Word: product
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...tenure but it wouldn’t have mattered. The mockery was a draft-day rite, although this year, Layden was very explicably gone. (Occasionally, in fact, my friends and I do nothing but think about how the Knicks passed up native St. John’s product Ron Artest for Frenchman Frederic Weis, who not only never made it to American shores but proceeded to be dunked over by Vince Carter in the Olympics. I’m not sure if I can stress this enough. Frederic Weis is over seven feet all, purportedly. Vince Carter physically dunked over...
...Once confined to research universities, the idea of markets working within companies has started to seep out into some of the nation's largest corporations. Companies from Microsoft to Eli Lilly and Hewlett-Packard are bringing the market inside, with workers trading futures contracts on such "commodities" as sales, product success and supplier behavior. The concept: a work force contains vast amounts of untapped, useful information that a market can unlock. "Markets are likely to revolutionize corporate forecasting and decision making," says Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, in Virginia, who has researched and developed markets. "Strategic decisions...
...understand the hype, take a look at Hewlett-Packard's experience with forecasting monthly sales. A few years back, HP commissioned Charles Plott, an economist from the California Institute of Technology, to set up a software trading platform. A few dozen employees, mostly product and finance managers, were each given about $50 in a trading account to bet on what they thought computer sales would be at the end of the month. If a salesman thought the company would sell between, say, $201 million and $210 million worth, he could buy a security--like a futures contract--for that prediction...
...make money with no concern for companies' fundamentals. But if the forward march of information technology is any indication, markets will come to play an increasingly important role. No matter the industry, companies are ultimately in the business of predicting the future: what a consumer will buy, where a product can be made most cheaply, how new laws might affect profit margins. There is such an undisputed advantage to knowing the future that corporations employ analysts and strategists, create committees and reports, conduct polls and pilots--all to figure out what will, and should, happen next. As HP's Huberman...
...company, Sun Precautions, is now one of the world's leading manufacturers of sun-protective clothing. Hughes goes under the sun lamps because he feels a sense of duty toward his customers. "It's important from an ethical consideration. I don't want anybody to buy a product that doesn't work," he says. "I believe management should be on the front lines and not in some back room...