LITMIR.BIZ

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with coupons and jars of loose change. Watering down milk to make it go further. Using washing up liquid instead of shampoo. Inventing excuses for skipping lunch. Having to walk everywhere. Sharing beds and baths. Mending clothes that are themselves second-hand. Reviving old newspapers as makeshift lampshades. Always being tired – poverty in austerity.

      The first is that entrepreneurs routinely see opportunities where everyone else sees problems. A surprising number of great companies were born out of fury and frustration.

      When Wal-Mart tried to impose alien rules on its German staff – such as compulsory smiling and a ban on affairs with co-workers – it touched off a guerilla war that ended only when the supermarket chain announced it was pulling out of Germany in 2006.

      When things went wrong for Middle Eastern tribes a couple of millennia ago, the accepted remedy was to send a sacrificial goat out into the wilderness to placate the gods. The practice continues today, but the voters have replaced the gods, and highly paid businesspeople the goats.

      Why do Americans spend such huge amounts of time, money, water, fertiliser and fuel on growing a useless smooth expanse of grass? Much better to cultivate something useful, like tomatoes.

      Walmart did not become a $200 billion company without running down a few pedestrians.

      Water flows towards money.

      The recovery has resembled third-world traffic, where juggernauts and rickshaws, cars and cycles ply the same lanes at different speeds, often getting in each other's way.

      Shoppers have been able to buy from out-of-state merchants since Sears issued its first mail-order catalogues in the 19th century.

      Warren Buffett: "It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked."

      The new strategy looks more promising, but as always success will depend on implementation.

      Consider an imaginary Englishman's day. He wakes in his cottage near Dover, ready to commute to London. Chomping a bowl of Weetabix, a British breakfast cereal resembling (tasty) cardboard, he makes a cup of tea. His privatised water comes from Veolia and his electricity from EDF (both French firms). Thumps at the gate tell him another arm of Veolia is emptying his bins. He takes the new high-speed train to London: it is part-owned by the French firm Keolis, while the tracks belong to Canadian pension funds. At St Pancras station, a choice of double-decker buses awaits. In the last couple of years, one of the big London bus companies was bought by Netherlands Railways. A second went to Deutsche Bahn, the German railway company. In March, a third was taken over by RATP, the Paris public-transport authority (its previous owners were also French). The Dutch railways logo is emblazoned on buses across London. Thanks to RATP's logo, a stylised image of the River Seine now adorns hundreds more: most Londoners neither know nor care. As for Weetabix, a French billionaire is interested in buying the firm, according to press reports. Yet Britain still feels British.

      Polaroid, whose once-iconic instant-photo firm, has only one significant asset now – its name.

      In a diatribe against the Rothschilds, Heinrich Heine, a German poet, fumed that money "is more fluid than water and less steady than air".

      New boss didn't magic away the problems.

      Most state-owned companies are prone to over-staffing, underinvestment, political interference and corruption.

      Putting business at the heart of the health-care system is not a must but a bug.

      The word "company" is derived from the Latin words "cum" and "pane" meaning "breaking bread together".

      The sheer size of the Al Saud clan has also helped cement the nation. There have been eight generations of Saudi rulers, dating back to 18th-century sheikhs who held sway in a few oasis towns near present-day Riyadh. Many have been prolific. King Abdul Aziz himself sired some 36 sons and even more daughters. The first son to succeed him, King Saud, fathered 107 children. King Abdullah is believed to have 20 daughters and 14 sons. The extended Al Saud family is now thought to number some 30,000, though only 7,000 or so are princes. Of these, only around 500 are in government, and only perhaps 60 carry real weight in decision-making.

      There's no exaggerating China's hunger for commodities. The country accounts for about a fifth of the world's population, yet it gobbles up more than half of the world's pork, half of its cement, a third of its steel and over a quarter of its aluminium. It is spending 35 times as much on imports of soya beans and crude oil as it did in 1999, and 23 times as much importing copper – indeed, China has swallowed over four-fifths of the increase in the world's copper supply since 2000.

      The world knows what it wants, but cannot agree on how to get what it wants.

      The financial results of Chinese companies that global investors wish to buy into can be as unintelligible as the dialect spoken in the company town. It is said (with apparent sincerity) that some Chinese firms keep several sets of books – one for the government, one for company records, one for foreigners and one to report what is actually going on.

      Nokia must still work to keep its chin above the waves.

      The problem is that as soon as fun becomes part of a corporate strategy it ceases to be fun and becomes its opposite – at best an empty shell and at worst a tiresome imposition.

      Roads, railways, water and gas mains, sewage pipes and electricity cables all move things around. So do the blood vessels of animals and the sap-carrying xylem and phloem of plants.

      Beekeeping is one example beloved by economic theorists. Bees create honey, which can be sold on the market. But they also pollinate nearby apple trees, a useful service that is not purchased or priced.

      The story of Ireland is like a fairy tale: from rags to riches and back to rags again.

      The full-blooded, unapologetic pursuit of America's national interest.

      The rich world is in the middle of a management revolution, from "motivation 2.0" to "motivation 3.0" (1.0 in this schema was prehistoric times, when people were motivated mainly by the fear of being eaten by wild animals).

      Then there is "gladvertising" and "sadvertising", a rather sinister-sounding idea in which billboards with embedded cameras, linked to face-tracking software, detect the mood of each consumer who passes by, and change the advertising on display to suit it. The technology matches movements of the eyes and mouth to six expression patterns corresponding to happiness, anger, sadness, fear, surprise and disgust. An unhappy-looking person might be rewarded with ads for a sun-drenched beach or a luscious chocolate bar while those wearing an anxious frown might be reassured (some might say exploited) with an ad for insurance.

      Romantics say that the bank used to prosper by deliberately not having any strategy at all.

      China's leaders hew to Deng Xiaoping's dictum that "China should adopt a low profile and never take the lead." China can hide its national demands behind a multilateral façade.

      PepsiCo announced that it had developed the world's first bottle to be made entirely of a plastic consisting of plant-based materials, which can be fully recycled. Its "green bottle" is composed of switch grass, pine bark and corn husk. Pepsi hopes to produce bottles in the future using orange and potato peels and other by-products from food.

      Saudi oil costs just $2 a barrel to produce, a small fraction of what it costs to extract the stuff in Alaska, say, or the North Sea. Demand from both Asia and America remains strong. Saudi Aramco, the giant state oil monopoly, is ramping up its production capacity. Having remained static at around 10m barrels per day for a generation, this is currently pushing 11m and may reach 12.5m by 2009 and perhaps 15m by 2015. Assuming a middle-of-the-range price of around $40 a barrel, the oil bubbling out of the ground could continue to be worth around $500m a day for many years to come. Oil exports, having bottomed out in 1998 at $35 billion, have since soared, hitting a record $160 billion in 2005. Last year's current-account surplus was close to $100 billion and the central bank's net foreign reserves rose to $135 billion, a jump of $90 billion in just three years.

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