Strategy and Tactics – Page 79

The Edison Ratio

Physicists should add the Edison Ratio to their list of fundamental, universal constants. Edison’s formulation for genius — 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration — is as invariant as the speed of light in a vacuum.

Purveyors of business panaceas appear to have reached a different conclusion. Whatever else happens in the corporation, they appear to be saying, it’s what happens in the executive suite that matters. Setting the right direction, whether through strategy, scenario-based planning, enterprise architecture, or Ouija board, is, in their view, what drives success. This perspective explains, perhaps, the ongoing rise in executive compensation and continuing decline in what regular employees receive.

Core American Virtues

By: Bob Lewis|In: Cloud|Last Updated: April 5, 2010

I’m promoting a new business model: Whole Business Outsourcing (WBO). It’s the next logical step after Full Functional Outsourcing (FFO) and its successor, business process outsourcing (BPO). Here’s our value proposition:

A popular means to personal wealth is to start a company, create the illusion of success, then get rid of it for a large chunk of change, leaving the hard work of running it at a profit to someone else.

If you accept the popular-but-unsupported-by-a-shred-of-evidence proposition that businesses should “keep the core and outsource the rest,” it follows that for companies like this, everything except shareholder relations, the IPO process, venture funding, and selling the company outright (pick no more than two) must be non-core.