Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

The price of oil is down — a little bit. It’s about $125 per barrel as I write this, which seems much better than the $140+ prices it was fetching a couple of weeks back, but only in comparison to those prices.

If you’re in the oil business, these prices are very good news: Exxon Mobil just announced profits of $11.7 billion for the past quarter. And if you’re in a fuel-intensive business like airlines or trucking, these prices offer little but pain.

But what about the rest of us, caught somewhere in-between? How can we benefit from this historic shift in petroleum prices? Here are just a few quick suggestions of my own:

• If you’ve been looking for an excuse to sell flex-time or teleworking to the top brass in your company, there’s never been a better time. Besides the general benefits that accrue to happy telecommuters, there’s the added morale boost that you’re saving these workers on gas money.
• You can promote camaraderie and teamwork by helping organize — or simply encouraging — carpooling. This could be as simple as putting up a cork board in the breakroom and then sending out one all-hands e-mail.
• You could lobby your local transit authority to locate a bus kiosk or the like near your facility, thereby permanently increasing the appeal of your location to bus commuters.
• If your business has anything to do with energy efficiency, even indirectly, you’ve never had a better market backdrop for putting forward your value proposition.
• Ditto if your business offers anything that helps people to virtualize work that has typically been done physically. This could be anything from online training software to teleconferencing equipment to efficient delivery services that save customers the trouble of driving themselves.
• If you’re in operations and have longed to make real improvements in overall efficiency, you’ve never had a better moment to sell your top brass on the virtues of investing in equipment or processes that will save energy in the long run.
• . . .

What would you add to this list?

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(Image by creativebob4u.)

I’m a grand starter of projects – lots of ideas, lots of enthusiasm. If starting a project was all it took, I’d be Napoleon by now.

Alas, there is also the finishing to tend to.

So for this one day, I’m going to try a little experiment: rather than follow my usual routine, which includes reading tons of news articles, blog commentary, and so on, I’m going to set all of that aside for tomorrow, and take this time instead to finish things that are already on my plate. I’m tantalizingly close to finishing roughly, oh, six thousand items on my to-do list, and I want to see how many of them I can get off my plate today.

I’ll check e-mail at intervals through the day to make sure nothing has blown up and I’ll talk to anyone who comes by my desk to talk to me, but otherwise, I’m planning to hold myself incommunicado while I finish, finish, FINISH.

At the end of the day, I’ll post again to let you know how everything went. Meanwhile, please tell me:

What could you accomplish if you turned off the spigot of new tasks coming into your life, concentrated solely on tasks or projects already underway, and spent one solid day knocking things out?

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Related posts:

• “Done.”
• Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.
  

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(Photo by Leonid Mamchenkov.)

It seems bizarre . . . but what if it works?

Before Roger Bannister broke the four-minute barrier for the mile in May 1954, running a sub-four-minute mile was supposed to be “impossible.”

We’ve heard some of the same nonsense about remedies for the possible (but overwhelmingly likely) dangers of climate change — that it’s not possible to do anything meaningful about global warming, or at least not without devastating consequences for standards of living worldwide. (Here’s one example.)

Roger Bannister proved that a man could run a sub-four-minute mile without dying or breaking down. And in various corners of the world, individuals and groups are working to demonstrate the same things about living in a more carbon-savvy way. Two examples:

• SmartPlanet: Emirates to build zero-carbon desert city — “Foster + Partners has drawn up a master plan for Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, designed to produce zero carbon emissions, zero waste and to be car-free. It’s being built according to the ten sustainability guidelines called One Planet Living drawn up by the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) and environmental consultancy BioRegional. Guidelines for building include sustainable materials, sustainable food and water, support of habitats, wildlife, culture and heritage, and to promote equity, fair trade, health and happiness.”
• The New Yorker: The Island in the Wind, by Elizabeth Kolbert — In this article, Kolbert talks about how the little Danish farming community of Samsø has shifted completely to wind power in the past decade.

Will these particular experiments will work on a broad scale? Who knows? Because of the accidents of petroleum wealth and autocratic governance, the United Arab Emirates are able to carry out grand experiments like Masdar City that could be awfully hard to duplicate in, say, Japan. And, as Kolbert makes clear in her article, in Samsø the wind blows all the time.

But my bet is that one of these experiments, or others like them, will come to be regarded in future decades as harbingers for better ways of designing cities and the energy grids that feed them. And in any event, trying large-scale experiments like these is a heck of lot more fruitful than sitting around saying that nothing can be done.

The application for business

Smart businesses are making the same transition. Whether driven by a sense of social responsibility, by the high costs of fuel, or simply by a prudent regard for managing future risks, these firms are trying things to reduce their energy use and improve their carbon footprint.

To the innovators go the spoils?

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(Picture by Hiddenloop.)

When I was in college, I was moved by Dr. Judith Rapoport’s classic book on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing. OCD sufferers engage in compulsive rituals like hand-washing as they try to alleviate obsessive thoughts centered on, for instance, germs.

We’ve come to use the term “OCD” flippantly, as in “Don’t touch Dave’s records — he gets OCD about his vinyl collection.” The real McCoy, as you can imagine, is much worse than our glib appropriations of it. This goes likewise for another condition, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OPCD), which sounds similar to OCD but has important differences.

Folks who suffer from OCD and OPCD can’t help themselves — they feel that they must adhere to certain standards of order, cleanliness, or the like.

But the rest of us? My sense — and this is hardly a professional psychological opinion, mind you — is that we subject ourselves to unfruitful rituals and arbitrary standards simply out of habit.

Obsessing over social-media standing

What prompted me to think of this: a few weeks back, I got into a conversation on Twitter with a fellow who expressed his disappointment about people unfollowing him after a certain set of tweets (i.e., messages) that he posted. I couldn’t see why he was so quick to care — and to judge others’ motives — about something that I found so trivial.

The guy, it turns out, has an elaborate tracking setup that alerts him immediately when people start or stop following him, so he believed that he could trace the cause-and-effect relationship between his messages (which were, to be fair, unobjectionable) and the choice of folks to stop following his messages.

I tried to suggest to him that people have many reasons for following or unfollowing someone on Twitter, and that he had so many followers (i.e. thousands of them) that the unconnected choices of half a dozen of them could easily look like a trend when it really wasn’t.

Oh, and one more thing: what’s the point of expressing dissatisfaction — or even feeling it — because a handful of people you don’t even know happen to decide that your messages aren’t quite their preferred flavor?

I use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn regularly, and I know how easy it is to obsess over them, and even to get competitive about how many connections you’ve made, whether people you follow have opted to follow you back, and so on. But when I find myself heading down this path psychologically, I try to stop and ask myself “Wait, what’s the point?”

Obsessing over the time clock

Some years ago, my wife worked in an office run by a manager who was an old pro at creating new things to worry about. Folks had to be at their desks by a very certain time (even though it didn’t really matter) and they had to be out the door at a very certain time (ditto) and they had to keep their office doors open at all times and they had to . . . well, it just went on and on.

The manager had a way of taking the most trivial things and turning them into themes for new daily crusades — crusades that were mostly carried out against all the smart people trying to work hard in that office. If it hadn’t been so pointless, it would have been funny to track the steady exodus of talented people (including my wife) out of that company.

The morals of this story:

• I have enough to worry about in my life without concocting new worries based on my social-media use, or my ascription of motives to my fellow Austin drivers, or whatever-the-heck else I might choose to worry about.
• Businesses usually have enough to worry about without also worrying about precise clock-ins, narrow dress codes, meaningless “mandatory” behaviors, and so on.

So, folks, please share:

What are some of the worries you’ve seen individuals or businesses create for themselves?

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(Photo by Todd Baker.)

The other shoe finally, finally drops at the trans-Atlantic telecom equipment maker:

Alcatel-Lucent’s Russo, Tchuruk to Quit; Loss Widens

Alcatel-Lucent SA, the world’s largest supplier of fixed-line phone networks, said Chief Executive Officer Patricia Russo and Chairman Serge Tchuruk quit after the sixth straight quarterly loss.

The second-quarter net loss widened to 1.1 billion euros ($1.7 billion), or 49 cents a share, from 586 million euros, or 26 cents, a year earlier, the Paris-based company said in a statement today.

Russo and Tchuruk were the architects of Alcatel SA’s November 2006 purchase of Lucent Technologies Inc., creating a company that has never earned a profit, shed 62 percent of its market value and is eliminating 16,500 jobs. [. . .]

It’s not like we couldn’t see this coming. The merger seemed like a bad idea to many outside observers (including some of my colleagues here at Hoover’s) from the beginning. How was the combination of two bloated, slow companies — much less two companies with cultures forged on opposite sides of the Atlantic — supposed to compete with better with smart outfits like Ericsson and, above all, Cisco?

It never made sense . . . not that that stopped them from going ahead with it.

Now here’s the challenge of all challenges: if the combined Alcatel-Lucent never made sense, is there any leader or leadership team that can make sense of it?

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Related posts:

• Alcatel-Lucent and the right way to do layoffs.
• Alcatel-Lucent — Company of the Day.
• Disorganization Negates Talent.
• A quick summary of the telecom equipment sector.
• Alcatel-Lucent: Ou sont les synergies?

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If you haven’t read this uber-feature already, do yourself a favor, set aside a little time, and imbibe.

“How the Web Was Won” uses small bits of narrative to link together lots of first-person anecdotes from seminal figures in the history of the Internet, including Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, Bob Metcalfe, Vint Cerf, Jeff Bezos, and Vinod Khosla.

The anecdotes — and the historical insights they convey — led me to wish that the feature was even longer, which is not something I can usually say about magazine journalism.

It also led me to notice, not for the first time, how new fortunes have been made in computing in every decade since the 1960s, and to wonder, not for the first time, where the next grand fortunes in computing and connectivity will be minted.

Here’s the link again: How the Web Was Won

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Of related interest:

• The Computer History Museum’s “Internet History” exhibit.
• Martin Dodge’s Atlas of Cyberspaces.

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(Image, “The Web Is Agreement,” by Paul Downey. It’s worth it to check out the Flickr page for the image to see the annotations.)

This came from Robert Scoble over the Twitter wires a few minutes ago:

Amen.

MY health is none of YOUR business (but I’m hale and hearty — thanks for asking!).

YOUR health is none of MY business, unless you’re, say, flying a plane in which I’m a passenger.

STEVE JOBS’s health IS the business of Apple investors.

What I’m saying is hardly original — besides Robert Scoble, many others have said it. But the point is clear: Jobs is so very closely identified with Apple and its fortunes that it’s impossible that his health could be anything but a matter of concern.

There are a few other CEOs about whom I could say the same thing. Examples:

• Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway . . . but he’s in his 70s, and has already announced that he has a firm CEO succession plan in place.
• Anne Mucahy of Xerox . . . but Ursula Burns has been her right hand and designated successor for years.
• Jeff Immelt of GE . . . but GE is famous for the depth of its management bench, so that even in the event of the unthinkable, one of its vice chairmen could easily step into the breach.
• A. G. Lafley of Procter & Gamble . . . but ditto everything I just said about GE.
• Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase.
• Michael Dell of Dell.

As vital as Dimon, Dell, et al. are to their respective companies, probably none of them are seen as being so vital to their companies’ futures as Jobs is to Apple’s. It’s a simple, albeit simplistic, equation: with Jobs around, Apple has kicked butt. When Jobs wasn’t around, Apple suffered. Add to that Jobs’s history of cancer and his current gaunt appearance, and you can understand the concern — the rightful concern — of Apple investors.

It’s not ghoulish. It’s financial risk management — and given Jobs’s apparently central (not to say megalomaniacal) role in Apple’s success, it comes with the territory.

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Related post:

• Banking on the founder’s mojo.

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The Wizard, looking dapper and trim in retirement.

From this morning’s headlines:

Toyota cuts 2008 outlook

[. . .] The weaker sales outlook also means global production at the parent company would fall 1 percent from 2007 to 8.43 million vehicles, marking the first decline in seven years.

Toyota’s revision underscores an ever-toughening environment for global automakers faced with falling demand for cars, especially higher-margin, bigger vehicles amid rising gasoline pump prices. [. . .]

It’s a simple observation, but Toyota is one of those bellwether companies that beats its industry in good times and bad. So if Toyota’s hurting, the causes of the pain go way beyond the incidents and accidents of (mis)management at, say, Ford or Chrysler. The Detroit auto makers are hurting much worse, but at least some of their woes can be chalked up to general conditions.

So why do I have a picture of a baseball Hall of Famer on this post?

Ozzie Smith is widely regarded as the best defensive shortstop ever. I remember a longtime baseball man once saying something to the effect that, “If Ozzie can’t get to a ball, you know nobody could have gotten to that ball.”

That’s how good Toyota has been. And that’s why its current stumble speaks volumes about the state of the world’s car markets.

(And yes, I do tend to see the world through baseball-tinted glasses as we get to the peak days of summer.)

Please tell me:

What are the companies you look to as industry bellwethers?

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Related posts:

• Company of the Day: Toyota.
• Two quick notes on the car business.
• What does the future hold for the Detroit car makers?

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(Photo by themikelee.)

“I hate snakes.”
– Indiana Jones

“HERE BE DRAGONS.”

That’s what they used to put at the edge of some maps, to show the unknown parts of the oceans that hadn’t been explored and seemed too frightening even to contemplate.

If there really had been dragons out there — sure, watch out! And if you encounter a cottonmouth or a cobra — get away!

But all too often I let myself be scared off from things (projects, situations, challenges, . . .) by my preconceptions, even when a moment’s reflection would reveal that those ideas are clearly founded upon ignorance.

See that little fella in the picture? He couldn’t hurt you if he tried. But if you’re ophidiophobic . . .

What are the “snakes” you irrationally fear?

What are the “dragons” you fear out of ignorance?

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(Photo by Benimoto.)

Perusing the virtual newsstand.

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Dan Markovitz of TimeBack Management makes some excellent points in this post:

How do you change lousy work habits?

I’ve pointed before to the article “Infomania,” which lays out in detail the real, honest-to-goodness, cash-money business costs of e-mail overload and constant interruptions. The intellectual framework is there: we know that bad habits around e-mail and meetings and interruptions cost money. Yet still we don’t change.

As Dan rightly points out, we have to get beyond the logical or intellectual reasons why this is true, and start changing the societal habits — the psychological frames — that we put around these habits.

Think of all the unhealthy social practices — whether something as historically serious as blatant racism or as incidental as spitting in public places — that we now regard as uncouth, unsociable, uncivilized. Organizations that want to improve their performance need to build up some of the same stigmas around unhealthy information practices.

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Social-media P.R. pioneer Brian Solis offers an interesting conversation-starter with this piece:

The Social Revolution is Our Industrial Revolution

There are terms here I would alter (”peoplenomics”? yecch), but I like Brian’s emphasis that not everything is changing, and his observation that much of the overheated talk about “social media” is coming from folks inside the social-media echo chamber; for most folks, social media is just “media” that’s taking on new forms and enabling new, more highly distributed, means of conversation. If you’re interested in what Brian says here, you might also like my earlier take in a related vein, “Western Union and record labels.”

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Joe Romm at the Climate Progress blog stumps for the power of energy efficiency:

Energy efficiency, Part 2: The limitless resource

People who have little experience with what serious energy efficiency investments can do for a company or a state [...] think it is a one-shot resource wherein you pick the low hanging fruit. In fact, fruit grow back. The efficiency resource never gets exhausted because technology keeps improving and knowledge spreads to more and more people.

Particularly compelling is Joe’s assessment of the energy-efficiency actions of Dow Chemical in the 1980s under manager Ken Nelson. You might think that a big, smart, capital-intensive company like Dow would be all over energy efficiency from the get-go, but it’s just not so. My own take on this is that energy was so cheap for so long — and our cultural practices around energy use were so entrenched — that even many big companies didn’t find it worthwhile to pursue efficiency.

The comments thread of Joe’s post is also worth reading. I left a couple of comments there, comparing energy efficiency to Moore’s Law rather than a fruit tree. Here were my last words on the subject there:

My summary: as we get better and better [at energy efficiency], I predict, we will see more and more that we can be doing. Yes, there will be diminishing returns at some point — but we’re so very far from hitting that point that it need not concern us for at least several decades.

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After a long, ridiculous delay, the FCC has finally approved the merger between Sirius and XM Radio. As we’ve discussed before, the National Association of Broadcasters and others have portrayed the deal as creating a monopoly. But, as the Washington Post’s article on the approval notes,

“The merger’s completion is a relief to shareholders who have expressed frustration with the prolonged approval process. XM and Sirius have struggled financially and have said that joining forces is the only way that they can survive. Music-enabled cellphones, iPods, music Web sites and traditional radio stations all provide increased competition.”

In almost every case, I’m against monopolies. But this isn’t a monopoly. If Popeyes, Church’s, and KFC joined forces into one mega-chain for fried chicken, they wouldn’t have a monopoly on fast food; they’d still be competing with McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Dairy Queen, and every other fast-food chain in the world.* That’s what’s happening in the Sirius-XM deal.

( * Sure, sure — in real life, YUM! Brands owns both KFC and Pizza Hut. But please humor me while I spin out this hypothetical.)

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(Picture by ernop.)