Art Diamond's web log
(p. 194) Sam Walton is my pick for America’s greatest entrepreneur of the twentieth century.
He not only built the world’s largest retailing empire and the single most valuable company in America, he created the institution with the greatest muscle to do good today.
Source:
Wyly, Sam. 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire. New York: Newmarket Press, 2008.
(p. 170) lnformatics had been run from the top down. Here’s a story typical of the way the company worked. They had a trainer at headquarters who was told to educate the troops at the Federal Systems Division in northern California, which was run by Geno Tolari, a tough-minded football player from Pittsburgh. When the trainer arrived and announced, “I’m here to train your people,” Geno shot back, “You can’t train my people.”
The trainer got haughty. After all, he was from headquarters. “I’m the education department. I train your people.”
But Geno insisted, “You can’t train my people because you don’t know what they do.”
So now the trainer asked, “Okay, what do they do?”
Geno answered, “I don’t know.”
The trainer thought Geno was joking with him, and insisted, “I’m the trainer; I need to know what they do.”
That’s when Geno confessed, “I can’t tell you because I don’t (p. 171) know. They’re under a mountain in Omaha, and it’s a military secret, and the Air Force won’t tell us what they do.”
Source:
Wyly, Sam. 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire. New York: Newmarket Press, 2008.
Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.
(p. A13) In 1912, . . . , Robert Lincoln uncharacteristically leapt into the arena of national debate to challenge Theodore Roosevelt’s appropriation of his father’s name for TR’s “New Nationalism” agenda. Robert, writing in the Boston Herald, labeled Roosevelt’s progressivism a doctrine that the elder Lincoln “would abhor if living.”
For the full review, see:
RYAN L. COLE. “BOOKSHELF; The Son Also Rises; Prominent lawyer, self-made millionaire, cabinet secretary–Robert Lincoln was more than just his father’s greatest advocate.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., May 9, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 9, 2012.)
The book under review is:
Emerson, Jason. Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T. Lincoln. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.
President Obama’s pick for World Bank President, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, is scheduled to take office on July 1, 2012.
(p. A8) Dr. Kim has drawn fire recently for comments in a book he co-edited in 2000, “Dying for Growth.” In a piece he co-authored for it, Dr. Kim co-wrote that “the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men.”
. . .
. . . an economist who has become one of Dr. Kim’s leading critics, New York University’s William Easterly, said the World Bank nominee offered an “amateur” approach to economics through an “antiglobalization point of view” that is critical of corporations.
“His critique was much more radical, that the system itself was responsible for creating poverty,” Mr. Easterly said.
For the full review, see:
SUDEEP REDDY. “WORLD NEWS; Criticism Over U.S.’s World Bank Pick Swells.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., April 9, 2012): A8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: online version of the article is dated April 8, 2012.)
William Easterly’s wonderful and courageous book is:
Easterly, William. The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002 [1st ed. 2001].
(p. 167) The world owes a debt of gratitude to Mike Milken and his creative team. Did some people go too far? Yes. Did some of them take advantage of the freer flow of capital and end up doing more damage than good? Sure. But markets are messy. Major shifts in the flow of capital often lead to periods of excess before the pendulum swings back and equilibrium is restored. Mike Milken and his team made a major contribution to today’s market atmosphere of high liquidity, which in turn has also helped lift the world’s poor out of poverty. Today the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has created microloans for mothers living on $2 a day. And that won Grameen the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Committee didn’t call microloans “junk” debt.
Source:
Wyly, Sam. 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire. New York: Newmarket Press, 2008.
Bryan Caplan persuasively pans the book he is revieiwng. But along the way Caplan makes an intriguing observation of his own:
(p. A11) . . . , happiness research makes a powerful case against European-style labor-market regulation. For most economists, the effect on worker well-being is unclear. On the one hand, regulation boosts wages; on the other, it increases the probability that you will have no wages at all. From the standpoint of a happiness researcher, however, this is a no-brainer. A small increase in wages has but a small and ephemeral effect on happiness. A small increase in unemployment, by contrast, has a massive and–unlike most other factors–durable effect on happiness. Supposedly “humane” regulations to boost workers’ incomes have a dire cost in terms of human happiness.
For the full review, see:
BRYAN CAPLAN. “BOOKSHELF; Lessons From Cloud Nine; Happiness predicts higher job performance and even future health. But what predicts happiness?” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., August 16, 2011): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(p. 163) Although [high yield] . . . bonds eventually became known as a favored tool for leveraged–buyout specialists in the 1980s, Mike’s original goal was different. He wanted to provide access to capital for growing companies that needed financing to expand and create jobs. Most of these companies lacked the investment grade” bond ratings required before the big financial institutions would back them. Mike knew that non-investment-grade (a k a “junk”) companies create virtually all new jobs, and he believed that helping these companies grow strengthened the American economy and created good jobs for American workers.
It was by studying credit history at Berkeley in the 1960s that Mike developed his first great insight. He found that while there could be significant risk in any one high-yield bond, a carefully constructed portfolio of these assets produced a consistently better return over the long run than supposedly “safe” investment-grade debt. This was proved during the two decades of the 1970s and ’80s when returns on high-yield bonds topped all other asset classes. Mike saw a great opportunity when he realized that the perception of default risk far exceeded the reality. In fact, these bonds had a surprisingly low-risk profile when adjusted for the potential returns.
After twenty years of superior gains, the high-yield bond market finally fell in 1990. Actually, it didn’t fall–it was pushed by unwise government regulation that forced institutions to sell their bonds. The dip only lasted a year, however, with the market roaring back 46 percent in 1991.
Mike’s competitors–Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Credit Suisse First Boston, the old oligopolies of the syndication (p. 164) business–labeled them “junk bonds” to disparage Mike’s brainchild. He was not a member of their white-shoe club and they were not going to take his act lying down.
Source:
Wyly, Sam. 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire. New York: Newmarket Press, 2008.
(Note: bracketed words and ellipsis added.)
(p. 94) Western Union’s lawyers carne up with a dusty old New York Stale law, dated 1905, that said no one could buy more than 10 percent of a telegraph company chartered in that state without the approval of Albany lawmakers. Hard to believe, but it was right there in black and white and there was no possibility of getting the New York State legislature to understand why it was vital to build digital highways.
Talk about unintended consequences!
(p. 95) Originally, the law was written to stop Western Union from monopolizing the telegram business, but the law backfired and was used by the monopolist for its own protection.
Source:
Wyly, Sam. 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire. New York: Newmarket Press, 2008.
Source of graphic: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.
(p. B1) “Most companies say they’re innovative in the hope they can somehow con investors into thinking there is growth when there isn’t,” says Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of the 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”
. . .
Scott Berkun, the author of the 2007 book “The Myths of Innovation,” which warns about the dilution of the word, says that what most people call an innovation is usually just a “very good product.”
He prefers to reserve the word for civilization-changing inventions like electricity, the printing press and the telephone–and, more recently, perhaps the iPhone.
. . .
Mr. Berkun tracks innovation’s popularity as a buzzword back to the 1990s, amid the dot-com bubble and the release of James M. Utterback’s “Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation” and Mr. Christensen’s “Dilemma.”
. . .
(p. B8) Mr. Christensen classifies innovations into three types: efficiency innovations, which produce the same product more cheaply, such as automating credit checks; sustaining innovations, which turn good products into better ones, such as the hybrid car; and disruptive innovations, which transform expensive, complex products into affordable, simple ones, such as the shift from mainframe to personal computers.
A company’s biggest potential for growth lies in disruptive innovation, he says, noting that the other types could just as well be called ordinary progress and normally don’t create more jobs or business.
But the disruptive innovations can take five to eight years to bear fruit, he says, so companies lose patience.
It is far easier, he adds, for companies to just say they’re innovating. “Everybody’s innovating, because any change is innovation.”
For the full story, see:
LESLIE KWOH. “You Call That Innovation? Companies Love to Say They Innovate, but the Term Has Begun to Lose Meaning.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 23, 2012): B1 & B8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(p. 42) It was February 1958. I got myself a room, not far from the office, in a little house built in the 1920s owned by a seventy-five-year-old woman named Mrs. Thompson. I lived in her “in-law’s room,” which meant I had my own front door, but I had to share the bathroom with her and, because I did not have a kitchen, I had to eat out. My rent was $10 a week.
I had my car, which meant I could get around, and the training school was air-conditioned, which meant my second summer in Dallas was a lot more pleasant than my first.
Thank you, Willis Haviland Carrier, for inventing air-conditioning. I owe you one. And I’m not the only one. At the height of the dot-com stock market bubble of 1999, Barton Biggs–the wise, graying investments guru at Morgan Stanley–posed this question to seventy-one people: which invention is more important, the Internet or air-conditioning? Barton was on the losing side of the vote, 70-2.
Obviously, he’d found seventy people who’d never spent an August in Texas.
Source:
Wyly, Sam. 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire. New York: Newmarket Press, 2008.