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Pastimes : The Justa & Lars Honors Bob Brinker Investment Club -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jeffrey D who wrote (10232)	12/3/1999 1:04:00 PM
From: Wally Mastroly	Respond to of 15132

How deep is the (labor) pool? cbs.marketwatch.com

To: Jeffrey D who wrote (10232)	12/3/1999 1:13:00 PM
From: Trebor	Respond to of 15132

Totally off topic, but interesting, IMHO. FEATURE/The Biggest Flops and Best Business Ideas Ever Made NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE FEATURES)--Dec. 1, 1999--The top 10 best and worst management decisions ever made have been chosen by Stuart Crainer, a noted business and management writer. Crainer, the author of The Ultimate Business Library and The Ultimate Book of Business Quotations, selected the top 10 lists from the decisions profiled in his new book The 75 Greatest Management Decisions Ever Made and 21 of the Worst (AMACOM, November 1999). To compile the contents of the book, executives, consultants, academics, and people within the business world were canvassed for their ideas and opinions about the best and worst decisions. The Top 10 Greatest Management Decisions No.10 Swiss watch manufacturers decide to collaborate. The result was Swatch. The Swiss share of the worldwide market rose from 15 percent to over 50 percent. No.9 Dell decides to sell PCs direct to consumers and built to order. Dell's model cut out the resellers, reduced working capital costs, and direct access to customers facilitated better product design, inventory management, and customer service. No.8 Mattel decides to add the Ken Doll to its line of Barbie toys. The addition of Ken was the first extension of the Barbie brand. Mattel has been extending the brand ever since to include several sisters, and friends of different cultural backgrounds. No.7 A slave owner in ancient Thebes places an advertisement for the return of a lost slave. The ad is the oldest existing ad, and the predecessor of the modern advertisement. No.6 Coca-Cola decides to return to it's old recipe. Instead of blindly following their new strategy, Coke admitted their mistake and quickly went back to the old recipe. No.5 Henry Ford decides to pay his workers $5 a day. In response to high turnover, Ford increased wages from $2.50 to $5 a day. No.4 Toyota decides to implement W. Edward Deming's quality techniques. While western car makers didn't adopt Deming's quality techniques until the 1980's, Toyota had been using them since the 1940's - pushing them to top of the automotive industry. No.3 Johnson & Johnson decides to pull Tylenol from store shelves. After eight people died from Tylenol capsules that someone had put cyanide in, Johnson & Johnson demonstrated that people were more important than profits by recalling it's entire inventory. No.2 Apple decides to build the first salable PC. The Apple I eventually led to the Mac, a high-tech consumer explosion - and a booming industry. No.1 Bill Gates decides to license MS-DOS to IBM. IBM agreed to pay most of the development costs for MS-DOS, while Microsoft was allowed to license the system to third parties. This laid the foundations for Microsoft's success, and IBM's fall from grace. The Top 10 Worst Management Decisions No.10 Charles Goodyear is slow about registering patents and careless about business matters. Despite developing the process of vulcanization, turning rubber from an impractical material into one that can be used for a huge variety of purposes, Goodyear hardly made a cent. The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, has no connection with Charles Goodyear - besides borrowing his name. No.9 France stops mass production. Honore Blanc, a French gunsmith, vowed to make 1,000 muskets a year for Napoleon, using interchangeable parts. The French government brought the effort to a halt, believing quality muskets couldn't be made in such a fashion. No.8 Thomas Edison believes that iron could be extracted from low-grade ore. The inventor who once noted that genius is largely a matter of knowing what won't work lost a ton of money and credibility attempting to prove his hypothesis. No.7 Henry Ford claims he can build 1,000 small submarines a day. In 1917, as World War I raged, the Navy brought Ford in to build 200-foot Eagle boats. Ford ignored the best brains the Navy had to offer. The auto giant managed to produce only 17 leaky boats - in a year. No.6 In 1899, Asa Candler sold the bottling rights for Coca-Cola for $1. No.5 Schlitz introduces "accelerated batch fermentation". Though the beer tasted the same, drinkers sensed lower quality. By 1980, Schlitz's value had plummeted from over $1 billion to $75 million. No.4 CEO James Robinson III decides to transform shipping giant American Express into a financial supermarket. Shearson Lehman brokerage ate about $4 billion in capital and was sold in 1993. No.3 Sony fails to license the Betamax. While Betamax was better, Japanese giant Matshushita developed the VHS video and licensed the technology, leading to VHS being the world standard in video. No.2 Xerox decides to turned down the first PC and allowed Steve Jobs to steal it. No.1 Apple refuses to allow its products to be cloned or licensed to other manufacturers. Playing by the old rules, Apple strove to retain total control of everything - and lost big.