It's back! Vertical intergration that is.

Vertical integration is back. After all the analysts said that companies must only focus on their marketing to the exclusion of the rest of their supply chain. Larry Ellison, the "bad boy" of Silicon Valley is now saying that for a company to be competitive in the new economic reality, there should be vertical integration throughout the company's markets. This is what happens when there is to much buy in of the latest fad from short term strategists.

For years it was spin off anything that doesn't have to do with core competencies. Now we are going back to the future in the manner of Henry Ford.

WSJ.com link

Outsourcing tutors

Well you would think that with the economy the way it is a teacher could make a little extra money tutoring students on the weekend or summer. Nope. The newest process that is being outsourced is tutoring to of all places, India. No shock there. Soon everything that is intellectual or not a concrete task, such as plumbing, will move offshore. Maybe I should ditch the MBA and learn a trade such as auto repair.

I recently had my hair cut at a cosmetology school in town and I was talking to the girl who was learning. I asked her why she was learning a trade instead of going to UIS. She said that she could always start a shop and work for herself no matter what the economy looked like. Mmm sounds like she may have something there.

Global Post link

Danny Pang

With the recent uproar of the House wanting to curb the powers of the Fed, this seems to be a good article to look at. Reading this I was amazed at the warning signs Pang showed throughout the years. And yet he still managed to attract investors that were willing to allow him access to their money. Never underestimate the power of a unbelievable return rate. Now could Dodd and Frank really have prevented this? Of course not. Pang was a con man pure and simple. And con men always find an angle to work. All the legislation in the world would not have prevented Pang from doing what he did. Just has it would most likely have not stopped Madoff. Con men tell people what they want to hear. Kind of like Obama and health care reform.

WSJ.com link

Economies of scale in medical care

Heart surgeon Devi Shetty's hospital did over 5000 heart surgeries in 2008. As he said in this article in the WSJ, "what the Japanese did for autos, India will do for health care". I wonder how many of those people that are proponents of outsourcing thought that health care would be the next industry to move from the US? I can see it now. When the government takes over the US health system and service tanks and it takes years to get an operation done, all those with the financial means will move to Mexico to quit paying high US taxes and will fly to India for health care. The poor will not pay anything and use the free health care. The middle class will pay foe most of the costs and be shocked at how poor the system has become. And the wealthy will move somewhere where taxes are low and go where the health care is cheap. And all of us will wonder what the hell happened.

WSJ.com link

Labor unrest in India

The global slowdown is creating labor strikes and violence in India. According to the WSJ, a company that build car parts for Ford and Toyota wanted to layoff a large number of employees. The HR director of Pricol was beat up and killed. It seems that the only thing keeping Americans from doing the same thing with a true unemployment rate of over 17% is a year of unemployment from the Obama administration. Or perhaps we're not as hungry as some machinist from India.

WSJ.com link

Finnegan Nye Dobbs

Here is our son who was born on 10/23/2007. Everyone is doing great.

Mgt Philosopher Russell Ackoff

As I opened my WSJ Wednesday morning, I saw the obituary of Russell Ackoff, a business professor at the Wharton School of Business. His model for teaching business education was "no curriculum, no classes, no examinations, no admission requirements -- only exit requirements." Wow what a fantastic idea. Too bad so few business schools actually believe in this. I see many in the field of business education to be very conservative when it come to thinking outside of the box in teaching concepts. The model of lecturing as teaching is dying. Why can't this be seen by the administrators of universities?

Testing in a holistic manner would get the concepts of business across so much better then simply a lecture. Perhaps teaming up with a local business and applying MBA concepts such as marketing, finance, and organizational function in the field would be so much more interesting then doing same thing I did as an undergrad.

WSJ.com link