What Retired Mechanical Engineers Do

3:17 run time

Thanks to Dad for the link

Speculation Vs. Investing

I'm not one to mearly post passages from something that someone has written, but this quote from Carly Fiorina in her book Tough Choices is too good not to share. Her comments on Wall Street are as relavent now as they ever were.

"Wall Street, and the market, works because it is large and liquid. Over time there are enough people with enough money that common sense will prevail. Time and the law of large numbers have to work, however. In the short term, or when the players are few, emotion, ambition, and greed can overwhelm common sense. This was reasonably apparent in 1995, long before the bubble of the late nineties or the growth of hedge funds. Still, in 1995, most investors were really betting on the underlying asset that is represented by a stock certificate. Five years later, more and more bets were being placed not on the asset, but on the value of the certificate itself. Today, for many traders and investors, this currency and its fluctuations have become more important than the companies and its capabilities."

Hooah

"Mark me down as a believer in innovation that is based on clarity, consistency, predictability relative to the market, and low cost; innovation that will serve investors over the long term; innovation that provides an optimal opportunity that it will work tomorrow rather than innovation based on what worked yesterday; innovation that not only minimizes the risks of ownership but clearly explains the nature and extent of those risks."

John Bogle in Enough.

Innovative Christmas Carol

Here's a great new arraignment (run time 3:30) of Christmas songs by the A Capella group Straight No Chaser. It's neat to see how people can take the old and recombine it into something fresh.

Neat Idea

The folks at Carbon's Golden Malted Flour have figured it out. Using the business model made famous by Gillette (give away the razor and sell the blades) they've developed a program where they give you the equipment in exchange for buying their batter.

My favorite is the batter dispenser shown above. Rather than have the traditional bowl of batter that ends up getting all over everything this device will neatly pour out just the right amount making it easier for both the user and provider.

Transperency

It's true that what gets measured gets done so it was neat to see this monthly report card prominently displayed at the front of the local YMCA. There should be no doubt among the staff or clients as to what the organization is trying to achieve.


The next question is does everyone on staff know their specific responsibilities?

Being Excellent Is Easy

No it's not.

While private equity firms control just a tiny fraction of U.S. corporations, their companies are disproportionately troubled. Of the 105 big U.S. companies that have filed for bankruptcy this year, 66 have been owned by buyout shops or been spun off by them, according to Capital IQ, another unit of McGraw-Hill. Investors, meanwhile, remain skeptical of many of the recent buyouts that haven't yet blown up but soon could. Loans made for those deals are now trading for as little as 33 cents on the dollar.1

You can't get some something for nothing. Building something that everyone is proud to be a part of takes time, effort, and patience.



Notes
(1)http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_49/b4111040876189.htm

Whale Facts

Things that quite possibly only interest me...

On Second Thought 8% Isn't That Bad
In Turkey, 40% of youth are unemployed.1

Name the 6 NFL Teams Without Cheerleaders
Pittsburgh, Green Bay, Chicago, Cleveland, the New York Giants and Detroit.2

Name the Two Growth Sectors of The US Economy in October
Health Care and Mining. 3

Which Fuel Provides More Than 1/2 of US Electricity?
Coal.

Name The Two States Without D1 College Football
Vermont and Alaska. 4


Notes
(1) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/08/business/worldbusiness/08turkey.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
(2)http://www.buffalonews.com/sports/billsnfl/story/479675.html
(3) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122731312556349581.html
(4)http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/sports/03vermont.html?_r=1

It's All About Accountability II

I forgot about this passage from Crucial Conversations: Tools for talking when the stakes are high when I wrote the previous post on accountability.

"One study of five hundred stunningly productive organizations revealed that peak performance had absolutely nothing to do with forms, procedures, and policies that drive performance management. In fact, half of the high flyers had almost no formal performance management processes.

What's behind their success? It all comes down to how people crucial conversations. Within high-performing companies, when employees fail to deliver on their promises, colleagues willingly and effectively step in to discuss the problem. In the worst companies, poor performers are first ignored and then transferred. In good companies, bosses eventually deal with problems. In great companies, everyone holds everyone else accountable - regardless of level or position."

The easy part is knowing that accountability is essential for success. The hard part is actually pulling off these conversations in a manner that respect for the individual is maintained.

Outliers: A Review Of Malcolm Gladwell's New Book

Malcolm's Gladwell's new book Outliers is a study of success and, like his other books, is a masterfully woven tale that seams together everything from airline crashes to Asian rice paddies. The premise of the book is that to be super successful, or an outlier, you need to be smart, work hard, and get lucky.

The treatise on being smart and hard working is brief and straightforward but still interesting; research shows that the successful tend to have IQ's above 120 and have accumulated 10,000 hours worth of practice before becoming great. 10,000 hours, by the way, is the equivalent of working a 40 hour week every week for 4.8 years.

The heart of the book deals with being lucky. It turns out that it matters substantially when you were born, where you were born, and what your parents did for a living. All of these things, which are the luck of the draw, influence how you act, what opportunities are naturally available to you, and the availability of others to help you. Therefore, your behavior, opportunities, and support, which are necessary elements of success, are subject to chance.

The fact that your natural context (the behaviors, opportunities, and support that you are born into) plays substantially into your success is not a ready made excuse for giving up. Rather by illuminating that fact that there are significant unseen forces at work in our lives Malcolm gives the gift of visibility. For by simply being cognizant that each of us has a default behavior set, a default set of opportunities, and a default level of support we then know that there is a group of elements that we can actively work on that will help us produce success.

Neat Idea

"One measure of an idea’s greatness is how obvious it seems in retrospect." - Jonathan Dee, NY Times Reporter

The packaging design house Brand Image has come up with the concept for a paper based water bottle. There is no information as to whether the idea is technically feasible or not (alas, again the devil is in the details) but the idea is genius.

The plastic bottle is under assault as of late: plastic water bottles are not environmentally safe while plastic baby bottles are potentially harmful to your baby. Any alternative, with the right price tag, would be gladly welcomed.

Innovation is everywhere and in everything. If the water jug can be innovated, and that's been around for a long long time, then most everything else can to.

Link via: thedieline.com
Image via: thegoat.backcountry.com