Supplier Business Quotes

Businesses are at all times and in different ways accountable to employees, suppliers, customers and community.

The essence of Relationship Selling is when we convert a customer into a client and the seller gains the status of a supplier. It is really a process of forming a business partnership, where each partner not only transacts business but is interdependent in a mutually beneficial relationship, with a common growth objective. Sales can be:    B2B (Business to Business)  B2C (Business to Consumer)  Direct or indirect selling

Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don't need to impress people I don't like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don't have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won't last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don't have to seem them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world.

In dated Industrial models, products and services flowed linearly from suppliers to manufacturers to distributors to consumers. But in a permaculture economy model, people and businesses are involved in a value web whereby they may each hold more than one of those roles and each entities role is more hybridized. It’s about cyclical co-creation and cyclical co-consumption.

My appreciation of the power of hospitality and my desire to harness it have been the greatest contributors to whatever success my restaurants and businesses have had. I’ve learned how crucially important it is to put hospitality to work, first for the people who work for me and subsequently for all the other people and stakeholders who are in any way affected by our business—in descending order, our guests, community, suppliers, and investors. I call this way of setting priorities “enlightened hospitality.” It stands some more traditional business approaches on their head, but it’s the foundation of every business decision and every success we’ve had.

The Model Will Provide Consistent Value to Your Customers, Employees, Suppliers, and Lenders, Beyond What They Expect

Why would you ever do business with me? Why would you ever change from your existing supplier? They’re great!

Regardless of whether you’re trying to convince someone to support your favorite charity, eat healthier, switch their business from their current supplier to your firm, or just adopt a new way of working at the office, one of the most common explanations for lack of persuasive success is also one of the simplest: People recognize they should change their behavior, but they just don’t feel like doing it right now.

In North America, some companies rotated purchasing agents so they didn’t get buddy-buddy with suppliers, for fear of kickbacks. I found company relationships in Japan to be so close that a Japanese manufacturer might have only one supplier for any one part.

Digital locks are roach motels: copyrighted works check in, but they don’t check out. Creators and investors lose control of their business—they become commodity suppliers for a distribution channel that calls all the shots. Anti-circumvention isn’t copyright protection: it’s middleman protection.

Recently, as I was teaching this concept, a CFO—who deals with numbers all the time—came up to me and said, “This is fascinating! I’ve always seen trust as a nice thing to have, but I never, ever, thought of it in terms of its impact on economics and speed. Now that you’ve pointed it out, I can see it everywhere I turn. “For example, we have one supplier in whom we have complete trust. Everything happens fast with this group, and the relationship hardly costs us anything to maintain. But with another supplier, we have very little trust. It takes forever to get anything done, and it costs us a lot of time and effort to support the relationship. And that’s costing us money—too much money!” This CFO was amazed when everything suddenly fell into place in his mind. Even though he was a “numbers” guy, he had not connected the dots with regard to trust. Once he saw it, everything suddenly made sense. He could immediately see how trust was affecting everything in the organization, and how robust and powerful the idea of the relationship between trust, speed, and cost was for analyzing what was happening in his business and for taking steps to significantly increase profitable growth.

Mass production was aimed at new sources of demand in the early twentieth century’s first mass consumers. Ford was clear on this point: “Mass production begins in the perception of a public need.”73 Supply and demand were linked effects of the new “conditions of existence” that defined the lives of my great-grandparents Sophie and Max and other travelers in the first modernity. Ford’s invention deepened the reciprocities between capitalism and these populations. In contrast, Google’s inventions destroyed the reciprocities of its original social contract with users. The role of the behavioral value reinvestment cycle that had once aligned Google with its users changed dramatically. Instead of deepening the unity of supply and demand with its populations, Google chose to reinvent its business around the burgeoning demand of advertisers eager to squeeze and scrape online behavior by any available means in the competition for market advantage. In the new operation, users were no longer ends in themselves but rather became the means to others’ ends. Reinvestment in user services became the method for attracting behavioral surplus, and users became the unwitting suppliers of raw material for a larger cycle of revenue generation.

The shareholders who own the businesses in this book have other, nonfinancial priorities in addition to their financial objectives. Not that they don’t want to earn a good return on their investment, but it’s not their only goal, or even necessarily their paramount goal. They’re also interested in being great at what they do, creating a great place to work, providing great service to customers, having great relationships with their suppliers, making great contributions to the communities they live and work in, and finding great ways to lead their lives. They’ve learned, moreover, that to excel in all those things, they have to keep ownership and control inside the company and, in many cases, place significant limits on how much and how fast they grow. The wealth they’ve created, though substantial, has been a byproduct of success in these other areas. I call them small giants.

Overnight, however, he apparently had second thoughts, or did some textbook reading on his own, and at the next meeting he turned to me as the first order of business. “On the black paint,” he said, “you were right about the advantages and I was wrong.” He handed me a quarter. It was a rare win. So Kelly approved my idea of painting the airplane black, and by the time our first prototype rolled out the airplane became known as the Blackbird. Our supplier, Titanium Metals Corporation, had only limited reserves of the precious alloy, so the CIA conducted a worldwide search and, using third parties and dummy companies, managed to unobtrusively purchase the base metal from one of the world’s leading exporters—the Soviet Union. The Russians never had an inkling of how they were actually contributing to the creation of the airplane being rushed into construction to spy on their homeland.

understand that there are rules to follow if you are to win: 1. The model will provide consistent value to your customers, employees, suppliers, and lenders, beyond what they expect. 2. The model will be operated by people with the lowest possible level of skill. 3. The model will stand out as a place of impeccable order. 4. All work in the model will be documented in Operations Manuals. 5. The model will provide a uniformly predictable service to the customer. 6. The model will utilize a uniform color, dress, and facilities code.

Michael was wrapping up a speech. He said: Spectra is a company run by people, and we take your health very seriously. As our business relies on overseas suppliers, especially those in southern China, we are taking precautionary measures with this announcement of Shen Fever. We are working in accordance with the New York State Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the next few weeks, we will keep you abreast of new updates for keeping you safe. We would appreciate your cooperation and compliance.

Forget the contracting end,” says Jocelyn. “It’s a sideshow. The main deal is the prison. Prisons used to be about punishment, and then reform and penitence, and then keeping dangerous offenders inside. Then, for quite a few decades, they were about crowd control – penning up the young, aggressive, marginalized guys to keep them off the streets. And then, when they started to be run as private businesses, they were about the profit margins for the prepackaged jail-meal suppliers, and the hired guards and so forth.” Stan nods; he understands all of this.

In the mid-1980s, Congress authorized the creation of the US Sentencing Commission to examine prison terms and codify norms to correct the arbitrary punishments meted out by unaccountable judges. First, in 1989 the commission’s guidelines for individuals went into effect, establishing a point system for how many years of prison a convicted criminal might get, based on the seriousness of the misconduct and a person’s criminal history. In 1991, amid public and congressional outrage that sentences for white-collar criminals were too light and fines and sanctions for corporations too lenient, the Sentencing Commission expanded the concept to cover organizations. It formalized the Sporkin-era regime of offering leniency in exchange for cooperation and reform. The new rules delineated factors that could earn a culprit mercy. In levying a fine, the court should consider, the sentencing guidelines said, “any collateral consequences of conviction.” 1 “Collateral consequences” was, and remains, an ill-defined concept. How worried should the government be if a punishment causes a company to go out of business? Should regulators worry about the cashiering of innocent employees? What about customers, suppliers, or competitors? Should they fret about financial crises? From this rather innocuous mention, the little notion of collateral consequences would blossom into the great strangling vine that came to be known after the financial crisis of 2008 by its shorthand: “too big to jail.” Prosecutors and regulators were crippled by the idea that the government could not criminally sanction some companies—particularly giant banks—for fear that they would collapse, causing serious problems for financial markets or the economy.

great. This is a good description of Rovio, which was around for six years and underwent layoffs before the “instant” success of the Angry Birds video game franchise. In the case of the Five Guys restaurant chain, the founders spent fifteen years tweaking their original handful of restaurants in Virginia, finding the right bun bakery, the right number of times to shake the french fries before serving, how best to assemble a burger, and where to source their potatoes before expanding nationwide. Most businesses require a complex network of relationships to function, and these relationships take time to build. In many instances you have to be around for a few years to receive consistent recognition. It takes time to develop connections with investors, suppliers, and vendors. And it takes time for staff and founders to gain effectiveness in their roles and become a strong team.* So, yes, the bar is high when you want to start a company. You’ll have the chance to work on something you own and care about from day to day. You’ll be 100 percent engaged and motivated, and doing something you believe in. You can lead an integrated life, as opposed to a compartmentalized one in which you play a role in an office and then try to forget about it when you get home. You can define an organization, not the other way around. But even if you quit your job, hunker down for years, work hard for uncertain reward, and ask everyone you know for help, there’s still a great chance that your new business will not succeed. Over 50 percent of companies fail within their first three years.2 There’s a quote I like from an unknown source: “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.

that speaks to the little secret behind the relationships that small giants have with their suppliers and customers. It’s generally not the people at the top of the organization who create the intimate bonds. It’s the managers and employees who do the work of the business day in and day out. They are the ones who convey the spirit of the company to the outside world. Accordingly, they are the company’s first priority—which, from one perspective, is ironic. For all the extraordinary service and enlightened hospitality that the small giants offer, what really sets them apart is their belief that the customer comes second.

Cook reduced the number of Apple’s key suppliers from a hundred to twenty-four, forced them to cut better deals to keep the business, convinced many to locate next to Apple’s plants, and closed ten of the company’s nineteen warehouses. By reducing the places where inventory could pile up, he reduced inventory. Jobs had cut inventory from two months’ worth of product down to one by early 1998. By September of that year, Cook had gotten it down to six days. By the following September, it was down to an amazing two days’ worth. In addition, he cut the production process for making an Apple computer from four months to two. All of this not only saved money, it also allowed each new computer to have the very latest components available.

Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group talked about businesses having soul. He believed soul was what made a business great, or even worth doing at all. “A business without soul is not something I’m interested in working at,” he said. He suggested that the soul of a business grew out of the relationships a company developed as it went along. “Soul can’t exist unless you have active, meaningful dialogue with stakeholders: employees, customers, the community, suppliers, and investors. When you launch a business, your job as the entrepreneur is to say, ‘Here’s a value proposition that I believe in. Here’s where I’m coming from. This is my point of view.’ At first, it’s a monologue. Gradually it becomes a dialogue and then a real conversation.

Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don’t need to impress people I don’t like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don’t have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won’t last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don’t have to see them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world.

I also worried about her morale. During Linda’s first season working for Amazon, she had seen up close the vast volume of crap Americans were buying and felt disgusted. That experience had planted a seed of disenchantment. After she left the warehouse, it continued to grow. When she had downsized from a large RV to a minuscule trailer, Linda had also been reading about minimalism and the tiny house movement. She had done a lot of thinking about consumer culture and about how much garbage people cram into their short lives. I wondered where all those thoughts would lead. Linda was still grappling with them. Weeks later, after starting work in Kentucky, she would post the following message on Facebook and also text it directly to me: Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don’t need to impress people I don’t like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don’t have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won’t last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don’t have to see them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world. After sending that, she continued: Radical I know, but this is what goes through my head when I’m at work. There is nothing in that warehouse of substance. It enslaved the buyers who use their credit to purchase that shit. Keeps them in jobs they hate to pay their debts. It’s really depressing to be there. Linda added that she was coping

Wal-Mart can't seem to grasp an essential fact: in 2006, the company has exactly the reputation it has earned. No, we don't give the company adequate credit for low prices. But the broken covenant Sam Walton had with how to treat store employees, the relentless pressure that hollows out companies and dilutes the quality of their products, the bullying of suppliers and communities, the corrosive secrecy, the way Wal-Mart has changed our own perception of price and quality, of value and durability--none of these is imaginary, or trivial, or easily changed with a fresh set of bullet points, an impassioned speech, and a website heavy with "Wal-Mart facts". If Wal-Mart does in fact double the gas mileage of its truck fleet, and thereby double the gas mileage of every long-haul truck in America, that will be huge. It will change gas consumption in the United States in a single stroke. But it hasn't happened yet. And even if it does, it will not make Wal-Mart a good company or a good corporate partner or a good corporate citizen.

The right Brand Promise isn’t always obvious. Naomi Simson — founder of one of the fastest-growing companies in Australia, RedBalloon — was sure she knew what to promise customers who want to give experiences such as hot air balloon rides as gifts, rather than flowers and chocolates. Her promises included an easy-to-use website for choosing one of over 2,000 experiences; recognizable packaging and branding (think Tiffany blue, only in red); and onsite support. It wasn’t until a friend and client mentioned that she was using the website as a source of ideas — but buying the experiences directly from the vendors — that Simson had an “Aha!” moment. She realized that other customers might be doing the same thing, assuming that RedBalloon must be marking up the price of the experiences to cover the costs of the website, packaging, and onsite support. To grow the business, she promised customers they would pay no more for the experiences they bought through RedBalloon than for those purchased directly from the suppliers; otherwise, customers would get 100% of their fee refunded. The company calls this promise, which is technically a pricing guarantee, a “100% Pleasure Guarantee,” to fit its brand.

She buys only the best couverture, from a fair trade supplier down near Marseille, and pays for it all in cash. A dozen blocks of each kind, to begin with, she says; but I already know from her eager response that a dozen blocks will not be enough. She used to make all her own stock, so she tells me, and though I'll admit I didn't quite believe it at first, the way she has thrown herself back into the business tells me that she was not exaggerating. The process is deft and peculiarly therapeutic to watch. First comes the melting and tempering of the raw couverture: the process that enables it to leave its crystalline state and take on the glossy, malleable form necessary to make the chocolate truffles. She does it all on a granite slab, spreading out the melted chocolate like silk and gathering it back toward her using a spatula. Then it goes back into the warm copper, the process to be repeated until she declares it done. She rarely uses the sugar thermometer. She has been making chocolates for so long, she tells me, that she can simply sense when the correct temperature has been reached. I believe her; certainly over the past three days I have been watching her, she has never produced a less than flawless batch. During that time I have learned to observe with a critical eye: to check for streaks in the finished product; for the unappealing pale bloom that denotes incorrectly tempered chocolate; for the high gloss and sharp snap that are the indicators of good-quality work.

History favors the bold. Compensation favors the meek. As a Fortune 500 company CEO, you’re better off taking the path often traveled and staying the course. Big companies may have more assets to innovate with, but they rarely take big risks or innovate at the cost of cannibalizing a current business. Neither would they chance alienating suppliers or investors. They play not to lose, and shareholders reward them for it—until those shareholders walk and buy Amazon stock. Most boards ask management: “How can we build the greatest advantage for the least amount of capital/investment?” Amazon reverses the question: “What can we do that gives us an advantage that’s hugely expensive, and that no one else can afford?” Why? Because Amazon has access to capital with lower return expectations than peers. Reducing shipping times from two days to one day? That will require billions. Amazon will have to build smart warehouses near cities, where real estate and labor are expensive. By any conventional measure, it would be a huge investment for a marginal return. But for Amazon, it’s all kinds of perfect. Why? Because Macy’s, Sears, and Walmart can’t afford to spend billions getting the delivery times of their relatively small online businesses down from two days to one. Consumers love it, and competitors stand flaccid on the sidelines. In 2015, Amazon spent $7 billion on shipping fees, a net shipping loss of $5 billion, and overall profits of $2.4 billion. Crazy, no? No. Amazon is going underwater with the world’s largest oxygen tank, forcing other retailers to follow it, match its prices, and deal with changed customer delivery expectations. The difference is other retailers have just the air in their lungs and are drowning. Amazon will surface and have the ocean of retail largely to itself.

Unconditional blame is the tendency to explain all difficulties exclusively as the consequence of forces beyond your influence, to see yourself as an absolute victim of external circumstances. Every person suffers the impact of factors beyond his control, so we are all, in a sense, victims. We are not, however, absolute victims. We have the ability to respond to our circumstances and influence how they affect us. In contrast, the unconditional blamer defines his victim-identity by his helplessness, disowning any power to manage his life and assigning causality only to that which is beyond his control. Unconditional blamers believe that their problems are always someone else’s fault, and that there’s nothing they could have done to prevent them. Consequently, they believe that there’s nothing they should do to address them. Unconditional blamers feel innocent, unfairly burdened by others who do things they “shouldn’t” do because of maliciousness or stupidity. According to the unconditional blamer, these others “ought” to fix the problems they created. Blamers live in a state of self-righteous indignation, trying to control people around them with their accusations and angry demands. What the unconditional blamer does not see is that in order to claim innocence, he has to relinquish his power. If he is not part of the problem, he cannot be part of the solution. In fact, rather than being the main character of his life, the blamer is a spectator. Watching his own suffering from the sidelines, he feels “safe” because his misery is always somebody else’s fault. Blame is a tranquilizer. It soothes the blamer, sheltering him from accountability for his life. But like any drug, its soothing effect quickly turns sour, miring him in resignation and resentment. In order to avoid anxiety and guilt, the blamer must disown his freedom and power and see himself as a plaything of others. The blamer feels victimized at work. His job is fraught with letdowns, betrayals, disappointments, and resentments. He feels that he is expected to fix problems he didn’t create, yet his efforts are never recognized. So he shields himself with justifications. Breakdowns are never his fault, nor are solutions his responsibility. He is not accountable because it is always other people who failed to do what they should have done. Managers don’t give him direction as they should, employees don’t support him as they should, colleagues don’t cooperate with him as they should, customers demand much more than they should, suppliers don’t respond as they should, senior executives don’t lead the organization as they should, administration systems don’t work as they should—the whole company is a mess. In addition, the economy is weak, the job market tough, the taxes confiscatory, the regulations crippling, the interest rates exorbitant, and the competition fierce (especially because of those evil foreigners who pay unfairly low wages). And if it weren’t difficult enough to survive in this environment, everybody demands extraordinary results. The blamer never tires of reciting his tune, “Life is not fair!

Performance measure. Throughout this book, the term performance measure refers to an indicator used by management to measure, report, and improve performance. Performance measures are classed as key result indicators, result indicators, performance indicators, or key performance indicators. Critical success factors (CSFs). CSFs are the list of issues or aspects of organizational performance that determine ongoing health, vitality, and wellbeing. Normally there are between five and eight CSFs in any organization. Success factors. A list of 30 or so issues or aspects of organizational performance that management knows are important in order to perform well in any given sector/ industry. Some of these success factors are much more important; these are known as critical success factors. Balanced scorecard. A term first introduced by Kaplan and Norton describing how you need to measure performance in a more holistic way. You need to see an organization’s performance in a number of different perspectives. For the purposes of this book, there are six perspectives in a balanced scorecard (see Exhibit 1.7). Oracles and young guns. In an organization, oracles are those gray-haired individuals who have seen it all before. They are often considered to be slow, ponderous, and, quite frankly, a nuisance by the new management. Often they are retired early or made redundant only to be rehired as contractors at twice their previous salary when management realizes they have lost too much institutional knowledge. Their considered pace is often a reflection that they can see that an exercise is futile because it has failed twice before. The young guns are fearless and precocious leaders of the future who are not afraid to go where angels fear to tread. These staff members have not yet achieved management positions. The mixing of the oracles and young guns during a KPI project benefits both parties and the organization. The young guns learn much and the oracles rediscover their energy being around these live wires. Empowerment. For the purposes of this book, empowerment is an outcome of a process that matches competencies, skills, and motivations with the required level of autonomy and responsibility in the workplace. Senior management team (SMT). The team comprised of the CEO and all direct reports. Better practice. The efficient and effective way management and staff undertake business activities in all key processes: leadership, planning, customers, suppliers, community relations, production and supply of products and services, employee wellbeing, and so forth. Best practice. A commonly misused term, especially because what is best practice for one organization may not be best practice for another, albeit they are in the same sector. Best practice is where better practices, when effectively linked together, lead to sustainable world-class outcomes in quality, customer service, flexibility, timeliness, innovation, cost, and competitiveness. Best-practice organizations commonly use the latest time-saving technologies, always focus on the 80/20, are members of quality management and continuous improvement professional bodies, and utilize benchmarking. Exhibit 1.10 shows the contents of the toolkit used by best-practice organizations to achieve world-class performance. EXHIBIT 1.10 Best-Practice Toolkit Benchmarking. An ongoing, systematic process to search for international better practices, compare against them, and then introduce them, modified where necessary, into your organization. Benchmarking may be focused on products, services, business practices, and processes of recognized leading organizations.

His other deals had tended to bring together companies from the same industry horizontally, or merge customers with their suppliers vertically, or bring together firms involved in different steps of manufacturing or marketing: this was known as a circular merger. But the merger that had produced C-T-R was, as Flint put it when he looked back on it later in his career, neither horizontal nor vertical nor circular. In fact, it was so uncommon as to almost justify the description sui generis—in a class by itself. Flint soon turned out to be right yet again. The C-T-R merger was a success from the outset. Flint was careful to ensure that a gospel of technical excellence and constant improvement of the new organization’s products was fundamental to its business philosophy.

The electronics effort faced even greater challenges. To launch that category, David Risher tapped a Dartmouth alum named Chris Payne who had previously worked on Amazon’s DVD store. Like Miller, Payne had to plead with suppliers—in this case, Asian consumer-electronics companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung. He quickly hit a wall. The Japanese electronics giants viewed Internet sellers like Amazon as sketchy discounters. They also had big-box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City whispering in their ears and asking them to take a pass on Amazon. There were middlemen distributors, like Ingram Electronics, but they offered a limited selection. Bezos deployed Doerr to talk to Howard Stringer at Sony America, but he got nowhere. So Payne had to turn to the secondary distributors—jobbers that exist in an unsanctioned, though not illegal, gray market. Randy Miller, a retail finance director who came to Amazon from Eddie Bauer, equates it to buying from the trunk of someone’s car in a dark alley. “It was not a sustainable inventory model, but if you are desperate to have particular products on your site or in your store, you do what you need to do,” he says. Buying through these murky middlemen got Payne and his fledgling electronics team part of the way toward stocking Amazon’s virtual shelves. But Bezos was unimpressed with the selection and grumpily compared it to shopping in a Russian supermarket during the years of Communist rule. It would take Amazon years to generate enough sales to sway the big Asian brands. For now, the electronics store was sparely furnished. Bezos had asked to see $100 million in electronics sales for the 1999 holiday season; Payne and his crew got about two-thirds of the way there. Amazon officially announced the new toy and electronics stores that summer, and in September, the company held a press event at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan to promote the new categories. Someone had the idea that the tables in the conference room at the Sheraton should have piles of merchandise representing all the new categories, to reinforce the idea of broad selection. Bezos loved it, but when he walked into the room the night before the event, he threw a tantrum: he didn’t think the piles were large enough. “Do you want to hand this business to our competitors?” he barked into his cell phone at his underlings. “This is pathetic!” Harrison Miller, Chris Payne, and their colleagues fanned out that night across Manhattan to various stores, splurging on random products and stuffing them in the trunks of taxicabs. Miller spent a thousand dollars alone at a Toys “R” Us in Herald Square. Payne maxed out his personal credit card and had to call his wife in Seattle to tell her not to use the card for a few days. The piles of products were eventually large enough to satisfy Bezos, but the episode was an early warning. To satisfy customers and their own demanding boss during the upcoming holiday, Amazon executives were going to have to substitute artifice and improvisation for truly comprehensive selection.

Department will develop and maintain guidelines for disclosure of gifts or services received from customers, suppliers, competitors or business partners. Employees should attempt to avoid conflicts of interest and employees who believe a conflict of interest may exist should promptly notify the Legal Department. The Legal Department will consider the facts and circumstances of the situation to decide whether corrective or mitigating action is appropriate

When we’re late to the party, we’re stuck reacting to, rather than leading, our prospects. Their initial opinions may be already formed. They’ve probably begun to define their evaluation process. Instead of being perceived as a value creator or problem solver, we’re now selling uphill, and already being viewed only as a potential supplier or vendor (I hate that word).

Soul can’t exist unless you have active, meaningful dialogue with stakeholders: employees, customers, the community, suppliers, and investors. When you launch a business, your job as the entrepreneur is to say, ‘Here’s a value proposition that I believe in. Here’s where I’m coming from. This is my point of view.’ At first, it’s a monologue. Gradually it becomes a dialogue and then a real conversation. Like breaking in a baseball glove. You can’t will a baseball glove to be broken in; you have to use it. Well, you have to use a new business, too. You have to break it in. If you move on to the next thing too quickly, it will never develop its soul. Look what happens when a new restaurant opens. Everyone rushes in to see it, and it’s invariably awkward because it hasn’t yet developed soul. That takes time to emerge, and you have to work at it constantly.

I visited with every customer it made sense to see. I sought to discover what they liked and disliked about their current situation and suppliers, and tried to position my company as a better partner that was easier to work with, more flexible, and more eager to meet their needs. I asked lots of questions, toured their facilities, and talked about improvements to our product and ways we were willing to customize our service. It didn’t take long to learn that it was a lot more fun calling on business owners and senior executives than purchasing agents,

1. Stop blaming China We taught them how to do what they are doing 2. Take responsibility – purchase consciously, purchase less, don’t go for lowest possible price 3. Follow good business ethics, it’s a two way street 4. Create global partnerships in a global village, create a true Win-Win situation with your supplier, consider the supplier a partner (what a concept!) 5. End the Price Pressure: Boycott Walmart & Club-buying stores, not China. Stop buying what you don’t need!

Chinese family businesses instinctively thought of ways of hiding income from the tax collector. The situation is quite different in Japan, where the family is weaker and individuals are pulled in different directions by the various vertical authority structures standing above them. The entire Japanese nation, with the emperor at the top, is, in a sense, the ie of all ies, and calls forth a degree of moral obligation and emotional attachment that the Chinese emperor never enjoyed. Unlike the Japanese, the Chinese have had less of a we-against-them attitude toward outsiders and are much more likely to identify with family, lineage, or region as with nation. The dark side to the Japanese sense of nationalism and proclivity to trust one another is their lack of trust for people who are not Japanese. The problems faced by non-Japanese living in Japan, such as the sizable Korean community, have been widely noted. Distrust of non-Japanese is also evident in the practices of many Japanese multinationals operating in other countries. While aspects of the Japanese lean manufacturing system have been imported with great success into the United States, Japanese transplants have been much less successful integrating into local American supplier networks. Japanese auto companies building assembly plants in the United States, for example, have tended to bring over with them the suppliers in their network organizations from Japan. According to one study, some ninety percent of the parts for Japanese cars assembled in America come from Japan or from subsidiaries of Japanese companies in America.43 This is perhaps predictable given the cultural differences between the Japanese assembler and the American subcontractor but has understandably led to hard feelings between the two. To take another example, while Japanese multinationals have hired a great number of native executives to run their overseas businesses, these people are seldom treated like executives at the same level in Japan. An American working for a subdivision of a Japanese company in the United States might aspire to rise within that organization but is very unlikely to be asked to move to Tokyo or even to a higher post outside the United States.44 There are exceptions. Sony America, for example, with its largely American staff, is highly autonomous and often influences its parent in Japan. But by and large, the Japanese radius of trust can be fully extended only to other Japanese.

In most southern, and perhaps most most northern, states a man with political ambition-and some political prospects-can always find a disgruntled or hopeful contractor or supplier willing to help finance a campaign. And these businessmen are often not concerned about political ideology: they want to do business with a winner, be he right, left, center, or monarchist.

As with Japanese keiretsu, the member firms in a Korean chaebol own shares in each other and tend to collaborate with each other on what is often a nonprice basis. The Korean chaebol differs from the Japanese prewar zaibatsu or postwar keiretsu, however, in a number of significant ways. First and perhaps most important, Korean network organizations were not centered around a private bank or other financial institution in the way the Japanese keiretsu are.8 This is because Korean commercial banks were all state owned until their privatization in the early 1970s, while Korean industrial firms were prohibited by law from acquiring more than an eight percent equity stake in any bank. The large Japanese city banks that were at the core of the postwar keiretsu worked closely with the Finance Ministry, of course, through the process of overloaning (i.e., providing subsidized credit), but the Korean chaebol were controlled by the government in a much more direct way through the latter’s ownership of the banking system. Thus, the networks that emerged more or less spontaneously in Japan were created much more deliberately as the result of government policy in Korea. A second difference is that the Korean chaebol resemble the Japanese intermarket keiretsu more than the vertical ones (see p. 197). That is, each of the large chaebol groups has holdings in very different sectors, from heavy manufacturing and electronics to textiles, insurance, and retail. As Korean manufacturers grew and branched out into related businesses, they started to pull suppliers and subcontractors into their networks. But these relationships resembled simple vertical integration more than the relational contracting that links Japanese suppliers with assemblers. The elaborate multitiered supplier networks of a Japanese parent firm like Toyota do not have ready counterparts in Korea.9

Anything that restricts entry works in the interests of the suppliers and against the interests of the buyers; so, it is not at all surprising that businesses lobby government aggressively for assistance in retarding entry with patents, copyrights, zoning laws, occupational licensing, environmental regulations, etc

If the Mac was so great, why did it lose? Cost, again. Microsoft concentrated on the software business and unleashed a swarm of cheap component suppliers on Apple hardware. It did not help, either, that suits took over during a critical period. (And it hasn't lost yet. If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.)

Wal-Mart is so large, its reach so great, that it has created an ecosystem in which its suppliers and competitors, and their suppliers and competitors, and their customers, all operate. Wal-Mart sets the metabolism, it sets the rules, of that ecosystem. Wal-Mart has inexorably changed our expectations as shoppers—and the Wal-Mart effect also extends to consumers who never shop at Wal-Mart. Likewise, Wal-Mart has reshaped the companies that supply it—and it has also reset the pace and the competitive landscape even for companies that try to do business outside the Wal-Mart ecosystem.

Outsourcing requires a tight integration of suppliers, making sure that all pieces arrive just in time. Therefore, when some suppliers were unable to deliver certain basic components like capacitors and flash memory, Compaq's network was paralyzed. The company was looking at 600,000 to 700,000 unfilled orders in handheld devices. The $499 Pocket PCs were selling for $700 to $800 at auctions on eBay and Amazon.com. Cisco experienced a different but equally damaging problem: When orders dried up, Cisco neglected to turn off its supply chain, resulting in a 300 percent ballooning of its raw materials inventory. The final numbers are frightening: The aggregate market value loss between March 2000 and March 2001 of the twelve major companies that adopted outsourcing-Cisco, Dell, Compaq, Gateway, Apple, IBM, Lucent, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, and Nortel-exceeded $1.2 trillion. The painful experience of these companies and their investors is a vivid demonstration of the consequences of ignoring network effects. A me attitude, where the company's immediate financial balance is the only factor, limits network thinking. Not understanding how the actions of one node affect other nodes easily cripples whole segments of the network. Experts agree that such rippling losses are not an inevitable downside of the network economy. Rather, these companies failed because they outsourced their manufacturing without fully understanding the changes required in their business models. Hierarchical thinking does not fit a network economy. In traditional organizations, rapid shifts can be made within the organization, with any resulting losses being offset by gains in other parts of the hierarchy. In a network economy each node must be profitable. Failing to understand this, the big players of the network game exposed themselves to the risks of connectedness without benefiting from its advantages. When problems arose, they failed to make the right, tough decisions, such as shutting down the supply line in Cisco's case, and got into even bigger trouble. At both the macro- and the microeconomic level, the network economy is here to stay. Despite some high-profile losses, outsourcing will be increasingly common. Financial interdependencies, ignoring national and continental boundaries, will only be strengthened with globalization. A revolution in management is in the making. It will take a new, network-oriented view of the economy and an understanding of the consequences of interconnectedness to smooth the way.

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.

Consider, for example, IBM’s decision to outsource the microprocessor for its PC business to Intel, and its operating system to Microsoft. IBM made these decisions in the early 1980s in order to focus on what it did best—designing, assembling, and marketing computer systems. Given its history, these choices made perfect sense. Component suppliers to IBM historically had lived a miserable, profit-free existence, and the business press widely praised IBM’s decision to out-source these components of its PC. It dramatically reduced the cost and time required for development and launch. And yet in the process of outsourcing what it did not perceive to be core to the new business, IBM put into business the two companies that subsequently captured most of the profit in the industry. How could IBM have known in advance that such a sensible decision would prove so costly? More broadly, how can any executive who is launching a new-growth business, as IBM was doing with its PC division in the early 1980s, know which value-added activities are those in which future competence needs to be mastered and kept inside? 2

As a business owner don't think your limitations, think business; it's all about business.

Elite performers build human connections. Business is about relationships. Nothing is more important than building emotional engagement with your teammates, with your suppliers and with your customers.

Canceled checks Along with your bank statement, you will most likely receive all the checks you wrote that were cashed during that month. You should keep these in case you ever have to prove to a supplier that you paid an invoice. The bank stamp on the back of the check carries information as to when and where the check was cashed.

Consider the average worker in almost any urban industrialized city. The alarm rings at six forty-five and our workingman or -woman is up and at it. Check the phone. Shower. Dress in the professional uniform—suits for some, coveralls for others, scrubs for the medical professionals, jeans and T-shirts for construction workers. Breakfast, if there’s time. Grab commuter mug and briefcase (or lunch box). Hop in the car for the daily punishment called rush hour or get on a bus or train packed crushingly tight. On the job from nine to five (or longer). Deal with the boss. Deal with the coworker sent by the devil to rub you the wrong way. Deal with suppliers. Deal with clients/customers/patients. E-mails pile up. Act busy. Scroll through social media feeds. Hide mistakes. Smile when handed impossible deadlines. Give a sigh of relief when the ax known as “restructuring” or “downsizing”—or just plain getting laid off—falls on other heads. Shoulder the added workload. Watch the clock. Argue with your conscience but agree with the boss. Smile again. Five o’clock. Back in the car or on the bus or train for the evening commute. Home. Act human with your partner, kids, or roommates. Cook. Post a picture of your dinner online. Eat. Watch an episode of your favorite show. Answer one last e-mail. Bed. Eight hours of blessed oblivion—if we’re lucky.

I asked our business leaders in the depths of the recession to begin working with their suppliers to prepare for the recovery. This seemed impossible to leaders at the time, since many economists and some of my staff were predicting that we’d see an L-shaped recovery—one that was essentially nonexistent. Our sales, according to this view, would never rebound to their prerecession levels. I insisted that recovery would come, just as it always had in the past. And when it did, our short-cycle businesses had to make sure they were first in line for supplies. Our leaders began these conversations, working with suppliers up front to lock in first priority over our competitors when the recovery came. This represented independent thinking on our part—our competitors weren’t doing this. We also took the opportunity to negotiate better payment terms, price reductions, and long-term deals, which were all easier to obtain during a recession. As a result of this effort, we got a big lift as the economy improved, outpacing our competitors in our sales growth, to the delight of our investors.

Executives at Walmart did just as Welch had suggested, disciplining themselves and their suppliers to work on “price-based costing” instead of “cost-based pricing.” By ruthlessly rethinking, reengineering, and reinventing every little decision in every link of their supply chain, Sam Walton and his team created innovative new business models that delivered customers a much better deal.

When a company is growing it is more likely to acknowledge the importance of its vendors and suppliers and treat them fairly. In return, its suppliers frequently become trusted partners in uncovering new business opportunities. When a company is constantly changing and its revenues and profits are growing you’ll generally find a more engaged group of vendors and suppliers who are interested in truly being good business partners

The model will provide consistent value to your customers, employees, suppliers, and lenders, beyond what they expect. 2. The model will be operated by people with the lowest possible level of skill. 3. The model will stand out as a place of impeccable order. 4. All work in the model will be documented in Operations Manuals. 5. The model will provide a uniformly predictable service to the customer. 6. The model will utilize a uniform color, dress, and facilities code.

Pope offers some sage advice for other companies and businesses wrestling with prices that have become or are becoming commoditized and want to change: “You can’t do business today the way you were able to even a few years ago. You must have collaboration with your suppliers and your customers. This was a ‘bid and quibble’ business. We’d have a price; they’d say no. We’d go back and forth and at some point end up at a price. We don’t do that anymore. We get on the same page.

suppliers (ii) JIT layout: Employees arranged in work cells. (iii) Inventory reduction (iv) Scheduling: with a level schedule (small batches of constantly changing items so that production meets daily demand) and Kanban system. (v) Continuous job improvement b) Six Sigma: A methodology that furnished tools for the improvement of business processes. The intent is to decrease process variation and improve product quality. The objective is get as close as possible to “zero defects” with an outer limit of 3.4 defects per million. i) Elements of six sigma: (1) Customer: The definition of quality – the acceptable rate of defects – is in the mind of customer. (2) Process: When assessing a process, the company has to adopt the customer ’mindset. (3) Employee: Training 6 sigma tools (green belt, black belt and master black belt). ii) 6 sigma process and tools: (1) Phase 1: Define the nature of the problem. (2) Phase 2: Measure existing performance and start recording data and facts that provide information on the underlying causes of the problem (3) Phase 3: Analyze the information to determine the root cause to the problem (4) Phase 4: Improve the process by effecting solutions to the problem. (5) Phase 5: Control the process until the solutions become ingrained.

you can’t measure the value of what a company does by looking at how big it is and how much profit it generates. A company’s record of growth and the consistency of its financial returns may tell you something about the skill of its management team, but they say little about whether or not the business is contributing anything great and unique to the world. Instead, the small giants focus on the relationships that the company has with its various constituencies—employees, customers, community, and suppliers. Why? Partly, no doubt, because the relationships are rewarding in and of themselves, but perhaps also because their strength reveals the degree to which people are inspired by the company, and its ability to inspire them is the best measure of how they perceive the value of what the company does. If they are as passionate about it as the founders and leaders, the financial results are likely to follow.

Wars are expensive, and the burden of supporting wars falls heavily on business, both directly and by taking spending money out of the pocket of the consumer. The vast amount of money poured out to support a war is permanently gone without bringing any economic return. After you have exploded a hundred thousand dollars worth of bombs, you have nothing to show for it except a hundred thousand dollars worth of bomb craters and rubble. Thus the gains made by munitions makers and government suppliers are more than swallowed up by the losses suffered by business as a whole. Those few who do make huge fortunes from war do so not because they are businessmen operating in a free market, but because they have political pull. And their profiteering from war harms all producers (as well as the consuming public) by hurting the economy as a whole.

Lucent, Not Transparent In mid-2000, Lucent Technologies Inc. was owned by more investors than any other U.S. stock. With a market capitalization of $192.9 billion, it was the 12th-most-valuable company in America. Was that giant valuation justified? Let’s look at some basics from Lucent’s financial report for the fiscal quarter ended June 30, 2000:1 FIGURE 17-1 Lucent Technologies Inc. All numbers in millions of dollars. * Other assets, which includes goodwill. Source: Lucent quarterly financial reports (Form 10-Q). A closer reading of Lucent’s report sets alarm bells jangling like an unanswered telephone switchboard: Lucent had just bought an optical equipment supplier, Chromatis Networks, for $4.8 billion—of which $4.2 billion was “goodwill” (or cost above book value). Chromatis had 150 employees, no customers, and zero revenues, so the term “goodwill” seems inadequate; perhaps “hope chest” is more accurate. If Chromatis’s embryonic products did not work out, Lucent would have to reverse the goodwill and charge it off against future earnings. A footnote discloses that Lucent had lent $1.5 billion to purchasers of its products. Lucent was also on the hook for $350 million in guarantees for money its customers had borrowed elsewhere. The total of these “customer financings” had doubled in a year—suggesting that purchasers were running out of cash to buy Lucent’s products. What if they ran out of cash to pay their debts? Finally, Lucent treated the cost of developing new software as a “capital asset.” Rather than an asset, wasn’t that a routine business expense that should come out of earnings? CONCLUSION: In August 2001, Lucent shut down the Chromatis division after its products reportedly attracted only two customers.2 In fiscal year 2001, Lucent lost $16.2 billion; in fiscal year 2002, it lost another $11.9 billion. Included in those losses were $3.5 billion in “provisions for bad debts and customer financings,” $4.1 billion in “impairment charges related to goodwill,” and $362 million in charges “related to capitalized software.” Lucent’s stock, at $51.062 on June 30, 2000, finished 2002 at $1.26—a loss of nearly $190 billion in market value in two-and-a-half years.

Everything in life requires investment and time is one of the main investments. Even if you have your own business and are able to work from home, you must invest your time in searching for suppliers, clients and opportunities. You will also invest more money to acquire all those things; Money to catch planes for meetings of one hour that can determine a future investment, money to pay for the lunch you don’t have time to cook or for the best doctors that will take care of your health when you can’t for lack of enough time or discipline. You always invest in health, money, food, friends, personal hobbies and happiness, and you lose or win depending on how well you can coordinate everything at the same time. Sometimes you invest too much and other times too less, but you always reap what you sow.

Texting and social media aren’t a good substitute for everything; they can’t fill in for a needed heart transplant, or if you are on the verge of not having enough food to eat. But it’s remarkable how many of our daily activities they can substitute for, as evidenced by the big time shift to those activities in so many of our daily lives. And that is the great unheralded virtue of the mobile internet. It’s not only fun but also a kind of near-universal consumption substitute that constrains monopoly power in many invisible ways. You call it addiction; I call it trust-busting. These days, virtually all suppliers, whether they know it or not, are competing with Facebook, social media, and texting. That’s a hard battle to win.

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After a time, the ads for POWER products grew less prominent in The Final Call; it seems that many who enjoyed Minister Farrakhan’s speeches continued to brush their teeth with Crest. That the POWER campaign sputtered said something about the difficulty that faced any black business—the barriers to entry, the lack of finance, the leg up that your competitors possessed after having kept you out of the game for over three hundred years. But I suspected that it also reflected the inevitable tension that arose when Minister Farrakhan’s message was reduced to the mundane realities of buying toothpaste. I tried to imagine POWER’s product manager looking over his sales projections. He might briefly wonder whether it made sense to distribute the brand in national supermarket chains where blacks preferred to shop. If he rejected that idea, he might consider whether any black-owned supermarket trying to compete against the national chains could afford to give shelf space to a product guaranteed to alienate potential white customers. Would black consumers buy toothpaste through the mail? And what of the likelihood that the cheapest supplier of whatever it was that went into making toothpaste was a white man? Questions of competition, decisions forced by a market economy and majoritarian rule; issues of power. It was this unyielding reality—that whites were not simply phantoms to be expunged from our dreams but were an active and varied fact of our everyday lives—that finally explained how nationalism could thrive as an emotion and flounder as a program.

for shade sail That is true, however when you read the fine print of a warranty they are all virtually the same. I understand op is talking about a metal roof, but in conditions of asphalt the products are the same regarding quality irrespective of supplier with a warranty generally simply cobering up to 20 years. Warranty as well only cover elements, certainly not install. The cert simply gaurantees the merchandise is normally intalled to company specs. Whats even more important may be the roofers do the job warranty. If the roof structure isn't installed correctly regardless of certification it will fail and warranty will be voided. A certification is purchased, no training is done. Thus if the roofer just buys a cert to improve business it will not matter if he follows the cert. Yes they could loose the, but most obtain the cert to improve business, certainly not for just about any added warranty for the home owner. So with regard to warranty a roofers warranty on their work is considerably more important. Just about all roofs mounted incorrectly or with shotty workmanship will are unsuccessful in a calendar year. Edit: added paet about warranty only covering materials.

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.

THE REASONS YOUR CUSTOMERS BECAME your customers in the first place will also impact the success of whichever growth path you choose. If customers joined you because you were offering the lowest price, it is highly likely that they will quickly move to another supplier who can offer an even lower price than you.

Finally, I noticed the passion that the leaders brought to what the company did. They loved the subject matter, whether it be music, safety lighting, food, special effects, engineering, beer, records storage, construction, dining, or fashion. Though they were good businesspeople, they were anything but professional managers. Indeed, they were the opposite of professional managers. They had deep emotional attachments to the business, to the people who worked in it, and to its customers and suppliers—the sort of feelings that are the bane of professional management.

The shareholders who owned the businesses I was looking at had other, nonfinancial priorities in addition to their financial objectives. Not that they didn’t want to earn a good return on their investment, but it wasn’t their only goal, or even necessarily their paramount goal. They were also interested in being great at what they did, creating a great place to work, providing great service to customers, having great relationships with their suppliers, making great contributions to the communities they lived and worked in, and finding great ways to lead their lives. They’d learned, moreover, that to excel in all those things, they had to keep ownership and control inside the company and, in many cases, place significant limits on how much and how fast they grew. The wealth they created, though substantial, was a byproduct of success in these other areas.

Much ink has been spilled over whether fascism represented an emergency form of capitalism, a mechanism devised by capitalists by which the fascist state—their agent—disciplined the workforce in a way no traditional dictatorship could do. Today it is quite clear that businessmen often objected to specific aspects of fascist economic policies, sometimes with success. But fascist economic policy responded to political priorities, and not to economic rationale. Both Mussolini and Hitler tended to think that economics was amenable to a ruler’s will. Mussolini returned to the gold standard and revalued the lira at 90 to the British pound in December 1927 for reasons of national prestige, and over the objections of his own finance minister. Fascism was not the first choice of most businessmen, but most of them preferred it to the alternatives that seemed likely in the special conditions of 1922 and 1933—socialism or a dysfunctional market system. So they mostly acquiesced in the formation of a fascist regime and accommodated to its requirements of removing Jews from management and accepting onerous economic controls. In time, most German and Italian businessmen adapted well to working with fascist regimes, at least those gratified by the fruits of rearmament and labor discipline and the considerable role given to them in economic management. Mussolini’s famous corporatist economic organization, in particular, was run in practice by leading businessmen. Peter Hayes puts it succinctly: the Nazi regime and business had “converging but not identical interests.” Areas of agreement included disciplining workers, lucrative armaments contracts, and job-creation stimuli. Important areas of conflict involved government economic controls, limits on trade, and the high cost of autarky—the economic self-sufficiency by which the Nazis hoped to overcome the shortages that had lost Germany World War I. Autarky required costly substitutes—Ersatz— for such previously imported products as oil and rubber. Economic controls damaged smaller companies and those not involved in rearmament. Limits on trade created problems for companies that had formerly derived important profits from exports. The great chemical combine I. G. Farben is an excellent example: before 1933, Farben had prospered in international trade. After 1933, the company’s directors adapted to the regime’s autarky and learned to prosper mightily as the suppliers of German rearmament. The best example of the expense of import substitution was the Hermann Goering Werke, set up to make steel from the inferior ores and brown coal of Silesia. The steel manufacturers were forced to help finance this operation, to which they raised vigorous objections.

We are an Australian-owned and Australian-registered business distributing high-quality PPE from our Sydney warehouse. Our mission is to provide proper protection for Australian people and businesses at an affordable price all the time. That's why we use only trusted suppliers who have passed our most diligent quality audit processes and meet or exceed the Australian standards.

As a physics major, before getting her hands dirty in New York, she had assumed that money is printed by a nation’s central bank, from where it is distributed to commercial banks. But while this is indeed how cash is created, cash accounts for only 3 per cent of all money. What of the remaining 97 per cent? Surprise and then foreboding were the reactions of every student to whom she had explained how the missing 97 per cent was created – and by whom: not by central banks but by commercial and investment bankers. At this point, her students would ask, ‘Without access to state-sanctioned printing presses, how do private bankers create money?’ ‘Simple,’ she would reply. ‘Every time a banker approves a loan of, say, one million dollars for Jack, a typical business customer, the banker just types 1,000,000 on Jack’s bank statement. However incredible it may seem, that’s all it takes. Bankers create money by granting loans by typing in some numbers!’ The crucial thing, she would explain, is that these numbers are typed into a shared database – or ledger – to which only the bankers have access. When their customers transfer this ‘money’ between them – when Jack transfers numbers from his account to the account of a supplier, say Jill, or of a builder, say Bob, or of a worker, say Kate, and when in turn, Jill, Bob and Kate transfer their numbers on, in the same way, to others to whom they owe money – these numbers simply migrate from one cell in the database to another. For this system to be sustainable, and not merely a pyramid scheme, there is a single condition: that, somewhere down the line, the one million dollars which some banker typed into existence on Jack’s behalf results in new goods and services whose total market value exceeds one million dollars. It is from this surplus that the banker takes his interest and Jack his profit. This is what Iris was referring to as a fool’s wager when she said that bankers plundered value from the future, or when Costa had once claimed that capitalism, like science fiction, trades in future assets using fictitious currency. It is in their nature that the wealthier bankers become by creating money, the more money they tend to create. The danger of such a system, of course, is that the banks end up typing into existence sums of money vastly larger than the market value of the goods and services created as a result of Jack, Jill, Bob and Kate’s endeavours. At the point when the bankers have collectively created money sums greater than the resulting values, the present can no longer repay the future for the money it borrowed from it. The moment Jack, Jill, Bob and Kate get a whiff of this, they may demand their bank balances in cash, sensing that the total value on the bankers’ database is lower than the actual value of their customers’ assets. ‘At that point, a bank run sets in,’ Eva would tell her students, ‘and that’s when the system comes crashing down.

The Business Roundtable is a powerful and conservative representative of big business that since 1997 has reinforced the idea that ‘corporations exist principally to serve shareholders’ – in other words, that business exists to make money. The 2019 statement upended that principle, suggesting that businesses have responsibilities not just to shareholders but to customers, employees, suppliers and communities. ‘Each of our stakeholders is essential,’ the statement read. ‘We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.

Altogether, the world of autos—and their fuel suppliers—has become the arena for a new kind of competition. It is no longer just about selling cars to consumers for personal use. No longer just automakers versus automakers, no longer gasoline brands versus gasoline brands. It has become multidimensional. Gasoline-powered cars versus electric cars. Personal ownership of cars versus mobility services. And people-operated cars versus robotic driverless cars. The result is a battle among technologies and business models, and a struggle for market share. Change does happen, just not overnight

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Saeid Salari has secure lucrative business deals with car customization parts companies. He has traveled to Japan multiple times to liaise with business partners and hosted them in Arizona. Saeid Salari's custom car workshop is the exclusive supplier of Super Veloce Racing and ZERO Design bodykits in the United States.

Our clients work with us because they know that they can trust us. To ensure that business goals can be met, we search the insurance marketplace for the best suppliers of insurance for your Vehicles. You'll be sure to appreciate the value of working with us making a direct comparison of coverage, service expertise and price. Our agents, deeply involved in the industry have knowledge of the varying products and prices offered by these companies and can obtain the coverage which is most appropriate.

The campaign drew heavily from the American anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, which led to the dismantling of racial segregation programs in South Africa by targeting the one thing which—unlike protests or letters or phone calls—no government can ignore: money ... SHAC set out to make Huntington the South Africa of the corporate world. They identified banks, suppliers, customers and employees—anyone with any financial ties to the lab, from Fortune 500 companies to toilet paper suppliers. They focused on businesses with no vested interest in animal experimentation, either philosophically or economically; Huntington needed them, but they did not need Huntington.

Tracy, if you've ever seen a gauntlet on TV, or someone being initiated into a gang - it's easier for a supplier to go through that than it is to get into my network. T

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• Launched Real Time Talent, one of the most innovative workforce development initiatives in the country. It links the curriculum and training for more than four hundred thousand postsecondary students with the skill requirements of employers in the state (RealTimeTalentMN.org). • Created the Business Bridge, which facilitates connections between the procurement functions of large corporations and smaller potential suppliers located in the region. As a result of this effort, participating businesses added more than $1 billion to their spending with local businesses in two years—a year ahead of their goal. • Helped to build the case for investing more aggressively in higher education. By strengthening relationships between business and higher education leaders, and using a fact-based set of findings to justify investing more than an incremental amount, a coalition organized by Itasca helped increase spending in the state by more than $250 million annually. That’s not bad for a group of people with no budget, no office, no charter, virtually no Internet presence, virtually no staff—but a huge abundance of trust.

One of my suppliers told me, “Ray, you know you aren’t in the hamburger business at all. You’re in the french-fry business. I don’t know how the livin’ hell you do it, but you’ve got the best french fries in town, and that’s what’s selling folks on your place.

The soul in customer experiences with soul is the essence of a business and we encounter the essence through each and every part, be it product, service, advertisement, interface or personal interaction we have with the organisation. For this reason the term ‘customer experience’ refers not only to the interaction our paying customers have with our products, services and brands, but also to every single interaction inside the business between colleagues, employees, suppliers, shareholders and contractors, and every interaction between those who work for a business and who are representing the business, and every person who comes into contact with the business. Every single one of us has our own personal customer experience which we project and for which we have to take full responsibility.

commerce store’s business model revolves around driving the highest volume of potential shoppers to its site, and so search ads and SEO are obviously vital channels, while marketplace businesses like Uber and eBay must divide efforts between channels for bringing in suppliers and those aimed at shoppers (or riders).

General Questions What are the business issues (service quality, product quality, speed, capacity, cost, morale, competitive landscape, impending regulations, etc.) we wish to address? What does the customer want? What measurable target condition(s) are we aiming for? Which process blocks add value or are necessary non-value-adding? How can we reduce delays between processes? How can we improve the quality of incoming work at each process? How can we reduce work effort and other expenses across the value stream? How can we create a more effective value stream (greater value to customers, better supplier relationships, higher sales conversion rates, better estimates-to-actuals, lower legal and compliance risk, etc.)? How will we monitor value stream performance?

The Most Important Strategic Decision Was to Become a Genuine Retailer The fundamental job of a retailer is to buy goods whole, cut them into pieces, and sell the pieces to the ultimate consumers. This is the most important mental construct I can impart to those of you who want to enter retailing. Most “retailers” have no idea of the formal meaning of the word. Time and again I had to remind myself just what my role in society was supposed to be. Many of the policy decisions for a retailer boil down to this: How closely should we stick to the fundamental retailing job? “Retail” comes from a medieval French verb, retailer, which means “to cut into pieces.” “Tailor” comes from the same verb. The fact is that most so-called retailers don’t want to face up to their basic job. In Pronto Markets we did everything we could to avoid retailing. We tried to shift the burden to suppliers, buying prepackaged goods, hopefully pre-price-marked (potato chips, bread, cupcakes, magazines, paperback books) so we had no role in the pricing decision. The goods were ordered, displayed, and returned by outside salespeople. To this day, supermarkets fight with the retail clerks’ union to expand their right to let core store work be done by outsiders. Whole Earth Harry’s moves into wine and health foods had taken us quite a distance into genuine retailing. In our cheese departments we were literally taking whole wheels and cutting them into pieces. I took this as an analogy for what we should do with everything we sold. Getting rid of all outside salespeople was corollary to the programs that would unfold during the next five years. In Mac the Knife, no outsiders of any sort were permitted in the store. All the work was done by employees. The closest thing to it that I see these days is Costco, which shares many features with Trader Joe’s.

We fundamentally changed the point of view of the business from customer-oriented to buyer-oriented. I put our buyers in charge of the company. From 1958 through 1976, we tried to carry what the customers asked for, given the limits of our small stores and other operational parameters. Each store manager had great latitude in what was carried and from what supplier it was ordered. There was very little central distribution except for Trader Joe’s labeled California wines or imports. Each store probably had access to ten thousand stock keeping units (SKUs), of which about three thousand were actually stocked in any given week. By the time I left in 1989, we were down to a band of 1,100 to 1,500 SKUs, all of which were delivered through a central distribution system. The managers no longer had any buying discretion and there were no “DSDs,” or direct store deliveries. And along the way not only did we drop a lot of products that our customers would have liked us to sell, even at not-outstanding prices, but we stopped cashing checks in excess of the amount of purchase, we stopped all full-case discounts, and we persistently shortened the hours. We violated every received-wisdom of retailing except one: we delivered great value, which is where most retailers fail.

I said that it was critical that the incumbent supplier recognize that there was competition and that other suppliers could do the work. Once the RFP was sent, the company noticed that the incumbent supplier's behavior improved dramatically. The supplier was on time with deliverables, their work was better than before, and they were much more responsive than in the past. My client was delighted, thanked me for my work, and asked me to send them my invoice. I stressed to them that we were not finished, though. They were surprised and reiterated that their incumbent supplier was now “behaving,” and they were so happy that they had done the RFP. I repeated that we were not finished yet and added, “You have to cut off a thumb.” They replied, “What thumb? We do not want to cut off a thumb.” I explained that we had to award some piece of business to someone else; if we gave all of the business back to the incumbent, we would only reinforce their perception that my client had no other alternatives.

Owing to this world-class cost structure and disciplined pricing policy, the Lee Group’s flip-flop business is thriving. A couple of years ago, it was paid the ultimate compliment when Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, came calling. Walmart wanted to know whether the Lee Group would consider becoming its flip-flop supplier. The Lee Group said no. The company has long sold all its flip-flops at its factory gates to local wholesalers, who take the shoes to every corner of Nigeria and into surrounding countries in West Africa. It has never had any trouble selling its entire output and didn’t see the point of disappointing long-standing distributors in order to serve Walmart. It didn’t need the business of the largest retailer in the world because it had found a more efficient production model to serve an even more price-conscious consumer. In some sense, it had outWalmarted Walmart.

And we're cheerful, too. You can count on that.' Obligingly she smiled in a neighbourly way at him. 'It will be a relief to leave Earth with its repressive legislation. We were listening OH the FM to the news about the McPhearson Act.' 'We consider it dreadful,' the adult male said. 'I have to agree with you,' Chic said. 'But what can one do?' He looked around for the mail; as always it was lost somewhere in the mass of clutter. 'One can emigrate,' the adult male simulacrum pointed out. 'Um,' Chic said absently. He had found an unexpected heap of recent-looking bills from parts suppliers; with a feeling of gloom and even terror he began to bills from parts suppliers; with a feeling of gloom and even terror he began to sort through them. Had Maury seen these? Probably. Seen them and then pushed them away immediately, out of sight. Frauenzimmer Associates functioned better if it was not reminded of such facts of life. Like a regressed neurotic, it had to hide several aspects of reality from its percept system in order to function at all. This was hardly ideal, but what really was the alternative? To be realistic would be to give up, to die. Illusion, of an infantile nature was essential for the tiny firm's survival, or at least so it seemed to him and Maury. In any case both of them had adopted this attitude. Their simulacra -- the adult ones -- disapproved of this; their cold, logical appraisal of reality stood in sharp contrast, and Chic always felt a little naked, a little embarrassed, before the simulacra; he knew he should set a better example for them. 'If you bought a jalopy and emigrated to Mars,' the adult male said, 'We could be the famnexdo for you.' 'I wouldn't need any family next-door,' Chic said, 'if I emigrated to Mars. I'd go to get away from people. 'We'd make a very good family next-door to you,' the female said. 'Look,' Chic said, 'you don't have to lecture me about your virtues. I know more than you do yourselves.' And for good reason. Their presumption, their earnest sincerity, amused but also irked him. As next-door neighbours this group of sims would be something of a nuisance, he reflected. Still, that was what emigrants wanted, in fact needed, out in the sparsely-populated colonial regions. He could appreciate that; after all, it was Frauenzimmer Associates' business to understand. A man, when he emigrated, could buy neighbours, buy the simulated presence of life, the sound and motion of human activity -- or at least its ​mechanical nearsubstitute to bolster his morale in the new environment of unfamiliar stimuli and perhaps, god forbid, no stimuli at all. And in addition to this primary psychological gain there was a practical secondary advantage as well. The famnexdo group of simulacra developed the parcel of land, tilled it and planted it, irrigated it, made it fertile, highly productive. And the yield went to the it, irrigated it, made it fertile, highly productive. And the yield went to the human settler because the famnexdo group, legally speaking, occupied the peripheral portions of his land. The famnexdo were actually not next-door at all; they were part of their owner's entourage. Communication with them was in essence a circular dialogue with oneself; the famnexdo, it they were functioning properly, picked up the covert hopes and dreams of the settler and detailed them back in an articulated fashion. Therapeutically, this was helpful, although from a cultural standpoint it was a trifle sterile.

By trying to eliminate the sexual division of labor that was the basis for family life, feminists have not created a gender-neutral utopia, with men and women interchangeably caring for children and earning wages. Instead, they have merely placed women as well as men on the employment treadmill. By flooding the workforce with new workers, they have driven down male wages, intensifying pressures on families to send the woman into the workforce and for the man to work longer hours, giving him less involvement with his family. The result is “big business socialism,” where every adult must work and provide tax revenue for the growing state machinery. Meanwhile children are institutionalized in day care and extended school days and activities for ever-longer hours at ever-younger ages, their childhoods regimented in preparation for similar lives as worker bees and suppliers of state revenue.

We are promoting building a better business, increasing shareholder value, enhancing the business’s competitive position through securing a lower cost base, and ensuring we have a capable supplier portfolio. Further, through a skilled procurement team, we can strengthen the business through excellence in contract management discipline, supply chain assurance and align our supply base with the company’s strategic goals, be they technologically based or meet sustainability objectives. What’s not to get excited about that? The CEO’s door will always be open to hear these types of discussions.

In practice, it’s about innovating and offering new products and services that improve lives and heal the planet. Or about helping employees find their purpose and improve their health and well-being, while building a diverse, inclusive company. Or helping suppliers make their businesses more efficient and sustainable, which builds tighter relationships and spurs joint innovation. Or helping communities thrive, going beyond the old argument that companies do enough by providing jobs and paying taxes (global communities may need much more than that, including support for local schools or building water and energy infrastructure).

I was in charge of decisions and marketing, and Sean was in charge of research and operations. When we were trying to identify our target customer, he spent a ton of time putting together spreadsheets comparing all the different markets we should consider. When he showed them to me and asked me what I thought, I replied, “Yoga.” Huh? “We could easily do multiple products serving people who do yoga,” I told him. “It’s an emerging trend. And I know a ton of those people; I can ask them what they want. Let’s start a yoga business.” Sean’s initial response was, “That’s not a quantitative analysis, Ryan!” I’ve never been one to overthink things—most people spend way too much time in the research period. I make decisions fast and adjust later. With our target customer identified, we made a list of possible products and chose our gateway product—a yoga mat. With that, we began the process of product development. We looked up the top-selling yoga mats on Amazon and read through the reviews; we asked questions on Facebook groups, subreddits, and Instagram influencer accounts. It didn’t take long before we had an idea of the main pain points we needed to address with our first product. I remembered Don’s advice and began looking for people to make the product. With a quick scroll and a click, we could choose between a wholesaler in China, a private label supplier out of India, or a contract manufacturer in Vietnam. For about fifty bucks, we were able to order a set of yoga mat samples that had the exact features we were looking for. It was that easy. Samples in hand, we needed to refine our product idea to make sure we were really hitting the pain points we’d identified. At that time, I’d done yoga maybe two or three times in my life, and I wasn’t nearly the right demographic for our mats anyway. That forced me to ask questions. We were targeting yoga-loving millennials, so I went where they often congregate: Starbucks. There, I did the kind of tough field work that really makes an entrepreneur sweat: asking young women questions over coffee. “Which yoga mat do you prefer? Why?” “What makes the difference between a bad yoga mat and a good one?” “What’s wrong with your current yoga mat?” “What do you think of this one? And what about this one?” Next, I headed over to local yoga studios to see how our samples stacked up against the strenuous demands of a yoga class. A few classes later, Sean and I had everything we needed to narrow down our product development. Armed with all our data, we went back to the manufacturers. From a couple yoga-clueless guys, we’d become knowledgeable enough to know not just what a good yoga mat looked like, but how it had to feel and perform. We knew what we needed our yoga mat to do. Now we just had to find the manufacturer to supply it.

It didn’t take long to find some willing partners. We set down the specifications, and Sean talked to all the manufacturers who said they could fulfill our requests. We narrowed it down to two quality options, and then we choose the one with the best price and the best communication. Sean ordered the prototype, had it embossed with our brand logo—Zen Active—and in no time at all, we unrolled our first yoga mat on the floor in Sean’s house. That was our yoga mat. It was our product, with our specifications, with our logo, in Sean’s house, ready for sale. And all it took was one website and a lot of groundwork asking questions. Now, I’m not saying we got the product totally right on our first try. We made some mistakes, and we made adjustments to improve the product over time, but the basics of taking an idea and making it a ready-for-market product really is this simple. All you have to do is find the suppliers, do the research, make the tweaks, and find the best offer out there. Find

Find Your Supplier I’ve come to trust and rely on suppliers from Alibaba.com, but I know it has its detractors. When it comes to user experience, the site is, frankly, a bit of a mess. There’s also a certain distance between you and the supplier that the more firm-handshake-loving, look-them-in-the-eye-while-you’re-negotiating types don’t like. These days, though, Alibaba has a lot of competition, so there are plenty of options out there if you want a different path to your product. You can search for wholesalers, manufacturing companies, or contract manufacturers for your chosen product and find any number of smaller companies you can contact personally to get that more direct experience. Or, if you’re feeling particularly old-fashioned, you can attend a trade show in the market you’re going into. Find out where the next event is, hop on a plane, and go speak to a room full of potential manufacturers in a new city. Some people even go so far as to fly to China to meet directly with manufacturers. I’ve never done that—and I never plan to do that—but plenty of my friends swear by it. Of these options, though, I’d still recommend starting on Alibaba or a similar site and ordering ready-made product samples. Something magical happens when you hold a product in your hand: You realize it’s real. While it may seem at the outset like the best way to make your perfect product is to go meet a contract manufacturer in person and get them to build your design from scratch, that option comes with a lot more risk: the risk of lost time. We’re talking about at least three months before you see your first prototype—more likely six, or even twelve. All of that and you won’t even know right away if the resulting prototype will be the one that will make your brand. That’s why I recommend you come up with the idea, get samples, and improve over time. Perfectionists hate the approach, but you can’t expect to make it to a million dollars in twelve months if it takes twelve months just to get a look at what you’re creating.

A better deal for a better product was out there, but I didn’t put our momentum on hold to look for it. We made the adjustment as we progressed. That never-ending, purpose-driven quest for improvement gives you the freedom to direct your focus right now on getting that product on the market. Whenever I catch myself overthinking a product and delaying the crucial move from concept to sale, I remind myself, “Let’s make some mistakes.” After all, there’s so little risk involved in this method; when you’re working with small orders up front, the downside of a mistake is very low. You’ll find a way to sell those first 100 units on Amazon eventually. Even if you don’t, the loss is minimal. Mistakes, even bad ones, are a part of this business. No amount of preparation ensures a perfect process. Sometimes you’ll make a modest mistake, like going to market with the second-best supplier cutting slightly into your margins. Other times, you’ll commit a nastier error, like the time we lowered the price on our yoga mats without really thinking through our inventory limitations.

When we cut our price, we sold really well (because when you follow the method in this book, it works), but we ran out of stock. It was a predictable outcome. Being out of stock is the worst thing that can possibly happen to your new business because you’re essentially out of business when you can’t take orders. We had to wait out the four-week lag for another shipment to cross an ocean and get to the Amazon warehouse. When we finally got new stock back in, we were essentially starting over. Yes, we had customer reviews, but our momentum was dead. We had to run another discount to get moving again. We did recover, but that one mistake set us back months. I can’t say whether an extra month of planning would have kept us from making that awful choice; probably not, honestly. You can’t control for everything. Your goal is just to take your product from an idea to a physical item in a customer’s hand. It’s simpler than most people think it is. Find the right supplier, get samples, refine with research, put in a small order, and get the product online. That’s all you need to worry about right now. Don’t overthink it. Just fix the mistakes as they come.

The first instrument could sequence a billion bases, which seemed extraordinary at the time, yet to accurately report a human DNA sequence with this technology, it was not enough to look at a given spot in the genome just once. Instead, it required sequencing that same territory more than twenty times. To cover a human genome with sufficient depth as to provide confident calling would therefore require nearly one hundred billion bases of sequencing. And since it took three days each time the machine ran, it would take up to a full year for one machine to sequence a human genome while running full-time. That did not seem like a scalable business plan. So West and his team started to think creatively about concentrating on the parts of the genome of maximum interest. What about sequencing just the gene sequences and ignoring the other 98 percent of the genome? Although by this time, it was clear that the non-gene part of the genome was definitely not junk, its function, especially in relation to disease, was less clear. Perhaps they could sequence just the 2 percent of the genome that was made up by genes? Their plan was to synthesize a few hundred thousand oligos and to use them as bait to fish out just the gene regions of interest. That would require much less sequencing and incur much less cost: something that could be completed perhaps in just one run. They needed a supplier for their oligos, so John reached out to Illumina.

The introductory topic taught in any modern course on business strategy is the connection between industry structure and profit. This topic is usually called the “Five Forces,” following Michael Porter’s pioneering analysis of industry structure, published in 1980. A quick summary is that a terrible industry looks like this: the product is an undifferentiated commodity; everyone has the same costs and access to the same technology; and buyers are price sensitive, knowledgeable, and willing to switch suppliers at a moment’s notice to get a better deal.

Applying a value lens to stakeholder capitalism, two ideas strike me as particularly important. First, business creates substantial value for customers, employees, and suppliers even if its only goal is to maximize financial returns. Think of all the stories in this book—Best Buy, Apple, Michelin, Quest, Intel, Tommy Hilfiger, and many more. Every one of them is testament to the ability of business to create significant customer delight, employee satisfaction, and supplier surplus. Competition is our best assurance that companies continue to innovate in service to these stakeholders. Second,