Competitiveness and Innovation
When I first moved to New York in the mid-70s, I was working downtown for New York State’s Emergency Financial Control Board. Yes, Virginia, we’ve had financial crises before, and that was a pretty bad one. My job was conducting ‘financial intelligence’ about the city subway system. A guy I worked with shared my interest […]
When Alice tumbled down the rabbit hole, she entered a world (“Wonderland”) reminiscent of her own—but in which everything seemed upside-down, and nothing worked as expected. After spending over a year researching the economics of the health care industry, I’ve concluded that health care is its own economic Wonderland. If you were given the hypothetical […]
I recently found a whitepaper the name of which startled me: “Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan”. Startling in the frankness of its analysis, startling in the clarity of the remedies it calls for, and most of all startling in its applicability to my own field of business research and analytics. […]
When I first got to Yale, I was struck that our motto LUX ET VERITAS was an extension of Harvard’s Veritas. I used to kid people that Yale was obviously twice as good—you got all the same Veritas, with the 100% added bonus of the Lux. Whatever that was. Product differentiation Later I came to […]
Last time we looked at where our health care funds in the US are spent. At more than one-sixth of our GDP, it’s undeniably a huge factor in our financial lives. Who pays for all this? Ultimately, of course, we all do—but the mechanisms by which this happens may surprise you. Since non-personal spending ($407 […]
Everyone knows health care is expensive, and is a significant part of our individual and collective budgets. How expensive, exactly? And how is that money spent? In 2010 we in the US spent $2.6 trillion on health care. That’s 2.6 with twelve zeros behind it, or 2.6 million millions if (like me) you get lost […]
In the interest of full disclosure, this post is not about algebra or calculus, nor is it about financial instruments. It’s about various kinds of business research ‘raw materials’ and how to discern their quality if you are a producer or user of such research. Whether you are navigating the waters off Tuscany in a […]
I just listened to a fascinating webinar in which five authors recounted their experiences, both personal and professional, with information overload. One of the speakers, Jonathan Spira, reports that he has measured this phenomenon, and that it costs the US economy over $1 trillion per year! Shifting the blame But in naming the phenomenon ‘information […]
If you have any experience with investing, you know about rebalancing your portfolio. Every so often—at the end of every year, say—you need to reassess your investments. Some may have grown, such that you’re too heavily invested in a particular stock or sector in the economy. In other areas, you may find that you have […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
Stop me if you’d heard this one. “[COMPANY] is in the final stages of preparing a bankruptcy filing, clinching a long fall for a company with humble beginnings that helped change the way Americans buy [PRODUCT], but failed to keep pace with the [CHANGE] rocking every corner of the [INDUSTRY] landscape.” Today (February 12, Wall […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
“I love you, you’re perfect…now CHANGE.” That’s what the market in effect continually tells high-achieving companies—because the world always changes around them. Companies tend to do best today what they did best yesterday…not what they’ll need to do best tomorrow. In working with companies of various sizes, in various industries, I’ve noticed that the most […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
I recently had a conversation with the publisher of a start-up niche business-to-business magazine. We had pointed out several things that we felt were opportunities for him. For one, our view—confirmed with some informal research—that the “look and feel” of his product was not what it could be, and that with a small investment, he […]