In a labor–management situation, for instance, a company may want to partner with its union to improve quality, productivity, or processes—yet it wants to be adversarial when it comes to negotiating benefits and wages. These two contrary positions may be difficult to understand. A true partnership needs to focus on mutual interests, but it doesn’t [...]
For investors tired of watching mutual fund managers make lousy decisions and underperform the market, mutual fund families invented the index fund. The manager of the index fund buys and holds the stocks in the market index. Index funds return exactly what the market returns. Index funds have become extremely popular in the last decade. [...]
Each investment has its own emotional traps. Ancient tribes stored seeds through winter. These tribal savings were loaded with community and individual feelings. Today, few realize the embedded emotion in passbook savings accounts until banks begin to fail or inflation destroys the purchasing power of precious dollars. Investing produces a wide range of emotion. The [...]
Competitor reaction to an innovative new development is always uncertain, but it is to be expected. Competitors have the power to obviate the assumptions in a business plan. Ignoring this power can lead to overvaluation of the option. We have seen this factor in the Amazon case. Prior to the innovation, some competitor reaction is [...]
If innovation has been the source of our extraordinary prosperity, it is important to inquire about its future. The good news is that the rate of discontinuous innovation in Western society appears to be accelerating. This rate is likely to hold if the two bedrock premises of innovation also hold over time: (1) the willingness [...]
Service relationships—with vendors, consultants, and law and accounting firms—have been mentioned as a hidden part of a company’s intellectual capital. Partnerships and alliances can be even more important. To the extent that a company can effectively muster the energies and the brainpower of a powerful strategic partner, it can speed its product development, reduce the [...]