Ged Carroll

Category: business | 商業 | 상업 | ビジネス

My interest in business or commercial activity first started when a work friend of my Mum visited our family. She brought a book on commerce which is what business studies would have been called decades earlier. I read the book and that piqued my interest.

At the end of your third year in secondary school you are allowed to pick optional classes that you will take exams in. this is supposed to be something that you’re free to chose.

I was interested in business studies (partly because my friend Joe was doing it). But the school decided that they wanted me to do physics and chemistry instead and they did the same for my advanced level exams because I had done well in the normal level ones. School had a lot to answer for, but fortunately I managed to get back on track with college.

Eventually I finally managed to do pass a foundational course at night school whilst working in industry. I used that to then help me go and study for a degree in marketing.

I work in advertising now. And had previously worked in petrochemicals, plastics and optical fibre manfacture. All of which revolve around business. That’s why you find a business section here on my blog.

Business tends to cover a wide range of sectors that catch my eye over time. Business usually covers sectors that I don’t write about that much, but that have an outside impact on wider economics. So real estate would have been on my radar during the 2008 recession.

  • The Layer Cake by JJ Connolly

    The Layer Cake is a hard bitten crime novel of 90’s underworld London that the movie was based on. However the book is worth reading because the plot is similar but different to the film.

    I won’t go into too much depth because that would spoil it for you, but suffice to say its a great read. The book doesn’t have the slick quality of the film, primarily because it has more depth.

    From the thought that has gone into it, one may wonder as to how J.J. Connolly got his knowledge. Having worked and lived in clubland during the late 1980s and early 1990s the type of characters Connolly describes brought me right back to my early and mid twenties.

    The Layer Cake mixing the world of private military contractors and criminal endeavour reminded me of a former boss who had an address book. The address book was alleged to be full of ‘good lads’ who could solve problems ‘at home or abroad’. He was anything but the action man himself, being obsessed with his Hugo Boss suits at the time. He’d apparently been employed because of his work for a major name in the road construction industry, before I’d worked for him.

    Great fiction like other forms of art has an intrinsic truth hidden inside that otherwise wouldn’t be able to be told.

    Get out and buy the book; watching the film before the book doesn’t affect your enjoyment of it. More book reviews here.

    The Layer Cake

  • Swiffer

    Swiffer is a US homeware brand owned by Proctoer & Gamble. Proctor & Gamble had to do a product recall last week on a battery operated vacuum cleaner that they sold in the US market under the Swiffer name. The product could overheat in certain circumstances and they had received 14 complaints. I was impressed by the recall notice on the front of the website, it showed real class. Rather than hiding behind legalese, they put personality to it and even had it signed by ‘Kris from the Swiffer team’. This conduct is likely to help them protect their Swiffer brand and reduce panic amongst consumers whilst still ensuring an orderly recall of the product.

    I have pasted the copy below because I have no idea how long P&G will keep it on their website.

    Swiffer Sweep+VacImportant product news

    As you know, we are very sorry to announce that Swiffer will be voluntarily recalling our new product, Sweep+Vac. The Sweep+Vac is our new battery-operated vacuum cleaner brought to you in September 2004.

    We are pleased to reassure you that this product recall does not involve any of our other great Swiffer products.

    We have identified an isolated Sweep+Vac product quality issue. Click here for complete details.

    If you have this product at home, we are asking that you stop using the Sweep+Vac immediately and disconnect the Sweep+Vac by removing the top section of the handle. Click here for instructions on how to disassemble your Sweep+Vac.

    Even though this issue has been observed in just a few Sweep+Vac units, we have taken this voluntary measure to ensure the highest standards of quality, safety, and satisfaction by recalling Sweep+Vac as quickly as possible. If you have purchased a Sweep+Vac, we would like to provide you with a refund. Click here for refund instructions.

    We’d like to thank the initial consumers who alerted us to this problem. We are very committed to delivering the highest standard of product quality and take these types of issues very seriously.

    We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your continued support of Swiffer,

    Kris from the Swiffer team

    More related content here.

  • Running Money by Andy Kessler

    Andy Kessler’s Running Money, Hedge Fund Honchos, Monster Markets And My Hunt For The Big Score is a well written set of memoirs from a technology fund manager. Together with his partner-in-crime Fred Kittler, Kessler managed to survive the highs and lows of the technology industry in the late 1990’s, he tells the story in a very articulate way that is as powerful as Robert X Cringely’s book Accidential Empires. The expansion of the tech sector is told using the industrial revolution as an analogy.

    One of the first things portrayed in Running Money (and other books) is that the tech sector actually revolves around a relatively small group of people. In addition to writing his memoirs Kessler tries to make sense of it all and proves very illuminating to readers. In this respect it is far better than The New New Thing by Michael Lewis.

    Post-industrial, IP-driven economy

    The book looks beyond the technology sector to put a positive spin on the huge US deficit. Running Money explains that America is now an IP economy and assumes that the developing world will follow on behind as a wave sweeps across national borders moving the economic status through hunter gatherer, agriculture/extractive, industrial, service and intellectual property economies. In some respects the US with its IP economy is following Europe; what is the Swiss banking system, LVMH’s luxury brands and the continents big pharmaceutical firms if not part of an IP ecosystem?

    Conclusion

    I would recommend anybody to read Kessler’s book. I thought I would end however on some of the differences in viewpoint I have with his writing. Where some of Kessler’s writing differs from my own perspective is when he outlines his analysis of the current state of affairs and some of his future vision:

    • Kessler considers markets to be a perfect instrument in the long term; which I am not convinced about at all. Think the great depression, the S&L debacle of the 1980s for instance, markets can break and require occasional interference
    • The neat model of China being an industrial workshop for US intellectual property is simplistic. China is fast moving into building its own brands from mobile handsets to luxury watches (the first Chinese astronaut went into space with a relative expensive Chinese brand of chronograph. China and India has a huge film industry. It isn’t only China either, Japan is now a source of numerous fashion trends, hot movies in Korea have their scripts optioned by Hollywood, some of the best advertising creative teams come from South America and India)
    • Kessler talks about the entertainment industry as being part of this US IP powerhouse but this fails to see the many flaws and mismanagment in the music, media and film industries that make Worldcom seem well managed. The RIAA and MPAA have hid behind piracy to hide a deeper malaise highlighted in Michael Wolf’s Autumn of the Moguls
    • Kessler doesn’t talk about what the inevitable post-intellectual property economy looks like

    More book reviews here.

  • The English Disease

    In the 1970’s through to the present day the English Disease referred to the reputation of a small minority of football supporters from England with a penchant for violent behaviour, the likes of which has not been seen in the US since the Rodney King riots.Within the technology sector there is another English Disease, this has been touched upon by Mike King, managing director of Johnson King in this op-ed which ran in Tuesday’s FT Creative Business. I would argue that it merits as much if not more attention as the organised violence of English football hooligans as is gnaws away at the future prosperity of the UK.

    This disease is a chronic lack of ambition and vision and manifests itself in different ways:

    • Mike complains that British start-ups are reluctant to invest in marketing and PR to enhance their reputation and grow their business. They often do not recognise the value of it and even where they do, the pathetically low budget put into marketing is below the critical mass required to deliver results. There is a similar attitude whether the management team are novices or drawing down a serious package as an ‘experienced entrepreneur’. Yet the most respected businessman for these people would be Richard Branson; a modern-day Barnum who built his empire with large doses of shameless self-promotion. Mike owning a PR agency was particularly interested in this aspect of the equation! However this is only a small part of the picture.
    • Funding is not forthcoming; venture capital in the technology sector is based on trying to achieve a ten-fold return on the money. UK start-ups have lower expectations of themselves, they do not share their American colleagues dreams of being the next Oracle, Apple, Microsoft or IBM. Consequently the technology business is trapped in a self reinforcing prophetic circle, a black hole with an expanding event horizon sucking away the vision and dreams. This in turn encourages the fund managers to husband their limited cash as much as they can by cutting back on ‘unnecessary expenditure’ on things like marketing and looking for an early exit strategy through acquisition or technology licencing agreements. It is not because the UK does not have the expertise and the smarts:
    1. US chip pioneer LSI Logic was founded by Wilf Corrigan, a Liverpool docker’s son made good
    2. Apple Computer’s sizzle is in large part to a product design team headed by Geordie designer Jonathan Ives who has designed every successful product from the original bondi blue iMac to the latest iPods
    3. Cambridge boffin Alan Turing was arguably the inventor of first programmable computer and laid down the defining test for true artificial intelligence
    4. LCDs: liquid crystals were invented in the UK, but made Japanese companies rich

    The problem is that the English disease is pervasive, it affects the value of houses, how much your future pension is going to be worth and what jobs the UK citizens of tomorrow are likely to have. The FTSE has underperformed US rivals for the past decade because it does not have its share of high-growth technology companies. Vodafone and mmO2 is just a seller of wireless services, just as much a merchant as supermarket chain Tesco, Lastminute.com is an e-tailer echoing the Napoleonic-era cliche of Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. ARM Holdings, the UK’s leading chip company, is a chip designer that can barely be described as a medium-sized enterprise. Software company Autonomy is noticable only for its lack of peers. Cambridge’s Silicon Fen is actually a laughable Silicon Sahara with precious few oasises.

    With such a poor technology sector, money for investment sloshes around in management buyouts (with the intention of trying to squeeze more value out of mature businesses), a cash bloated property market and overseas where entrepreneurs generally have more vision. Thus setting the UK up for economic underachievement ad infinitum. Instead the UK will be an economy based on the export of a small amount of golf sweaters, rainwear, antiques and pre-prepared curry cooking sauces. It would be side splittingly funny if it wasn’t so tragic. More related posts here.

  • Autumn of the Moguls by Michael Wolff

    I have been working my way through Michael Wolff’s new book Autumn of the Moguls and found some of it very predictable. Its obsession with disfunctionality amongst business leaders including Eisner and Messier.One thing that did strike a chord with me was the way technology had moved from saving the record industry from itself to becoming the industry’s kryptonite. Around about 1984 or so, the music industry had hit paydirt as Joe Public moved from their analogue recordings on 8-tracks, cassettes and vinyl on to CDs. Artists of the 1960s and 1970s were the money spinners, reputedly there was one CD factory in Germany that did nothing but make copies of Pink Floyd’s Dark side of the Moon.

    Autumn of The Moguls highlights how this model then collapsed.

    Then the internet came along and the record companies were slow to take advantage of this technology so the consumers did. Instead the industry created a huge knee jerk reaction blaming the customer for their own mistakes. From pages 283 and 284:

    File sharing replaced radio as the engine of music culture.

    It wasn’t just that it was free music – radio offered free music. But whatever you wanted was free, whenever you wanted it. The Internet is music consumerism run amok, resulting not only in billions of dollars in lost sales but in an endless bifurcation of taste. The universe fragmented into subuniverses, and then sub-subuniverses. The music industry, which depends on large numbers of people with similar interests for its profit margins, now had to deal with an ever-growing number of fans with increasingly diverse and eccentric interests.

    Not a unique challenge, clothes manufacturers, car companies et cetera all have had to deal with the fragmentation of consumer interests. There is no longer any such thing as the teenager, when do people now get old? These are all similar challenges. The fear in Autumn of The Moguls isn’t piracy, it’s the ability of these businesses to manage themselves and adjust to a post modern society.

    My own take on this is that the music industry has failed:

    • Failed to give customers what they want, more eclectic artists and built a business model about more ‘customised’ sales. I read somewhere that a Volvo car model can have some 48,000 variants. Customers now have a more eclectic musical taste, artists and record companies should build for a business model of selling 40,000 rather than 400,000 of a given record
    • Failed to take advantage of their back catalogue of deleted recordings and putting them for sale online to make a better return on slowly decaying master tapes
    • Failed to innovate, during the time that record companies may or may not have sold less CDs, depending whose numbers you believe; they signed and supported less acts and off loaded talented but not huge selling artists
    • Failed to realise that a fast buck is not always the best buck. In prostituting their recordings for supermarket soundtracks, films and car advertisements the music industry turned music into musak
    • Failed to grab their own destiny and allowed their product to be dictated to them by the radio stations
    • Failed to recognise that a number of customers still wanted analogue recordings, thus allowing niche players to subvert a reasonable revenue stream. Much of the US and European requirement for vinyl is pressed in state-of-the-art factories based in the Czech Republic as the majors exited the market

    More book reviews here.