I got around to reading another Buffet letter tonight, this one from 1978. It was pretty pedestrian, but the candor of this sentence jumped out at me.
Frank DeNardo came with us in the spring of 1978 to straighten out National Indemnity’s California Worker’s Compensation business which, up to that point, had been a disaster.
Emphasis added. When’s the last time you heard a corporate leader use a term like “disaster” to describe his own operation? Usually they use a euphemism like “challenges” and/or try to blame it on something external like seasonality, the weather, the economy, whatever.
One other section that stood out was a discussion of their involvement in the textile industry. After laying out the reasons why it’s a tough business, Buffet added this:
We hope we don’t get into too many more businesses with such tough economic characteristics. But, as we have stated before: (1) our textile businesses are very important employers in their communities, (2) management has been straightforward in reporting on problems and energetic in attacking them, (3) labor has been cooperative and understanding in facing our common problems, and (4) the business should average modest cash returns relative to investment. As long as these conditions prevail – and we expect that they will – we intend to continue to support our textile business despite more attractive alternative uses for capital.
Again, emphasis added. I wonder whether Buffet’s attitude re: the importance of companies to their communities has changed over the years?
Almost exactly two years ago my wife and I were married in New Zealand. We spent two weeks there and, because my wife is a social butterfly, we met a lot of Chinese expats. Of course, we know a lot of them here in the US, but most of them are in their twenties and thirties. In New Zealand we met several college students around twenty years old, and in doing so it became immediately obvious to me that, though the US imports a lot of stuff from China, they are importing equal amounts of American culture.
One of the student we met was wearing a Yankees baseball cap, an Allen Iverson jersey and kept going on an on about how much he loved Eminem. Eminem in China?
But my description doesn’t do it justice. Here’s the proof: rap in Shanghai.
It’s actually pretty good. I’ve seen Chinese rap on CCTV, but it’s really watered-down and showbiz-ified, like what you might see on an Up with People special. This is much closer to the real deal.
Via Shanghaist
Here’s something you don’t expect to see: Malcom Gladwell being interviewed on a sports web site and comparing himself to quarterbacks, particularly one whom I happen to like and who nevertheless breaks my heart every year.
To stretch the quarterback analogy here, I’m Jake Plummer: I work in an offensive system designed to make me look way better than I actually am. Speaking of which, how fascinating was the Plummer meltdown in the Pittsburgh game? People have been beating up on Plummer, saying that his true colors emerged in that game. I prefer to look at it the other way. Shanahan managed to put in place an offensive system so brilliant and so precisely tailored to his quarterback that he could make Plummer — Plummer! — look like a great quarterback for 17 consecutive games. That’s pretty remarkable. The Plummer story is not about the frailty of individuals. It’s about the redemptive power of environments. As I said, I think I’m Plummer.
Poor Jake. He did not play well in that game, but it was really the Broncos defense that lost it. They let Pittsburgh score at will early on, so Plummer was forced to try to be a miracle worker, which is not his forte, and the Broncos had been so good all year that he didn’t really have any practice at coming from behind.
In fact, he played better the Roethlisberger did in the Super Bowl, but Pittsburgh’s defense was stout in that game, so he’s still Big Ben. Kind of like Terry Bradshaw’s first Super Bowl, in which he threw for less than 100 years. (I was a huge Bradshaw fan as a kid and still think he was one of the game’s great quarterbacks, but numbers don’t lie.)
This is one of those things that’s smart both operationally and from a PR perspective:
The company has decided to store search records from the site outside of the country in order to prevent China’s government from being able to access the data without Google’s consent, said Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, speaking Monday at a panel discussion at Santa Clara University. “We didn’t want to be in the position of having to hand over these kinds of records to the government,” he said.
Found in InfoWorld via Danwei.