Business Consolidation Quotes

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

Thoughts repeated over time, no matter how incorrect, become consolidated in our minds as beliefs because we’ve repeatedly affirmed them over and over again.

Tea Party advocates work in or run small businesses. Yet the politicians they support back laws that consolidate the monopoly power of the very largest companies that are poised to swallow up smaller ones.

All social orders command their members to imbibe in pipe dreams of posterity, the mirage of immortality, to keep them ahead of the extinction that would ensue in a few generations if the species did not replenish itself. This is the implicit, and most pestiferous, rationale for propagation: to become fully integrated into a society, one must offer it fresh blood. Naturally, the average set of parents does not conceive of their conception as a sacrificial act. These are civilized human beings we are talking about, and thus they are quite able to fill their heads with a panoply of less barbaric rationales for reproduction, among them being the consolidation of a spousal relationship; the expectation of new and enjoyable experiences in the parental role; the hope that one will pass the test as a mother or father; the pleasing of one’s own parents, not to forget their parents and possibly a great-grandparent still loitering about; the serenity of taking one’s place in the seemingly deathless lineage of a familial enterprise; the creation of individuals who will care for their paternal and maternal selves in their dotage; the quelling of a sense of guilt or selfishness for not having done their duty as human beings; and the squelching of that faint pathos that is associated with the childless. Such are some of the overpowering pressures upon those who would fertilize the future. These pressures build up in people throughout their lifetimes and must be released, just as everyone must evacuate their bowels or fall victim to a fecal impaction. And who, if they could help it, would suffer a building, painful fecal impaction? So we make bowel movements to relieve this pressure. Quite a few people make gardens because they cannot stand the pressure of not making a garden. Others commit murder because they cannot stand the pressure building up to kill someone, either a person known to them or a total stranger. Everything is like that. Our whole lives consist of metaphorical as well as actual bowel movements, one after the other. Releasing these pressures can have greater or lesser consequences in the scheme of our lives. But they are all pressures, all bowel movements of some kind. At a certain age, children are praised for making a bowel movement in the approved manner. Later on, the praise of others dies down for this achievement and our bowel movements become our own business, although we may continue to praise ourselves for them. But overpowering pressures go on governing our lives, and the release of these essentially bowel-movement pressures may once again come up for praise, congratulations, and huzzahs of all kinds.

But we know that whatever it was, Washington did not stop helping to carry out Operation Annihilation. The US economic elite heard a very different message. Indonesia was open for business. In 1967, the first year of Suharto’s fully consolidated rule, General Electric, American Express, Caterpillar, and Goodyear Tire all came to explore the new opportunities available to them in Indonesia. Star-Kist foods arrived to see about fishing in Indonesian waters, and of course, defense contractors Raytheon and Lockheed popped over, too.

We have seen how women, biologically distinguished from men, are culturally distinguished from “human.” Nature produced the fundamental inequality — half the human race must bear and rear the children of all of them — which was later consolidated, institutionalized, in the interests of men. Reproduction of the species cost women dearly, not only emotionally, psychologically, culturally but even in strictly material (physical) terms: before recent methods of contraception, continuous childbirth led to constant “female trouble,” early aging, and death. Women were slaves class that maintained the species in order to free the other half for the business of the world — admittedly often its drudge aspects, but certainly all its creative aspects as well.

The very first U.S. census began on August 2, 1790, a year after the inauguration of President George Washington. Census takers in 1790 counted the number of persons in each household according to the following categories: free white males sixteen years and older, free white males under sixteen years, free white females, all other free persons, and slaves. Since then, every U.S. census has sorted people by race—but the racial groupings have changed twenty-four times over the last two hundred years. In the second census, taken in 1800, Indians were specified as a separate category of free persons. Chinese were added to the 1870 census. In 1920, race had become even more complicated. That census included ten racial categories: white, black, mulatto, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Hindu, Korean, and other. By the end of the twentieth century, the racial groupings were consolidated into five main choices: American Indian or Alaska native, Asian, black or African American, native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and white.

Within the huge trade unions, a similar managerial officialdom, the “labor bureaucracy” consolidates its position as an elite. This elite is sharply distinguished in training, income, habits and outlook from the ordinary union member. The trend extends to the military world, the academic world, the non-profit foundations and even auxilliary organizations of the U.N. Armies are no longer run by “fighting captains” but by a Pentagon-style managerial bureaucracy. Within the universities, proliferating administrators have risen above students, teaching faculty, alumni and parents, their power position expressed in the symbols of higher salaries and special privileges. The great “non-profit foundations” have been transformed from expressions of individual benevolence into strategic bases of managerial-administrative power. The United Nations has an international echelon of manager entrenched in the Secretariat. There are fairly obvious parallels in the managerial structures of the diverse institutional fields. For example, managers in business are stockholders as labor managers are to union members; as government managers are to voters; as public school administrators are to tax-payers; as university and private school administrators are to tuition payers and fund contributors.

Though it’s hard to believe now, newspapers were once the envy of the business world. Through the eighties and nineties, 20, 30, even 40 percent returns on investment were not uncommon, triple the norm for U.S. industry over the same period. Dollar signs in their eyes, chains devoured up local papers, consolidating and centralizing to maximize shareholder value, sometimes purchasing vibrant independent publications just to kill off competition. The overlords of monopoly journalism became increasingly disconnected from the communities they were supposed to serve. And when profits plateaued, they gutted themselves to maintain growth, trimming staff, reducing reporting budgets, and publishing fluff. Today, newspaper chiefs prefer to point fingers at new technology or distracted readers or even their own staff, but the erosion of standards and depth owes more to their long greedy binge than to the Internet or the rise of blogging or social media.

While Newport housed the numbers Bankers, Cincinnati was the domain of the Runners/Writers and pickups. Runners worked on a commission based on the total amount of bets they wrote from playing customers. The commission ranged from thirty-five percent to twenty percent and when consolidation came in the 1950’s it dropped as low as ten percent. Who were these Runners or policy Writers? Some were well dressed men and women, others were low-key housewives all participating in a business that required no high school, college or business education. They fanned out or ran across neighborhoods and cities looking for players. They booked numbers bets at hotels, schools, big and small businesses and at churches at the risk for being caught with policy slips, which was a misdemeanour, subject to a fine of $40- $50. My grandmother, Lula Harshaw, booked a small number of bets in our kitchen from players in a four block area. She worked for Albert “White Smitty” Schmidt who was

Consolidate What’s Been Learned While it is true that you learn the most in the midst of a project, the lessons are not generally coherent. Any individual can have a great insight but may not have the time to pass it on. A process might be flawed, but you don’t have time to fix it under the current schedule. Sitting down afterward is a way of consolidating all that you’ve learned—before you forget it. Postmortems are a rare opportunity to do analysis that simply wasn’t possible in the heat of the project.

used to scorn this, seeing their human judgment as irreplaceable. Now, says Jiri Stejskal of the American Translators’ Association, it has won respectability. Technological change has not brought consolidation to a fragmented industry, however. Lionbridge, which has the largest disclosed revenues ($489m in 2013), makes much of its money from services other than translation. Like most of its rivals, Lionbridge talks up technology, but is fairly traditional. The heart of the business is managing projects, acting as a go-between for customers and freelance translators on jobs like managing file formats and locations, client reviews and so forth. Tedious project-management tasks like these may offer scope for disruptive

Supplier Consolidation Once the purchasing process has been streamlined, as was described in the preceding sections, the next step is to pursue cost reduction activities. A significant cost reduction technique is to reduce the number of suppliers with which a company does business. By concentrating its orders with a smaller number of suppliers, it can use higher purchasing volume to negotiate price reductions, rebates, and discounts. This concept is addressed in more detail in Chapters 8 and 9. The following subtopics address various supplier consolidation issues at a general level. Bottom 10 Percent Besides concentrating order volume, another reason to consolidate suppliers is to eliminate the worst-performing ones. These are the suppliers that deliver the wrong items late and with low quality. Even if these suppliers offer what appear to be rock-bottom prices, the total cost of doing business with them is much higher, because the company is endlessly dealing with receiving inspections, product returns, and the processing of credits. Consequently, having a separate program to identify and eliminate a company’s lowest-rated suppliers can also reduce costs.

The factors that usually decide presidential elections—the economy, likability of the candidates, and so on—added up to a wash, and the outcome came down to a few key swing states. Mitt Romney’s campaign followed a conventional polling approach, grouping voters into broad categories and targeting each one or not. Neil Newhouse, Romney’s pollster, said that “if we can win independents in Ohio, we can win this race.” Romney won them by 7 percent but still lost the state and the election. In contrast, President Obama hired Rayid Ghani, a machine-learning expert, as chief scientist of his campaign, and Ghani proceeded to put together the greatest analytics operation in the history of politics. They consolidated all voter information into a single database; combined it with what they could get from social networking, marketing, and other sources; and set about predicting four things for each individual voter: how likely he or she was to support Obama, show up at the polls, respond to the campaign’s reminders to do so, and change his or her mind about the election based on a conversation about a specific issue. Based on these voter models, every night the campaign ran 66,000 simulations of the election and used the results to direct its army of volunteers: whom to call, which doors to knock on, what to say. In politics, as in business and war, there is nothing worse than seeing your opponent make moves that you don’t understand and don’t know what to do about until it’s too late. That’s what happened to the Romney campaign. They could see the other side buying ads in particular cable stations in particular towns but couldn’t tell why; their crystal ball was too fuzzy. In the end, Obama won every battleground state save North Carolina and by larger margins than even the most accurate pollsters had predicted. The most accurate pollsters, in turn, were the ones (like Nate Silver) who used the most sophisticated prediction techniques; they were less accurate than the Obama campaign because they had fewer resources. But they were a lot more accurate than the traditional pundits, whose predictions were based on their expertise. You might think the 2012 election was a fluke: most elections are not close enough for machine learning to be the deciding factor. But machine learning will cause more elections to be close in the future. In politics, as in everything, learning is an arms race. In the days of Karl Rove, a former direct marketer and data miner, the Republicans were ahead. By 2012, they’d fallen behind, but now they’re catching up again.

The fratricidal Yoruba wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a great boost to the transatlantic traffic in human beings. There were constant skirmishes between the Ijebus, the Egbas, the Ekitis, the Oyos, the Ibadans, and many other Yoruba groups. Some of the smaller groups might even have been wiped out from history, as the larger ones enlarged their territory and consolidated their power. The vanquished were brought from the interior to the coast and sold to the people of Lagos and to communities along the network of lagoons stretching westward to Ouidah. And they in turn arranged the auctions at which the English, the Portuguese, and the Spanish loaded up their barracoons and slave ships. Some of these intertribal wars were waged for the express purpose of supplying slaves to traders. At thirty-five British pounds for each healthy adult male, it was a lucrative business.

Westcliff turned to the black-haired man beside him. “Hunt, I would like to introduce Matthew Swift—the American I mentioned to you earlier. Swift, this is Mr. Simon Hunt.” They shook hands firmly. Hunt was five to ten years older than Matthew and looked as if he could be mean as hell in a fight. A bold, confident man who reputedly loved to skewer pretensions and upper-class affectations. “I’ve heard of your accomplishments with Consolidated Locomotive Works,” Matthew told Hunt. “There is a great deal of interest in New York regarding your merging of British craftsmanship with American manufacturing methods.” Hunt smiled sardonically. “Much as I would like to take all the credit, modesty compels me to reveal that Westcliff had something to do with it. He and his brother-in-law are my business partners.” “Obviously the combination is highly successful,” Matthew replied. Hunt turned to Westcliff. “He has a talent for flattery,” he remarked. “Can we hire him?” Westcliff’s mouth twitched with amusement. “I’m afraid my father-in-law would object. Mr. Swift’s talents are needed to built a factory and start a company office in Bristol.” Matthew decided to nudge the conversation in a different direction. “I’ve read of the recent movement in Parliament for nationalization of the British railroad industry,” he said to Westcliff. “I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter, my lord.” “Good God, don’t get him started on that,” Hunt said. The subject caused a scowl to appear on Westcliff’s brow. “The last thing the public needs is for government to take control of the industry. God save us from yet more interference from politicians. The government would run the railroads as inefficiently as they do everything else. And the monopoly would stifle the industry’s ability to compete, resulting in higher taxes, not to mention—” “Not to mention,” Hunt interrupted slyly, “the fact that Westcliff and I don’t want the government cutting into our future profits.” Westcliff gave him a stern glance. “I happen to have the public’s best interest in mind.” “How fortunate,” Hunt commented, “that in this case what is best for the public also happens to be best for you.” Matthew bit back a smile. Rolling his eyes, Westcliff told Matthew, “As you can see, Mr. Hunt overlooks no opportunity to mock me.” “I mock everyone,” Hunt said. “You just happen to be the most readily available target.

Continue to grow and consolidate core businesses.

But however determined this programme of domestic consolidation, following the Reichstag election results of May 1924, not even the votes of the SPD were sufficient to carry the constitutional amendments necessary to ratify the Dawes Plan, which included an international mortgage on the Reichsbahn. Over a quarter of the German electorate had voted for the far right - 19 per cent for the DNVP, almost 7 per cent for Hitler's NSDAP. Almost 13 per cent had opted for the Communists. The two-thirds majority would have to include at least some deputies from the DNVP, intransigent foes of the Versailles Treaty and the progenitors of the 'stab in the back' legend. So concerned were the foreign powers that the American ambassador Alanson Houghton intervened directly in German party politics, summoning leading figures in the DNVP to explain bluntly that if they rejected the Dawes Plan, it would be one hundred years before America ever assisted Germany again. Under huge pressure from their business backers, on 29 August 1924 enough DNVP members defected to the government side to ratify the plan. In exchange, the Reich government offered a sop to the nationalist community by formally renouncing its acceptance of the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty. Nevertheless, on 10 October 1924 Jack Morgan bit his tongue and signed the loan agreement that committed his bank along with major financial interests in London, Paris and even Brussels to the 800-million Goldmarks loan. The loan was to apply the salve of business common sense to the wounds left by the war. And it was certainly an attractive proposition. The issuers of the Dawes Loan paid only 87 cents on the dollar for their bonds. They were to be redeemed with a 5 per cent premium. For the 800 million Reichsmarks it received, Germany would service bonds with a face value of 1.027 billion. But if Morgan's were bewildered by the role they had been forced to play, this speaks to the eerie quality of the reconfiguration of international politics in 1924. The Labour government that hosted the final negotiations in London was the first socialist government elected to preside over the most important capitalist centre of the old world, supposedly committed by its party manifesto of 1919 to a radical platform of nationalization and social transformation. And yet in the name of 'peace' and 'prosperity' it was working hand in glove with an avowedly conservative adminstration in Washington and the Bank of England to satisfy the demands of American investors, in the process imposing a damaging financial settlement on a radical reforming government in France, to the benefit of a German Republic, which was at the time ruled by a coalition dominated by the once notorious annexationist, but now reformed Gustav Stresemann. 'Depoliticization' is a euphemistic way of describing this tableau of mutual evisceration. Certainly, it had been no plan of Wilson's New Freedom to raise Morgan's to such heights. In fact, even Morgan's did not want to own the terms of the Dawes Settlement. Whereas Wilson had invoked public opinion as the final authority, this was now represented by the 'investing' public, for whom the bankers, as financial advisors, were merely the spokesmen. But if a collective humbling of the European political class had been what lay behind Wilson's call for a 'peace without victory' eight years earlier, one can't help thinking that the Dawes Plan and the London Conference of 1924 must have had him chuckling in his freshly dug grave. It was a peace. There were certainly no European victors.

This control of super-capital and big business was being developed during the 10 years of southern reconstruction and was dependent and consequent upon the failure of democracy in the south, just as it fattened upon the perversion of democracy in the north. And when once the control of industry by big business was certain through consolidation and manipulation that included both north and south, big business shamelessly deserted not only the Negro, but the cause of democracy, not only in the south, but in the North.

The failure of these B2B marketplaces is a sharp contrast to the one major success story in B2B ecommerce from the dot-com era: Alibaba. Alibaba took a very different approach from these other marketplaces. Rather than going after large, consolidated industries, it went after small businesses. This strategy was the brainchild of Alibaba’s founder and CEO, Jack Ma. Ma’s vision was that “the revolutionary significance of the Internet is that it will enable small enterprises to operate independently.

While the assembly line created some meaningful advances in society, it widened the gap between the haves and the have- nots by solidifying a tremendous barrier to entry for manufacturing businesses. Factories and assembly lines cost millions and millions of dollars to build, and those resources were only available to large organizations and wealthy industrialists. That made it nearly impossible to disrupt or innovate without being associated with one of these entities. The assembly line also marked a tipping point for standardization and globalization. Prior to its arrival there was a strong emotional connection between the artisan and the product. The maker was close to the consumer, and that meant something to both of them. Standardized production over the twentieth century eroded that connection by separating the producer from the product. Producers no longer had to be skilled—they now only had to handle a piece of the process. That, with very few exceptions, systematically eliminated specialized artisan work. And the more efficient production became, the more financially beneficial it was to consolidate on the retail side as well, which led to what most call globalization, but I call global monotony. We entered the “Boring Age,” one in which different cities and countries all featured the same stores and products.

The first is what I call breadth analysis. It asks two questions. One, is the company’s customer base broad, and unlikely to consolidate? And two, is the company’s supplier base broad, and unlikely to consolidate? The business isn’t good unless the answer to both is yes.

Globalization is peaking, with a sharp backlash toward greater sovereignty and protectionism, exactly like the 1930s. But every cycle has its expansionary phase and then its consolidation and deleveraging phases. This is the peak of the dramatic growth of Western and developed countries and will lead to the continued rise of emerging and Asian countries. That’s why we see more volatility and civil unrest in those areas. We need to buckle our seat belts now to prepare for not only a great debt and financial-bubble deleveraging and deflationary period in the next several years, but also a time of true revolution in everything. I’m talking everything from political and social structures to business organizations reshaping and re-forming for many years, and even decades to come, just like after the Civil War. I’m talking the bottom-up network revolution in everything! It’s time to hunker down in your business and household finances. Cash out of the bubble in all risk assets for just a few years, even if you get out a bit too early. Crashes happen much faster than the bubbles build, so don’t wait for the horse to bolt before closing the barn door. Consider where you should be living and target less bubbly areas that are safer and more aligned with your political and social values.

Many of the pregnant facts of our early history have been purposely omitted from the books: the origins of things have been misrepresented: the very compromises and principles upon which our complex Government was built have been so wilfully suppressed and blotted from the record that the generation now crowding toward the open fields of busy life know little of the real truth of the political strategy which transformed a league of sovereign States into a consolidated Republic.

Spector’s visit to London had consolidated his position at the top of the music business tree. He had cemented friendships with the two biggest groups on the British music scene, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who would soon follow their British rivals to America. Spector was thrilled at the music, the breath of fresh air it carried. But he could little have imagined that the impending British Invasion was to prove the harbinger of his decline.

The consolidated accounts present the parent and its subsidiary as a single entity. Thus, only transactions with third parties i.e. outside the group should be included and not intra-group activity. This is a requirement of IFRS 10 Business Combinations.

When you have a massive shift like that, you almost always have a Wild West period, followed by a big correction or consolidation. For years, I warned my listeners and followers to use the opportunities on Amazon to build a real brand. Those who did made millions of dollars. Those who did not got swallowed up when bigger players came onto the scene selling spatulas for 50 cents cheaper than they were.

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But in most fields, incrementalism is merely a lack of audacity and boldness. Maybe you won't lose, but you won't win either. Larger, established enterprises are especially prone to incremental behavior because risks are not rewarded—but screwups are severely punished. Many of these companies end up killing themselves gradually, through stagnation. That's why very few enterprises that were in the Fortune 500 just 50 years ago still exist. A living organism like a business needs to reinvent itself all the time, rather than just consolidate and extend

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That is the biggest differentiator. Even today, with all the acquisitions being done in the asset management business, most of them are just consolidation plays. Our acquisitions were based on growth and building deeper relationships with our clients.

Democracy was surrendered without a fight. This was most notably the case in the collapse of the grand coalition in 1930. It was again the case – however vain the opposition might have proved – in the lack of resistance to the Papen coup against Prussia in July 1932. Both events revealed the flimsiness of democracy’s base. This was not least because powerful groups had never reconciled themselves to democracy, and were by this time actively seeking to bring it down. During the Depression, democracy was less surrendered than deliberately undermined by élite groups serving their own ends. These were no pre-industrial leftovers, but – however reactionary their political aims – modern lobbies working to further their vested interests in an authoritarian system.255 In the final drama, the agrarians and the army were more influential than big business in engineering Hitler’s takeover.256 But big business, also, politically myopic and self-serving, had significantly contributed to the undermining of democracy which was the necessary prelude to Hitler’s success. The masses, too, had played their part in democracy’s downfall. Never had circumstances been less propitious for the establishment of successful democracy than they were in Germany after the First World War. Already by 1920, the parties most supportive of democracy held only a minority of the vote. Democracy narrowly survived its early travails, though great swathes of the electorate opposed it root and branch. Who is to say that, had not the great Depression blown it completely off course, democracy might not have settled down and consolidated itself? But democracy was in a far from healthy state when the Depression struck Germany. And in the course of the Depression, the masses deserted democracy in their droves. By 1932, the only supporters of democracy were the weakened Social Democrats (and even many of these were by this time lukewarm), some sections of the Zentrum (which had itself moved sharply to the Right), and a handful of liberals. The Republic was dead. Still open was what sort of authoritarian system would replace it.

Ask Customers for suggestions on how best to serve them: Let me get Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce to weigh in on it. ‘In 2008, Howard Schultz returned to Starbucks as CEO, after being out of that role for eight years. The company had lost touch with consumers, and Schultz was determined to fix that. The first thing he did was create an app that asked customers how they thought the coffeehouses could be improved. The company consolidated the top ten responses and put them to a consumer vote. Then it implemented the top five fixes. The process engaged customers in the turnaround and helped restore revenue growth.’13

The main problem of corralling people in to the consolidated digital space, is that it will erode all other non digital forms of activity. If all business is transacted in the digital sphere will this affect our freedom, our ability to function as autonomous individuals. Will it be possible to create societies and communities based on alternate value systems if only one system of communications exists? Also in the field of creativity, what impact does the transference of artistic and cultural activity into the digital realm have. How does it influence and corrupt the process of creation, adaptation and development of real World skills. Also the creation of alternative political and social structures within society may be hampered or curtailed, due to the vast power that digital device usage has to influence and alter discourse.

Hitler had been sworn in as Chancellor two months earlier by Paul von Hindenburg, President of the German Republic, on the supposition that only he and his National Socialists—by then the largest party in the country, with one-third the popular vote—could deal with the paralysis that had immobilized the government for months. Hitler took power legally; there followed immediately a series of illegal acts designed to consolidate his power and intimidate the opposition. A fire set in the Reichstag, blamed on a Dutch pyromaniac, who may have been used by the National Socialists, gave Hitler his excuse to begin a pseudolegal process of abolishing all constitutional guarantees of individual freedom. The party’s infamous storm troopers assaulted the political opposition, trade union leaders and Jews. Sheer terror purged the Reichstag of so many opposition deputies that Hitler had no trouble in pushing through the Enabling Act that gave him dictatorial powers. The boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, which simply institutionalized storm trooper violence against Jewish professionals and businesses, was Hitler’s first formal effort against the people he believed to be at the heart of a Bolshevik conspiracy to destroy Germany. That

In February 2010, Ad Age reported that Wal-Mart had consolidated its stocked range of food bags from three brands, Ziploc, Glad and Hefty, down to the market leader, Ziploc, and their own Great Value private label offering.3 Pactiv, the makers of Hefty, gained the consolation prize of the contract to manufacture the Great Value products, whereas the owners of Glad lost their entire food bag business in Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart could do this easily as, unlike many other retailers, they consolidate all manufacturer payments into the buying price and pass on most of the benefit to the shopper in lower prices. Retailers who take manufacturer payments to their bottom line are sometimes unwilling to give up the short-term benefit of such payments for the longer-term return of better margins from their private label. The secondary brands that are targeted by private label are usually big payers of trade spend to make up for their lower level of consumer appeal versus the top brands.

Today, the best businesses position themselves as “partners” with their customers, vendors, and suppliers. Instead of spreading their business over a large number of other companies, they consolidate their business with a single supplier with whom they work closely to develop high-quality relationships that lead to better quality, greater efficiency, and eventually, lower prices and higher profits for both parties.

The key to the understanding of any society lies in the observation and analysis of the insignificant and the mundane. For one of the primary functions of societal institutions is to conceal the basic nature of the society, so that the individuals that make up the power structure can pursue the business of consolidating and increasing their power untroubled by the minor carpings of a dissatisfied peasantry. Societal institutions act as fig leaves for each other's nakedness...And so, when seeking to understand the culture or the history of a people, do not look at the precepts of the religion, the form of the government, the curricula of the schools, or the operations of businesses; flush to johns.

The evidence of past mistakes was still everywhere in 2000. Koch Industries was still carrying the accumulated litter that was left behind by countless Value Creation Strategies, years of acquisitions, and rapid growth. As Koch reviewed its holdings, one executive described the corporate structure as representing a table piled high at a rummage sale, full of odds and ends that had no apparent rationale for belonging together. Koch began to unload these properties, selling off pipeline holdings like the Chase Transportation Company. It sold a chemical firm called Koch Microelectronic Service Company and closed down a new $30 million chemical plant in Bryan, Texas. Over a period of years, Koch would sell off thousands of miles of pipelines. The corporate odds and ends were discarded. The remaining businesses at Koch were restructured and streamlined. The most important division, Koch Petroleum, was renamed Flint Hills Resources and given new leaders. Other businesses were consolidated under a new, simplified structure that put them under the umbrella of a few new companies like Koch Minerals, Koch Supply & Trading, and Koch Chemical Technology Group.

Before 2008, Koch’s lobbying efforts had been fragmented. There was a team of lobbyists working for Invista, one for Georgia-Pacific, and another for the oil refining division, Flint Hills Resources. This fragmentation reflected Koch’s commitment to maintain its corporate veil, organizing its various divisions under a legal structure that categorized each division as an independent business. This structure helped Koch contain its legal liabilities, but it also hobbled its corporate lobbying efforts. Because Invista and Flint Hills didn’t coordinate closely, they might be duplicating their efforts or sending mixed messages to lawmakers. In 2008, Koch Industries consolidated its lobbying operations into a single, newly formed company called Koch Companies Public Sector. Now all of Koch’s lobbyists worked side by side, sharing information and strategies as they worked toward common goals.