Business management

11. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal (17 Aug 2007)

by kurto

Narrates the rise of Dow Jones to the 1980s, emphasizing the

    Wall Street Journal’s

pathbreaking transition from trade publication to the country’s first national newspaper. CW Barron and Barney Kilgore are the protagonists, the former for his world-renowned stature as a journalist and confidence of the elite, and the latter for introducing news analysis and quirky ‘A hed’ stories. Perforce, the author treats major economic and political events, and thereby delves into the growth and influence of the editorial page. Wendt’s work displays a now-quaint preoccupation with printing and delivery operations.

13. Millard, Cloud Computing Law (7 July 2023)

by kurto

Limns core and emerging concepts of legislation, jurisprudence, and policy regarding software, platform, and infrastructure as IT services, focusing on the European Union and United Kingdom circa 2020. To this reader, the most pertinent topics may be divided as operations, commercial matters, and taxation.

Operations:
• Cloud services, for purposes of governance, are fundamentally different from outsourcing in terms of design and control and geographic nexus
• PaaS is indicated by large degree of client control over specification or complexity of usage
• Security
o Security by nature entails risk management, as rules can never encompass all use cases; risk management is well suited to principle-based regulation (common in UK and Australia). For this reason, insurance is commonly part of risk management
o Misconfigurations are the largest internal threat to security
o To establish one’s services as a ‘trusted execution environment’, one should encourage the client to consider whether the vendor’s security setup is better or worse than the client’s own systems
• Data transfers
o across international borders may be governed by any of several mechanism (e.g., Privacy Shield, Standard Contractual Clauses, approved bespoke certifications)
o The acceptability of the SCCs to the EU is premised on the former’s compliance with the recipient country’s standards (e.g., the Australian Privacy Principles)
• Privacy: data sharing (e.g., among companies) is a controller-to-controller sequence; conversely, controller-to-processor is provision and instructed use. See chart p. 311 (which further demonstrates that Jacobi’s control of platform security, etc., make it at least a joint controller)

Commercial matters:
• The most negotiated clauses are liability (12 months’ fees being standard) including carveouts; service levels including availability; security and privacy; lock-in, portability, and exit; and intellectual property rights
• An estimated 1/3d of negotiations fail over the transparency of using subcontractors
• Data residency and indemnification for 3d-party claims are frequently client imperatives, increasingly joined by transition plans. APIs have come to be seen as acceptable means of interoperability or portage
• Pre-commercial procurements (PCP) are a means for public buyers (government) purchasing and then sharing emerging technologies without violating state-aid strictures of GATT

Taxation
• The most fluid question is re-establishing consensus of jurisdiction: where is value created? The residence of a provider’s 3d-party infrastructure does not create nexus (because the provider does not control hardware); however the location of the end user (the client) might. There is dispute among OECD and UN principles,
• Cloud fees (including PaaS) are generally taxed business profits not royalties
• A service that is linked (i.e., not separable) is likely to be singularly taxed, rather than as separate products or business lines

***16. Cannadine, Mellon (15 Dec 2007)

by kurto

An exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) biography of an oligarchic, reticent banker who became an admired Treasury secretary, until the Great Depression turned the tables on the socioeconomic assumptions he had lived by. Mellon, whose father was an austere, Scotch-Irish magnate of western Pennsylvania, grew very wealthy by financing vertical businesses in heavy industries as well as banking. Mellon fils expanded into chemicals, electricity, and oil, extending the Judge’s model. He was, however, emotionally stunted and his marriage a disaster. In Washington, he should have left after the end of the Coolidge administration (his second); not only did the Hoover era end badly, but Roosevelt deliberately pressed trumped-up (and sensationally dismissed) tax fraud charges. Notwithstanding, Mellon saw fit to donate the whole of his grand art collection as well as build the National Gallery to his country (and adopted city). Fine scholarship.

11. Pfeffer, Leadership BS (20 June 2023)

by kurto

The leadership-training industry is broadly disconnected from contemporary practice, which is Machiavellian in pursuit and use of power. Leaders should be true to the external situation, not ‘authentic’, which ideal epitomizes the cant of value-laden prescriptions often inapplicable to demanding roles. Trust is bound to constrain options; those who violate trust aren’t held accountable because power trumps penalties. In difficult times, administrators protect those closest to them, their sources of power. One should presume others (i.e., rivals) are acting of self interest.
More constructively, Pfeffer sees that ‘walking around’ management closes gaps among people, helps leaders understand the front lines. Promoting from within magnifies culture. Get over ambivalence – act on incomplete data with conviction.
Pfeffer’s ‘realism’ never takes him beyond the normative. Thus the ability to misrepresent is possibly the most critical skill of leadership! However much debunking is needed, pyscho-sociological study is no substitute for elaborating competencies (i.e., the Troop Leadership Development 11) in the context of events, objectives, problems. An apology for power yet falls short of principled management.

2. Porter, Competitive Strategy (13 Feb 2010)

by kurto

Details techniques for analyzing industries and their component firms, for purposes of making capital-intensive decisions and achieving lasting advantage over industry rivals. Porter postulates five forces driving equilibrated competition: existing rivalries, potential entrants, substitutes, suppliers, and buyers. There are typical positions to take: cost leadership, differentiation, and industry (segment) specialization. Within this framework, the author then identifies ways to analyze market signalizing and competitor movements, dealings with buyers and suppliers, and industry subgroups and evolution. Written in 1980, the book focuses on old-line businesses (e.g., materials or manufacturing), often delving into industry classification by structure or lifecycle (fragmented, emerging, global, etc). The final chapters are more action-oriented, dealing with questions of vertical integration, capacity expansion, and entry into new business. The paradigmatic textbook has recently been challenged on the grounds that no strategy can deliver sustainable advantage.

6. Cagan, Inspired (14 May 2010)

by kurto

Product development is the process of discovering valuable, useable, and feasible services. In a how-to format, the author touches on roles/responsibilities, emphasizing the purpose is to determine what (now how) to build; the importance of focusing on the problem that is being solved for the user; the value of high fidelity prototypes (essentially, frequent iterations of the product requirements document); and the implicitly changing nature of product development in consumer businesses. Much of the material is already online, and represents a distillation of consulting engagements.

7. Kotler, On Marketing (4 Jun 2010)

by kurto

Outlines leading concepts in strategic, tactical, and operational (administrative) marketing. The author does not quite agree Drucker’s maxim that good marketing makes selling superfluous, but thinks instead that its task is to discover and satisfy unmet needs. The most useful (practical) chapters are 9 and 10: planning and evaluating performance. Also a useful review of the famous 4 Ps: product, prices, promotion, placement. Most of this material is probably now online.

10. Lewis, Big Short (24 Sep 2010)

by kurto

A character-driven narrative of oddball investors who foresaw the subprime housing collapse and devastating consequences for investment banks. To benefit from the seizure, one had to divine how mortgage-backed credit default swaps and collateralized default obligations generated revenue, able to access the rarefied market, and be willing to wait out the gravity-defying origination of new home loans. The book is intended to (again) portray the ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ ethos of Wall Street, and generally succeeds too in favorably depicting the protagonists. But the coda, where Lewis looks to tie investment banking’s demise to the flotation of Salomon Brothers, seems the greatest overreach. Conflict preceded public listing, however questionable that mechanism. Ironically enough, the contemporary response to the crisis – more regulation – may get at the problem suggested by Lewis, which is that people are at the heart of the problem and rules can always be surmounted.

12. Hagel et al, Pull (4 Nov 2010)

by kurto

Articulates a theory for individual and enterprise participation in 21st-century knowledge development, to elaborate practices for personal excellence and sustainable competitive advantage. The predominant 20th-century paradigm, in which firms and governments controlled ‘stocks’ of information based on demand forecasting, resource allocation, and mastery of the experience curve, suffered from diminishing returns. The proposed model – here presented as an ugly rococo diagram – advocates collaborating with emerging experts ‘at the edge’; by attracting these experts to one’s endeavors; and by importing the fruits into the enterprise. The individual and the firm must clearly identify its aims (‘trajectory’) in order to benefit from participation. Building on the trio’s 2009 Shift Index of information technology, it is still a bit utopian and the theory lacks a governor / metric for evaluating effectiveness and also opportunity costs – especially dead ends. Even if influential, it is not clear enough to be the last word.