Posts

Jeff Bezos agreed to the acquisition of the Washington Post for $250M on August 5, 2013. As it is known, the numbers of The Washington Post are not encouraging. In the first half of 2013, The Post reported losses of $49 million, and an average weekly circulation decline of 8.4% compared to the same period last year. This article, which appeared in The Post the first week of September, shares some insights on what Bezos has in mind. Read more...

These three1 questions are pretty obvious. That’s why it’s amazing how many times we forget to ask them when one of our reports is having performance problems, or when we want to help someone perform better. Does she know how to do what is expected of her? (lack of knowledge, or skills) Has he been given the necessary resources to do it? (lack of resources) Does she want to do it? Read more...

Steve Jobs’s commencement Speech at Standford on 2005 is famous for promoting the idea that working on what you love is a condition for doing great work. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. Read more...

Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, has released the alpha version of Hyperloop, a proposal for a high-speed train connecting Los Angeles-San Francisco. The Hyperloop would cover the proposed 570 km route in around 35 minutes, at an average speed of 962 km/h. The Hyperloop document can be downloaded here. Technical details aside, the first pages of the document offer a good insight on how Musk frames a problem and compares alternatives. Read more...

Asymco’s Horace Dediu, quoting Apple’s CEO Tim Cook from three years ago: We can put all of our products on the table you’re sitting at. Those products together sell $40 billion per year. No other company can make that claim except perhaps an oil company. Revenues quadrupled since to a total of $170 billion for the last four quarters. The table, however, has not gotten bigger. Read more...