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Aug30
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In a bid to keep its produce safe in the minds of its customers, Dole Food Company has ramped up its testing and tracking of produce to prevent any more outbreaks of E.coli like the one that killed three people last year and caused 200 others to get sick. Talking to Reuters, Eric Schwartz, Dole's president for worldwide vegetables, said that every acre of spinach, and other vegetables to be marketed under the Dole label will be tested. If any problem is discovered the plants from that area won't be included in Dole's processing chain. Another move Dole is taking to protect the produce is putting an electronic system in place that can trace within 30 feet where any specific batch of spinach was grown. With this weeks' news that more contaminated spinach testing positive for salmonella was found in California's Metz Fresh LLC products, it's imperative the food companies have strict measures in place to protect the food supply.
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Aug30
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Majority of Scientists, Climatologists Now Reject Global Warming HypeIt will probably take months to filter through the various media outlets and reach the general population, but the global warming fears and the alleged science behind it is starting to fall...
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The U.S. economy grew at its quickest pace in over a year with business investment and international trad leading the way.For the April - June quarter the gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 4 percent, higher than...
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Aug29
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"What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose."In...
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Leona Helmsley left her dog "Trouble" a small fortune in her will, as she bequeathed the pup $12 million trust fund in her will. After the dogs' luxury life, it will be buried next to Helmsley in the mausoleum. In...
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Aug28
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The seven point drop in consumer confidence to 105.0, is the worse drop since Katrina hit New Orleans.With the United States consumers accounting for about two-thirds of spending in the economy, it looks like economic growth may be stale for...
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The Koch Foods Inc. chicken plant in Fairfield, Ohio was the target of a massive raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Tuesday as hundreds of agents took part in the operation."As of 2:45 p.m. (EDT) more than 180...
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For low-income famililies in the United States, 2006 proved to be a much better year as the poverty rate dropped from 12.6 percent to 12.3 percent. The median household income also grew during that same period, reaching $48,200.The US Census...
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Aug27
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When it comes to newly hired people in a company and delegating, I think it's important to handle things differently with them than those that have been around for some time.Even though we may be confident in our hiring process,...
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Aug26
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"Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information."One of the problems I think business leaders have with expectations is a emotional...
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The eventual appearance of Tesco's "Fresh & Easy" neighborhood grocery stores in the U.S. market has Wal-Mart (WMT) concerned for the first time in a long time.With the expansion of their Supercenter stores in certan markets being opposed, it does...
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Aug25
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Focus on what you can control! There is nothing like a good situation that you have no control over to get your focus off what matters.What can you do about something you have no control over? Pretty much nothing. So I wonder...
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"One of Berkshire's businesses is FlightSafety, the founder is dedicated to preventing deaths, he's not motivated by the next quarter's numbers."This was Warren Buffett's response to how he identified extraordinary business ability. The thing he was getting at was having...
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With unemployment rates as low as two percent in the eight states bordering the Rocky Mountains, businesses aren't able to find enough workers to fill positions.The overall unemployment rate in the eight states on average was at an all-time low...
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With Wal-Mart being given the go ahead to enter the Indian retail market as a wholesaler, they've begun their search for suppliers with the Indian market itself.Wal-Mart has partnered with Bharti Retail in the venture, and is already in talks...
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Aug24
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"Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one...
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“I was taught to put my best effort into anything I did, and I can honestly say I've always done that.”Mary Kay made that statement shortly before she died, reflecting on how she handled things in her life.When you consider...
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A report from the Commerce Department shows before the tightening of credit, the US economy had been much strong in July. Sales of new homes in July rose by 2.8 percent, that came after a 4 percent decline in June....
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The impact of the subprime mortgage market problems is continuing to make American consumers jittery. News of housing foreclosures, problems with mortgage lenders and heavy debt, among other things, has put the American consumer in a skittish mood.A lot of...
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4 Things we can do to protect our marriages if we run a business together.The disruption in the Christian celebrity world over the last couple days concerning the alleged beating of Juanita Bynum by her estranged husband Thomas Weeks III,...
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Aug23
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Welch's 21 Steps to Management Greatness - 17 "Managers should learn to become team players. Middle managers have to be team members and coaches. Take steps against those managers who won't learn to become team players." That business success is...
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"She challenged and did much to overturn the psychology of decline which had become rooted in Britain since the Second World War, pursuing national recovery with striking energy and determination."The area a lot of leaders don't understand when they attack...
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With a strategy of developing a hyperlocal series of business magazines, BusinessWeek announced it will launch its efforts in Chicago. “You could call us a guinea pig in a way,” said Michael Arndt, a senior correspondent who is now the...
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Dow Jones & Co. (DJ) have doing a lot of shuffling in their management ranks, and the latest move has been to place Almar Latour in the managing editor position of the Wall Street Journal Online. Latour will replace Bill...
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In a move that will hurt the company, AMD (AMD) chief sales and marketing officer, Henri Richard will be leaving the company next month. The company has suffered its third straight quarterly loss, dropping $600 million in the second quarter.Richard...
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Aug22
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Citing data from global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. and adding up the proliferation of layoff announcements recently made, an AP report says over 40,000 workers have lost their jobs at mortgage lending businesses since the beginning of...
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Bank of America Corp. (BAC) has invested $2 billion into Countrywide Financial Corp. (CFC), in a bid to shore up confidence in the beleagured company. Countrywide has been rocked by the abundance of defaults on the subprime mortgages they had...
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"The mission of the organization must be clear enough and big enough to provide common vision. Managements' first job is to think through, set and exemplify those objectives, values and goals."If business leaders and managers take care of the most...
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Thankfully the second hit on land in Mexico from Hurricane Dean wasn't at the level it hit on Tuesday, although it's still a formidable force.Tuesday the Hurricane hit the Yucatan as a Category 5 Hurricane with winds reaching 165 mph,...
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With almost all the aspects of the case taking place in Arkansas, a Michigan state judge dismissed the lawsuit by former Wal-Mart (WMT) marketing executive Julie Roehm. The judge wrote that Arkansas "is the appropriate, convenient forum."Wal-Mart had filed the...
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Early indications are the auto industry could be down 10 percent in August sales, following the plunge of 19 percent in July sales.Those tracking the industry are increasingly attributing the continually falling numbers as being connected to the mortgage problems...
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Aug21
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"Think small and there is room for expansion."This is another one of those counterintuitive thoughts that have to be digested a little to understand their power. Everyone seems to thing in terms of big and huge, fast and furious. Those...
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"Assume any career moves you make won't go smoothly. They won't. But don't look back."One of the most paralyzing habits by business leaders, and anybody for that matter, is the tendency to look back when things don't go smoothly. Many...
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Leona Helmsley lived big and now she evidently has died big, as her final resting place in a mausoleum is worth about $1.4 million. She will be laid to rest at Sleepy Hollow Cemetary, where, you guessed it, the writer of...
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In somewhat of a surprise move, Delta Air Lines (DAL) named board member Richard Anderson as the airlines new CEO, replacing Gerald Grinstein, 75. It's a partial surprise because Grinstein had been known to favor hiring someone from the current...
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Aug20
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Countrywide Financial Corp. has been under scrutiny as the largest mortgage lender in the United States, and is obviously a bellweather of the industry. Today they announced they are cutting 500 jobs in the Wholesale Lending Division and Full Spectrum...
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"...if you don't do it someone else will, so you may as well be the one to get the money." Be careful!Buffett has talked about this type of thinking and how it can get business leaders and managers into a...
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The decision by Wal-Mart (WMT) to disgard its former uniform vests has been a boon to troops serving in the U.S. armed forces or former troops as well.Working together with the VFW, Wal-Mart has taken the former vests of their...
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While there have been a number of concerns over Chinese exports over the months, for the first time clothes are now officially part of the concern as scientists in New Zealand allegedly discovered high levels of formaldehyde in some children's...
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Capital One Financial Corp. (COF) announced it is closing it wholesale mortgage unit, which will end up costing 1,900 jobs.Accorging to the company, effective immediately they'll stop originating mortgages through its GreenPoint Mortgage business.The Greenpoint unit has 31 locations across...
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"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."Jobs has said more than one time something along the line of what he...
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Aug19
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"Ash believed that without a sense of direction, it would be too easy for one to get lost in the business world, as in life."This particular reality I can relate to personally. In the past, one of my problems was...
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Welch's 21 Steps to Management Greatness - 16 Involve EveryoneJack Welch caught the essence of business like very few business leaders before him. Along with Welch though, far before it became the flavor of the day, the great business...
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"Thatcher's political and economic philosophy emphasized free markets and since gaining power she had experimented in selling off nationalized industries starting with the National Freight company, most of the large utilities followed."If nothing else Margaret Thatcher was bold. When you...
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"We must change old habits and acquire new ones. The more successful an organization has been, the more difficult and painful this process is apt to be."We've talked before about the challenges success can bring us. It's truly an amazing...
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"Good enough is never good enough."In talking about "Good enough is never good enough," let's first say that we need to be working on the right things, or great,or even being close to perfection won't matter. Working on the right...
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"Risk is the cost of aggressive objectives."Risk is an interesting phenomenon in that there is a right and wrong way to approach it. Risk for the sake of risk, is just recklessness. Being reckless has no real connection to risk....
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As Warren Buffett mentioned earlier this year, when the bid by Rupert Murdoch for Dow Jones & Co. (DJ) became the headlines of the day for about 3 months, he wouldn't buy into the newspaper industry with Berkshire funds because...
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Aug18
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"Manage good times for bad."This message is an excellent one during this time of upheavel. A mistake many business leaders make when things are going great for a company, is not managing that time so when the bad times come...
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Customers of Countrywide Bank in California came in droves to the branch offices, phone lines and Web site to get their money out of it for fear the bank will declare bankruptcy.The concerns stem from Countrywide Bank parent Countrywide Financial...
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After losing a battle over trademark rights and 10 years of delays, Starbucks (SBUX) is about to open its first Café in Russia. In September the company will open in the Mega Mall on the northern outskirts of MoscowConsumer spending...
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"The danger today is that future generations of Americans will be unwilling to continue paying for today's spending and force political action with potentially negative consequences." This was Buffett's response to a question on what he thought about leveraging the...
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Aug17
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He abandoned his consumer instincts in favor of a strategy that amounted to, I’ll show you. Recipe for disaster.This was one of the times of weakness for Jobs, as the writer above was talking about obsession with developing a computer...
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"Why are you theorizing about a dream company. Why don’t you just start one?” When writing down notes on ideas to write a book, Mary Kay suddenly asked herself the question above. The answer to the problem of course became...
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"Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action."I guess you could say Peter Drucker believed it was important to have times of quiet reflection, and he was right.To me the most important...
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Michael Wolff has been enlisted by Doubleday to write a book on Rupert Murdoch and how he got to where he is today, along with the recent successful bid for the Dow Jones (DJ) company. The book is scheduled to...
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In a move that deals more with the psychological side of the market, the FED lowered its key discount rate by half a percentage point. The market reponded by climbing 233.30 points, to go over the 13,000 mark again.This was...
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"Success" is still trying to live up to its namesake as it keeps coming back after it seems to have died. "Success" was originally launched in 1891 as a personal development magazine.After being shut down for five years, in May...
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Aug16
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"I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left." The importance of Thatcher's comment above, as it relates to...
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"Marketing should reflect and promote the corporate culture to employees and customers."One of the simplest to understand but greatest disciplines needed in a business leader is sticking to the corporate purpose, culture and core values of a company.Yet over and...
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In a letter from the editor on Barrons.com web site, they announced the site now as about 102,000 paying subcribers, over the 97,000 reported by competitor Financial Times. Sister site of Barron's, The Wall Street Journal Online, enjoys almost 1...
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The growing crisis in the US mortgage industry underscores why we must stay with what we know in business, as we talked about last post. One of the biggest mistakes businesses and business leaders make is doing something because everyone...
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“There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don't understand, but that doesn't cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one…Never invest in a business you cannot understand.”Warren Buffett...
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Aug15
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The storm season is upon us with Tropical Storm Dean increasing in strength in the Atlantic Ocean, and heading toward the Caribbean. Tropcial Storm Erin is projected to hit the coast of south Texas on Thursday, although at this time...
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A Harris poll says that a huge 94 percent of Americans are satisfied with their lives. Two years ago the numbers were at 90 percent. It makes you wonder about the other polls that imply life is a disaster. You...
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"He had his eye on marketability of electronic products and persuaded Wozniak to work with him toward building a personal computer."Wozniak is Stephen Wozniak, co-founder of Apple (AAPL) with Jobs. He was a superior engineer to Jobs. The reason I...
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As business leaders and owners, we need to be careful on what causes we may want to align ourselves with: it can come back to haunt you.The latest example is the bottled water issue that really isn't an issue, but...
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In its quarterly filing, Warren Buffett revealed he purchased 2.8 million shares of Dow Jones & Co. through Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) before the deal was completed by Rupert Murdoch. The filing didn't reveal how much Berkshire paid for the shares...
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Aug14
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Responding to Transitional CrisisFor the first time in the history of Mary Kay, in 1984 the company experienced a decline in sales. Changes in the American labor force had finally caught up with the company. Losses also were experienced in...
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"I tend to concentrate on things where I have something to say, and I do a lot of homework. So I ration the use of that role, which is probably one reason I have it."Grove was responding to the observation...
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Almost two weeks after recalling 1.5 million toys under the Fisher-Price brand, Mattel has announced another recall of over 9 million toys made in China. Some of the toys are Barbie, "Cars" and Polly Pocket.The two issues are lead paint...
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Aug13
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In a survey by the Federal Reserve, it was found that over half of banks responding said they're tightening the lending standards for subprime mortgages, lending further proof the problem is larger than may have been first admitted or expected.The...
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