I came across Planning for the sequel:How Pixar’s leaders want to make their creative powerhouse outlast them, an article in the June 19, 2010 Economist a few weeks back when I Was catching up on my back issues.  It was perfect timing since I’m taking a class on transformation right now.  I thought it was an excellent article about a system being in place to last a long time.

We all know that Pixar is still a pretty killer company, even though Disney owns it now.  But the people in Pixar are getting older so the worry is always what’s going to happen to the creativity.  However, the company has planned for this well.  The article points out two specifics.  1) people are before projects so creative people are brought in and kept there.  This is opposed to the usual Hollywood method of building a team around a project.  And second, there is a system of everyone working together from the earliest, unfinished pieces of work.  This is a system that was inspired by Toyota and their method of “lean production.” Feedback is constantly being taken to avoid flaws.  Further efforts that are done is the post mortems once films are complete where each film has 5 things done right and 5 done wrong.

The article acknowledges the challenges of staying creative and the effects that succuess has.  But it shows great admiration for the way Pixar does things – and especially looking to a car company for inspiration

I was riding w/ my Bro-in-law Zargham today around Rolling Meadows, IL and we went inside of a gas station briefly to grab some food/snacks.  Zargham’s in the gas station business and has been very successful in it so far in the still relatively few years he’s been in there.  He pointed out to me that this gas station was still for sale but he had no interest in buying it because it wasn’t a good station and overpriced.  He said a huge factor was the property taxes – here in Rockford, he pays half of that.

After our purchases, as we were leaving, he pointed out that they were in trouble.  I asked how he knew and he said that was the owner who just rang us up (he was pretty nice to us which alone would lead me to think this.  I asked how he knew – did he know him personally? And he said he didn’t but he could tell because the back office door was open which meant he was in there doing paperwork and serving customers and if that was occurring on a Saturday, then he was cutting back on payroll.  I thought that was pretty clever and made a note in my head not to be aware of what signs I give off as trouble.

The crisis of middle-class America

By Edward Luce

Published: July 30 2010 17:04 | Last updated: July 30 2010 17:04

This was an excellent article in this past Friday’s Financial Times.  Below is a list of my takeaways:

• $70,000 is a third more than the median household’s annual income
• “The slow economic strangulation” …. “middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973..”
• “Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the ­multiple is above 300″
• “The trend has only been getting stronger. Most economists see the Great Stagnation as a structural problem – meaning it is immune to the business cycle. In the last expansion, which started in January 2002 and ended in December 2007, the median US household income dropped by $2,000 – the first ever instance where most Americans were worse off at the end of a cycle than at the start.”
• What is worse is that there is “declining income mobility” meaning you “have a smaller chance of swapping your lower income bracket for a higher one than in almost any other developed economy”
• Also, there is a “steeply rising inequality.”  So in addition to “grinding income stagnation,” there is also “diminishing likelihood of escaping it”
• “During the three postwar decades, which many now look back on as the golden era of the ­American middle class” … “Incomes grew in real terms by almost 2 per cent a year – almost doubling each generation. And though mass higher education drove it, “you did not need to have graduated from high school to make ends meet.”
• “most economists” … “diverge on the causes. Many on the left blame the Great ­Stagnation on globalisation”
• “Another group singles out the explosion of new technology”
• “Then there are those, such as Paul Krugman, The New York Times columnist and Nobel prize winner, who blame it on politics, notably the conservative backlash which began when Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980, and which sped up the decline of unions and reversed the most progressive features of the US tax system.Fewer than a tenth of American private sector workers now belong to a union. People in Europe and Canada are subjected to the same forces of globalisation and technology. But they belong to unions in larger numbers and their healthcare is publicly funded. More than half of household bankruptcies in the US are caused by a serious ­illness or accident.”
• Much as they disagree on what has caused the Great Stagnation, economists also differ on the remedies. Most agree that better education improves people’s earnings potential, even if it does not solve the underlying problem. Others point out that not everybody can be a bond trader, a software entrepreneur or a Harvard professor.Many of the jobs of the future will be in “inter-personal” roles that cannot be easily replaced by computers or ­foreigners – janitors, beauty technicians, home carers and landscape gardeners, for whom college is often superfluous. Furthermore, a large chunk of Americans who have been hit by ­stagnation over the past decade are college graduates. Even they are not immune. But more education, at the very least, will improve one’s chances. Paying for it is another matter.
• “the cost of education is soaring”
• “For years, the problem was cushioned and partially hidden by the availability of cheap debt.”…. “That cushion is now gone. Easy money has turned into heavy debt”
• “To be pessimistic about the future is so new for Americans and so strikingly un-American,”

I wrote this letter to the Washington Post (letters@washpost.com) after reading their Endorsement for Mayor Fenty in the upcoming election:

In your recent endorsement for Mayor Fenty ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/30/AR2010073003145.html ), something I did not see mentioned was what Mayor Fenty did with Information Technology.  I am a part-time MBA student of the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business and in a previous semester, I did a paper on the DC Government’s Office of the CTO (OCTO as they call themselves) for a class project.  The current Federal CIO Vivek Kundra was the DC CTO prior to his role and it was what Mr. Kundra did with IT in DC that led him to his promotion.  When Mr. Kundra left the DC Government, Chris Willey became the interim CTO.  And since he was a Smith Alum, It was through him that I had the chance to do my paper on this subject and find out what exactly Mayor Fenty and Vivek Kundra did together.

The objective was to foster better relations with the public by promoting transparency and access of data to the public.  The start of this initiative was in 2007 after Mayor Fenty became mayor.  In his experience as a councilman, he felt there was not enough accessible data for the government and public.  He wanted uncompromised, raw data for the public.  A short time later he brought Vivek Kundra aboard and they got started on Mr. Fenty’s initiatives.  First CAPSTAT (modeled after Baltimore’s Citistat) was formed.  These were one-hour sessions that were videocast online that occurred at least once a week where Mayor Fenty and executives were brought in to discuss performance and ways to improve.

Next they took the data from the city’s data warehouse (CityDW) (an IT initiative started during Mayor Williams’s term) and made it public using feeds.  This was a worry because of the data not being clean and easily leading to misinterpretation.  However, Mr. Fenty insisted on this still being carried out.

In late 2008, after realizing that ways to use the data feeds were limited, the Apps for Democracy contest was held to come up with a solution.  This $50,000 contest is estimated to have saved $2.6 million in internal development costs.  Another contest was held in 2009.  Now there is a DC App store.

The Harvard University’s Ash Institute recognized as the winner of the 2009 Innovations in American Government Award in Urban Policy.  The award is very appropriate because it was started in 1985 as a result of concern about trust of government.

Mr. Willey informed me of next steps to create a web-based marketplace where the buyer would be the DC Government and the seller would be the public.  Through this, the DC Government can put needs in a public sphere (for example, Mr. Willey specifically mentions a data catalogue need he has) and consider solutions from more sources.  Some solutions could even be free, allowing the government to take advantage of developers who have a degree of citizenship and e-volunteerism.

One last thing worth mentioning is that Mayor Fenty also pushed OCTO’s role by making them manage the School System’s IT.  This helped him marry his two initiatives: Transparency and education reform.

Shahryar Rizvi
IT Specialist, U.S. Census Bureau
University of Maryland, Smith School of Business c/o 2010

Shear Business: Can the divorced founders of Hair Cuttery run their salon chain together?

Sunday, July 11, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/02/AR2010070204172.html

Great article in the July 11th Washington Post magazine on Dennis and Ann Ratner, who started Hair Cuttery in the 70s as husband and wife.  Then a little while after divorce happened but they still continued working together on the business.  And, at least by the impression of this article, it seems things are going well.

Takeaways from this article are not just about working with family but business in general.  There’s a discussion on how they started (looking to McDonald’s as a model) and agreement to the model of convenience, price, and consistency.  Also on how they saw opportunities from their work in the industry (ex. Ann was convinced future was for blow drying).  And Division of duties is also covered.

But the best lessons are the ones regarding business and family including: how the headquarters is referred to (family office), resisting temptation to go public, going with a veteran marketer instead who introduced new consumer analytics, and having a mediator at the “Family business meetings” held 4 or 5 times a year.

The Summer 2010 FT Wealth magazine had a nice article on Ben Cohen of  Ben & Jerry’s.  The article is titled “A Force for Good” in the magazine but I don’t see it in the article online.  It’s in the “My Liquidity Moment” section in the back.

The article starts becoming out their moral and ethical decisions six years after they started when their sales were $4 million.  They started having doubs because they “felt big business exploited the community, its workers and the environment.”  In response, they decided to change the way business was done by “making their products and factories greener,” closing the gap between the highest and lowest-paid employees, and directing profits to the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation.  Also, they sourced ingredients from non-profit organizations.

Unfortunately for them, the company was sold to Unilever against Ben & Jerry’s wishes (since the company was public).  They both had tried to stop the sale and take the company private but Unilever outbid them.

Ben & Jerry are now employees but still try to do their part for the company.  Ben Cohen at least works with other causes (Jerry isn’t mentioned regarding this in the article).

The article also gives a little nice background on how they started – $12,000 start-up capital between cash and loans, sought out a warm, rural college town for their shope which led them to Vermont.

Today’s Financial times has an article on the new top-level domain names coming (ex. .eco, .canon, .sport, etc).  I was excited when I first heard about this but it seems it’s going to have a $185,000 application fee? I didn’t know that.

Here are the details on the article:
A battle for online naming rights
By Maija Palmer, technology correspondent
Published: June 17 2010 03:00 | Last updated: June 17 2010 03:00
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b5fb21a4-79a6-11df-85be-00144feabdc0.html

Now that I am dealing with fire damage at my house, my obsession with keeping track of purchases is finally proving to be helpful. I wish I didn’t have to use the word obsession but that probably is the word everyone would use when they see my office at times when receipts are all over the floor in an “organized chaos.”

The problem isn’t in keeping receipts for important items. I’m sure we can all agree that’s important. The problem is that I have a pretty intense method of dealing with receipts. I like to do two things 1) I like to mark off my receipts off of statements to make sure the proper amount was charged and 2) I like to make notes on both the receipt and statement for any important transaction.

One of the great things about online banking is that I can go online in the middle of my statement period and see if something was charged properly. If it was (and most of the time it is), then great. But I can’t leave a note behind and throw the receipt away because when I get the statement in the mail, I’ll be like, “hey, what’s this charge? I don’t have a record for it.”

And, for the receipts that matter, I can’t leave any notes online like “see return on 10/21/2008″. I have to wait until the statement comes in the mail, and then make the notes I need. Sure I could print out whatever activity then and there and note that up, but that would lead to other confusion and excess papers being generated (I won’t go into the confusion I just mentioned, but I’m sure you can think of some ideas).

Ideally, I would love to fill in information for different entries on the actual website while browsing through my transactions. If there was a notes field, I could put whatever info I need there, and then when the statement came in the mail, my notes would be on it. With this, I could check off the receipt and then throw it away or “archive” it. My receipts would no longer remain in “pending” status, which is where they usually always seem to remain because when statements come, I get lazy, get backed up, etc and next thing you know, I have 4 months of statements to go through, 4 months of receipts, and not enough floor space.

I would like to discuss “receipt archiving” on a later day, maybe within ifweran.com, or maybe somehwere else if I feel the topic falls outside the scope of the “If We Ran…” site. But for now, let’s just leave this topic at editable online accounting.

6/24/2009 Update: I e-mailed chevy chase banking today (chevychasebank.com): Here’s what I said: I like printing out a lot of my transactions and find it annoying to have to change the view to the date/date, go to print friendly, and then print. Perhaps make an easier method? I also like to make notes and there is no field for that. I wish I could make notes online and those notes could carry over to the statement when its printed and sent to me. Until I have that ability, I don’t like verifying my transactions until I get my statements so that I can write notes on the statement for special transactions. Let’s see what they say (“Your message has been sent. Reference number: 1602″)]