Buying Back Your Own Left Leg There has been much written about the spectacular sale of Pixar to Disney for $7.4 billion this week. The fact that Steve Jobs is now Disney’s largest individual shareholder is amazing news on many levels. Fred has a great posting on this today from the investor perspective. Another angle that I find interesting about this transaction is that it reminds me to some extent of Yahoo’s purchase of Overture a couple years back. Yahoo OWNED the search business. For years. Invented it. Synonymous with it. Then they let others lap them they became more of a diversified online media company, and voila! Others focused, innovated, and created a massive business in paid search. Yahoo…
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Current Affairs
Four Balls or One Strike?
Four Balls or One Strike? In baseball, four balls is a walk. Today in New York, all it took was one strike, and lots of us were taking long walks – to work, from work, to dinner. Even though I’m a CEO and “management” and part of the establishment, I don’t have a systematic bias against organized labor or strikes. Sometimes, they’re entirely warranted. (Perhaps it helps that my mother-in-law is a senior exec at a major union – hi, Carmen.) Also, to be fair, I am not up close and personal on the issue of the transit strike here, so maybe I’m missing something. Those caveats aside, I have a limited amount of sympathy for the TWU and the…
Armistice Day
Armistice Day Back in May, writing about Decoration Day, I promised an exciting conclusion to the “forgotten past names of minor American holidays” series this week. I’m on vacation the rest of the week, so I’ll post today about Friday’s holiday, what we now call Veterans Day but what Grandma Hazel still periodically calls Armistice Day. Once again, Wikipedia to the rescue. Armistice Day is the anniversary of the official end of World War I, November 11, 1918. It commemorates the armistice signed between the Allies and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front, which took effect at eleven o’clock in the morning — the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh…
Book Short: The Most Rapacious Guys in the Room
Book Short: The Most Rapacious Guys in the Room I just finished The Smartest Guys in the Room, by journalists Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. This is the story of Enron, and what a tale it is! The book is a good quick business novel read. It reminded me a lot of Barbarians at the Gate, except that it made me far angrier. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m at a different place in my career now than I was 10 years ago and therefore have a different appreciation for what goes on in companies, or if the Enron guys were just far worse than anyone surrounding RJR Nabisco. But in any case, as my Grandpa Bill would have…
Decoration Day
Decoration Day Today, Memorial Day, is the day my Grandma Hazel always calls Decoration Day. That’s obviously a name that pre-dates me, so I thought I’d look it up today and figure out what it originally stood for and when the switch happened. According to Wikipedia, the holiday originally called Decoration Day was first observed in 1868 to honor fallen Union solidiers of the Civil War. As you can imagine, southern states didn’t really recognize the holiday until at least 50 years later, and many continue even today to have a separate Confederate Decoration Day (now Confederate Memorial Day or somewhat disturbingly Confederate Heroes Day in Texas) for years. After World War I, the day came to honor all American…
The Bush Dilemma
The Bush Dilemma I think I’ve finally articulated The Bush Dilemma that I am having as a moderate Republican with the upcoming election. Here was my dialog with Fred, an ardent but utterly rational Democrat, the other night at dinner. Matt: Kerry is clearly a much smarter person than Bush, but I tend to agree with Bush’s philosophy and positions on more issues than I do Kerry’s. Fred: If you agree with him on the top 10 issues, then you should vote for him. Matt: I agree with him on most of MY top 10 issues…but not on most of HIS top 10 issues. Fred: That’s a dilemma. I suspect many other moderate Republicans have this same dilemma. Whether they…
Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part III: The First Debate
Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part III: The First Debate Well, there you have it. Both of my first two postings on this subject — Realism vs. Idealism and Admitting Mistakes — came up in last night’s debate. At one point, in response to Kerry’s attempted criticism of him for expressing two different views on the situation in Iraq, Bush responded that he thought he could — and had to — be simultaneously a realist and an optimist. And a few minutes later, Kerry admitted a mistake and brilliantly turned the tables on Bush by saying something to the effect of “I made a mistake in how I talked about Iraq, and he made a mistake by taking us to war…
Comment on Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part II: Admitting Mistakes
Comment on Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part II: Admitting Mistakes My colleague Mike Mayor writes: So you’e only asking for politicians to be honest Matt? Is that all? 🙂 Couldn’t agree more on the CEO side. A CEO who cannot admit to failure is doomed to be surrounded by “yes men” and, therefore, must go it alone, whereas the CEO who admits to having the odd bad idea every now and then is more likely to get truthful and accuruate information from those around him/her. Which scenario would you prefer to base your next decision on? However, I look more to Hollywood for fostering the faux CEO/Board Room stereotypes, not politics. Look no further than the highest ranked show among…
Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part II: Admitting Mistakes
Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part II: Admitting Mistakes The press conference this past spring where President Bush embarrassingly refused to admit that he had ever made any big mistakes, other than to reiterate his gaffe at trading Sammy Sosa when he owned the Texas Rangers, brings up another issue in this series: is it good for leaders, both political and corporate, to admit mistakes? On the corporate side, I think the ability to admit a mistake is a must. Again, I’ll refer back to Jim Collins’ books Good to Great and Built to Last, both of which talk about humility and the ability to admit mistakes as a critical component of emotional intelligence, the cornerstone of solid leadership. And in…
9/11 Remembered in NYC
It’s the end of a long September 11 in New York City. We thought everyone would want to see the Tribeca close-up of the “twin beams” memorial that comes out from time to time to evoke the memory of the fallen towers. The beams are truly amazing, reaching up high into the sky, seemingly endless. While they are geographically incorrect from this particular view (the towers stood behind and to the left of the new construction of the new 7 World Trade Center), they do the job and from most views look in place.
Our Next July 4?
Our Next July 4? We could hear the church bells ringing this morning out our window at the 9/11 memorial ceremony as we observed a moment of silence at 8:48 a.m. to remember. What really got me, though, was when I walked past the site and heard some of the names being called out by parents of the victims, their voices alternating between bravely strong and quivering with emotion. There will always be something awful about this day every year, a wound reopened fresh over a healing scar. I hope that it will continue to serve as a unifying force in our country, an annual rallying cry against those in the world who threaten our way of life and seek…