Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Here, have some rant. My friend Sheila — a travel writer and a former Navy officer — whipped it up for you:

If you have nothing good to say about U.S. travel, come sit by me

I am disgusted.

I am a U.S. traveler with multiple transportation options, and most of them are awful.

. . .

I am not clueless about the current high price of fuel, so I understand why the airlines (except for Southwest, which actually planned for a fuel price increase) think they must nickel and dime passengers for every mangy pillow, blanket, sandwich, suitcase and inch of legroom, but I’d rather just pay for a somewhat higher-priced ticket and not be treated like a fee-ridden pest in coach.

I’m your customer, Mr. Airline.

. . .

Read it all. I thought Sheila’s comments on dubious anti-terrorism measures and on a lack of viable transportation alternatives were particularly apt.

At some point, whether because of lousy service or higher fuel prices (ergo higher ticket prices) or whatever, the airlines will have to change their ways. Or, as I fervently hope, one or two of the most far-sighted airlines will figure out a way to deliver better service — a better experience — to enough passengers that those companies will win outright in the marketplace.

Talk about your untapped market opportunities! Any airline that can offer better service all the way around — service that answers Sheila’s complaints — will be sitting on a gold mine.

~

Previously in this vein:

• Runway congestion: the inescapable math.
• Clueless airlines: which verse of this song are we on now?
• Airline inanity follow-up: amen to Jeff Jarvis.
• Massive reality disconnect in the airline industry.
• Air travel is getting worse.

~

(Photo by lunchtimemama.)

Is this a picture of the Department of Widgets and Doodads in your organization?

The picture actually displays an homage to the great cartoonist Rube Goldberg, pictured here with a couple of young volunteers while giving a talk in front of the drawing board.

Goldberg’s famous namesake drawings were hiliarious because the contraptions in them were elaborate and impractical beyond all reason. But I talk to plenty of people whose daily frustrations make them feel like their organizations are built along the same lines. (You can see more of Goldberg’s famous contraption drawings at the official Rube Goldberg site.)

The other day I polled the crowd about what to do with high-maintenance people, so now let’s broaden the focus:

How do you deal with the high-maintenance processes
in your organization?

~

(Contraption photo by freshwater2006; Goldberg photo courtesy of Alan Light.)

As I write this, oil is trading at an eye-popping $123.39 per barrel on the NYMEX futures board. Part of the high price of oil stems from the low value of the dollar relative to other currencies — especially the euro — so the other day I pulled together some figures to see how much cheaper oil would be if it were priced in euros instead of dollars.

Inputs:

• Price of oil in dollars, taken from the Energy Information Administration of the US Department of Energy.
• Exchange rate, dollars to euros, taken from Exchange-Rates.org.

Timeframe:

• 5 November 2007 through 29 April 2008 (i.e. Tuesday of last week).

Results (greenbacks in green, euros in blue):

My simple-Simon conclusions:

• The exchange-rate divergence has meant more and more over the past couple of months.
• Even when priced in euros, oil is still plenty expensive.

Other items potentially of interest in this vein:

• Statistics Matter: Oil, Dollars, Euros & Gold — This one includes a chart scanned from the Wall Street Journal earlier this year.
• Crude Oil Prices, Dollars vs. Euros: Is There a Difference? – I used this post’s sources in formulating my own chart.
• U.S. gas: So cheap it hurts: “Relatively low taxes have kept pump prices far below most other developed nations, which some say is precisely why the current runup is so painful.” — This article explains why “the U.S. is actually one of the cheaper places to fill up in the world” and digs into the effect of government policy on gasoline prices.

~

In February, Fast Company ran a special section on oil companies and their efforts at sustainability. You can find an overview and links to various sections here:

Sensible Investing: Oil

The approach of the section puts me in mind of something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, namely how business evolves to incorporate elements that were previously regarded as externalities. Sometimes it happens because of new regulation, sometimes in response to the concerns of customers, sometimes in response to events beyond any one company’s control. Some historical examples:

• Two hundred years ago, as the Industrial Revolution got underway, workers in Britain, the United States, and other industrializing countries had little legal protection from accidents on the job. If you lost a finger or a hand tending a loom, those were the breaks. Employers would be concerned about this only insofar as they needed to keep a supply of workers close to hand, or else only out of the goodness of their hearts.

  

• A century ago, the U.S. meatpacking industry underwent huge upheaval after Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, which exposed the industry’s health and safety shortcomings. The Pure Food and Drug Act forced meatpackers like Armour and Swift, along with companies in related industries, to come to grips with the demands of food safety — even when that meant large outlays of money.
• In the postwar boom of the 1950s, many major U.S. employers started offering health insurance and similar benefits as a way of attracting workers. What had once been an externality well outside employers’ purview became a key selling point in recruiting new employees.
• During the 1980s, anti-Apartheid activists forced many U.S.-based companies like Coca-Cola to rethink, revamp, or even retract their activities in South Africa, despite the money that the companies were making there. Coke and other companies were forced to bring political externalities into their calculations about how to do business in a major overseas market.
• Since the rise of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, more companies than ever are offering telecommuting and other flexible work-life arrangements to attract and retain the best talent. In the old days, a company could afford to ignore issues like this, and indeed to insist that workers pattern their time around an 8-to-5 schedule. That seems to be decreasingly true.

Today, of course, the major issue is climate change. For now, companies like Exxon Mobil continue to focus on pumping hydrocarbons out of the ground, convinced — maybe rightly — that oil & gas will continue to be the world’s key sources of energy for decades to come. Other oil majors, like Shell, are taking substantial steps to reduce their carbon footprints now, since they figure that some sort of regulation on carbon (a tax, a cap-and-trade system, or the like) is probably inevitable.

Once upon a time, the key challenges of life were getting enough to eat, avoiding illness or injury, and raising one’s children to adulthood. These days, most of these basic needs are pretty well met for Americans and their economic peers. Yet the world continues to face major problems, including one — climate change — that could be The Problem for this century and beyond.

No doubt different companies and different governments will take varied approaches to bringing these new externalities inside companies’ circle of concern. But however it unfolds, the whole process can’t fail to be interesting.

How do you deal with high-maintenance people?

That question arose on Twitter with the following exchange between Brett Nordquist and me:

• Brett: High maintenance employees can sure suck the fun out a job.
• Me: What do you do (or try to do) to get them to lower their level of maintenance?
• Brett: Good question, since that’s my job.

So now I turn it over to you, dear readers: share your wisdom on dealing with high-maintenance people (including yourself, if you’re brave enough to admit that it applies) in the comments. Feel free to share horror stories!

~

(Image from Cyron.)

My wife and I joined some friends for an Iron Man double-date on Saturday night. Our verdict: A fun, well-done flick all the way around.*

And, oh, by the way, a blockbuster in the making for Marvel:

‘Iron Man’ Forges Historic Box Office Win

The 2008 summer movie season started off on a historic note as Iron Man opened with huge box office numbers that propelled it to a weekend win and landed it in the company of the most impressive movie premieres of all time. The Marvel comic adaptation grossed $101 million from Friday to Sunday, according to early estimates. When Thursday evening’s screenings are added in, the film’s full weekend total comes to $104 mil. . . . [W]hen you consider just superhero flicks, this movie scored the fourth top opening in history, following those of Spider-Man 3 ($151.1 mil), Spider-Man ($114.8 mil), and X-Men: The Last Stand ($102.8 mil) — all of which are Marvel properties, though Iron Man is the first film to be fully financed by the comic studio. […]

To call this the biggest opener ever for star Robert Downey Jr. is an understatement: The actor has never even fronted a movie that grossed $100 mil during its entire run, let alone in one weekend.

Here are two lines of thought about Iron Man that extend beyond the film itself:

1. Which stars have redeemed themselves more thoroughly than Robert Downey Jr.?

I’m the last person to follow celebrity gossip, but even I couldn’t fail to be drawn in by the horror of Downey’s collapse into addiction. The pretty-boy druggie of Less Than Zero became what he had portrayed, and I feared that he would be a broken man after his stint in prison.

But now, Downey is a clean-living family man — albeit very much after his own fashion. His id still overflows nonstop — along with his R-rated language — and his conversations zigzag from the philosophical to the practical to the scatalogical in the span of a few sentences. All of this comes out clearly in a brilliant cover feature from Esquire’s March 2007 issue:

He’s looking at me as a car cuts us off, and I reflexively reach for the wheel as he hits the brakes and the spring-loaded Buddha on the dashboard starts bobbling madly. He waves off my apology — Downey, not Buddha. Buddha can go f*** himself.

“I want you to feel completely free to let all your codependent neuroses out,” he tells me. “You can grab the wheel, you can ask me if my tummy hurts, you can give me a foot rub later, anything. Enmeshment is really okay in small doses.”

Small doses? A dab of Downey — trust me — would fill this magazine cover to cover. Which makes a couple of hours sitting and talking at the Chateau Marmont perfect; we have only met, and I’ve brought — just in case conversation lags — my carefully researched notes.

“Me too,” he says.

You have notes? “I do, yeah. I actually already printed out the article if you’d like to read it. It really went great.”

But I’m worried about the lead. I need to redo the lead.

“You don’t need a lead,” Downey purrs. “Dude, the lead’s about to happen.”

Even better, as this post from Jason Craft points out, Downey is channeling all of this hyperkinetic energy and all his crazy foibles into his roles:

[Downey] took his issues past a point where we understood them within a revival or “bad boy with a heart of gold” narrative: he got bothersome, and let us give up. He didn’t publicly apologize in the mode we’re accustomed to now. He didn’t get Christian: he just hit rock bottom. We figured he’d be in jail until we forgot about him.

But he then lived. What’s more, he understood himself as the man lost and found again, the prodigal, and performed it.

In Iron Man, Downey’s Tony Stark is a louche billionaire playboy who develops a sense of morality after seeing human suffering up close. Yet even after this transformation, Stark/Iron Man remains as impulsive as ever. It’s just that now his impulses are channeled to better ends — something like Downey himself.

Besides the celebrity-redemption interest, I think there’s a general-purpose career lesson hiding in Downey’s story: You’ll be at your best not when you’re stifling all your impulses and personality, but when you’re channeling everything you have — both the virtuous and the weird — into positive efforts.

2. What the heck took Marvel so long bringing these characters to the screen?

I spent many, many hours of my childhood poring over comics. (I was profligate: I absorbed Marvel and DC stories in equal measure.) Tim Burton’s original Batman hit theaters when I was still in high school, but it would be many more years before Marvel took Spider-Man — surely one of the most bankable characters ever — and made a huge movie franchise out of it.

A quick tour of IMDB’s listing of all-time worldwide box office receipts reveals a LOT of Marvel:

11. — Spider-Man 3 (2007) — $885,430,303
18. — Spider-Man (2002) — $806,700,000
22. — Spider-Man 2 (2004) — $783,577,893
67. — X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) — $455,260,014
182. — X-Men (2000) — $294,100,000
248. — Hulk (2003) — $241,700,000

Even Daredevil, which was not nearly so well regarded, grossed nearly $180 million worldwide.

If you know of any analysis that explains Marvel’s long delay, please leave a comment that points me to it. Whatever the cause of the delay, Marvel sure seems to have its act together now. Without giving away the ending of Iron Man (and uh, be sure to stick around through the end of the credits), it’s clear that the film is ripe for a sequel. And Marvel is also queueing up the second installment of its Hulk series for next month, this time bearing the imprint of Transporter director Louis Leterrier and heavyweight actor Edward Norton.

In related news, director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale will follow up on their 2005 hit Batman Begins with its sequel, The Dark Knight, in July.

Could be a very good summer for old comic-book geeks like me.

~

* A caveat: I’m glad I didn’t take my under-13 kids to see it, because some of the scenes are pretty intense.

(Photo: EW via Gizmodo.)

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three,
and not a hundred or a thousand . . . Simplify, simplify.

Thoreau won’t be displacing Peter Drucker at the top of the management-wisdom heap anytime soon, but on this one thing they certainly agreed: you need to get things simpler if you want to do them better.

Drucker held that top executives could handle one or maybe two major initiatives at a time. Anything more and something was sure to get lost in the shuffle. Thoreau believed that the trappings of America’s increasingly mechanized life — way back in the mid-19th century, mind you — were crowding out human interactions, with each other and with the realm of nature.

Every day I hear from dozens of people who lament the complexity of their lives — at work, at home, and especially in the mixture of the two. Special anger wells up at company policies, cultures, and individuals who gum up the works with needless complexity.

Mind you, some complexity is necessary: you don’t build an MRI machine or an airport terminal using 3rd-grade-level math. But how many of your tasks — your team’s projects — your company’s larger endeavors — would benefit from a hard dose of simplification?

So, tell me:

What should YOU make simpler for yourself?

What should your ORGANIZATION make simpler for everyone?

~

Being both a stickler for words and a student of workplace issues, I’ve been paying more attention lately to the “crutch” words we use when we talk about work. I encounter these in my own office (not least from myself!), from my students, from my friends on Twitter, and in countless articles about the way we work today.

Here, then, is my nominee for Public Enemy #1 in the category of “crutch” words:

Busy.

Someone asks, “How’s it going?” We say, “Good — but I’m soooo busy” or “Ack — I’m SO busy” or just “Busy, busy, busy.” Often, we don’t even pause to think why we’re so busy, or why the busy-ness isn’t getting better over time.

The way I’ve used the word, and the way I’ve heard others use it, it’s like talking about the weather: “I can’t believe how rainy it’s been” turns into “I can’t believe how busy I’ve been.” As though busy-ness is something that just happens to us.

Well, UNlike the weather, busy-ness is something that everybody talks about that we CAN do something about. So in the interest of reminding myself that I’m responsible for my own working life, I’ve stopped using “busy” and started using expressions like these:

• “I have a lot on my plate right now.”
• “I’ve taken on too many commitments, and now I’m trying to figure out how to balance them.
• “My schedule has been hectic, but that’s my own fault.”

Sure, these are just semantic tricks, but the words we use shape the way we think. And I’d rather think clearly about the way I work, instead of acting like the universe has dropped a big pile of “busy” on my plate and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Down with “busy”-itis!

~

Now over to you, dear reader:

What are the worst “crutch” words YOU hear at work?

~

(Photo by wanderingseoul61.)

If you care at all about relations between the United States and China — and in my book, you should — do yourself a favor and read anything James Fallows writes on the subject in The Atlantic Monthly. Fallows has been living in China for the past couple of years, filing story after story on the commercial, economic, and political realities at work in the world’s most populous country.

Particularly interesting is this article from the beginning of this year, in which he discusses the strange financial relationship that prevails between the two powers:

The $1.4 Trillion Question

The whole thing is worth a read, but here’s the nut graf:

Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China. Like so many imbalances in economics, this one can’t go on indefinitely, and therefore won’t. But the way it ends—suddenly versus gradually, for predictable reasons versus during a panic—will make an enormous difference to the U.S. and Chinese economies over the next few years, to say nothing of bystanders in Europe and elsewhere.

Continue reading James Fallows on U.S.-China relations.