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Apres moi, le deluge

George Friedman, Founder and CEO of Stratfor, is always worth reading for the same reason that, say, James Kilpatrick was: You might not have agreed with much that he wrote, but there were usually a few nuggets amidst the infuriation, and he wrote so amazingly well. In fact, in his later years, his columns on writing were all I remember.

Friedman has an important column today in Stratfor, The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power. He opens with:

I received a great deal of feedback, with Europeans agreeing that this is the core problem and Americans arguing that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government’s official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might.

And proceeds to argue most eloquently that the United States faces exactly that. This was also something Boyd worried about. For examples, here’s part of his discussion of the prerequisites for an insurrection:

Insurrection/revolution becomes ripe when many perceive an illegitimate inequality—that is, when the people see themselves as being exploited and oppressed for the undeserved enrichment and betterment of an elite few. (Patterns, 94)

Continue reading →

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OODA sighting

I assume most of you have seen Tom Friedman’s oped in the NYT today, “More risk-taking, less poll-taking.”

He opens with:

THE U.S. military trains its fighter pilots on a principle called the “OODA Loop.” It stands for observe, orient, decide, act. The idea is that if your OODA Loop is faster and more accurate than the other pilot’s, you’ll shoot his plane out of the sky. If the other pilot’s OODA Loop is better, he’ll shoot you down. Right now, our national OODA Loop is broken.

Although we could quibble with his use of the term (for how Boyd actually used it, see “Boyd’s OODA Loop” on the Articles page), his claim that our “national OODA loop is broken” has some validity.

Recall that in Boyd’s framework, action flows from orientation. Individuals have orientations, but when we’re talking about countries or other groups, we need a surrogate for orientation. What Boyd suggested was something called a “common outlook” or “similar implicit orientation,” which he describes on pages 74 and 79 of Patterns and pp. 18-23 of Organic Design.

What Friedman appears to be arguing, and in this I think he’s right, is that we have nothing like the common implicit orientation that we need to implement solutions to our problems, and that the President’s focus now should be on creating one.

I haven’t seen the movie, but didn’t Lincoln say something about a house divided?

 

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The unexpected

Apple has charged the credit card for my wife’s new Mac, so I thought I’d see what’s going on.  Here’s the message from Apple’s Order Status page at 6 am EST Sunday morning:

We’re sorry, but our Order Status services are extremely busy right now. Please try again later.

All I can figure is that jubilant Packers fans are still up ordering new Macs.

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Eight years of cheng and chi

Congratulations to Amazon, again: For the 8th straight year, they’ve led the Holiday E-retail Customer Satisfaction Survey conducted by Forsee. Amid all the usual blather about the range of products they sell and how well their website works, the fundamental point got overlooked. Amazon’s competitors have had eight years (let that sink in for a second) to expand their range of products and fix any problems with their web sites, and still Amazon rules. And eight years for a scrappy new competitor to emerge. Continue reading →

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Awaiting my new Kindle

The first non-Apple device I’ve bought in more than 5 years.

With the Kindle Fire HD (7″), though, I’m going to diversify my ecosystem. Partly this is because I’m getting tired of reading about Apple filing yet one more lawsuit in an effort to limit consumer choice or trying yet again to fix prices. And partly it’s because for what I need, the Fire looks like a better device.

We already have 2 iPhones and an iPad, but I also have a lot of existing Kindle content (from a gift of an original Kindle years ago) and an Amazon Prime account. The Fire’s form factor seems ideal: If I need more computing power, I can carry my MacBook (yes, I’ll be replacing our two Macs next year with two more Macs). Otherwise the Kindle should be more portable than a laptop but better for Web surfing and movie watching than the iPhones.

I’ll let you know.

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Cheng and chi on the Web

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned a piece by Hiroshi Mikitani on why customers buy. The simple answer: Because it’s fun. Another way to say this is that because it engages them emotionally, and a good way to do that is by exploiting the cheng / chi pattern.

Today, Shauna Mei tackles the same theme in a post on Quartz (an Atlantic magazine site):

How we sold out of an $840 reindeer leather apron this holiday season: Lessons for luxury retail in an e-commerce boom

Luxury retailers have made a science out of engaging customers’ emotions, particularly vanity, in their brick-and-mortars, but have been slow to capture the effect online. Mei notes:

Websites for luxury brands function mostly as digital catalogs, imparting very little context and even less of the emotion that is traditionally a major part of a luxury brand’s appeal. … The approach thus far has been misguided. The answer may actually lie in using the Internet as more than just another platform to display merchandise. In order to be successful, we must think of e-commerce as an outlet for strategic brand creativity, with the ultimate goal of engaging customers emotionally.

Not easy, certainly, but as Mei shows, possible. If you make achieving cheng / chi your Schwerpunkt, then you can initiate your observe-orient-hypothesis-test loops to create ways to do it.

 

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Is outsourcing dead?

Of course not. There are still reasons to buy from overseas suppliers but as Boeing and now GE are learning, there are many reasons for bringing manufacturing back together with sales and R&D. This does not mean they they have to be co-located, by the way.

In case you haven’t read it, Charles Fishman lays out the argument, using GE as an example, in the December issue of The Atlantic. One caveat: To get maximum benefit, your company needs to be deep into lean.

Indeed, for many companies, it would make more sense to outsource the design function and keep manufacturing in-house (and in-country), sort of a reverse Apple. Speaking of which, is Apple’s domestic assembly of part of its Mac production a sign that they recognize the benefits of insourcing or a PR stunt?