BLOG OF ADAM HARTUNG
Buying Trouble
So the stock market is crashing. Is now the time to buy? Many CEOs are asking this question. The problem is that too often people try to buy a company that's "cheap", using its past history as the basis. Take Bank of America (see...
Big Shifts
This blog primarily focuses on businesses. But in Create Marketplace Disruption I point out that Success Formulas exist at multiple levels - not just companies. At a higher level, Success Formulas exist for functional groups, work teams and...
General Electric Optimism
I was asked today what I thought about Berkshire Hathaway's bail-out of GE - did it make me less of a GE fan? No. Firstly, Warren Buffet's $3B investment in GE is not a bail-out (read about the deal here). The U.S. bail-out package is for purchasing...
Planning to Succeed
I've talked about scenario planning several times during this recent financial crisis. Scenario planning is the first step in becoming an evergreen Phoenix Principle organization that can achieve above-average long-term performance. If we overcome our...
Other side of the storm
Today the U.S. Congress failed to pass a bail-out bill to buy up bad bank assets. Before the vote, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down about 300 points. After the vote, the DJIA fell to close down about 700 points (read about the vote and market...
Good survivors
General Electric (see chart here) today announced earnings will decline (read article here). Its very large GE Capital unit, which produced 45% of last year's corporate earnings, is seeing its unit earnings hit hard in this financial crisis. With its...
Ga-Ga over Google G1 phone?
Yesterday, amidst all the brouhaha over the dissolving of America's financial system, Google (see chart here) launched a new phone (read article here.) This would have surely been the #1 front-page news, except - again - the Congressional effort to deal with a...
$700 billion for what?
By now, everyone knows the story. After all the cost to take over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, plus the guarantees given to J.P. Morgan Chase for their acquisition of Bear Sterns, and the cost to keep AIG alive - in the range of $300million to $600million - the...
Effective Scenarios
After my blog on Tuesday, I was bashed by a number of folks as a pessimist - or worse. Some have said my willingness to discuss America's financial crisis in a negative light based on the assessment it is likely to worsen, as well as the loss of America's...
There’s always room for a winner
There has been a lot of press recently about the terrible situation for retailers. With house prices plunging, incomes stagnating for 6 years, and credit tight we've entered a consumer-led receission in the USA. Analysts are giving plenty of reasons for...
So Far, So Good?
Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped over 500 points (read article here) despite the U.S. Federal Reserve pumping $70B into the system - the most since terror attacks on 9/11/01 shut down the markets for a week (read article here). That's down more than 4%...
Toubled Leadership
Leaders of organizations, especially those with lots of employees and/or big revenues, have a leveraged impact when making decisions. If a manager with 8 people in a group makes an error, it's felt by those 8, plus those all 9 work with. If the CEO of a...
Merger Mistakes
CEOs and investment bankers love to talk about, and do, mergers. So do journalists. A big combination of two companies gets people all excited. There is always a lot of talk about how "synergy" will allow the two companies to be worth more...
Would you do it, if you had the chance?
Google (see chart here) is 10 years old. That's right, it was just 1998 that $100,000 was invested to start up Google (read article here). Today the company is worth almost $150billion, and its two 35 year old founders have stakes valued at approximately...
Even a stopped clock…..
WalMart (see chart here) has announced recent earnings, and they were better than Wall Street anticipated (read Marketwatch article here). Same store sales were up 3% compared to last year. As a result, the stock is worth today almost what it was worth 5...
On the flip side (yawn)
Today Coca-Cola (see chart here) announced it was planning to acquire the largest juice company in China (read Marketwatch article here.) At a cost of $2.4 billion Coke is hoping to expand its footprint in the most populous country on earth. Are you...
It surely glitters
Today Google (see chart here) announced the launch of its new web browser - called Chrome (see Marketwatch article here). At first blush this may seem quite techie, thus uninteresting to most of us. But it is big news for some very important companies -...
Going over the waterfall
The U.S. credit crisis has a lot of people very concerned about the economy. (Read LATimes article on the high stakes of this problem here.) As well it should. It was a credit crisis in the 1930s which created a rash of loan failures lead to bank...
Fearing Cannibalization versus White Space
Sometimes management behavior can cause outsiders to think the industry and company leaders fear growth. Take for example a new book about innovation in the movie business Inventing the Movies by Scott Kirsner (see at Amazon here or read a review in Forbes...
Career limiting moves
Most managers want to move up. It is characteristic to have ambition in organizations. To want to do more, to accomplish more, and to receive more compensation. So we look for opportunities to do more, inside our organizations and outside. ...
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