Vertical Integration Quotes

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We want to help our children become better integrated so they can use their whole brain in a coordinated way. For example, we want them to be horizontally integrated, so that their left-brain logic can work well with their right-brain emotion. We also want them to be vertically integrated, so that the physically higher parts of their brain, which let them thoughtfully consider their actions, work well with the lower parts, which are more concerned with instinct, gut reactions, and survival. The
Daniel J. Siegel (The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind)
Apple doesn’t own the saw, and it doesn’t own the company that owns the saw. It also doesn’t staff the factory where the saw will be used. But it absolutely has an opinion as to which saw its supplier will use. It’s a new form of vertical integration. Where once a manufacturer would own every step of the process, Apple now controls each step without owning any of it.
Adam Lashinsky (Inside Apple)
We are a vertically integrated publishing house that equips readers to make positive changes in their lives and in the world around them. Microcosm emphasizes skill-building, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and zines about DIY skills, food, bicycling, gender, self-care, and social justice.
Microcosm Publishing
He even made an interesting concession. Throughout their careers they had adhered to competing philosophies on one of the most fundamental of all digital issues: whether hardware and software should be tightly integrated or more open. “I used to believe that the open, horizontal model would prevail,” Gates told him. “But you proved that the integrated, vertical model could also be great.” Jobs responded with his own admission. “Your model worked too,” he said.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
Women remained in an underprivileged position under social modernity. The ‘male breadwinner model’67 brought with it new inequalities. Since housewives were not employed, they were excluded from many insurance benefits, or minimally covered by these. The care and reproductive work that women performed in the household was neither paid nor integrated into the official order of social modernity. In other words, while social modernity attenuated the conflicts and risks induced by vertical inequalities (between classes), it reproduced new inequalities on the horizontal level—weighing especially on women and migrants.
Oliver Nachtwey (Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe)
In the Kabbalah, the structure of human faculties takes the form of a tree with a right-hand side and a left-hand side; humanity’s task is to integrate them, both laterally and vertically.39 Specifically it is held that the mind is made up of two faculties: wisdom (chochmah) on the right, which receives the Gestalt of situations in a single flash, and understanding (binah), opposite it on the left, which builds them up in a replicable, step-by-step way. Chochmah and binah are considered ‘two friends who never part’, because you cannot have one without the other. Chochmah gives rise to a force for loving fusion with the other, while binah gives rise to judgment, which is responsible for setting boundaries and limits.40 Their integration is another faculty called da’at, which is a bit like Aristotle’s phronesis, or even sophia – an embodied, overarching, intuitive capacity to know what the situation calls for and to do it. What is more this tree is a true organism, each ‘part’ reflected in, and qualified by co-presence with, each of the others.
Iain McGilchrist (The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World)
When two or more specific assets are closely linked, the chance for opportunistic behavior is greater than if the assets have separate owners (Rubin: p. 8). Since the landfill is a specific asset that is required for the garbage company, there is a greater chance that a holdup may occur if owned by a separate company. This makes a compelling case for vertical integration even though, owning and managing
Anonymous
Capitalists don’t want free trade any more than they want whooping cough. Their nature is to conglomerate, homogenate, vertically integrate and dominate until there is no competition. The rules? Screw the rules! They’ll rig the game, spit on the ball, bribe the refs, tilt the playing field, pork the cheerleaders and kick free enterprise in the nuts.
Tim Dorsey (Orange Crush (Serge Storms #3))
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.
Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)
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
Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)
Enron. One: The firm endorsed Enron’s asset-light strategy. In a 1997 edition of the Quarterly, consultants wrote that “Enron was not distinctive at building and operating power stations, but it didn’t matter; these skills could be contracted out. Rather, it was good at negotiating contracts, financing, and government guarantee—precisely the skills that distinguished successful players.” Two: The firm endorsed Enron’s “loose-tight” culture. Or, more precisely, McKinsey endorsed Enron’s use of a term that came straight out of In Search of Excellence. In a 1998 Quarterly, the consultants peripherally praised Enron’s culture of “[allowing executives] to make decisions without seeking constant approval from above; a clear link between daily activities and business results (even if not a P&L); something new to work on as often as possible.” Three: The firm endorsed Enron’s use of off–balance-sheet financing. In that same 1997 Quarterly, the consultants wrote that “the deployment of off–balance-sheet funds using institutional investment money fostered [Enron’s] securitization skills and granted it access to capital at below the hurdle rates of major oil companies.” McKinsey heavyweight Lowell Bryan—godfather of the firm’s financial institutions practice—put it another way: “Securitization’s potential is great because it removes capital and balance sheets as constraints on growth.” Four: The firm endorsed Enron’s approach to “atomization.” In a 2001 Quarterly, the consultants wrote: “Enron has built a reputation as one of the world’s most innovative companies by attacking and atomizing traditional industry structures—first in natural gas and later in such diverse businesses as electric power, Internet bandwidth, and pulp and paper. In each case, Enron focused on the business sliver of intermediation while avoiding the incumbency problems created by a large asset base and vertical integration.
Duff McDonald (The Firm)
I read a couple days ago Ben Smith saying that in three years he doesn't think BuzzFeed will exist in its current form. Can you tell me what Ben was talking about and what you think that means? He was talking about all the stuff we've been talking about. It's hard to predict three years out, so part of it was saying, "Who knows what'll happen in three years, what the web will be like in three years?" We've been based on a model of continual change. Three years ago, BuzzFeed had no reporters. Two years ago we had no video. One year ago we didn't have foreign correspondents around the world or an investigative team. Three years ago we were a cat site, an internet meme site. So a lot has changed in three years. It's an out-of-context quote — Ben was talking about the changes that have happened in three years. We went from the traditional media model of content and distribution to the vertically-integrated model of content distribution technology to the network-integrated model of technology helping at every level. Technology helping with content creation and then that content going on our platforms, distributed across the web, potentially going to traditional platforms like television or print. We don't really have plans to do any print. "Three years ago we were a cat site." But there's a possibility of having something that you look at and think that this isn't a site, this is a global media company. It's not just a site, it's a whole process for distributing news, buzz, life, on the web, mobile, native apps, and it looks very different than it looks today.
Anonymous
But what if the Afghan government wasn’t really trying to govern? What if it was focused on another objective altogether? What if corruption was central to that objective and therefore to the government’s mode of operation? Perhaps GIRoA could best be understood not as a government at all but as a vertically integrated criminal organization—or a few such loosely structured organizations, allies but rivals, coexisting uneasily—whose core activity was not in fact exercising the functions of a state but rather extracting resources for personal gain.
Sarah Chayes (Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security)
He links Judeo-Christian symbolism with Taoism. Jung said: The Chinese symbol of the one [Being], Tao, consists of yang (fire, hot, dry, south side of the mountain, masculine, etc.) and yin (dark, moist, cool, north side of the mountain, feminine, etc.). It fully corresponds, therefore, to the Jewish symbol [the “star of David,” ✡, which consists of Δ =fire and V =water. The hexad is a totality symbol: 4 as the natural division of the circle, 2 as the vertical axis (zenith and nadir)—a spatial conception of totality].... The Christian equivalent can be found in the Church’s doctrine of one unity of mother and son and in the androgyny of Christ.109
David H. Rosen (The Tao of Jung: The Way of Integrity (Compass))
This is the way we stimulate neuronal activation and growth—how we SNAG the brain toward a more vertically integrated state as we connect body to cortex with interoception. The more we focus our attention toward bodily sensations within our subjective experience in awareness, the more we activate the physical correlate of insula activation and subsequent growth. As
Daniel J. Siegel (The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
brothers reduced house building to a twenty-seven-step process in which single-task, unskilled and un-unionized workers only painted or only tiled or only hammered. They also vertically integrated their company to take control of their own concrete and timber production.
Conor Dougherty (Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America)
Subjectivity is truly no one. It is truly the desert. What is constitutive of the subject is to be integrally with the things, with the world, to have no positively assignable interior, to be generality. Subjectivity is this foam at the mouth of the world, that the world never dissipates. This is where we find the truth of what Sartre says about nothingness. But what we thus say about subjectivity as nothingness must be immediately translated: therefore there is nothing to say about that, that is not, this nothingness is not, and the negation of this nothingness, the negintuition of this nothingness is not a beginning in one part of philosophy, to which we could then add a counterpart or a complement of facticity. The desert of subjectivity, this notion is one with that of object-Being. And the two notions are both thrown back precisely through the acknowledgment of nothingness as nichtiges Nichts. That of which it is suitable to speak, that which is, is the vertical, non-projective world, and it is the seeing, speaking subject—thinking only on the basis of these operations.This subject is not consciousness, nor Ichheit, not even as 'pure' negativities, it is Speech and Experience, and correlatively, Being is not a distance that I extend, but a distance of transgression, of encroachment and overcoming, and this being surrounds me, and at the limit all my thoughts participate in it. The true nothingness, the nothingness that is true, is Being as distant and as non-hidden (that is, also hidden).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Merleau-Ponty Reader (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy))
Sirhind (or Lahore), Rajputana, Gujrat, Malwa, Audh (including Rohilkand, strictly Rohelkhand, the country of the Rohelas, or "Rohillas" of the Histories), Agra, Allahabad, and Dehli: and the political division was into subahs, or divisions, sarkars or districts; dasturs, or sub-divisions; and parganahs, or fiscal unions. The Deccan, Panjab (Punjab), and Kabul, which also formed parts of the Empire in its widest extension at the end of the seventeenth century, are omitted, as far as possible, from notice, because they did not at the time of our narration form part of the territories of the Empire of Hindustan, though included in the territory ruled by the earlier and greater Emperors. Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa also formed, at one time, an integral portion of the Empire, but fell away without playing an important part in the history we are considering, excepting for a very brief period. The division into Provinces will be understood by reference to the map. Most of these had assumed a practical independence during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, though acknowledging a weak feudatory subordination to the Crown of Dehli. The highest point in the plains of Hindustan is probably the plateau on which stands the town of Ajmir, about 230 miles south of Dehli. It is situated on the eastern slope of the Aravalli Mountains, a range of primitive granite, of which Abu, the chief peak, is estimated to be near 5,000 feet above the level of the sea; the plateau of Ajmir itself is some 3,000 feet lower. The country at large is, probably, the upheaved basin of an exhausted sea which once rendered the highlands of the Deccan an island like a larger Ceylon. The general quality of the soil is accordingly sandy and light, though not unproductive; yielding, perhaps, on an average about one thousand lbs. av. of wheat to the acre. The cereals are grown in the winter, which is at least as cold as in the corresponding parts of Africa. Snow never falls, but thin ice is often formed during the night. During the spring heavy dews fall, and strong winds set in from the west. These gradually become heated by the increasing radiation of the earth, as the sun becomes more vertical and the days longer. Towards the end of May the monsoon
H.G. Keene (Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan)
you haven’t yet broken the law; that’s vertical integration . . . as long as you are standing up, it’s okay. You can stand up and talk to a colored person all day and not break the law. It’s when you sit down that you get into trouble.
Bob Zellner (Wrong Side of Murder Creek, The: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement)
Companies like Pets.com made the mistake of choosing a linear business model in the age of the platform. What is a linear business model? It’s the model that has dominated in various forms since the Industrial Revolution, when new technologies like steam power and railways gave rise to the large, vertically integrated organization.
Alex Moazed (Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy)
had just accomplished, we controlled the visual channel by the hand signals we gave, and we controlled smell and taste by giving either peas or hot dogs. Outputs are also easy to understand, especially if we consider movement as the main output of the brain. The earliest fMRI experiments had human subjects lying in the MRI and tapping their fingers for periods of thirty seconds. When the subjects tapped their fingers, activity in the part of the brain that controlled the hand was plainly visible. The central sulcus is a groove in the human brain that runs almost vertically down the outside of each hemisphere. Everything behind the central sulcus is broadly concerned with inputs and everything in front with outputs. It is a defining landmark that divides the frontal lobe in front of the groove from the parietal lobe behind. The frontal bank of the central sulcus, it’s important to note, contains the neurons that control movement of all the parts of the body. Toward the bottom of this groove, above the ear, we find neurons that control the hand and mouth, and as we move up toward the crown of the head, we find neurons that control the legs. The neurons found along the sulcus control the opposite side of the body. When you move your right hand, a portion of the left central sulcus will become active, and this can be seen easily with fMRI. In contrast, the neurons behind the central sulcus respond when the corresponding parts of the body are touched. These are the primary sensory neurons. As you move farther toward the back of the head, the functions of the neurons become multimodal, meaning they integrate the inputs from many senses. At the very back of the head, we find the primary visual area, which receives inputs from the eyes. Another obvious landmark of the human brain is the protuberance along the sides of the brain, just above the ear. This is the temporal lobe. Sitting directly next to the ear, parts of the temporal lobe are concerned with hearing. Other parts of the temporal lobe, along the inner crease next to the rest of the brain, contain structures critical for memory. With the dog brain, the first thing you notice is that, apart from being smaller, it has a lot fewer folds. The massive amount of folding in the human brain is the solution that evolved to cram more brain into a small space. If you could flatten out the brain, you would find that all the neurons are contained in a thin sheet just a few millimeters thick.
Gregory Berns (How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain)
And here is where we could see the emergence of new types of companies—“Auto-Tech.” These would either be vertically integrated or strategically allied companies, from vehicle manufacture, to fleet management, to ride hailing through their own platforms. They would be the master coordinators of multiple capabilities—manufacturing, data and supply chain management, machine learning, software and systems integration, and the delivery of high-quality “mobility as a service” to customers around the world. At this point, there is still no tipping point where the benefits of new technology and business models prove so overwhelming that they obliterate the oil-fueled personal car model that has reigned for so long.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
HMOs have been so successful that they now occupy a dominant position in the market for health care in the United States. Approximately forty-five million Americans are uninsured. Of the remainder, about half are enrolled in some type of HMO. Most others receive some sort of managed care plan. Less than 10 per cent of Americans still have classic fee-for-service private health insurance (down from more than 70 per cent in the late ’80s). So even though many people equate HMOs with private health care, these sorts of corporations exist only because of the failure of private markets to supply appropriate health care. HMOs succeed precisely because they are more efficient than insurance markets. There should be no illusions about the character of these organizations—they are giant bureaucracies. The largest of them, Kaiser Permanente, employs over eleven thousand physicians and has more than six million subscribers in the state of California alone. This makes Kaiser larger than most of the government-run health care systems in Canada. And while the Canadian system is extremely decentralized, Kaiser Permanente is a single, vertically integrated corporation.
Joseph Heath (The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets)
The fifth factor in the T Algorithm is the ability to control the consumer experience, at purchase, through vertical integration.
Scott Galloway (The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google)
Conceptual integrity does require that a system reflect a single philosophy and that the specification as seen by the user flow from a few minds. Because of the real division of labor into architecture, implementation, and realization, however, this does not imply that a system so designed will take longer to build. Experience shows the opposite, that the integral system goes together faster and takes less time to test. In effect, a widespread horizontal division of labor has been sharply reduced by a vertical division of labor, and the result is radically simplified communications and improved conceptual integrity.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)
management of externalities becomes a key leadership skill. Growth comes not from horizontal integration and vertical integration but from functional integration and network orchestration. The focus on processes such as finance and accounting shifts from cash flows and assets you can own to communities and assets you can influence. And while platform businesses themselves are often extraordinarily profitable, the chief locus of wealth creation is now outside rather than inside the organization. Network effects are creating the giants of the twenty-first century. Google and Facebook each touch more than one-seventh of the world’s population. In the world of network effects, ecosystems of users are the new source of competitive advantage and market dominance.
Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
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Fuck heightened consciousness—we aren’t birds. Fuck transcendence-addiction masquerading as evolution. Fuck ‘non-duality’ that conveniently removes everything uncomfortable from the unified field. Fuck ‘enlightenment’ without integrity. Fuck patriarchal detachment models presented as ‘the’ royal road to the ‘Kingdom’ of God—what about the Queendom— our only hope. Fuck “The New Earth” as described by dissociative and disembodied pain bypassers. Fuck the yoga ‘industry’ that feigns awareness it does not hold. Fuck vertical spirituality that ignores what is happening before our very eyes. Fuck the bullshit soulebrities who don’t give a shit about humanity. Fuck the guru who imagines himself realized. Fuck the New Cage movement and its trail of lies. Fuck any version of spirituality that doesn’t SERVE humanity. Fuck the story bashers. Fuck the victim bashers. Fuck the bloodied spiritual lie. Embrace enrealment—before it’s too fucking late.
Jeff Brown (Hearticulations: On Love, Friendship & Healing: On Love, Friendship & Healing)
No one can push you, pull you, or go with you. All thoughts, ideas, feelings, concepts, and systems of knowledge and belief boil down to this one unequivocal distinction; sewer or sunshine, dungeon or daylight, ego or surrender, obstruction or flow, segregation or integration, vertical entrenchment or horizontal progress.
Jed McKenna (Spiritual Warfare (The Enlightenment Trilogy Book 3))
While the factories of Europe worked overnight to produce war materials, Ivar quietly purchased match factories throughout Sweden.13 He was a pioneer of vertical integration, buying timber tracts and chemical factories to secure the raw materials needed to make matches. Finally, he merged the leading Swedish competitors to form Swedish Match, a single dominant business with initial capital of about $10 million. Ivar owned half of Swedish Match, held all of the senior executive positions, and controlled the company’s board.
Frank Partnoy (The Match King: Ivar Kreuger and the Financial Scandal of the Century)
The handover from efficiency to adaptivity comes with sweeping changes in the economy and society including the shift from productivity to regenerativity, growth to flourishing, ownership to access, seller-buyer markets to provider-user networks, linear processes to cybernetic processes, vertically integrated economies of scale to laterally integrated economies of scale, centralized value chains to distributed value chains, corporate conglomerates to agile, high-tech small- and medium-sized cooperatives blockchained in fluid commons, intellectual property rights to open-source sharing of knowledge, zero-sum games to network effects, globalization to glocalization, consumerism to eco-stewardship, gross domestic product (GDP) to quality-of-life indicators (QLI), negative externalities to circularity, and geopolitics to biosphere politics.
Jeremy Rifkin (The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth)
Dell Inc.’s low relative costs up through the early 2000s came from both sources. Vertically integrated rivals, such as Hewlett-Packard, designed and manufactured their own components, built computers to inventory, and then sold them through resellers. Dell sold direct, building computers to customer orders using outsourced components and a tightly managed supply chain. These competing approaches had very different cost and investment profiles. Dell’s model required little capital since the company did not design or make components, nor did it carry much inventory. In the late 1990s, Dell had a substantial advantage in days of inventory carried. Because component costs were then dropping so fast, buying components weeks later, as Dell effectively did, translated into lower relative costs per PC. And Dell’s customers actually paid for their PCs before Dell had to pay its suppliers.
Joan Magretta (Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy)
Structured methods for learning Method Uses Useful for Organizational climate and employee satisfaction surveys Learning about culture and morale. Many organizations do such surveys regularly, and a database may already be available. If not, consider setting up a regular survey of employee perceptions. Useful for managers at all levels if the analysis is available specifically for your unit or group. Usefulness depends on the granularity of the collection and analysis. This also assumes the survey instrument is a good one and the data have been collected carefully and analyzed rigorously. Structured sets of interviews with slices of the organization or unit Identifying shared and divergent perceptions of opportunities and problems. You can interview people at the same level in different departments (a horizontal slice) or bore down through multiple levels (a vertical slice). Whichever dimension you choose, ask everybody the same questions, and look for similarities and differences in people’s responses. Most useful for managers leading groups of people from different functional backgrounds. Can be useful at lower levels if the unit is experiencing significant problems. Focus groups Probing issues that preoccupy key groups of employees, such as morale issues among frontline production or service workers. Gathering groups of people who work together also lets you see how they interact and identify who displays leadership. Fostering discussion promotes deeper insight. Most useful for managers of large groups of people who perform a similar function, such as sales managers or plant managers. Can be useful for senior managers as a way of getting quick insights into the perceptions of key employee constituencies. Analysis of critical past decisions Illuminating decision-making patterns and sources of power and influence. Select an important recent decision, and look into how it was made. Who exerted influence at each stage? Talk with the people involved, probe their perceptions, and note what is and is not said. Most useful for higher-level managers of business units or project groups. Process analysis Examining interactions among departments or functions and assessing the efficiency of a process. Select an important process, such as delivery of products to customers or distributors, and assign a cross-functional group to chart the process and identify bottlenecks and problems. Most useful for managers of units or groups in which the work of multiple functional specialties must be integrated. Can be useful for lower-level managers as a way of understanding how their groups fit into larger processes. Plant and market tours Learning firsthand from people close to the product. Plant tours let you meet production personnel informally and listen to their concerns. Meetings with sales and production staff help you assess technical capabilities. Market tours can introduce you to customers, whose comments can reveal problems and opportunities. Most useful for managers of business units. Pilot projects Gaining deep insight into technical capabilities, culture, and politics. Although these insights are not the primary purpose of pilot projects, you can learn a lot from how the organization or group responds to your pilot initiatives. Useful for managers at all levels. The size of the pilot projects and their impact will increase as you rise through the organization.
Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)
Henry Ford famously chose to operate his own rubber plantation in Brazil in the late 1920s, a decision that did not turn out too well. Ultimately, choices like this, about how vertically integrated you want to be, are choices every company makes about “where to sit” in the value system.
Joan Magretta (Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy)
My next key point concerns the value of aircraft over the sea, which I have already stressed so often. Whether fixed or rotary winged, these machines are an integral part of a modern navy, and no ship can survive in a war against an up-to-date enemy without their help. That is why the navy must keep so close to Coastal Command, and why some form of ship to carry aircraft will always be needed. One can argue all day about the size of aircraft-carriers, and quote the merits of vertical take-off and other modern devices which can affect the size of the carrier. But ships cannot survive without aircraft, and shore air-bases cannot provide all the necessary protection.
Peter Gretton (Convoy Escort Commander: A Memoir of the Battle of the Atlantic (Submarine Warfare in World War Two))
As you might expect, a person’s brain works best when the upstairs and downstairs are integrated with each other. So a parent’s goal should be to help build and reinforce the metaphorical stairway that connects the child’s upper and lower brain so that the two can work as a team. When a fully functioning staircase is in place, the upper and lower parts of the brain are vertically integrated. That means that the upstairs can monitor the actions of the downstairs and help calm the strong reactions, impulses, and emotions that originate there. But vertical integration works in the other direction, too, with the downstairs brain and the body (the house’s foundation) making important “bottom-up” contributions
Daniel J. Siegel (The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind)
Elon Musk is indeed the man of the moment for entrepreneurship and innovation in this era. In our time, he has propelled proprietary innovation in various industries: finance, automotive and space travel.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
I see Elon Musk as a combination of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs, of our time. In his entrepreneurial pursuits, he has played the role of a programmer, industrial designer, product architect, mechanical engineer and physicist.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
Elon Musk is a synthesizer of engineers. He has brilliantly played human resource and hired amazing engineers to create ‘material-discovery-novelty to proprietary-novelty’ innovations.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
Everything comes from something, and anything new is made out of things already in existence.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
It is worth noting that Elon Musk enjoys certain privileges that may not be available to everyone. For instance, he is situated in the United States, which is a developed country with a large population of over 300 million people, and where funding opportunities are relatively more abundant. His previous entrepreneurial successes have also placed him in favourable positions to secure funding for his ambitious projects.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
Despite Elon Musks’ privileges and advantages, I believe that his approach to innovation is adaptable and can be replicated to varying degrees.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
Elon Musk calculated that by producing about 80% of their hardware in-house for SpaceX, they could cut the cost of launching for customers and still enjoy a 70% gross margin.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
One of the most notable innovations of SpaceX is the creation and engineering of reusable rockets. Prior to this innovation, once a rocket was used, it was done with, resulting in significant financial loss.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
The Falcon 9’s two launch stages are engineered to return to earn. The first part of the rocket propels the rocket head and then returns to earth and lands where it fired from. This is done by using grid fins and the engines performing retry burning.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
The Raptor engine is another advanced innovation, as it is the first full-flow staged combustion rocket engine ever flown and produces the highest combustion chamber pressure ever reached by an operational rocket engine (330 bars). The previous record holder did 290 to 300 bar in one mode of operation is the (Soviet's RD-701 engine) in the 1980s.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
Overall, the success of SpaceX serves as an example of how re-imagining manufacturing and applying new materials and proprietary innovations can lead to significant cost reductions and novel innovations. It is important to always remain on the lookout for new ideas and improvements and to have a technically capable team in place to make them a reality.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
Innovators have artisan-like hands. They have ability to deconstruct innovations, reassemble them, and even generate their own iterations of innovative products.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
Elon Musk, a multifaceted industrial designer, engineer, and technologist, also possesses these artisan-like hands. He has the capacity to deconstruct complex systems, identify areas for improvement, and construct his own enhanced versions.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
Innovators possess the drive and determination to act upon their interest to learn a skill or pursue a vision, even if it means hiring skills to develop or create for them. Again still, they possess the drive and determination to act upon their visions, turning them into tangible realities. Their actions set them apart from the rest, as they actively engage with the challenges, uncertainties, and possibilities inherent in the creation process.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
To become an innovator, one must first be in motion, continuously pursuing their passions and engaging in meaningful activities. This proactive mindset, coupled with the drive to explore and create, is what sets the stage for innovation. Just like Dr. Fleming, who made groundbreaking discoveries by actively conducting experiments and pushing the boundaries of his field, true innovators understand the value of taking action.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
Innovation itself can be viewed as a stack of interconnected elements. Consider a chair, for instance, which combines wood or other solid materials with a specific geometric shape designed for comfortable seating, primarily suited for humans. Adding cushions to the chair further enhances its innovation by increasing comfort.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
To become an innovator, one must possess the ability to envision novel innovations across a range of domains, from material discoveries to proprietary-novelty. Acquiring diverse skills and cultivating a mindset that embraces cross-disciplinary thinking and exploration paves the way for the generation of groundbreaking ideas. The breadth of knowledge and expertise allows innovators to traverse different realms, connect seemingly unrelated concepts, and ultimately push the boundaries of what is possible.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
As you acquire more skills, your ability to create a wider range of products expands. With each new skill, you gain increased confidence, practicality, and boldness, enabling you to pursue and develop even more daring and innovative creations. Elon Musk's approach to innovation operates in this manner.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
Elon Musk hires smart people and let them figure solutions. At the founding of SpaceX, Musk hired various engineers to help build these would be novel rockets that would cost clients a fraction of the then going rate.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
Elon Musk over promises to deliver proprietary-to-novel products in short time but delivers a bit late. The advantage of this tactic is it drives global PR ad also lures pre-orders.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
Elon Musk suffers from over promising and delivering a tad bit late – but not under-delivering.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
Innovation is a mix of different innovations, e.g., internet + banking = internet banking.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
A great frame inferred to encapsulate Musk’s hiring philosophy is the ‘two-hands test’. It means the candidate must have first-hand experience and a hands-on expertise in testing. Passing the two-hands test proves you have skin in the game.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
The primary venue for activities in which value is created for participants shifts from an internal production department to a collection of external producers and consumers—which means that management of externalities becomes a key leadership skill. Growth comes not from horizontal integration and vertical integration but from functional integration and network orchestration. The focus on processes such as finance and accounting shifts from cash flows and assets you can own to communities and assets you can influence. And while platform businesses themselves are often extraordinarily profitable, the chief locus of wealth creation is now outside rather than inside the organization.
Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
Snatch. The kettlebell snatch is a total-body exercise with special emphasis on the entire posterior chain. It simultaneously develops strength, explosiveness, structural integrity, cardiorespiratory capacity, and virtually every attribute on the athletic continuum. There are six stages to the snatch: Inertia swing Acceleration pull with hip and trapezius Hand insertion deep into the handle Overhead lockout Direction change into the drop Grip change into the backswing To perform this exercise, with the kettlebell on the floor in front of you, load your hips and grip the kettlebell with your fingers as you would for the swing (see figure 7.21a). Swing the kettlebell back between your legs as you begin to stand, further loading the hips (see figure 7.21b). As with the swing and clean, various thumb positions can be used in the downswing and upswing portion of the snatch. The most common is to rotate the thumb back at the end of the downswing and transition to a 45-degree angle (thumb up) at the beginning of the acceleration pull. Keep your arm connected to your body and extend your knees and hips, allowing the inertia of the kettlebell to pull your arm forward (figure 7.21c). Just as the arm begins to separate from the body, accelerate the kettlebell vertically as fast as you can by rapidly pulling with the hip, followed by a shrug of the trapezius. If you are snatching with your right hand, push forcefully with your left leg, pull back your right hip, and shrug with your right trapezius (see figure 7.21d). As the kettlebell is accelerating upward, release your fingers and insert your palm deeply into the handle (see figure 7.21e). Allow the momentum to carry the kettlebell all the way to the top and lock out your arm in the fully extended elbow position (see figure 7.21f). This overhead lockout position is identical to the overhead position in the push or push press (thumb facing back, no or minimal rotation). To drop the kettlebell back down, first shift your weight to the opposite foot (if snatching with the right hand, shift to the left foot) and lean your upper body back (see figure 7.21g). Keep your hips and torso extended maximally and let your triceps connect to your torso. Finish the downswing by changing grips and pulling your hand back to catch the handle with your fingers (see figure 7.21h), and tighten the fingers as you follow the kettlebell between your legs into the backswing (see figure 7.21i). Use the rhythmic motion to continue the snatch for the desired repetitions.
Steve Cotter (Kettlebell Training)
In a normal curve, the greatest frequency occurs at a data value in the center of the distribution. This central value is the mean. A vertical line drawn through the mean serves as an axis of symmetry for the normal curve. Since half of the values in the distribution lie below the mean and have lie above it, this center value is also the median. Moreover, since this center value has the greatest frequency in the distribution, it is also the mode.
Edward P. Keenan (Integrated Mathematics: Course 3)
Sometimes, however, you may need greater rigor and focus to get a project or situation under control, to identify a solution, or to ensure that all the right steps have been determined. This is where vertical focus comes in. Knowing how to think productively in this more vertical way and how to integrate the results into your personal system is the second powerful behavior set needed for knowledge work.
David Allen (Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity)
Entrepreneurs who lead late-stage startups must maintain balance while pursuing opportunity, which requires them to set goals for speed and scope that are sufficiently ambitious yet achievable. By “speed,” I mean the pace of expansion of the venture’s core business—that is, its original product offered solely in its home market. “Scope” is a broader concept that encompasses four dimensions. The first three—geographic reach, product line breadth, and innovation—collectively define the range of the startup’s product market: How many additional customer segments will be targeted, and which of their needs will be addressed? The fourth dimension, vertical integration, refers to the range of activities that the startup will perform in-house rather than outsourcing to third parties.
Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
developmental theorists envision a mind rent by vertical splits between different self-states that have not been integrated with one another.
Stephen A. Mitchell (Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought)
Your base needs to be wider. See how it leans?” Yuri pointed. “It’s already maybe eight degrees off vertical.” Yuri got on the floor beside him and snapped two long blocks onto the bottom of the tower. “See? This will increase your structural integrity.
Katie Kennedy (Learning to Swear in America)
At the core of Tyson’s strategy is an economic principle called vertical integration.
Christopher Leonard (The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business)
The cost-savings from factory farming are slowing down, but Tyson’s control over the marketplace has not loosened. Once the broad-based meat industry was traded away for a vertically integrated one, the deal could not be easily undone. The economies of scale now make it almost impossible for new competitors to enter the field and compete head-to-head with Tyson and its imitators. The tallest ramparts that protect Tyson’s rule are its network of meat factories in places like Waldron. To compete against those facilities, a new company would need to invest hundreds of millions of dollars up front, before the first day of business. It would need animals, of course, and Tyson has much of that supply locked down with its contracts. And a competitor would surely know that even if it built a plant and secured supplies of chickens or hogs, Tyson and its few competitors have the ability to flood the market with product and make prices collapse in the short term, a hardship they could surely endure while an upstart struggled.
Christopher Leonard (The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business)
Tyson first pioneered this model in the poultry business. Then the company expanded into raising hogs. Within two short decades America’s independent hog industry was wiped out and replaced with a vertically integrated, corporate-controlled model. Ninety percent of all hog farms disappeared. The amount of money spent at grocery stores went up, but the amount of money farmers received went down. Companies like Tyson keep much of the difference.
Christopher Leonard (The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business)
healthy transcendence is more horizontal than it is vertical. It’s about confronting the realities of the human condition head-on with equanimity, wisdom, and loving-kindness and harnessing all that we are in the service of realizing the best version of ourself so we can help raise the bar for the whole of humanity.[6] With healthy transcendence, we have done the inner work to integrate our whole self, including our deprivation motivations, so that they no longer rule our actions in the world. We see the world on its own terms, and what we see may be intensely beautiful.
Scott Barry Kaufman (Choose Growth: A Workbook for Transcending Trauma, Fear, and Self-Doubt)