Category: Business

Filling the soul

Reading Time: < 1 minute

What’s the common characters among book, coffee and music? Besides you can have them all in Borders or Barnes&Nobles. They all can fill your soul. One would wonder while that’s true for book and music, how can the coffee fill our souls? Well, that’s what I heard from Howard Schultz on today’s “60 minutes”. Mr. Schultz is the founder of Star Bucks, which has 11,000 stores in 33 countries, and is opening 5 stores everyday.

Schultz says, “One of our colleagues coined a phrase a long time ago and said, ‘We’re not in the business of filling bellies. We’re in the business of filling souls.'”

Business Stocks

Haigui MBA

Reading Time: 2 minutes

MBA is a hot topic for many overseas Chinese students and professionals: for the money or the dream. I have thought about doing this from time to time, but I am still at ground zero due to reasons such as: lack of the money and time; not sure about the purpose of the MBA; don’t want to follow the crowd; etc.

I read the following article from a well known overseas Chinese web site. And thought it is a good one. Maybe some day I will go for a MBA if I could find a compelling reason to do so. Here is the link of the article. Note I don’t necessarily agree everything the author says.

Business Saint Louis

Jack Welch

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Went to the Business School at Washington U. this afternoon, to listen Jack Welch’s talk about “Leadership”. I read his two books, and have some idea of the topic. Some of the take aways from his talk:

1) Work with tough minded (rather than nice) and fair people, so that you will get rigorous training early in the career.

2) Evaluating people is very important task and skill. In GE one of Jack’s main job is picking the right people and leadership development. Also in GE the VP of Human Resource is more important then CFO. Because developing people is more important than keeping the score (Jack’s word).

3) Authenticity: be true to yourself.

4) Be curious: learning all the time.

Business Software development

Open source millionaires

Reading Time: 2 minutes

There is a little piece of news in the software industry caught my attention this week. Red Hat, one of the biggest open source solution provider decided to buy JBoss, a not so well known open source middleware (application server) softare developer, for USD 350 million. I read an article on Business week about JBoss’s CEO Marc Fleury and “how he got here” last week. Because I did not find the BW article, I put a similar article on eWeek here, this one is interview. Quote Marc’s word “I have said many times that I want to create a new generation of open-source millionaires.” I think his word is true to a great extent because his company is mainly owned by founders and employees.

Business Saint Louis

Trader Joe’s

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Trader Joe’s is a small grocery store which provides “high quality foods and beverages at honest low prices”. The quoted word is taken from its paper shopping bag (unlike Aldi, its bag is free). Recently Trader Joe’s is growing very fast and I remember reading a magazine article talking about business model and growth.

Seeing is believing. A few days ago, after dinner, I stopped by its newly opened store in Creve Couer. The store is right across street from Dierbergs, one of the largest and oldest grocery stores in St. Louis area. Except I had minor problem locating its entrance, I was very pleased with my shopping experience. There are varities of food, from cheese, bread, fruits, vegetable, meats, to beverages, and beers. The price is close to Schnucks’ (another grocery store in the area, considered as middle range), i.e., it’s cheaper than Diebergs. But the quality is not discounted. Not to mention the service. I like the way they ring the bell (the real bell), the corner tasting table (free coffee, cookies, etc.), and the friendliess of cashier. It’ like a neighbourhood store, as oppose to the big chain store like Wal-mart or Sam’s club. I noticed there are a few neighbourhood drug stores on the Olive street, despite WalGreen’s store ubiquitous apprearnce. I guess the mom-pop stores still have customers and business, otherwise how can they keep open.

Business China

Taxi driver

Reading Time: < 1 minute

From mitbbs

================================================
出租司机给我上的MBA课

我要从徐家汇赶去机场，于是匆匆结束了一个会议，在美罗大厦前搜索出租车。一辆
大众发现了我，非常专业的、径直的停在我的面前。这一停，于是有了后面的这个让
我深感震撼的故事，象上了一堂生动的MBA案例课。为了忠实于这名出租车司机的原
意，我凭记忆尽量重复他原来的话。

“去哪里……好的，机场。我在徐家汇就喜欢做美罗大厦的生意。这里我只做两个地
方。美罗大厦，均瑶大厦。你知道吗？接到你之前，我在美罗大厦门口兜了两圈，终于
被
我看到你了！从写字楼里出来的，肯定去的不近~~~”

“哦？你很有方法嘛！”我附和了一下。

“做出租车司机，也要用科学的方法。”他说。我一愣，顿时很有些兴趣“什么科学的
方法？”

“要懂得统计。我做过精确的计算。我说给你听啊。我每天开17个小时的车，每小时成
本34.5元……”

“怎么算出来的？”我追问。

Business Stocks

Expectations

Reading Time: 1 minute

In the stock market there is a thing called “earning”, basically it’s how much money a company made for each share of the stock. The higher the earning, the better for share holders (company owners). But the stock price does not necessarily hold a linear relationship with the earning. Why? Because there is another thing called “street estimate” or “estimated earning”. It’s the Wall Street’s expectation of company’s earning. If the company’s actual earning meets (or beats) “street estimate”, the stock will go higher; otherwise the stock will be punished. The latest example is Google. It dropped sharply after the 2006 Q1 earning report.

I think same rule can applied to the work place. I got this idea partially from Jack Welch’s (former CEO of General Electric) book “Winning”. Recently I reinforced this idea from my own experience and observations. In the work place there are expectations from the boss, the coworkers and (sometimes) customers. If we just work hard enough to meet the expectation, we will keep the job. But if we work much harder or smarter, and make our bosses looking good, we will get reward or promotion. On the other hand, if we miss the expectation from our boss without a good explaination, we know what will happen.

Business Software development

The unexpected

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I hope everyone had a happy new year and everything worked out as expected. I wish things always happen as we expected. But unfortunately reality sometimes caught us off guard. From my experience in computer world I know all kinds of things (good or bad) can happen. The infamous Windows “blue screen” problem. A friend lost the Ph.D. diseration because of hard drive crash – probablly worth one year’s hard work? I am not biased against Bill Gates here. Years ago when I was developing a program on a HP UNIX machine with 128 Mega Bytes memory, the machine crashed couple times because a program error.

In the programming world we call those condition as “exceptions”. Thus comes the “Exception Handler”, which is a piece of code to deal with an exception. A good example is “divide by zero”. You know your little calculator can not do that; your powerful “Intel inside” box can not do it either. The exception handler will provide some meaningful feedback during those conditions and quit the program if necessary. In other words, it will try to “die” gracefully.

In school days we rarely write the “exception handling” code. In school everything is perfect, right? It appears to me most of times professors don’t care about the “exception” either. This is OK because we won’t run those “student code” in real life anyway. Our airplane and automobile are not designed by the “student code”. But I think proper training is necessary in the schools because eventually some of them will be engineers and design the real things.

When I was in graduate school, at one time I had a phone interview for an “industry consultant” position for a startup company. I remember one question was “what if you can not finish a project on time?” I told him I would work day and night, give up sleep, etc. The interviewer, who is a senior consultant, was not impressed. There are many reasons a project can get behind. Unexpected things such as “people quit”, “3rd party supplier delay”, do happen. But the customer will be disappointed if you tell him/her at the last minute. The senior consultant gave me one answer “deliver portion of the functionality”. This is a very realistic answer. I believe the new Microsoft Operating System “Longhorn” is taking a similar path.

Business Fun Software development

NBA and team work

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I got chance to watch some NBA games lately. I am not a big NBA fan because I don’t have cable at home and I felt it takes too much time (usually 2.5 hrs) to watch a game. I told my friends who are big NBA (Yao Ming) fans that I only need to watch the final 5 minutes because that’s when a game gets decided most of the time.

Anyway back to the games. Last week there are a few superstars made steller performance in some games. Kobe Bryan made 62 points in 3 quarters against Dallas. Vince Carter scored 51 points against Miami. Both Bryan and Carter’s teams won the games. Then there is this amazing story, Allen Iverson scored 53 points but his team Philadelphia lost to Atlanta. I don’t know what exactly happened in that game. But I started to watch Allen’s game since 2000 and I can guess what happened. Allen, who is only 6 feet tall and 165 pounds in weight, is the most agile player in the NBA. I remember somebody (maybe his former coach Larry Brown) said “pound for pound, he is the best player in the league”. But at the same time, Allen sometimes relies too much on himself without passing the balls to his teammates. Basket ball is a team sport. Star player or team leader is very important. They make shots in the crunch time (final 5 minutes). Allen, Kobe, Robert Horry, Tracy McGrady and many others are those kinds of the guy. But superstars are not supermans. They can have injuries, illness or just bad days. During those times, their teammates’ help is more critical. Even if they are on the top of the game, they need to get their teammate involved. Because if you don’t make your teammate look good, they won’t make you look good too.

This can be applied to the software development and other businesses. In “mythical man month” I read an exceptional software developer can be as productive as 300 average developers. I believed it. I think the founders of Netscape, Yahoo and Google are those kinds of guy. That’s cool. But what’s more amazing is those guys are not running the show themselves. They know their limit especially in the business side so they asked some senior people to join the team. The results are obvious — success of the companies.

This does not means average developer (like me) are totally hopeless. First I think “exceptional developer” is very rare. My brother and I went to Google campus recently and saw some Google people at the packing lot. My brother’s comment was “they are average people like we are except they are lucky enough to be hired by Google”. So here is the hint: join a winning team. I am not saying “jump to the Google now” because they raised the bar very much. There are many winning teams including your current employer (you may not realize it). Do your work and help your teammates. Make your boss look good. They will make you look good too.

Back to NBA. My favorite team is Detroit pistons. In 2004 when they won the NBA champion they don’t have a guy in the All Stars game. The 5 starters are good players but are not at the level of Shaq and Kobe. But they beated the LA Lakers by the teamwork. 2005 Champion San Antonio Spurs is also that kind of team. Tim Ducan is a superstar but he is probablly most unselfish superstar in the league.

Business China Saint Louis

Got my car back

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Got my car back this morning. This time they called me at 8:20 AM and told me it’s ready. The noise problem was caused by an idle pulley used for A/C. Ironically when I was in Rolla I did research on the V-ribbed accessory belt drive. That pulley is a part of the accessory drive. I did have a feeling something was wrong with the drive but I did not have the courage to open it and see it myself. So much for my mechanical engineering backgound. When I picked up the car, I compained the miscommunication problem yesterday. The service rep agreed a $20 discount. And he even pulled my car over (like valet). It seems I got “BMW or Lexus” treatment this time. I have a friend who recently got a BMW 525i and I will check with him about his BMW service experience.

The good thing is, I got my car and my freedom. I was a little upset just because “without a car for one night”. I know I am spoiled being in the States for more than 8 years. My Accounting class instructor once said “we take too many things for granted over here in the States”. I agree. My fellow American graduate student commented “people here can get upset waiting in McDonald for 5 minutes, they don’t know many people in Africa are starving”. I appreciate those comments very much. I know in China the customer service is definitely not at the US level yet (it’s catching up). I think that’s why “Chatea” and “Ctrip” alike are so popular because they make customer happy. I remember Dallas Maverick owner Mark Cuban once said “treat your customers like they owned you”. If I have a business one day, I will do exactly that.