Weekly Links (Week of Jan.18, 2010)

Find a Bright Spot, and Clone it (Fast Company, Jan.2010) - An excerpt from the upcoming book "Switch" by the Heath brothers (authors of "Made to Stick"). I highly recommend the book to all my classmates that are faced with leading changes in their business or their lives.

Shareholders vs. Stakeholders vs. Communities (January, 2010) - A follow-up to a case study in Global Strategy II, looking at the challenge of pharmaceuticals in emerging markets. This specific item looks at the trade offs between shareholder value, crowd-sourcing Intellectual Property and giving back to communities that can benefit from their older R&D.

New Pampers giving P&G Diaper Rash (January, 2010) - Following up to our Crisis Management discussions with Rick Amee, intertwined with the speed and power of Social Media. This looks at the mistakes P&G made in introducing their "new" Pampers without properly communicating to their customers about the changes and benefits. Plus this article seems especially relevant to teammate Portia Mount and her newborn baby :)

Pepsi Brings in the Health Police (Business Week, Jan.2010) - The current Dean of the Wake Forest Schools of Business hired current Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi. It's interesting to see how an international CEO is taking such dramatic steps to shift the company from US-centric lifestyle foods (soda, chips, pizza), which are less healthy, to a more International-centric approach to nutrition.

Will Walmart's "Sustainability Index" Really Work? (Fast Company, Jan.2010)- An initial look at the impact that Walmart's "Green" initiative is having on their suppliers, their product mix, and the future of supplier relations. It also looks at the difficulties of creating a universal "sustainability index" and labeling model across a breadth of products.

Disruption vs. Shareholder Maximization - Part II

[With our Global Strategy course this semester, I'm going to highlight a bunch of interesting business models and strategies]

"What's very dangerous, is not to evolve.", Jeff Bezos. In a recent interview with Fast Company, Bezos once again talks about how Amazon is using aspects of their core business to disrupt an existing business model (publishing). This time their Kindle eReader is threatening to reinvent the publishing business.

But Amazon is an online store, a reseller of other company's stuff. Why is it trying to compete in the consumer electronics business with a device? Without a massive quantity sold, how can they possibly achieve the same level of margins that the online business does?

Once again, letting NPV's dictate the business can be dangerous to a company's long-term health. Kindle is an enabler. It enables Amazon to make buying books (from Amazon) easier than ever before. It enables Amazon to potentially disrupt the publishing value-chain. It enables Amazon to accelerate the pace at which costs associated with supply-chain for physical reading materials are reduced or eliminated. And it ultimately enables the on-going evolution of Amazon's strategy to be a critical player in the digital economy.

The Kindle may or may not ultimately be the dominant eReading device. It may fail to pass any litmus tests for success (long-term positive NPV; etc.) but the paradigm it has enabled will position Amazon to be a significant influencer in the digital life of consumers for the next decade. That's a position than shareholders of many other companies would highly desire.

A Preview of our ObamaNation (Social Media) presentation

In the publishing industry, there is nothing worse than being "scooped" by your competition. In other words, they got the story to press before you did.

Portia Mount and I are presenting our Team 5 Market Trends report this weekend, something we've been looking forward to all semester.

So I was slightly disappointed to open the mailbox last week and see the cover story in Fast Company (see right) that highlights how Chris Hughes brought social media to the forefront of the Obama campaign and played a huge role in his eventual election. An excellent piece, it highlights many of the focus areas we planned to present.

One of the key points the article makes is that Hughes was the least technical of the three Facebook founders, instead being the one focused on how all this technology could highlight or enhance human behaviors and interactions. While our presentation intends to touch on the underlying technology, there is an entire section devoted to applying the techniques and lessons to almost any business. The approach taken by the Obama campaign will not only revolutionize how elections are structured in the future, but also how companies and individuals will market their brands and products going forward.

That last point is the focus of our presentation. We hope we do it justice in the 10-15 minutes alloted to the presentation. I'll be sure to post the presentation and highlights in subsequent posts following next weekend. If anyone from the Wake Forest community would like to attend , it will be on Saturday April 18th, between 1-3pm in Babcock Room 1101.