Monthly Archive for August, 2010

From The Economist

Henry Kissinger, who started his career in the killing fields of Harvard before moving to Washington, DC, is said to have quipped that academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. Schumpeter has no idea whether the contest to succeed Jay Light as dean of the Harvard Business School (HBS) was vicious. But he is sure that the stakes were not small.

HBS is hugely influential. The school is a training ground for America’s business elite: a striking number of the top office holders of Fortune 500 companies, including the heads of General Electric and Boeing, sharpened their skills and elbows there. The school is also the apex of the vast global industry devoted to teaching business. It sits on an endowment of $2.1 billion and employs some terrific thinkers, including Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen. It developed the “case method”—using case studies to teach students about real-world business problems. It claims to be the source of four-fifths of the case-study materials used in the world’s leading business schools.

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From The Economist

The United Arab Emirates announced on August 1st that it had failed to reach an agreement on data traffic with Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, and would suspend messenger, e-mail and web-browsing services on BlackBerrys from October 11th. There are lots of smart-phones in the world that handle e-mail and web browsing; why pick on BlackBerry? From the UAE’s telecoms regulator:

BlackBerry data is immediately exported off-shore, where it is managed by a foreign, commercial organization. BlackBerry data services are currently the only data services operating in the UAE where this is the case.

Whenever you read about a dispute between a web-based service and a country, you need to ask yourself only one question: where is the server located? The conflict between Google and China came down to the conditions under which Google could locate servers in China. Closer servers offer a faster load-time, but servers on the Chinese mainland fall under Chinese law. WikiLeaks, as well, takes advantage of server law by routing all links through servers in countries with strong protections for whistleblowers and journalists.

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From The Economist

The members of the Village People, a pop group founded in the 1970s, are dismayed that the organisation that inspired their greatest hit is to change its name after 166 years. The American branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association, known to arm-waving disco mavens as the YMCA, announced on July 12th that it would become plain “The Y”. This is part of what the outfit describes as a “major brand revitalisation” intended to make it seem warmer and more welcoming. It may turn out to be a misguided rebranding exercise on a par with Coca-Cola’s launch of New Coke and British Airways dropping the Union Jack from the tails of its aircraft.

Non-profit organisations such as the one formerly known as the YMCA are commonly advised to become more like for-profit businesses. Management experts and consultants view them as horribly inefficient due to the absence of the concentrating power of the profit motive. The negative reaction to the Y’s rebranding suggests that non-profit outfits are not all that good at emulating business even when they try. There has been barely any reciprocal pressure on for-profit firms to learn from the non-profits. Yet this is what Nancy Lublin, one of America’s most successful non-profit leaders, proposes in a new book, “Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business.”

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