Virginia Postrel, writing in Southwest Airlines’ Spirit Magazine [pdf].
Category: Culture
Dealer Activism for GM’s Embattled Chairman
Lee Hawkins, Jr., Monica Langley and Joe White:
Besides Mr. Fisher’s statement, Mr. Wagoner recently has won the backing of two prominent GM dealers. John Bergstrom, chairman of Wisconsin-based GM dealership chain Bergstrom Automotive, sent a letter to the board late last week to “share with you my total support and respect for Rick Wagoner…who has earned the respect of all of us in the retail network.”
Another dealer, Carl Sewell, who has 15 GM franchises in the Dallas area, recently began talking to other dealers to say, “We need to come to our company’s and Rick’s defense.” GM is providing his dealerships with “the best product we’ve ever had,” he said, adding that Mr. Wagoner is “a wonderful human being of intellect and integrity.”
Google’s $2Billion Stock Sale
It must want to buy something. No other conceivable explanation jumps to mind for why a cash-gushing monster with an $8 billion war chest would toss away another 5 million shares in tonight’s shelf filing.
Scheduled 2006 big ticket items are $1 billion to AOL for the search deal, $1 billion (rumored) to Dell for the Google Pack deal, and $1-$2 billion for capex, all offset by an estimated $2-$3 billion of positive cash flow. Add that together and you get a net 2006 cash outflow of maybe $1 billion, leaving $7 billion on the balance sheet–more than enough to compete with anyone except…
Ligeti and a Madison Speeding Ticket
Flashing lights from an unmarked black sedan; sudden short blare of a siren out of nowhere. I pull over, but the police car doesn’t move on. Those lights, for me? For me?
I’d been tooling along John Nolen Drive, lost in Ligeti’s propulsive first Étude. Is that what it was about the throbbing blue Beetle, swimming along in a sea of cars going just as fast, that asked for special attention?
What’s the Biggest Change Facing Business in the Next 10 Years?
In Fast Company’s first decade, we introduced readers to a lot of amazingly smart people. To launch our second, we asked 10 of our favorite brains what’s next–and how to get ready for it.
I think Malcolm Gladwell nails it, business will become much more active in political issues:
“Business has to find its national voice. It has to be engaged in the politics of this country in a way it’s not accustomed to. Right now, executives are very good at saying, ‘Cut our taxes, cut our regulations.’ And they’re really terrible at making far more important and substantive arguments about social policy. It’s time they stopped banging this one-note drum and started saying that a lot of the things that have been relegated to ideology are, in fact, matters of fundamental international competitiveness for this country.
Take, for example, health care. We are ceding manufacturing jobs to the rest of the world because we can’t get around to providing some kind of basic, uniform health insurance. Because of our strange ideological problem with nationalized health insurance, we’re basically driving Detroit out of business–which strikes me as a very counterintuitive, nonsensical policy. The simple fact is that GM and Ford and Chrysler cannot compete in the world market if they’re asked to bear the pension and health-care costs of their retirees. Can’t be done. It’s that simple.
Why Don’t More Businesses Use Prediction Markets?
Last week in The New York Times (TimesSelect), Joseph Nocera quoted Robin Hanson as saying private businesses had not made a breakthrough with the use of idea futures. It seems natural to let your employees bet on future business conditions, the success of product lines, or broader questions of corporate strategy. Microsoft and Google and a few other companies have played with the idea, but it does not (yet?) seem to be taking off. Why not?
- Prediction markets threaten the hierarchical control of top managers. It would become too obvious that most managers are idiots, unable to predict the future.
- Prediction markets make a big chunk of the bettors into “losers.” Yet within a company morale is all-important. Businesses proceed by soliciting feedback, and by reshaping their plans to pretend that everyone is on board and has an ego stake in the final outcome. Prediction markets make this coordination more difficult. Once people make bets, they start rooting for their bet to win and for the other bet to lose. They move away from maximizing the value of the firm and develop an oppositional mentality vis-a-vis other employees. Furthermore it is disruptive to have a running tally on who are the winners and losers each day.
Gladwell: Lazy Centers
David Sally, a behavioral economist at Dartmouth, responds to the discussion I had with Bill Simmons yesterday on the tendency of NBA players to so dramatically over-perform in the last year of their contract:
With regard to the contract year phenomenon, we can go a little further–we can predict that the likelihood of the post-contract dip is positively correlated with the height of the player. Why is that? Again, the answer lies in the environment-individual link. The seven foot guy has heard that he should be a basketball player since he was eight years old or even younger. He’s been pushed his whole career onto the grade school team, onto the varsity, into Division I, and then the NBA draft. He is much less likely than the six foot guy to ever have made a committed choice. He may never had to exert anything approaching his maximum effort level until his contract year. As a result, he has either no idea how to persevere or no intrinsic motivation. So, Simmons’ rule is actually too blunt: it seems he should be able to draft contract-signing point guards and two guards for his fantasy team, but never centers or fours. Small forwards–we’d have to do the empirical study.
Apathy, The Downside of Everything
No, instead I’m concerned about our country’s lack of vision for the future and the can-do attitude that we seem somehow to have lost — at least, it’s missing from most discussions on issues facing us today. In a nutshell, I’m lamenting the apparent mortal illness of optimism and ingenuity — the kind of spirit and drive that ignores all the negative issues in the news, the naysayers and the partisans and simply presses forward, driving toward solutions that benefit all of society.
I know we had that once, because the car industry as we know it today was not the invention of large and well-funded corporations. It was created and delivered by men who, though they often worked against the most incredible odds, never lost sight of their dreams and visions. With that focus — which often earned them scorn and insults — they changed the world for the better in a way that centuries of innovation hadn’t. And they did it in mere decades.
DSG: Death of the Stick Shift?
OK rivet counters: Audi didn’t invent the double clutch. Citroen offered something similar over 70 years ago, and Porsche’s formidable 962 racer also gave it a go. But Audi has just about perfected the DSG. (The only drawbacks are a certain sluggishness when gently tipping-in and a slight hesitation when paddling down more than one gear, as the DSG shuffles through the intervening ratios.) Even with its quirks, the DSG rules– to the point where the clutch pedal and traditional manual gearbox is a mechanical redundancy, a dead device shifting. In fact, any car manufacturer who doesn’t have a DSG or something similar installed in their performance-oriented products will soon be at a tremendous disadvantage.
Requiem for Don Knotts
Knotts first rose to prominence in the late 1950s, joining Louis Nye and other comedy players on “The Steve Allen Show.” In 1961, United Artists Records released a comedy album titled “Don Knotts: An Evening with Me,” which featured various takeoffs on the “nervous man” routine the comic had made famous on Allen’s show. One of the bits, “The Weatherman,” concerned a TV forecaster forced to wing it after the meteorology report fails to make it to the studio by air time.
During the mid- to late 1960s, in a largely unsuccessful bid for major film stardom, Knotts made a series of family films that many connoisseurs now say were critically underappreciated at the time. These include “The Incredible Mr. Limpet” (1964), “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” (1966) and “The Reluctant Astronaut” (1967). The latter two were made as part of a five-picture deal with Universal Pictures.
Much more on Don Knotts.