Excellent Overview of the Philosophy of Social Sciences

Daniel Little’s article for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides an excellent overview of the key issues in the philosophy of social sciences. You can read it here.

Logical Incrementalism in Product Development

This little exerpt from the NY Times explains well the concept of logical incrementalism in management.

Mr. Schmidt didn’t stop there. He acknowledged that “Google might not get it right the first time,” and said that Apple probably wouldn’t either, briefly alluding to some better features coming with the second generation of the iPad. But he said both companies would have “the next two to three years to figure it out.”

The Power of Infinity

Steven Strogatz explains beautifully how the concept of inifinity first tripped up philosophers but then provided them with a powerful tool to calculate things that could not be calculated without taking things to inifity. I wish I had had as good a math teacher as Strogatz. The lesson here is also that Strogatz does not provide a solution to Zeno’s paradox but that he shows that even without fully removing the puzzles around infinity one can use the concept to get more knowledge in other areas.
Read his column Take It to the Limit.

Apple with only 7% of Sales account today for 35% of Industry Profits

According to a Business Insider article, the banking giant has aggregated numbers from the top ten PC makers in the world and determined that, while Apple only commands 7 percent of overall revenues in the PC market, its products account for 35 percent of the operating profits. See Full Article.

Blackboard Course Website

For all information and resources regarding the course, UNSW students should log into the Blackboard Course Website.

Couse Outline for Intellectual Foundation of Social Sciences now available

Here you can find the course outline. STRE 8005 More information for enrolled students is available at the UNSW course webpage.

Richard Branson’s Fundamental Objective

The Financial Times posed twenty questions to Richard Branson. Here are the two important ones that touch upon the idea of a fundamental objective.

How important is money?
My priority is learning and trying to improve the world – not being rich.

How do you want to be remembered?
That I have made a difference.

Read full interview.

Duplicity

Rarely is a Hollywood movie such a great teaching instrument. Duplicity gives a wonderful picture of how far large companies go in figuring out what their competition is up to. What’s more, the principles of game theory are very well illustrated by Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, who make a wonderful pair. I recommend that every Strategic Management student watch this film.

Lessons for Entrepreneurs

Ryan Trainor

1. Articulate and sell your vision and build strong teams with skilled people who offset your weaknesses and excel at implementation.
2. Foster good relationships with your bank, clients, staff and other stakeholders.
3. Create processes and systems to get the best out of employees. People want to be part of a company where they can have input and be recognised for it.


Mario Salva

1. Know your market. Research who your target customers are, what they can afford and how you can deliver your product at a more competitive price than your opposition.

From BRW, Feb 12-18, 2008

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Rolls-Royce: Transforming its Jet-Engine Business Model

The Economist reports how Rolls-Royse figured out a different way to make money in the jet engine business:
The big pay-off from getting engines under more wings comes from selling spares and servicing them. This is because selling aircraft engines is like selling razors. The razor and engine make little if any profit; that comes later, from blades or spare parts and servicing (see chart 3). Gross margins from rebuilding engines are thought to be about 35%; analysts at Credit Suisse, an investment bank, estimate that some makers of jet engines get about seven times as much revenue from servicing and selling spare parts as they do from selling engines. Many analysts suspect that Rolls-Royce (and others) sell engines at a loss. Judging this is hard, though, because of the way Rolls-Royce accounts for long-term contracts, often by booking a profit on the sale for income that will be received only over many years. Rolls-Royce says that, on average, engines are sold at a profit. The trouble with selling razors at a loss is that someone else may make the blades to fit them. And the juicy margins in engine maintenance have indeed attracted a swarm of independent servicing firms (and engine-makers after each other’s business).

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What the Financial Crisis Taught us about Human Decision Making

David Brooks writes in the NY Times:
Once there was just Newtonian physics and the world seemed neat and mechanical. Then quantum physics came along and revealed that deep down things are much weirder than they seem. Something similar is now happening with public policy.Once, classical economics dominated policy thinking. The classical models presumed a certain sort of orderly human makeup. Inside each person, reason rides the passions the way a rider sits atop a horse. Sometimes people do stupid things, but generally the rider makes deliberative decisions, and the market rewards rational behavior. Markets tend toward efficiency. People respond in pretty straightforward ways to incentives. The invisible hand forms a spontaneous, dynamic order. Economic behavior can be accurately predicted through elegant models. This view explains a lot, but not the current financial crisis — how so many people could be so stupid, incompetent and self-destructive all at once. The crisis has delivered a blow to classical economics and taken a body of psychological work that was at the edge of public policy thought and brought it front and center. In this new body of thought, you get a very different picture of human nature. Reason is not like a rider atop a horse. Instead, each person’s mind contains a panoply of instincts, strategies, intuitions, emotions, memories and habits, which vie for supremacy. An irregular, idiosyncratic and largely unconscious process determines which of these internal players gets to control behavior at any instant.

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BP does not try to run its rural service stations in Australia

Excerpt from BRW: For an expanding independent petroleum retailer, customer relationships are everything.
Biq organisations are usually considered to be more efficient than smaller enes - but rarely more customer-friendly. Case in point, big banks. sharehelders love their taut back offices and fat profits; customers hate their skinny front lines and rate them well below small credit unions and building societies in satisfaction surveys.
It is a business theory that influences how oil companies distribute fuels in Australia. In cities, drivers have choices and can seek out the service station offering the cheapest petrol. In the country, the distance between service stations is qreater and what people expect from them - mechanical repairs and farm deliveries as well as fuel - is more varied.
Accordingly, the local arms of some of the world’s biqgest companies run city statiens themselves but use independent operators elsewhere. “I don’t think we have the ability to understand and build the sort of relationship with customers that is really important in rural Australia,” ‘BP Australia’s vice-president of wholesale reseller and retail, ‘Dean Salter, says.  However, ene of Salter’s independent operators, led by a predecessor in his position, is trying to prove that big orqanisations can be intimate as well as efficient.

Read Full Story.

Scorecard: Wesfarmers after Coles Acquisition

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Wesfarmers showed how a corporation could be successful with a similar strategy as GE in America: buying and selling unrelated businesses. But then private capital entered the acquisition market,  bidding up the price for Australian corporations that were up for sales. Wesfarmers found it more difficult to pursue it disciplined strategy of finding acquisitions that you be managed more effectively and unlock shareholder value. Almost two years ago Wesfarmers but the underperforming Coles supermarket chain. Plenty of commentators were worried that Wefarmers, breaking its traditions, overpaid for Coles and would never be able to improve the performance of Coles as the Perth-based conglomerate had done with earlier acquisitions such as Bunnings.

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Alcaltel & Lucent: The French American Merger does not realize the promised benefits

WHEN Alcatel, a French maker of telecoms equipment, announced its plan in 2006 to merge with Lucent, an American rival, reactions were mixed. There was general agreement that bigger was better and that the combined firm would benefit from greater geographical reach. But there was also scepticism that its French and American managers would be able to get along. With good reason, it seems: on July 29th Alcatel-Lucent announced its sixth consecutive quarterly loss and the resignations of Serge Tchuruk, its French chairman, and Patricia Russo, its American chief executive. Their firm’s troubles stem in large part from its internal clash of cultures. Read more on Economist.com

Adrian Finlayson on the Difference of Being a Consultant and Being a CEO

“It’s much harder doing than telling. Things take a lot longer than you initially think, and along the way you have to manage a broad stakeholder base, including your team, investors and the board. A chief executive is a management consultant who has to implement his own recommendations.”

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