BLOG OF ADAM HARTUNG
Finding White Space
Chipotle's Mexican Grill went public last week. The stock shot up in price, and ended the week posting a whopping Price/Earnings multiple of 36! As you probably know, Chipotle's has been a subsidiary of McDonald's. Now, it is it's own company -...
Deep Challenges
Success Formulas are nested. We have personal Success Formulas, which interact with Work Team Success Formulas, which connect with Functional and B.U. Success Formulas, which tie to Industry Success Formulas those are impacted by Success Formulas within the...
Lipstick on a Pig
If you've read this BLOG for a while you know I am no fan of Sears. Since the merger of KMart and Sears the combined company has done nothing to change its competitiveness versus better managed companies like Target, Kohls and WalMart. Today Sears stock...
Reading Tea Leaves
Today I got a call from a friend, asking me my opinion of DuPont. I worked for DuPont from 1987 to 1990, and of course DuPont is one of those large and historically great American companies. An early manufacturer of gunpowder for our war efforts, the...
Did you see Oscar’s Challenge?
Did you ever wonder why Sony doesn't dominate the digital music market? After all, they are historically strong in consumer electroncis (i.e. walkman). And they own a recording studio. Yet, Apple dominates and the word "I-Pod" is synonymous...
Sweet Home Chicago
I'm a midwestern guy - born in Oklahoma, college in Kansas and now a long-time resident of Illinois. I love Chicago. But, I have to admit, some things have been concerning me lately. Illinois lost jobs last year. In fact, Illinois has had a net job loss...
Disruptive Leadership
HP's CEO Mark Hurd is making a difference at the company. The turnaround since his arrival has been large and successful. I'm often asked what a leader should do when their company is in need of change. As BusinessWeek recently reported, you should...
What you measure matters
Recently GM announced with pride that it had reduced it's IT expenditures by 25%. The company's IT spend to sales ration has dropped from 2.4% to 1.6% - a 33% decline. This was held up as a sign of great progress. But, as Baseline recently reported,...
View of the Swamp
McDonald's has been in the news a lot lately. There is a hedge fund operator pushing the company to spin out its company owned stores. They just had to re-evaluate the fat content in their products, and discovered that "bad fat" is greater than...
Perilous Ignorance
My three weeks in India were fantastic. I visited twenty-some companies, all developing new business models in their pursuit of new revenues. From company to company, I saw people working in White Space as they sought out Success Formulas that would...
Sacred Cows
I've been delayed posting because I'm traveling around India. What a wonderful country that is regularly creating new Challenges for old businesses. Auto traffic in India is always difficult, primarily due to very poor quality, and insufficient,...
Now that’s entertainment
I'm a boomer, and for my generation going to the movies was a primary pastime. With only 3 channels of TV, we looked forward to the movies as an alternative. We also enjoyed the big screens, the color, and the immersion experience that the theatre...
In this corner, the Challenge
The Chicago Tribune ran a great overview of the situation facing McDonald's leadership today. In a nutshell, an upstart hedge fund manager (William Ackman of Pershing Square Capital LP) is pushing McDonald's to restructure itself by spinning off restaurant...
Want a wild ride?
Harley Davidson is a great, well known brand. But as one of my old professors used to say "a good product, and a good company, doesn't necessarily make for a good stock." Despite it's brand image, for the last 2 decades things have been changing at...
Are you the retiring type?
Everyone over 40 thinks about retirement. Nearly everyone looks forward to it. And younger workers look forward to the opportunities which retirement creates. But will you retire? This week's announcement by IBM that it can't afford to continue...
Motoyahoogle!
Motorola has done it again. As reported by every news agency that attended the Consumer Electronics Show, Motorola has joined up with Google, Yahoo and Kodak to improve its products and make new products. This is, of course, after partnering with Apple months ago....
Synergy – Not
2006 has started with the completion of Viacom's spin-off of CBS. Since these two entities merged, their value has about shrunk in half. What was to be an integrated media company is trying to increase its value by dis-integrating. Even Sumner Redstone,...
Where’d you shop for holiday gifts?
There's a better than 50% chance you shopped at least once in WalMart. Five years ago, there was an equally large chance you shopped in KMart or Sears. But this year, did you shop at Sears? Or Sears Essentials (the replacement concept for KMart)?...
Getting Sirius about radio
Most people I know think Howard Stern is an oddity. Although he's had a loyal following for 30 years, most business people never listen to his show. And they can't believe he's being offered $500M to change his broadcast to satellite radio. Of...
Outside the Lunch Box
This week before Christmas, 2005 I had a great lunch. I was in L.A. and I called an old acquaintance to join me for lunch. He's a great guy, somewhat trapped in an "old-line" American manufacturing company that's been Locked-in for several...
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