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Buisness and Economics

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 7 months ago

"Never tell everything at once." - Ken Venturi; Ken Venturi's Two Great Rules of Life

Table of Contents


 

Business Sub-Catigories

Business

Career Quotes

Crisis Managment

Competing With Asia

Economy

Efficiency

Employment and Work

Fiscal Conservatism

Jobs

Management

 

Business & Economics

 

 

From the Life of Mitt Romney

 

 

Prior to his Olympic service, Romney enjoyed a noted career helping businesses grow and improve their operations. From 1978 to 1984, Mr. Romney was a Vice President at Bain & Company, Inc., a leading management consulting firm. Following a period of decline after Romney's departure, he returned as CEO several years later and engineered a complete recovery. Today, Bain & Company employs more than 2,000 people in 25 offices worldwide.

 

In 1984, Romney founded Bain Capital, one of the nation's most successful venture capital and investment companies. Bain Capital helped launch hundreds of companies on a successful course, including Staples, Bright Horizons Family Solutions, Domino's Pizza, Sealy, Brookstone, and The Sports Authority.

 

Quotes From Mitt Romney about Business

 

"I have today with me today Bob Pozen, formerly Vice Chairman and President of Fidelity who is now our chief of economic affairs. Part of his job is to keep clearing the underbrush of regulation and to make it easier to make businesses grow and thrive. We recently asked a couple of our agencies -- our economic development head and our environmental head -- and said, "You know, people who are thinking about starting biotechnology businesses need places to go where they can get environmental approval. Sometimes it takes the state a year or longer to give environmental approvals to someone who wants to put up a biotech lab of some kind. Why don't we pre-approve biotechnology permits in various areas of our commonwealth, so that as we compete for these kinds of entrepreneurs and businesses, they'll know this is a friendly place for people to do business?" We aim to be a very friendly place for people to do business to keep our tax burdens modest, to keep our regulatory burdens small, and to make the investments necessary to make this an attractive place for you to stay and grow."

 

Let me just note finally that as I think about my job in state government and as I think about your job in taking what you have innovated to market, I fall back on some of the principles I used to apply when I was also in the venture capital world. As some of you may know, I had the chance to work with a company that was ostensibly involved in venture capital and what we found on occasion -- actually what we found on every occasion -- was that no business worked like we thought it would and every business got into trouble at one time or another. It was the inevitable crisis. And I am convinced that the period of crisis is the greatest period of opportunity in any business' life, or in any enterprise's life, because you make choices at that time that determine exactly where you are going to be long term.

 

I am going to take a diversion here. I once did a consulting assignment for a company called the Charms Candy Company. I don't know if any of you remember Charm's Candy? Little Square candy -- you unwrap the cellophane -- sort of like a Lifesaver, only square.

 

Anyway, I met with the Chief Executive, owner of Charms and I said, "How big is your company?"

 

I was shocked. "$1 million in sales per year. That's all it is. A million dollars in sales."

 

I said, "Boy that is extraordinarily small. I had no idea you were so small. "

 

And he said, "Well, we used to be the number one, the number one candy company in America."

 

I think it was back in the forties and there was a spike in sugar prices and the price got so high and they got nervous so they entered into a long-term sugar contract to assure a secure source of supply. Their smaller competitor that didn't actually wrap the individual candies called Lifesavers decided to buy sugar on the spot market, and go up with it and down with it. To make a along story short, the market price for sugar came tumbling down, Lifesaver was able to buy sugar at a fraction of the cost of Charms. Charms went bankrupt and did not emerge until many years later and obviously as a much smaller company. That made all the difference. The decisions you make in those times of crisis, those tough times, can make all the difference.

 

In my experience, the things we had to do in the very difficult times follow a few key principals: Number one is to be honest about where you were and audit where you were. Audit was the first step. I don't mean by calling in Price Waterhouse Coopers, I mean by looking at your own company, your product and your technology, your people, your competitors, your financial setting, your debt structure, the whole thing and say let's audit where we are and be honest about where we are.

 

Number two is to fix the team and make sure you have the right people in place, because sometimes when things are good you sort of go along with same people you've had all along and then you don't make the tough decisions.

 

Number two was getting the team right and number three is what I'll call 'Focus, focus, focus' - deciding what is absolutely essential and focusing on that. Every time we got in trouble that I can recall in my investment career there was some aspect of failure to focus and the desire to do too many things for too many people, or too many markets or too many products. That focusing on where we had significant potential and what would help us accomplish our mission was to focus.


My Thoughts on business

  1. Companies should hire people with strong political or religious beliefs, even if it is not politically correct to do so.
  2. It is is businesses best self interest to not allow their employees to talk about religion or politics.
  3. Interpersonal Relationships at work
  4. It's rude to go on and on about how cool the person was, who you took their place.
  5. Your goal should be to always be completely accurate. In business and politics you should not exaggerate or over simplify.

 

 

 

Links

  1. http://www.mass.gov/eoaf/index.html
  2. http://ideastockexchange.com/buisness.htm

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