RIck Perry's Brain Freeze

Rick Perry's mental lapse has lead the news. Videos of the CNBC debate showing his inability to recall all the agencies he would close have led news broadcasts across the country. He has my sympathy; more than once I've had a brain freeze as I tried to remember the perfect word or phrase, or, worst of all, someone's name when I saw them.

However, the question of eliminating Cabinet-level departments or agencies is actually a serious and important one. When the country was founded, there was the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Attorney General. That was it. Four individuals reporting to the President. It metastasized into its current form in the twentieth century. While populist thinking would eliminate both the Department of Education and the Department of Energy (both excellent ideas if we are really going to try to repay $15 trillion in debt), I'm now questioning the Department of Housing and Urban Welfare.

One thing we can say about the current economy is that we have plenty of houses. Millions of houses for sale and millions more in foreclosure. If you work for the Department of Housing and Urban Development aka "HUD", what do you do every day? One would hope that they don't show up every day and try to get someone to build more houses.

Sounds like a good place to start if we are going to cut some spending to try to avoid the fate of Greece and Italy.

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Book Review: What Matters Now by Gary Hamel

Interview of Eric Schmidt by Gary Hamel at the MLab dinner tonight. Google's Marissa Mayer and Hal Varian also joined the open dialog about Google's culture and management style, from chaos to arrogance. The video just went up on YouTube. It's quite entertaining. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Cover of The Future of ManagementMy list of must-read business writers continues to expand.Gary Hamel, however, author of What Matters Now, with the very long subtitle of How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation, has been on the list for quite some time.Continuing his thesis on the need for a new approach to management introduced in his prior book The Future of Management, Hamel calls for a complete rethinking of how enterprises are run.

Fundamental to his recommendation is that the practice of management is ossified in a command and control system that is now generations old and needs to be replaced with something that reflects an educat…

Have you ever watched, or been involved in, a business failure, where, despite the best efforts of hardworking people, the business doesn’t survive? Scott Sonenshein lived through it, as he describes in the Introduction to his engrossing book Stretch. (In some books, the reader can skip the intro- not this one; the introduction is a must-read part of the book.) He was hired by start-up Vividence in Silicon Valley at the very apex of the tech boom. Despite prestige VC backers, top-tier hires and $50 million, Vividence didn’t make it. As his career continued, that experience led to an interest in why some well-funded operations don’t succeed, while other, more resource constrained, do. Peter Senge wrote about reinforcing cycles as part of his book The Fifth Discipline, which I consider one of the finest business books ever penned. In it, Senge describes the downward cycle that some companies fall into, and why it is so difficult to reverse. Sonenshein explores those cycles from diffe…

The Acceleration of Asset Lite Business Models

The number of asset lite businesses is steadily increasing, as is the breadth of industries effected. I first noticed them in the 1970’s, when Baron Hilton sold several flagship Hilton hotels while retaining management contracts that entitled Hilton Corporation to a share of revenue and earnings. Over the next two decades, Marriott Corp copied and then perfected the hotel management agreement business approach, coupling a Marriott franchise with a management agreement for any one of a growing stable of brands (Fairfield Inns, Courtyard by Marriott, Residence Inns, J.W. Marriott, etc. etc.), enabling absentee investor/owners. It turns out, however, that asset lite business structures date back much earlier.
Franchises and Dealers Early versions of asset lite businesses include franchise and dealer organizations. Soft drink and beer distributors, auto dealers and tire and repair franchises date to the early nineteen hundreds, as manufacturers needed mass distribution. The dealers furn…

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