Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce.com, made his billions creating a software company in the cloud's digital age. Why did he and his wife, Lynne, just plunk down $190 million to purchase Time, a print magazine founded in 1923? They say they want to find solutions to some of the most complex problems in today's society.
Do complex problems in today's society lend themselves to hashtag solutions, slogans on posters in marches, presidential "debates," and election campaign ads on TV? Consider: racism, gun violence, immigration, cancer, gene editing, an income gap between the Benioffs and nearly everyone else in the world, corruption, censorship by the government in China and Facebook in the US, robots replacing human workers, marriage, privacy versus national security, climate change, lopsided trade balances.
TV headlines and 3-minute interviews, apps, and a limited number of Twitter characters have not solved today's problems, and they never will. The Federalist Papers argued before the U.S. Constitution was ratified. An extra Bill of Rights was needed. The print media backed further Amendments needed to clean up initial mistakes about the election of the President and Vice President, slavery, women's suffrage, and alcohol.
Print carries revolutionary ideas everywhere in the world. Why do authoritarian governments always shut down the press? Writing at Iowa's Storm Lake Times, with a circulation of only 3,000, Art Cullen won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for showing transparency's importance as a guard against bribes affecting government decisions. He wondered who was enabling the local Board of Supervisors in Buena Vista County, population 10,000, to help fund a million dollar defense against the Des Moines Water Works. His editorial disclosed the corn and soybean agribusiness farms that were contaminating drinking water with nitrates from their fertilizer.
Open a discussion about tariffs at the dinner table or on social media. You'll see a difference of opinion on the purpose of tariffs, if they can accomplish these purposes, even if these purposes need to be achieved. Does anyone mention what they have read about what government representatives, experts on economics, seniors, Walmart shoppers, or farmers have said about tariffs?
Informed judgments require the extended, detailed information print provides. Read the"Letters to the Editor," too. I'm often inspired by the readers who take time to compose the thoughtful opinions published. A grandmother's letter told why she insisted her two teen-aged grandchildren, she called them "screen zombies," put down their "tiny rectangles" to take in the spectacular sight of crossing the four-and-a-half-mile bridge over Chesapeake Bay.
A digital marketer like Marc Benioff deserves gratitude for funding the printed link between society's complex problems and those who depend on the extensive body of information needed to solve them.
Showing posts with label tariffs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tariffs. Show all posts
Sunday, September 23, 2018
Saturday, March 4, 2017
How to Become an International Entrepreneur
In Shoe Dog, Phil Knight, the creator/founder of NIKE, quotes the maxim, "When goods don't pass international borders, soldiers will." He adds, "Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity."
Knight's book encourages those who would work for world peace and their own happiness. He frankly presents the ways he handled and mishandled the challenges every international entrepreneur faces and tells them they have a big bull's eye on their backs. He observes trolls everywhere trying to block, thwart, and say no to the entrepreneurial spirit. Elsewhere, I've read entrepreneurs can best avoid discouragement by telling no one, when they first decide to start a business.
Knight's business began modestly. He sold shoes out of the trunk of his car at sporting events and opened his first office next to a pulsating bar.
He embraced a management style of telling people what to do (not how to do things) and letting them surprise him with the results. What did one of his early employees do? He set up a data base keeping information about his retail customers, not only what they bought but also their birthdays so he could send cards. And he furnished a store with comfortable chairs bought at yard sales, shelved books about running along with shoes, hung posters of runners, and gave his best customers T-shirts with the company logo on them.
Knight outlines sources of funding: family and friends; local, regional, national, and international banks; venture capitalists; trading companies; public A and B stock offerings. Each funding option has pluses and minuses. Trading companies, for example, lend money with the aim of buying out/taking over the business unless, at the offset, a business stipulates its unwillingness to sell.
Besides the never-ending need to find funding, Knight ran into other problems. Steve Prefontaine, the famous distance runner who was NIKE's first celebrity endorser, died in an automobile accident. Packing too many innovations into a new shoe led to a recall. Despite a contract, the first overseas manufacturer Knight relied on to provide the shoes he sold decided to dump him and get a new distributor. NIKE would have better luck when it was first to find a shoe supplier in China. In the US, competitors tried to put NIKE out of business by using an American Selling Price customs provision. After making a high priced shoe similar to NIKE's, US manufacturers asked the government to impose a $25 million duty on NIKE imports that totaled 20% of their American selling prices. Even after negotiations, NIKE paid a custom's duty of $9 million.
Setbacks can turn into learning experiences and worldwide benefits. After the media blasted conditions in its overseas factories, NIKE responded by becoming a leader in the factory reform movement. To eliminate the toxic process of bonding shoe uppers to soles in a rubber room, NIKE invented a fume-less water-based bonding agent that the company shared with its competitors.
And, finally, Shoe Dog teaches the cure for burnout is more work, and the Japanese word, kensho, means the aha experience of enlightenment, when you suddenly understand.
Knight's book encourages those who would work for world peace and their own happiness. He frankly presents the ways he handled and mishandled the challenges every international entrepreneur faces and tells them they have a big bull's eye on their backs. He observes trolls everywhere trying to block, thwart, and say no to the entrepreneurial spirit. Elsewhere, I've read entrepreneurs can best avoid discouragement by telling no one, when they first decide to start a business.
Knight's business began modestly. He sold shoes out of the trunk of his car at sporting events and opened his first office next to a pulsating bar.
He embraced a management style of telling people what to do (not how to do things) and letting them surprise him with the results. What did one of his early employees do? He set up a data base keeping information about his retail customers, not only what they bought but also their birthdays so he could send cards. And he furnished a store with comfortable chairs bought at yard sales, shelved books about running along with shoes, hung posters of runners, and gave his best customers T-shirts with the company logo on them.
Knight outlines sources of funding: family and friends; local, regional, national, and international banks; venture capitalists; trading companies; public A and B stock offerings. Each funding option has pluses and minuses. Trading companies, for example, lend money with the aim of buying out/taking over the business unless, at the offset, a business stipulates its unwillingness to sell.
Besides the never-ending need to find funding, Knight ran into other problems. Steve Prefontaine, the famous distance runner who was NIKE's first celebrity endorser, died in an automobile accident. Packing too many innovations into a new shoe led to a recall. Despite a contract, the first overseas manufacturer Knight relied on to provide the shoes he sold decided to dump him and get a new distributor. NIKE would have better luck when it was first to find a shoe supplier in China. In the US, competitors tried to put NIKE out of business by using an American Selling Price customs provision. After making a high priced shoe similar to NIKE's, US manufacturers asked the government to impose a $25 million duty on NIKE imports that totaled 20% of their American selling prices. Even after negotiations, NIKE paid a custom's duty of $9 million.
Setbacks can turn into learning experiences and worldwide benefits. After the media blasted conditions in its overseas factories, NIKE responded by becoming a leader in the factory reform movement. To eliminate the toxic process of bonding shoe uppers to soles in a rubber room, NIKE invented a fume-less water-based bonding agent that the company shared with its competitors.
And, finally, Shoe Dog teaches the cure for burnout is more work, and the Japanese word, kensho, means the aha experience of enlightenment, when you suddenly understand.
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