Category: Business

Alliant Energy’s Erroll Davis on Humility in the NYT

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as told to Eve Tahmincioglu:

Enron made me very angry. We are all paying a tremendous price for the screw-up.

These are powerful positions we executives hold. I have $8 billion at my disposal. We don’t have that many checks and balances on us. You can lose perspective and start to think you’re royalty. I think of these guys with their $10,000 shower curtains and I say to myself: “I could understand how they could do that.” But I also understand why you shouldn’t.

If you lose track of where you came from – and surprisingly, a lot of these people came from humble beginnings – you lose track of your moral compass, what work means to the average employee.

Davis’s Wisconsin based Alliant Energy has been in some hot water over investments in Brazil and a Mexican resort. Interesting to see this in the NY Times. I wonder if this piece was “placed” by a pr firm?

The Death of a Salesman

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Frank Hayes offers some useful comments on the perils of CEM (Customer Elimination Management using CRM – Customer Relationship Management Software):

Siebel was built, inside and out, on CRM. Siebel was all about automating CRM as a business process.
Trouble is, customer relationship management isn’t primarily a business process that can be automated. Real management of customer relationships is a culture, a strategy, a way of doing business.
And too many organizations use CRM in a way that marketing guru Herschell Gordon Lewis has dubbed CEM — customer elimination management.
They don’t use CRM software to help good salesmen do a great job. Instead, they feed customers into the CRM sausage machine, a mechanical data-grinder that combines a phony familiarity — strangers in a call center who know everything about the customer — with a relentless, robotized drive to sell, sell, sell.

Minneapolis named top “Technopolis”

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Some interesting tidbits on Minneapolis in the latest eprairie newsletter, including Popular Science’s proclamation as the top “Technopolis”.

UW-Whitewater’s Literate Cities Study ranked Minneapolis #1… (Madison was #4). Take a look at their data sources, here. (I wonder what the yellow pages tells them, exactly. I never use it, frankly. The web is much faster).

I also have my doubts on the value of newspaper circulation data, now.

Gladwell: The Ketchup Conundrum

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Malcolm Gladwell:

Many years ago, one mustard dominated the supermarket shelves: French’s. It came in a plastic bottle. People used it on hot dogs and bologna. It was a yellow mustard, made from ground white mustard seed with turmeric and vinegar, which gave it a mild, slightly metallic taste. If you looked hard in the grocery store, you might find something in the specialty-foods section called Grey Poupon, which was Dijon mustard, made from the more pungent brown mustard seed. In the early seventies, Grey Poupon was no more than a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year business. Few people knew what it was or how it tasted, or had any particular desire for an alternative to French’s or the runner-up, Gulden’s. Then one day the Heublein Company, which owned Grey Poupon, discovered something remarkable: if you gave people a mustard taste test, a significant number had only to try Grey Poupon once to switch from yellow mustard. In the food world that almost never happens; even among the most successful food brands, only about one in a hundred have that kind of conversion rate. Grey Poupon was magic.

Where the Innovators Are

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Laura Rich:

As James Surowiecki writes in the April 11, 2005 issue of The New Yorker, innovation has fallen almost entirely upon the shoulders of small businesses; big companies can’t manage it anymore. They’re still spending money on research and development, but those budgets have shrunk dramatically in most cases, and many are outsourcing R&D or forming R&D alliances with other big companies.
Surowiecki focuses on the decline of an innovation culture at Sony, which hasn’t really been able to corner any market since the Walkman. While some may bemoan the disintegration of innovation out of such giants, it’s really not so sad. New ideas that come from smaller businesses are often more exciting and groundbreaking (just look at many of the ideas that come from the Inc. 500), and, as small businesses make up three-quarters of all businesses, perhaps even more essential to the health of the economy.

Yet another reason why our politicians need to pull their head out and make true high speed networks a reality in Wisconsin…

United Replaces Some Air Wisconsin Routes

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PR Newswire:

These 30 aircraft will fly on some routes previously operated for United by Air Wisconsin Airlines. As the company indicated in an announcement to employees late last month, United also is considering reductions in the United Express fleet to further reduce spending on U.S. domestic capacity, given high fuel prices and the current fare levels.

Air Wisconsin is based in Appleton and recently invested in US Airways as part of a deal to redeploy aircraft.

Employees Who Smoke Face Health Care Surcharge

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Paul Gores:

That’s why she is troubled by a rule that will go into effect at her company next January. Trapp-Dietz and other smokers who work at Northwestern Mutual – regardless of whether they light up at home or outside the building at work – will pay an extra $25 a month for health insurance coverage.

Trapp-Dietz said considers the fee an invasion of her private life.

“I know I have to quit, and I really want to. But I don’t like being told to by my employer,” she said.

These type of disincentives are already in play if one purchases other benefit type products such as life insurance.