From its beginning as a sailboat equipment company to its success in capturing the admiration and loyalty of legions of landlubbers, Lands’ End has stayed true to its famous mantra, “Guaranteed.Period.®” In addition to the company’s focus on quality, they have kept their eyes on their customer. In 2008 they were named to the NRFF-AMEX Top Ten for consistent excellence in customer service and retained that standing in 2009. To find out how this predominately catalog and Internet retailer continues to win accolades from consumers the world over, we caught up with Nick Coe, President of Lands’ End. You’ll find “quality” resonates through the answers of this top exec, who fell in love with retailing when he was intrigued by quality in “great tailoring or a perfect pair of jeans” – products he couldn’t afford.
In the five years NRF Foundation and American Express have conducted the Customers’ Choice survey, Lands’ End has consistently been ranked in the top ten. How do you continue to delight your customers year after year?
Category: Business
Foxconn: The Man Who Makes Your iPhone
Frederik Balfour & Tim Culpan:
The interview took place at Longhua, the entrance to which looks like a border crossing, with seven toll-booth-like lanes and uniformed guards. Although drab and utilitarian, the campus is a fully functioning city, with fast-food joints, ATMs, Olympic-size swimming pools, huge LED screens that flash public-service announcements and cartoons, and a bookstore that sells, among other things, the Chinese-language translation of the Harvard Business Review. Prominent on display are biographies of Gou, one of which collects his many aphorisms, including “work itself is a type of joy,” “a harsh environment is a good thing,” “hungry people have especially clear minds,” and “an army of one thousand is easy to get, one general is tough to find.”
Foxconn is now the biggest exporter out of China, and its general is the richest man in Taiwan, estimated by Forbes to have a personal fortune of $5.9 billion. He says he cannot confirm that figure, however, as he does not keep track. “I have one guy in charge,” Gou says in heavily accented English that he picked up while touring the U.S. in the 1980s. “Every year he gives me a piece of paper and says, ‘Hey, this is how much.’ I think for me, I am not interested in knowing how much I have. I don’t care. I am working not for money at this moment, I am working for society, I am working for my employees.”
The colossus that Gou (pronounced “Gwo”) runs today started with a $7,500 loan from his mother. His first world headquarters was a shed he rented in 1974 in a gritty Taipei suburb called Tucheng, which means Dirt City in Mandarin. Gou, then 23, had done three years of vocational training and served in the military. He then worked for two years as a shipping clerk, where he got a firsthand view of Taiwan’s booming export economy and figured he ought to stop pushing paper and get into the game. With the cash from his mother, he bought a couple of plastic molding machines and started making channel-changing knobs for black-and-white televisions. His first customer was Chicago-based Admiral TV, and he soon got deals to supply RCA, Zenith, and Philips (PHG).
Imagining his future success, he practiced signing his name in English over and over until he had perfected it. He remains proud of it today, walking over to a whiteboard during the interview and signing with a schoolboy flourish. It looked like the perfect cursive script from the credits of I Love Lucy.
The Style of an Elegant Bookstore
Lunch with Luca Cordero di Montezemolo
Screaming down the home straight of Ferrari’s test track at 200kmph an hour in a classic red 458 Italia, I suddenly don’t feel like lunch. The Fiorano track near Bologna in central Italy is, at 3km, not long. But, partly in an attempt to impress the test driver next to me with some fast cornering, I feel as if I have left part of my stomach on one of its hairpin bends. Matters fail to improve as, in heavy fog untypical of early summer, I take the car off the track and, rather more slowly, on to the winding roads of the Apennines, heading for Ferrari HQ in nearby Maranello.
I am still spinning slightly when we pull into the car park just before the company’s elegant and aristocratic chairman, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, who somewhat incongruously arrives in a small Fiat. He explains that his journey from Rome has been a nightmare as fog diverted his helicopter and forced him to take trains and cars – hence the Fiat. Nevertheless he appears in characteristically enthusiastic mood. “I’ve just been to a conference at the Vatican [on the financial crisis]. Fantastic,” he explains. “Fantastic” is a word Montezemolo uses a lot. Ferrari is “fantastic”, Italian food is “fantastic”, his new high-speed train company, NTV, is “fantastic”, as is the 458 Italia I have been driving.
On my way out he hands me a white postcard. “This is what I give to all new employees at Ferrari,” he says. Looking at it in a Ferrari 599 on the way back to Milan, it looks to me like the perfect credo for Montezemolo. It starts: “The real secret of success is enthusiasm. You can do anything if you have enthusiasm … With it there is accomplishment. Without it there are only alibis.”
Clusty Search: Luca Cordero di Montezemolo
“The Time We Have is Growing Short”
If we need any further illustration of the potential threats to our own economy from uncontrolled borrowing, we have only to look to the struggle to maintain the common European currency, to rebalance the European economy, and to sustain the political cohesion of Europe. Amounts approaching a trillion dollars have been marshaled from national and international resources to deal with those challenges. Financing can buy time, but not indefinite time. The underlying hard fiscal and economic adjustments are necessary.
As we look to that European experience, let’s consider our own situation. We are not a small country highly vulnerable to speculative attack. In an uncertain world, our currency and credit are well established. But there are serious questions, most immediately about the sustainability of our commitment to growing entitlement programs. Looking only a little further ahead, there are even larger questions of critical importance for those of less advanced age than I. The need to achieve a consensus for effective action against global warming, for energy independence, and for protecting the environment is not going to go away. Are we really prepared to meet those problems, and the related fiscal implications? If not, today’s concerns may soon become tomorrow’s existential crises.
I referred at the start of these remarks to my sense five years ago of intractable problems, resisting solutions. Little has happened to allay my concerns. But, of course, it is not true that our economic problems are intractable beyond our ability to react, to make the necessary adjustments to more fully realize the enormous potential for improving our well-being. Permit me a note of optimism.
A few days ago, I spent a little time in Ireland. It’s a small country, with few resources and, to put it mildly, a troubled history. In the last twenty years, it took a great leap forward, escaping from its economic lethargy and its internal conflicts. Responding to the potential of free and open markets and the stable European currency, standards of living have bounded higher, close to the general European level. Instead of emigration, there has been an influx of workers from abroad.
Incapable of Rational Thought
It started with an email sent to the Chevrolet employees at their Detroit headquarters and warned them not to use the word Chevy in lieu of the far more formal Chevrolet. GM PR people added that there was a plastic jar put into the hallway there so that each time someone heard another use the now “forbidden” word, they would deposit money as a personal penance. This decision, they said, was simply protecting the brand image of Chevrolet, much the way Coke or Apple protected its image. The memo was signed by the President of Chevrolet and GM’s Vice President for Marketing.
Apparently at Ed Whitacre’s new GM, morons have retaken the institution.
Are they not aware that “Chevy” has been an affectionate nickname for Chevrolet for at least 80 years and is not likely to go away? Did these executives not know that “Coke” is to “Coca-Cola” what “Chevy” is to “Chevrolet”?
People don’t call their computers “Apple” — “Mac” being to “Macintosh” what “Chevy” is to “Chevrolet” — and certainly nobody calls anything “my Apple iPod.”
America’s Car-Mart: Bentonville’s Secret Sauce Makers
The Financial Investigator: Most every day at 802 Southeast Plaza Avenue in Bentonville, Arkansas appears to be a pretty good one.
That’s because that address houses the headquarters of Americas Car-Mart, an auto retailer that has found the sweet spot, the intersection where a corporation’s business model meets consumer demand and the net income flows like cool, clear water.
Focusing exclusively on the sub-prime auto-buyer, their clean and efficiently-organized used-car lots throughout the south-central and southwest regions offer a stark contrast to the traditionally dodgy experience of buying a used-car; no one at any Americas Car-Mart locale is likely to be mistaken for the Kurt Russell character in Used Cars. The staff is friendly and well-turned out, there is a wide variety of cars, trucks and vans to choose from, the business offices are clean and air-conditioned and, perhaps best of all, the word “no” just doesn’t appear to be used all that often.
From an analytical standpoint, the business model appears to be simplicity itself.
Wall Street’s War
Congress looked serious about finance reform – until America’s biggest banks unleashed an army of 2,000 paid lobbyists.
t’s early May in Washington, and something very weird is in the air. As Chris Dodd, Harry Reid and the rest of the compulsive dealmakers in the Senate barrel toward the finish line of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act – the massive, year-in-the-making effort to clean up the Wall Street crime swamp – word starts to spread on Capitol Hill that somebody forgot to kill the important reforms in the bill. As of the first week in May, the legislation still contains aggressive measures that could cost once-
indomitable behemoths like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase tens of billions of dollars. Somehow, the bill has escaped the usual Senate-whorehouse orgy of mutual back-scratching, fine-print compromises and freeway-wide loopholes that screw any chance of meaningful change.
The real shocker is a thing known among Senate insiders as “716.” This section of an amendment would force America’s banking giants to either forgo their access to the public teat they receive through the Federal Reserve’s discount window, or give up the insanely risky, casino-style bets they’ve been making on derivatives. That means no more pawning off predatory interest-rate swaps on suckers in Greece, no more gathering balls of subprime shit into incomprehensible debt deals, no more getting idiot bookies like AIG to wrap the crappy mortgages in phony insurance. In short, 716 would take a chain saw to one of Wall Street’s most lucrative profit centers: Five of America’s biggest banks (Goldman, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup) raked in some $30 billion in over-the-counter derivatives last year. By some estimates, more than half of JP Morgan’s trading revenue between 2006 and 2008 came from such derivatives. If 716 goes through, it would be a veritable Hiroshima to the era of greed.
Google has mapped every WiFi network in Britain
Google has mapped every wireless network in Britain in order to use the information for commercial purposes, it has emerged.
Every WiFi wireless router – the device that links most computer owners to the internet – in every home has been entered into a Google database.
The information was collected by radio aerials on their Street View cars, which have now photographed almost every home in the country.
The data is then used on Google’s Maps for Mobile application to locate mobile phones such as iPhones in order for users to access information relevant to the area such as restaurants, cinemas, theatres, shops and hotels.
The project had remained secret until an inquiry in Germany earlier this month in which Google was forced to admit that it “mistakenly” downloaded emails and other data from unsecured wireless networks where they we
The fate of a generation of workers: Foxconn undercover fully translated
Richard Lai: I know of two groups of young people.
One group consists of university students like myself, who live in ivory towers and kept company by libraries and lake views. The other group works alongside steel machineries and large containers, all inside a factory of high-precision manufacturing environment. These guys always address their seniors as “laoban” (boss), and call their own colleagues — regardless of familiarity — the rude “diaomao” (pubic hair) in loud.
After going undercover in Foxconn for 28 days, I came back out. I’ve been trying to tie the two pictures together. But it’s very difficult. Even with people living in these two places sharing the same age, the same youth dream.
My undercover was part of Southern Weekend’s investigation on the then six Foxconn suicides. We soon found out that most of Southern Weekend’s reporters were rejected due to age — Foxconn only recruits people around the age of 20. In comparison, being just under 23 years old, I was quickly brought into Foxconn.
The 28-day undercover work made a strong impact on me. It wasn’t about finding out what they died for, but rather to learn how they lived.