“THE remarkable juxtaposition of American heartland, Midwest values and a whole lot of foreign accents” is what makes Midland, Michigan, a beacon of hope for the country’s manufacturing sector, reckons Andrew Liveris. His is one of those accents, though he no longer sounds crocodile-wrestlingly Australian. The boss of Dow Chemical has lived on and off for years in the company town that grew up around the brine wells that Herbert Dow first tapped in 1897 for his pioneering electrolysis process. The chemical firm still employs 5,500 of the town’s 42,000 inhabitants. (The second-biggest employer is Dow Corning, a silicone-making joint venture.) Dow’s success has delivered the nice homes, good schools and ball parks that make up the American Dream.
Like many immigrants, Mr Liveris shares that dream. But he now fears it is under threat. He has become one of the leading voices calling on the American government to embrace industrial policy. Last July Dow launched a plan to revive American manufacturing, which Mr Liveris then expanded into a book, “Make It In America”. On June 24th President Barack Obama appointed him co-chair of a new “Advanced Manufacturing Partnership” that brings together government, academia and business to “build a roadmap” for a more competitive manufacturing sector.
Category: Entrepreneurs
Invasion of the body hackers
Michael Galpert rolls over in bed in his New York apartment, the alarm clock still chiming. The 28-year-old internet entrepreneur slips off the headband that’s been recording his brainwaves all night and studies the bar graph of his deep sleep, light sleep and REM. He strides to the bathroom and steps on his digital scale, the one that shoots his weight and body mass to an online data file. Before he eats his scrambled egg whites with spinach, he takes a picture of his plate with his mobile phone, which then logs the calories. He sets his mileage tracker before he hops on his bike and rides to the office, where a different set of data spreadsheets awaits.
“Running a start-up, I’m always looking at numbers, always tracking how business is going,” he says. Page views, clicks and downloads, he tallies it all. “That’s under-the-hood information that you can only garner from analysing different data points. So I started doing that with myself.”
His weight, exercise habits, caloric intake, sleep patterns – they’re all quantified and graphed like a quarterly revenue statement. And just as a business trims costs when profits dip, Galpert makes decisions about his day based on his personal analytics: too many calories coming from carbs? Say no to rice and bread at lunchtime. Not enough REM sleep? Reschedule that important business meeting for tomorrow.
The founder of his own online company, Galpert is one of a growing number of “self-quantifiers”. Moving in the technology circles of New York and Silicon Valley, engineers and entrepreneurs have begun applying a tenet of the computer business to their personal health: “One cannot change or control that which one cannot measure.”
Lessons from war’s factory floor
The lowest point of the US occupation of Iraq was about five years ago. American forces had no effective strategy in the face of a street-level civil war and a particularly vicious insurgent group, al-Qaeda in Iraq. At Haditha, frightened and frustrated marines had killed 24 civilians. At Samarra, the Golden Dome mosque had been destroyed – a potent symbol of conflict between Shia and Sunni Muslims. Donald Rumsfeld, then defence secretary, appeared to be in an advanced state of denial, breezily waving away good advice, and in a notorious press conference shortly after the atrocity at Haditha, refusing to use the word “insurgent”, or to let the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff use it either. The US strategy was failing and its leadership was determined not to change direction. It was a case study in organisational dysfunction.
Yet by 2008, the situation in Iraq had improved radically. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was in retreat, and the number of attacks, American and Iraqi deaths had fallen dramatically. Although the success remains fragile and there were other factors involved, a complete transformation of US military strategy deserves much credit.
How did it happen and what are the lessons for other organisations that need to turn around? The easy answer is that the solution was a change of leadership. Thanks to behind-the-scenes campaigning and a drubbing in the midterm elections for President George W.?Bush, Mr Rumsfeld was replaced, and General David Petraeus was put in charge of the war in Iraq.
US set to regain industrial crown
The era of widespread offshoring of manufacturing from the US to China is coming to an end, according to a study that forecasts a renaissance for American production industries over the next five years.
The report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) forecasts that, by 2015 – on the back of good productivity growth and relatively low wages – the US is likely to be slightly ahead of China as a base for making many of the goods destined for sale in North America.
Obituary: The man who gave the world CDs
Norio Ohga, who was instrumental in bringing the world the compact disc and the PlayStation and is credited with building Sony into a global electronics and entertainment group, has died of organ failure aged 81.
“It is no exaggeration to attribute Sony’s evolution beyond audio and video products into music, movies and games, and subsequent transformation into a global entertainment leader to Ohga-san’s foresight and vision,” Howard Stringer, Sony’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.
“By redefining Sony as a company encompassing both hardware and software, Ohga-san succeeded where other Japanese companies failed,” Mr Stringer said.
A musician by training, who was a close friend of Austrian conductor, Herbert von Karayan, Mr Ohga led Sony during perhaps its most successful years, as president from 1982 until 1995, when the Japanese electronics maker became one of the most admired companies in the world.
It was under Mr Ohga that the name Sony came to symbolise Japanese manufacturing excellence and to define what was “cool” in the world of electronics – an image encapsulated in the catchphrase, “It’s a Sony.”
The secret life of the start-up
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f you were going to spend $2bn to improve the world, where would you put it? Forty-odd years ago, Ewing Marion Kauffman, a self-made billionaire from Missouri, was faced with just that choice. He took a rather unusual decision. Instead of using his self-made billions to battle homelessness or help the poor, he decided to chase the Great American dream. More specifically, he founded an institute, which takes his name, in Kansas City, to promote entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial ideal. These days the Kauffman Foundation is one of the largest private foundations in America, topped only by groups such as the Ford Foundation or the giant Bill and Melinda Gates charity.
When I first encountered the Kauffman Foundation – which is barely known outside the US – I must admit I found the whole endeavour a little odd, if not ironic. After all, the usual image of entrepreneurs is that they go forth and boldly strike out on their own, without any paternalistic aid. And America, perhaps more than anywhere else, is supposed to epitomise the entrepreneurial dream; indeed, it is one thing that makes it so attractive.
Is Facebook geared to dullards?
Are you ashamed that you find Facebook boring? Are you angst-ridden by your weak social-networking skills? Do you look with envy on those whose friend-count dwarfs your own? Buck up, my friend. The traits you consider signs of failure may actually be marks of intellectual vigor, according to a new study appearing in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior.
The study, by Bu Zhong and Marie Hardin at Penn State and Tao Sun at the University of Vermont, is one of the first to examine the personalities of social networkers. The researchers looked in particular at connections between social-network use and the personality trait that psychologists refer to as “need for cognition,” or NFC. NFC, as Professor Zhong explained in an email to me, “is a recognized indicator for deep or shallow thinking.” People who like to challenge their minds have high NFC, while those who avoid deep thinking have low NFC. Whereas, according to the authors, “high NFC individuals possess an intrinsic motivation to think, having a natural motivation to seek knowledge,” those with low NFC don’t like to grapple with complexity and tend to content themselves with superficial assessments, particularly when faced with difficult intellectual challenges.
The researchers surveyed 436 college students during 2010. Each participant completed a standard psychological assessment measuring NFC as well as a questionnaire measuring social network use. (Given what we know about college students’ social networking in 2010, it can be assumed that the bulk of the activity consisted of Facebook use.) The study revealed a significant negative correlation between social network site (SNS) activity and NFC scores. “The key finding,” the authors write, “is that NFC played an important role in SNS use. Specifically, high NFC individuals tended to use SNS less often than low NFC people, suggesting that effortful thinking may be associated with less social networking among young people.” Moreover, “high NFC participants were significantly less likely to add new friends to their SNS accounts than low or medium NFC individuals.”
To put it in layman’s terms, the study suggests that if you want to be a big success on Facebook, it helps to be a dullard.
Enterprise remains rooted in the land
Farmers were the first entrepreneurs. About 10,000 years ago, in Phoenicia and Mesopotamia, humankind started to cultivate crops and converted from hunter-gatherers to settlers. This initiative enabled cities and, indeed, civilisation to flourish.
Since then, agriculture has developed into a modern industry. But it remains dominated by family concerns, headed by rural entrepreneurs focused on the same core issues as their ancient predecessors: land, water, weather, disease, soil and yields.
Traditionally, farms were passed down the generations, offering modest but volatile cash returns and the possibility of long-term capital appreciation – at least, for those who were not tenant farmers. But while more than 90 per cent of farms in countries such as Britain and the US remain privately held, big business has become seriously interested in the sector.
The soft commodities boom of recent years means that many institutions now see farmland as an attractive asset class and an offset against inflation. Hedge funds, private equity, pension and insurance groups are all investing in land in places such as Brazil, Ukraine and Africa. This weight of capital, as well as better farm incomes, has helped drive farmland prices up. Meanwhile, demand among these investors for agricultural opportunities in mature economies such as the US, Australia and Canada has also increased.
To Cut Smog, Navistar Blazes Risky Path of Its Own
Tom Zeller & Norman Mayersohn:
In a testing cell tucked deep in the bowels of Navistar’s engine plant and technical center here, a hulking prototype of a truck engine sits behind a large glass window like a patient on an operating table. A snarl of sensors and wires is attached to nearly every part of the humming engine, feeding reams of data to a battery of computers and watchful engineers in the adjacent control room.
One measurement — for nitrogen oxide emissions, or NOx — is of particular concern to Navistar. From 2010 onward, all new truck engines must achieve tough, near-zero limits for NOx, a chief ingredient of smog. Virtually every truck maker besides Navistar chose to use an add-on system to their existing engines that uses a fluid cocktail to help neutralize the pollutant as it makes its way out of the exhaust.
Navistar went a different route, deciding to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to refine an engine that produces minimal NOx in the first place. At the same time, the company attacked the competing systems, suing federal air quality regulators and claiming that the add-on technology was so flawed that it failed to meet the clean-air requirements.
Tiësto: Electronic Music’s Superstar
If we needed evidence that electronic dance music is a force in pop culture, last weekend’s Ultra Music Festival held downtown here provided it. Some 150,000 tickets were sold to the three-day event–about equal to the total for last year’s Coachella Music & Arts Festival in the desert town of Indio, Calif., and about twice the number for June’s Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tenn.
Whereas Coachella 2011, next month, will feature Arcade Fire, Kanye West, Kings of Leon and the Strokes as its rock and pop headliners, and Bonnaroo will offer Eminem, Robert Plant & Band of Joy and a reunited Buffalo Springfield (as well as Arcade Fire and the Strokes), the biggest name at Ultra Music–at least to a mainstream audience–was Duran Duran, which was here to promote its new album. But traditional measurements for rock-and-pop success are irrelevant in the electronic-dance culture. Witness Tiësto, the stage name of the Dutch disc jockey, producer and composer Tijs Michiel Verwest, the headliner on Friday, Ultra’s opening night. Though he’s never had a crossover radio hit and his solo albums sell modestly, Tiësto is a major international star, as confirmed by one familiar evaluation: His annual income apparently exceeds $20 million.