take their shares public on the market.
What that allows those companies to do is, when they have a disruptive innovation that they need to launch, they can just do it under the private umbrella of the holding company, and not have it reduce the near-term performance of the publicly held subsidiaries.

For the full interview, see:
Martha E. Mangelsdorf, interviewer. “Executive Briefing; How Hard Times Can Drive Innovation.” Wall Street Journal (Mon., DECEMBER 15, 2008): R2.
(Note: ellipses added.)

“Leapfrog Over the Other Players in Their Industry”

(p. 152) The early market is driven by the demands of visionaries for offerings that create dramatic competitive advantages of the sort that would allow them to leapfrog over the other players in their industry.

Source:
Moore, Geoffrey A. Living on the Fault Line: Managing for Shareholder Value in the Age of the Internet. 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2000.

Kodak Ignored Digital to Its Peril

SassonStevenKodakInventor.jpg “Steven J. Sasson, an electrical engineer, created the first digital camera.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Kodak’s problems in detailed in the article below, fit very well Christensen’s account about how difficult it is for incumbent firms to embrace major disruptive technologies.

(p. C1) ROCHESTER — Steven J. Sasson, an electrical engineer who invented the first digital camera at Eastman Kodak in the 1970s, remembers well management’s dismay at his feat.
“My prototype was big as a toaster, but the technical people loved it,” Mr. Sasson said. “But it was filmless photography, so management’s reaction was, ‘that’s cute — but don’t tell anyone about it.’ ”
. . .
(p. C2) The company now has digital techniques that can remove scratches and otherwise enhance old movies. It has found more efficient ways to make O.L.E.D.’s — organic light-emitting diodes — for displays in cameras, cellphones and televisions.
This month, Kodak will introduce Stream, a continuous inkjet printer that can churn out customized items like bill inserts at extremely high speeds. It is working on ways to capture and project three-dimensional movies.
. . .
Paradoxically, many of the new products are based on work Kodak began, but abandoned, years ago. The precursor technology to Stream, for example, pushed ink through a single nozzle. Stream has thousands of holes and uses a method called air deflection to separate drops of ink and control the speed and order in which they are deposited on a page.
“I remember wandering through the labs in 2003, and seeing the theoretical model that could become Stream,” said Philip J. Faraci, Kodak’s president. “The technology was half-baked, but it was a real breakthrough.”
Other digital technologies languished as well, said Bill Lloyd, the chief technology officer. “I’ve been here five years, and I’m still learning about all the things they already have,” he said. “It seems Kodak had developed antibodies against anything that might compete with film.”
It took what many analysts say was a near-death experience to change that. Kodak, a film titan in the 20th century, entered the next one in danger of being mowed down by the digital juggernaut. Electronics companies like Sony were siphoning away the photography market, while giants like Hewlett-Packard and Xerox had a lock on printers.
“This was a supertanker that came close to capsizing,” said Timothy M. Ghriskey, chief investment officer at Solaris Asset Management, which long ago sold its Kodak shares.

For the full story, see:
CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH. “At Kodak, Some Old Things Are New Again.” The New York Times (Fri., May 2, 2008): C1-C2.
(Note: ellipses added.)

CampAllenTechnicianKodak.jpg “Allan Camp, a technician at Kodak’s inkjet development center in Rochester, works on the development of print heads for printers.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

NASA Suffers From “Utterly Dysfunctional Funding and Management System”

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Source of book image: http://press.princeton.edu/images/k8618.gif

(p. A13) The space shuttle Discovery arrived safely home over the weekend, and I suppose we are all rather relieved – that is, those of us who were aware that the shuttle had blasted off a couple of weeks ago on yet another mission. Space exploration is attracting a lot of excitement these days, but the excitement seems to have less to do with the shuttle and more to do with private space ventures, like Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic or Robert Bigelow’s plans for space hotels or Space Adventures Ltd., whose latest customer for a private space trip is Google co-founder Sergey Brin. He bought a ticket only last week.

Robert Zimmerman’s “The Universe in the Mirror” serves to remind us that NASA, too, can do exciting things in space. Yet the career of the Hubble Space Telescope has been both triumphant and troubled, bringing into focus the strengths and the weaknesses of doing things the NASA way.
. . .
In addition to telling a thrilling tale, Mr. Zimmerman provides a number of lessons. One, he says, is the importance of having human beings in space: Had Hubble not been designed for servicing by astronauts, it would have been an epic failure and a disaster for a generation of astronomers and astrophysicists. Though robots have their uses, he notes, “humans can fix things, something no unmanned probe can do.” . . .
But the biggest lesson of “The Universe in a Mirror” comes from the utterly dysfunctional funding and management system that Mr. Zimmerman portrays. Hubble was a triumph, but a system that requires people to sacrifice careers and personal lives, and to engage in “courageous and illegal” acts, in order to see it succeed is a system that is badly in need of repair. Alas, fixing Hubble turned out to be easier than fixing the system that lay behind its problems.

For the full review, see:

GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS. “Bookshelf; We Can See Clearly Now.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., June 16, 2008): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The revised edition of the book under review (including an afterword added by the author) is:
Zimmerman, Robert. The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It. revised pb ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Investment in General Purpose Technologies is Partly a “Leap-of-Faith”

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Caricature of Glenn Britt. Source of caricature: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B2) WSJ: You invested $550 million in Clearwire Corp., which is building a wireless broadband network. Why?
Mr. Britt: We saw that as a defensive move. The business today is largely about making voice telephone calls, text messaging, and some data.
This venture is about very fast broadband delivery, but the technologies and the products are as yet not fully defined. It’s a bit of a start-up, leap-of-faith kind of thing.
WSJ: What uses could this wireless network be put to?
Mr. Britt: An obvious one is using your laptop in a portable way just as you might today with WiFi hot spots. Another is going to be the PDA, the smallest device you can use to access the Internet. If you have an iPhone you can start seeing what that might look like with a more robust network.
Out in the future, people are talking about machine-to-machine communication, the idea of heart monitors talking to hospitals, your camera automatically uploading photos to Shutterfly or whatever printing service you might use.
WSJ: What about the idea of mobile video delivered to portable devices?
Mr. Britt: I know people talk a lot about mobile video, and I certainly think there is some application for it. But I quite honestly haven’t seen it as a big deal. People do want to get video wherever they are. We already have a robust over-the-air television system which, as it goes digital, will be able to have a mobile component to it. But I don’t know how big the ultimate market is in this country. I’m skeptical.

For the full story, see:
VISHESH KUMAR. “BOSS TALK; Cable Boss Airs Growth Plans; Time Warner Cable CEO Sees New Freedoms, Threats After Its Spinoff.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., June 2, 2008): B1-B2.
(Note: the title of the online version of the article is “BOSS TALK; Grappling With Cable’s Future; Time Warner’s Glenn Britt Sees Freedoms, Threats As Unit Readies for Spinoff.”)