Category: Uncategorized

Private Equity Deals Hurt Consumers

Private Equity, Part 3: Bad for Consumers In a previous discussions about the private equity industry, I’ve spoken mostly about their lack of contribution to growing the economy – since the function of a private equity deal is to provide a sky high ROI to the firm and “partners,” they have no interest in really… Continue reading Private Equity Deals Hurt Consumers

There’s Only One Task For Any CEO

I know many CEOs who believe they have four ‘audiences’ for their concern: Wall Street, regulatory agencies, customers, and employees. (Usually in that order). I believe this to be misguided; I feel that if CEOs make their employees their only priority, all other corporate needs and accomplishments will fall in line. While many in business… Continue reading There’s Only One Task For Any CEO

One Word Branding

The One Word Company Rebrand In my last piece, about the impatient and spoon fed message generation, I opined that growing up with burst messages, no matter the medium, has created a class of employees who basically have a rather short attention span and abbreviated decision making process. Neither is necessarily bad in all cases,… Continue reading One Word Branding

The Trouble With Digiorno’s Twitter Move This Week

There were a couple of Twitter gaffes this week by companies that should know better. Both used the Ray Rice domestic violence story as the basis for a “humorous” tweet. Neither were funny, of course, there’s no humor in the issue. Domestic abuse, no matter the age or sex of the victim is one of… Continue reading The Trouble With Digiorno’s Twitter Move This Week

The Idiocy of Multi-Billion $ Evaluations

 Part  Deux –  In Which I Continue My Rant On Valuations The other day, I penned my thoughts about private equity. Amplifying on that theme, there are a lot of unprofitable companies out there funded by private equity or venture money, with multi-billion dollar valuations. Oh yeah? Sez who? Apparently only the people who hope… Continue reading The Idiocy of Multi-Billion $ Evaluations

The Wisdom (?) of Very Young Officers Heading Multinationals

So Burger King has a 32 year old CEO, Daniel Schwartz, who has no previous industry experience. Fresh from his grueling undergrad education, Schwartz went to Wall Street as an M&A analyst, made a couple of other stops before joining 3G (Burger King’s private equity owner) as an analyst in 2005. A few years later,… Continue reading The Wisdom (?) of Very Young Officers Heading Multinationals

What’s Happened to Customer Service in America?

The  Service Economy Where No One Gets Service Decades ago, economists predicted that the day would come in the US when manufacturing would fall by the wayside and we’d become a “service based economy.” What they didn’t anticipate was that much of that ‘service’ would be left to the hands of automated computer responses or… Continue reading What’s Happened to Customer Service in America?

What’s Wrong with Crackle.com

Founded in the early 2000s as “Grouper” the company streams movies, television shows, and some original programming over a wide variety of hardware platforms. Grouper was purchased by Sony Entertainment in 2007 and rebranded as Crackle after the purchase. With Sony’s support, the ‘channel’ has access to a large library of video product from both… Continue reading What’s Wrong with Crackle.com

Company Operating Tenets

I like companies / owners / executives that have and operating under tenets that the entire roster of personnel at a company understand and embrace.   Of course, you won’t see the employees rallying around the mission if they don’t see executives “walking the walk” as well as “talking the talk”. I saw this list… Continue reading Company Operating Tenets