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Godin, 47, recognized the potential of the Internet way back in the mainframe era. The author, who got his first e-mail address more than 30 years ago, when he was a precocious high school student, sold Yoyodyne, a direct-marketing firm he founded in 1995, to Yahoo! three years later for a reported $30 million. Now on his 11th best-selling business book, Godin is a Web legend with a cult following and even a Seth Godin action figure. His talent as a writer is to impart his techie zeal without the baggage of geek jargon. "When I send...
Inside an empty former electronics factory in the Dutch town of Eindhoven, hundreds of Philips employees sit around endless rows of tables. Split into small groups, staffers of the Amsterdam-based firm--maker of everything from lightbulbs and toothbrushes to TVs and X-ray machines--get to work. "We're not always an easy company to deal with," says Theo van Deursen, boss of Philips' lighting division. From a platform in the center of the vast space--still latticed with girders and pipes, its walls temporarily lined with giant TV screens--Van Deursen lays down a challenge. "We have...
...greener lighting and the rising sums being spent on health care for aging populations offered Philips the prospect of steadier growth. Flush with cash from selling unwanted units, Philips has splashed more than $7 billion on lighting and health-care companies, from Genlyte, a U.S. commercial lighting-fixtures firm it bought in November for $2.7 billion--the biggest buy it ever completed--to Lifeline, a Massachusetts-based provider of home medical-alert systems...
Another way the firm thinks it can stand out: extending treatment to the home, where the brand is well known. For instance, heart patients can be monitored from their living rooms using Philips' new Motiva device, which checks vital signs via a broadband link to a hospital. If something is out of whack, a nurse will intervene; a regular checkup might uncover the problem too late...
...companies offer a more stunning testimonial to the benefits of privatization--and fortuitous timing--than the formerly state-owned Brazilian mining firm Companhia Vale do Rio Doce. In the 55 years following its founding in 1942, Vale, as it is now known, grew into a comfortably large domestic player. Since being unshackled from Brazil's state bureaucracy in 1997, Vale has soared into the ranks of global-commodities powerhouses, with net income rising from $680 million in 2002 to $9.2 billion in the first nine months of 2007, placing it as one of the top-three diversified mining...