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Administration to Creation - Microsoft recovers its mojo
Back in 2006, Microsoft was on top of the world. Then they released Vista and Apple released the iPhone.
A company with Microsoft’s scale can drift into faded grandeur over decades, like the last years of the Ottoman Empire, before finally vanishing beneath the weight of history. An efficient and capable administration can keep the wheels spinning and replace worn-out cogs. What it cannot do is invent new things that will delight, inspire and renew. That is the province of leaders and visionaries.
Read more: Administration to Creation - Microsoft recovers its mojo
The unforgivable cost of state-protected monopolies
“A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures. The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked, by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments, whether they consist in wages or profit, greatly above their natural rate,” wrote Adam Smith in 1776.
Read more: The unforgivable cost of state-protected monopolies
Job creation, innovation and the Apple iPad
It was a speech much-awaited, driving speculation and controversy before it even started. No, not Steve Jobs in San Francisco but Barack Obama in Washington.
It has been a bad few weeks for the US President. More than one in 10 Americans is unemployed and Obama has used up much of the goodwill that catapulted him into office on a controversial health reform program. His first State of the Union address was hoped to put some fire back into the US economy.
Google and the Cold War that businesses must play
“What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not! They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.”
The line belongs to Alec Leamas, from the movie, The spy who came in from the cold. The Cold War, a sordid world of espionage, sabotage, assassination and deception; where governments attempted to outcompete each other through war and other means. It certainly wasn’t all James Bond and vodka martinis.
Read more: Google and the Cold War that businesses must play
Africa, prosperity and its ever-seeking union
In 1940, in order to put a warm glow over their war efforts, the Japanese Imperial Army announced that the reason they were hacking their way through Asia was the pursuit of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
The Imperial Army were not demolishing local governments and murdering people, they were simply chasing out Western imperialists and promoting regional economic union.
The reason this was a complete failure was that “union” - either political or economic - requires that the parties to that union actually want to be together. A shotgun wedding works as well as a shotgun economy.
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