musings on Bloomberg by Bloomberg
I started writing this blog post about a year ago, and for one reason or another never got around to posting it. I think mostly because I got wrapped up in grad school apps or some other excuse. This is a collection of quotes from Bloomberg by Bloomberg that caught my attention and I’ve decided to post and comment on.
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I have to admit that I heard of Bloomberg the company and Bloomberg the magazine long before I knew anything about Bloomberg the entrepreneur or Bloomberg the mayor of New York. After watching Bloomberg get elected to mayor of New York and reading an article about him where he talked about the ‘bullpen,’ I decided I’d like to read up on this republican turned democrat.
Bloomberg by Bloomberg is a story of how an entrepreneur from wall street created a niche market and from there a media empire. I found the story engaging and Bloomberg to be not only a ‘good guy,’ but someone that would be exciting to work for. While reading the book I found some qoutes that jumped out at me and made me think. I thought I’d share both the quotes and my thoughts.
“(From John D. Rockefeller to Sam Walton,) great financial success comes from staring businesses with concrete products in the real world, building jobs, creative value, and helping people.”
“If you’re going to succeed, you need a vision, one that’s affordable, practical, and fills a customer need. Then, go for it.” – this reminds me of Jack Welch’s quote “if you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete”
“I’d always prefer to have a smart, fair, honest, demanding client than a nasty dummy or an ‘I don’t care’ user.”
This is something that I can totally relate too. Too often I’ve worked with users that have only vague requirements of look, feel, functionality, and requirements. I’ve also worked with users that have highly specific detailed requirements from the color of lines on a chart to the font used on a web site and the order of columns in a report. If I was given the choice between the two extremes, I would definitely choose the specific, demanding user as long as they can provide the specifics up front. There is nothing worse than having a user that knows exactly what they want but is unable to communicate it during the requirements/design phase. The demanding user that can’t communicate what they want until they have something in their hands leads to a time consuming, highly iterative development phase.
“Your company is one of your families, and the office is that family’s home. Do those outsiders live in pigsties?”
“If you’re not providing something unique, you have no ability to impose charges.”
“No uniqueness: too much supply”
“Distribution changes rapidly. Content evolves slowly with cultural advancement.”
“Technology makes our job different but more productive and more interesting. Technology frees us to do more creative work. Technology is responsible for the employment of more and more people, not fewer and fewer.”
“Making change is difficult.”
“You promise users everything; then you build what you can, and what you think they need.”
“The great system advances are pushed on users, not demanded by them. You can’t run governments or companies successfully by polling or asking for suggestions. Someone must have a visions and take others along, not the reverse.”
“A manager’s primary job is to get those he or she supervises to work together – particularly with technology, where many contribute to any single project.”
“Knowing the company’s products, competitive position, accounting, marketing, and personnel policies is what’s critical to success for any CIO; that knowledge, along with leadership, business acumen, and hands-on management, is what’s needed.”
“CIOs have to stay ahead of the curve and take the rest of the organization along.”
“Technology, it turned out, was no substitute for management.”
“Ours (physical plant) is an open plan layout. People must develop the ability to concentrate, despite myriad distractions. But, the good part is, they absorb information peripherally while focusing elsewhere. Openness also constantly puts them in front of their peers, preventing childish fantasies that coworkers are out to get them.”
“As true with markets, transparency produces fairness.”
“I issue proclamations telling everyone to work together, but it’s the lack of walls that really makes them do it.” “Openness also shows off our most important asset, our people. They are the company.”
“I long ago declared that we would never rehire anyone who quite for other than family reasons.”
“We have no reserved parking spaces for senior executives. If you want to leave your car right by the door, just come in earlier.”
“If we constantly remind those people at the bottom that they are not at the top, do you really expect them to be ‘gung ho’ about the company? Remember, shoot the bottom 50 percent and half of everyone joins that lower group instantly.”
Is this in contrast to rewarding your top performers, or are you just rewarding someone for being older, and working their way to the top of the company over a longer period of time. I believe that these executive parking spots could be used instead for reward and recognition like an employee of the month.
“Constant training, retraining, coaching, and instruction from on-staff, full-time experts increase everyone’s worth.” “Be honest, work hard, treat each other fairly and openly. Add a dash of competency, and we’ll be together for a long time.” “Consumers have an insatiable appetite for improving their lives – and zero loyalty to past products or brand names.” “Growth makes us a moving target. No growth makes us a sitting duck.”
“Without growth, no new opportunities are created, and employees who work hard to get a promotion have no place to go….So we must grow to create new valuable positions, or watch our best and brightest quit for management jobs elsewhere and dissipate everything we’ve built over the years.”
“When is diversification appropriate? Only when it fits with what you already do.”
“The primary function of those at the top is the care and feeding of the company’s most valuable asset, its employees, including designing and administering a compensation system that encourages cooperation, rewards risk taking, and gives inducements to work hard – Job One for the CEO.”
“It may be a standard of success harder to measure, but rather than raising stock prices and even generating earnings, building, leading, and motivating the staff a company needs for the future is what managers should be paid for.”
“The CEO is also the company’s morale officer. He or she must promote an atmosphere in which ordinary people who try new things that fail are encouraged to try again.”
“Being well-rounded, inquisitive, perceptive, logical, and communicative is more valuable than knowing a given sequence of buttons to push.”
“America’s concentration on value-added industries(as opposed to commodities businesses that compete based on price) puts it in a position to maintain margins and salaries, and generate the capital to reinvest in even greater labor saving technology.”
“Compensating top management appropriately, particularly vis-a-vis the rest of the employees, also influences how hard everyone works together and how well a company does. How much to pay the CEO? Try roughly the amount other competent managers make in other fields…The argument that someone is worth tens of millions of dollars in compensation per year because his or her company’s market value went up many times is so ludicrous that I’ve always been amazed anyone can espouse it as fair with a straight face. “
“The corporate change that works is evolutionary change, not revolutionary change.”
“Good business is also providing summer jobs to students.”
“wealth, wisdom, and work – the three contributions one can make.”
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I chose each of these quotes as excerpts because each struck a cord with me in one way or another. Either because they made me reflect on the way the current organization I work for is run, how I would like to lead and motivate people, or the type of environment I would like to foster and work in.
Sorry for not providing page numbers.
