Tag: Advantage

The battle for the London Stock Exchange has all the structure of a Jane Austen novel. Miss L.S.E., - a great name and the inheritor of a great tradition. It wouldn’t be the first time though that a suitor has to pay a high price for little more than a grand title. But such purchasers often do not regret their choice.

The Crisp Wars represent a slice of British cultural history. The business lesson is that success in these markets demands genuine skills of brand and category management

The peculiar characteristic of markets with standards is that quality is not important to commercial success. But while Global English has become the lingua franca, native speakers are now less internationally useful than their bilingual colleagues, and English firms have similarly lost a source of advantage.

Perhaps the most important single event in modern world history is that in the late 18th century economic growth took off in Western Europe and not in south-east China, despite the apparent similarity of technological and economic development and natural resource availability in the two regions.

Peter Drucker’s The Concept of the Corporation, and Alfred Sloan’s My Years at General Motors are probably the two most influential management texts ever written. The two had nothing in common but acute intelligence and deep interest in business.

Utility liberalisation has come slowly and belatedly to continental Europe. But the lessons so expensively learnt by British and American investors have been ignored and utilities are at the centre of Europe’s rising tide of cooperate activity.

Merger Monday has proved that in the merger market, hope springs eternal. The wall of money chasing alternative investments in hope of the returns achieved in the heady 1990s, made it possible to take almost any company private.

There are two broad models of the process of innovation. Both systems work, though both are imperfect. When science and technology policy is framed, both examples should be held in mind.

The efficient industry hypothesis suggests that if an industry looks particularly attractive, or unattractive, then companies will enter, or leave, until the attractiveness or unattractiveness disappears. But then there are businesses which governments are keen on. The airline industry is one of them and governments fight to allow their taxpayers to pour ever more money into black holes.

Wherever there are markets there are marketplaces. But how this natural monopoly itself is governed varies widely. The management of marketplaces requires the political abilities of the quiet courtier. Private ownership has shown to not always provide these capacities