Word: breakthroughs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...late summer's rays of hope have since been clouded, by a series of setbacks that appear to have reversed progress on every front. The most recent apparent breakthrough had come on November 10, when the government pledged to end its aerial bombardment of suspected rebel redoubts, the rebels promised to disclose their troop locations and both sides renewed their assurances of unfettered access to aid workers. Just two weeks later, in this dusty trading town precariously situated between government, rebel and janjaweed strongholds, those tentative steps toward d?tente collapsed, plunging Darfur into a new round of violence...
...Jenkins' world suddenly began to brighten two years ago. The breakthrough was Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il (the son and successor of Kim Il Sung) in Pyongyang. Kim confirmed Japan's long-held suspicion that North Korea had been kidnapping Japanese citizens and forcing them to teach at its spy schools. Soga, Jenkins' wife, was acknowledged to be among the abductees. After the summit, she and the four others Pyongyang said were still alive returned to Japan for what was meant to be a 10-day visit. They never went back...
...joke. "It should not have worked," Grier says. Yet it did - where earlier optical traps could capture a maximum of two substances, this cheap plastic one split the laser beam into 16 parts which, when properly harnessed, gave them the potential to trap 16 separate substances. It was the breakthrough they had been after for years. "We were stunned,'' Grier recalls...
...optical trap. This has been a hot area of scientific inquiry at least since 1986, when Bell Labs invented one. (Grier had done a postdoctoral fellowship at Bell Labs.) Back then, Bell Labs scientists invented a single-beam "optical tweezers" that trapped just one substance. That was a monumental breakthrough, but scientists began to ponder traps that could catch multiple substances and move them from one point to another. Since their plastic fantastic moment gave Grier and Dufresne 16 separate optical traps, that was enough for the University of Chicago to eventually showcase the duo to Lewis Gruber, a biotech...
That said, a number of the good-to-great companies did undertake significant acquisitions, but--and this is the key point--they did so in circumstances that clearly differed from those of the mediocre comparisons. First, they never tried to use a big acquisition to ignite a breakthrough but attempted to accelerate greatness only after (usually years after) they had already achieved a breakthrough. Second, their best acquisitions met three litmus tests: 1) the acquisition must accentuate what the company can do better than any other company in the world; 2) the acquisition must enhance a powerful pre-existing economic...