In Search of the Perfect Investment

But the jobs report really was miserable.  From one commentary:

Total employment fell by 445,000. Full-time employment is down by 0.5% in the last year, while part-time is up 3%. David Rosenberg calls this the just-in-time labor market. The total number of unemployed rose to over 14 million. If you count the discouraged workers not in the official unemployed, the total number rises to 20.6 million.

High-yielder dividend stocks and gold are holding up best. Stay right away  from non-dividend paying industrials and financials — too many cockroaches.

Waiting for Gravity to hit LinkedIn. Hugely bearish article on LinkedIn in the New York Times. Click here.

My dumbest investment decisions: Biotech and California real estate. In both cases I did not ask, “What’s the worst that can happen? Can I lose all my money?”

I was reminded of biotech perils on the weekend with an email from the president of a small biotech company I had (stupidly) help fund:

We are writing to update you on XYZ Corp’s  progress and status. You will recall that late last year we attempted an IPO that failed, unfortunately, given the capital market conditions. Subsequently, the company’s Board of Directors and its Management Team began to pursue aggressively several strategic options to advance the company. These options have included another public financing scenario as well as several private, strategic combinations and licensing transactions. Currently, a private, strategic option remains active and is progressing rapidly. This potential collaboration would provide XYZ Corp’the necessary resources to advance development of each of its programs with a goal of creating a viable outcome for our investors. While we are optimistic with our progress, we cannot be assured of a success. Discussions which began in the 1st quarter of this year are expected to take several more months to complete.

Concurrently, the Board is working together with management to drastically reduce expenses to enable the Company to preserve resources necessary to see us through this difficult but focused time. We have reduced headcount, fixed overhead, and salaries to the bare minimum. The Board has implemented a management incentive plan that will enable me as your CEO, to remain in place for an indefinite period in order to lead and close this initiative with the goal of providing a positive outcome for our shareholders.

Encouraged by the sustained interest and recent progress with this potential strategic partner, XYZ Corp is assessing interest level among its investors and a few 3rd parties familiar with the company, in undertaking a small debt bridge financing not to exceed $450,000, under very attractive terms. As of this correspondence we have received commitments for a third of this amount. The objective is to provide a cash runway through to the consummation of this collaboration with a private pharmaceutical partner. Should you have an interest in participating in this offering, please contact me this week as we hope to finalize interest and seek shareholder approval to implement before month’s end. This investment does come with significant risk ifXYZ Corp is unable to close the strategic collaboration.

If XYZ Corp does not receive adequate financing in the near future, it will be forced to cease operations altogether. Nevertheless, Management and the Board are currently optimistic that a positive outcome can be realized. Your past and ongoing support has been most appreciated.

Yours Sincerely,

XXXX, President and CEO;

My Summer at an Indian Call Center. You must read this very funny, very sad piece from Mother Jones.

Google+ social networking could help GOOG stock. I begged to get on. But Google’s PR people said it wasn’t ready for me yet. I could look at their press site and learn more.  Click here.

Please buy yourself a solid state drive (SSD). A SSD is the fastest way to speed up your laptop. This is the easiest package. It’s got the cloning software, the cable and even a metal container if you want to use the SSD as an external drive.

The Kingston kit comes in three sizes — 64 gig for $120, 128 gig for $220 and 256 gig for $460 — at Amazon. Click here.

This stuff is genuinely amazing. Invent something in a can or bottle and riches byeyond your wildest imagination are yours.

I used Turtle’s Rubbing Compound to remove a bunch of scratches on my 9-year old Subaru Outback. Looks as good as new. Huge weekend accomplishment.

Six bucks a can. At Amazon. Click here.

Picking the Lock of Google’s Search. How do you get Google to recognize your business? It’s a black art. And other people play it better than you do.  Some call it “gaming”  Google. Click here.

Investigating the Dreaded `Check Engine’ Light. Really interesting and actually quite useful for figuring out what the Check Engine light on you car means. First clue: clean and tighten your gas cap. Read the comments. Click here.

Your taxpayer money gone mad. From a Wall Street Journal article by Professor Paul Light on how to save Federal expenses:

Cut federal jobs. Flatten the number of federal management layers to no more than six. In a 2005 study, I found an average of 18 layers between, say, the secretary of agriculture and the forest ranger, or the secretary of the interior and the oil-rig inspector—up from seven layers in 1960.

For the Prof. Light’s full WSJ piece, click here.

3D Printing  comes of age. You must watch this new technology. Click here.

There are always a great entrepreneurial opportunities. Parked outside our bulding on Friday.

It’s a tiny Mercedes Smart Car. Perfect for parking in tight spots.

Mnagement books to read this summer. From the Economist. The beginning is funny.

Aiming high
We launch a quarterly review of business books by considering six of the best

THERE are few divisions of the book industry with a worse reputation than business publishing. Hundreds if not thousands of business books come out every year, all with glowing press releases and effervescent puffs. Literary editors tend to consign them straight to the bin.

This is understandable. An astonishing number are worthless. Celebrity CEOs blow their trumpets, consultants market miracle cures, self-help gurus promise that you can grow rich by working four hours a week. Wait a few months: the CEOs have been caught with their hands in the till, the miracle cures are poisons, the self-help gurus bankrupt. What remains is a tangle of jargon-ridden prose.

Understandable but wrong. It is silly to dismiss a whole genre just because so many business books are bad. There are some excellent titles in among the dross: CEO biographies that capture something essential about business, useful prescriptions for restoring companies to health, even self-help books that help make sense of the contradictory pressures of modern corporate life. The average employed person in the West spends more waking time in the office than at home, so it makes no sense to be so dismissive of writers who focus on such an important activity.

The best books provide an insight into how business revolutionises the world. Why is the centre of growth shifting from the developed to the developing countries? Why do some companies succeed and others fail? Why are we swapping the white collar for the no-collar workplace? Why do managers say the astonishing things that they say? The answers to these questions lie in the business books that many literary editors so casually toss out.

Some business writers pass Karl Marx’s test of changing the world as well as interpreting it. Peter Drucker’s 1946 classic, “Concept of the Corporation”, made people think of companies as communities rather than just productive units. “The Machine That Changed the World” (1990) by James Womack et al popularised Toyota’s manufacturing system with its emphasis on just-in-time parts and proactive workers. Michael Hammer and James Champy’s “Reengineering the Corporation” (1993) encouraged companies to sack large numbers of workers even as their profits soared.

This week The Economist launches a quarterly review which will highlight a selection of new business books. To introduce this feature we re-examine six classics published over the past half-century or so that illustrate the wide variety of books that march under the banner of business. They also show how the best books help both to shape the business world and to make sense of it.

Henry Ford is rightly credited with inventing the assembly line—and with it mass production. But it was his great rival at General Motors (GM), Alfred Sloan, who really invented modern professional management. Sloan organised his company into divisions that specialised in cars “for every purse and purpose” and he fashioned a managerial class that turned GM into the world’s biggest company. His 1964 book, My Years with General Motors, is a cool explanation of how he did it (“management has been my specialisation,” he wrote flatly). It is a book that puts subsequent business autobiographies to shame.

William Whyte’s The Organisation Man (1956) is business journalism at its best, taking us inside the daily life of the giant corporations that dominated American capitalism during its heyday. Organisation men were conformists to their fingertips. They eschewed creativity in pursuit of pleasing their bosses, hitting the numbers and creating what Sloan called “objective organisations” as distinct from those that “get lost in the subjectivity of personalities”. Later authors, such as Richard Florida, have tried to examine the demise of “organisation man” and the rise of the creative class, but nobody matches Whyte’s ability to mix detailed anecdotes with broad generalisations.

Drucker was the doyen of management gurus—a man who kept up a stream of insightful commentary on business from the 1940s until his death in 2005. Picking his best book is not easy; the inelegantly titled Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973) is as good an example as you can get. Drucker explains why “management may be the most important innovation of the 20th century”. He traces broad revolutions such as the rise of knowledge workers and the development of voluntary organisations, boosting his argument with stories about the growth of the East India Company and the development of Japanese art.

In Search of Excellence by two McKinsey alumni, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, was the first business blockbuster, selling millions of copies and demonstrating that consultants could talk to a general as well as a business audience. Many of the companies they profiled performed badly in subsequent years and the book has been heavily criticised since it came out in 1982. But it was a powerful attack on the rationalist school of management which saw workers as mere numbers, and it provided a compelling portrait of how companies work.

Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997) introduced one of the most influential modern business ideas—disruptive innovation—and proved that high academic theory need not be a disadvantage in a book aimed at the general reader. Mr Christensen showed that great companies can fail despite doing everything right: even as they listen to their customers and invest heavily in their most productive technologies, their markets can be destroyed by radical new technologies.

C.K. Prahalad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (2004) unleashed a business revolution that has done far more good than any number of “Live Aid” concerts. Using a wealth of vivid examples, from Indian eye clinics to Mexican cement companies, Prahalad made three powerful points: that consumers who live on less than $2 a day collectively represent billions of dollars-worth of demand, that together they will account for much of the growth in global demand in the future, and that companies that want to reach these markets need to start early and rethink their assumptions about design and distribution. Prahalad, who died last year, is one of the writers who is most admired by developing-world entrepreneurs, from Muhammad Yunus, who founded Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, to James Mwangi, CEO of Kenya’s Equity Bank.

Companies and consultancies will buy thousands of books to flatter their CEOs or market their latest “breakthrough” ideas. The temptation for publishers to churn out rubbish should be resisted. Business is going through a particularly fascinating phase, as new technologies disrupt long-established business models, new economic giants shift the balance of economic power and new gurus, many of them from emerging markets, reinterpret the landscape. The need to separate the wheat from the chaff has never been greater.

A Letter from Rupert Murdoch. This is funny. You must read it.

Where I Stand on the News Corporation Scandal

by Rupert Murdoch

Dear Friends,

As details of the scandal surrounding my company, News Corporation, have emerged in recent days –- including employees hacking into mobile phones and bribing the police –- my defense has been consistent: I had no idea what was going on.

Now, I’m sure many of you are wondering, how could I, Rupert Murdoch, one of the most powerful men in the world, have no idea what is going on? The answer, my friends, is simple: I get all of my information from my own newspapers. If you relied on News of the World, The Sun, and The New York Postfor your information, I can assure you that you wouldn’t have a clue what was going on, either.

Some of you aren’t buying this argument. You maintain that a media titan like me would get his information from sources beyond newspapers – like TV, for example. Well, that’s true. But in my case, the only TV I watch is the Fox News Channel. So not only do I not know what is going on around me, I know nothing about the theory of evolution, global warming, or President Obama’s birthplace.

If you still don’t believe that I know nothing, here’s a final piece of evidence: I paid $580 million to acquire MySpace. Case closed.

Now that we’ve established that I know nothing, let me address some of the allegations about News Corp. that have come up in recent days: first and foremost, that our reporters have regularly bribed the police to obtain information. I am shocked and appalled by this charge. News Corporation has a longstanding zero tolerance policy regarding information, both the getting of it and the publishing of it. Going forward, we will be subjecting our employees to a series of random information tests. Any employees found to be possessing even trace amounts of facts will be immediately terminated.

Finally, it has come to my attention that several of my company’s tabloids have featured pictures of women with their shirts off. I am as shocked by this news as you are and I intend to launch a full investigation.

In closing, I want to assure you that I intend to make amends for any and all of the wrongdoing perpetrated by employees of News Corp. in recent years. And to that end, I have plan: I implore the British government to let me own 100% of the satellite broadcasting giant B-Sky-B. I have made some grievous mistakes with the media properties I already control, and the only way I can think of to make things right is by controlling even more.

Your friend,

Rupert

This letter is a spoof by comedian Andy Borowitz, whose web site is here.

Acceptable use of the “F” word. Here are the times in history when the “F” word is considered acceptable.

+ “What the @#$% do you mean, we  are sinking?” — Capt. E.J Smith of RMS Titanic, 1912.

+ “What  the @#$% was that?” – Mayor Of Hiroshima, 1945.

+ “Where did all  those @#$%ing Indians come from?” — Custer, 1877.

+ “You want WHAT  on the @#$%ing ceiling?” – Michelangelo, 1566.

+ “Scattered @#$%ing showers,  my ass!” – Noah, 4314 BC.

+ “I didn’t think  they’d get this @%#*^ing mad.” – Saddam Hussein, 2002.

And the winner is

+ “I need a Navy SEAL in my  house like I need a @%#*^ing hole in my head.” –  Osama Bin Laden,  2011.

Harry Newton who wishes he were here — the second most beautiful place in the world (after Yosemite):

The Grand Tetons in Wyoming with the Snake River in the foreground. Ansel Adams did a wonderful job with this gorgeous place.