Cars Mania » Business

SPECIAL REPORT: Astra Needs to Expand Its Domestic Manufacturing Base

davidguide — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 01:15:27 +0000

JAKARTA (IFT) – PT Astra Internatonal Tbk (ASII) has been in automotive business for years but the company only expands its Japanese brands. According to IFT Research Department, Astra, which eyes to be the a national pride, should have bigger contribution to the development of domestic industry.

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Business leaders helping to shape Pinellas budget, union contract

davidguide — Tue, 24 May 2011 01:33:24 +0000

In recent months, the Pinellas Education Foundation has played a bigger role in the school district’s budget cuts and contract talks, with members offering advice to top administration officials on the former and tapping a business consultant to meet with them on the latter.

The foundation is even considering hiring a part-time coordinator to continue the process of matching up business leaders with department heads to help transfer business practices into the district.

That way, “on a regular basis, we add some value in freeing up dollars to throw in the classroom,” Craig Sher, who chairs the foundation board of directors, told the St. Petersburg Times editorial board today.

Some potential examples: Perhaps someone with Blue Cross Blue Shield or Humana could meet with the district to look at ways of bringing insurance costs down, Sher said. Or someone from Crown Automotive could look at transportation costs.

“We’ve …

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Thorstad Family To Close Local Automotive Dealership

davidguide — Sun, 08 May 2011 01:14:34 +0000

A south side Madison business that’s been open for nearly half a century will close its doors in July.

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Lapo Elkann: Style Icon

davidguide — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:16:38 +0000

Why He’s A Style Icon

Style icons are almost always bred from the usual celebrity stock of actors, athletes and rock stars. But the business world is occasionally a prime pasture from which to find tastemakers of our time. And there is no better example of that than Lapo Elkann. The New York-born Italian playboy single-handedly revived the stagnant automobile maker Fiat, which at one point was chaired by his dapper grandfather Gianni Agnelli . And although it’s a last name that’s no stranger to British tabloids and the Italian press (they found his bout with a brood of transsexuals and a cocaine-induced coma fascinating), the Agnelli empire isn’t plagued by paparazzi on this side of the Atlantic. Instead, the few times Elkann has come under the microscope here has been for his sartorial sensibility. This shouldn’t be surprising, given that he hails from a long line of style-conscious men. Patriarch Gianni was known for donning meticulously tailored suits , which Elkann is rumored to have snagged. In fact, he still sports them occasionally — a true testament to their timelessness. But the clean-cut, coiffed Elkann is just one half of the story. After all, any man involved in a tranny-type sex scandal must have a wilder wardrobe lying around somewhere. And, indeed, this tatted-up trendsetter has tastes that range from perfectly pressed rich kid to casual cowboy, complete with vintage denim shirts. Of course, an army of accessories, including fedoras, bracelets and sunglasses appear on the main menu too. But don’t worry; Elkann doesn’t have a split personality. A guy this bold has no problem mixing it all up — like taking a single breasted blazer and topping it off with a ski cap. Dress The Elkann Way

Normally, inheriting a heap of hand-me-downs is the quickest way to kill your closet. Even though raiding a collection of clothing as great as that of granddaddy Gianni isn’t exactly a bad hand to be dealt, it requires skill to integrate the past with the present — and Elkann is a master. Wraparound shades from his very own line of lightweight carbon-crafted sunglasses contrast with his never-ending appetite for dandyish duds. But there are few men (perhaps only Elkann himself) who can pair a dinner jacket with a T-shirt and shades, and manage to avoid douchedom . The foolproof way to emulate Elkann’s eternal elegance: A double-breasted blazer with a knit tie and folded white pocket square.

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Panasonic to sell automotive battery division to Chinese firm

davidguide — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 01:20:35 +0000

OSAKA – Panasonic Corp will sell its automotive nickel-hydride battery business at a Kanagawa Prefecture plant to a Chinese battery manufacturer by the end of April for about 500 million yen. The …

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Business looking up for auto suppliers

davidguide — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 01:17:03 +0000

Suppliers are working more collaboratively with automakers and gaining greater access to credit, while volumes are rebounding to meet increased sales of cars and trucks, the chief executive of TI Automotive said Tuesday in addressing the Automotive Press Association.

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Elgin business leader sees positive outcome of meeting with Hu

davidguide — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 01:14:31 +0000

Pin Ni operates one of the largest automotive parts companies in China, called Wanxiang, with major operations in Elgin. He’s at the White House on Wednesday and we’re hoping to reach him for comments.

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How Facebook Used White Space To Crush Myspace

davidguide — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:25:25 +0000

Mike talks a lot about disruptive innovation, about how — despite all outward appearances — newcomers can compete and even usurp the establishment (which are also called “entrants” and “incumbents” by Clayton Christensen ). The examples are plentiful: Microsoft Money was outfoxed by Intuit’s Quicken , Nike’s pre-loaded iPhone app was leapfrogged by RunKeeper , Blockbuster was run into the ditch by Netflix , Kodak was surprised by the swift adoption of digital cameras … the evidence shows again and again that the size of the company and vastness of its resources do not necessarily guarantee its market dominance . Gerd Leonard tipped me off to a great Forbes article by Adam Hartung called How Facebook Beat Myspace . For anyone who used both of those social networks, the grievances against Myspace are easy to list: too many ads, irrelevant ads, poor programming leading to browser crashes and typographic eyesores, letting users customize their profiles to such a degree that profile pages would either take too long to load (because of 50+ 10MB images) or the colors were simply too garish to view without getting a headache. Myspace, for all its fantastic social networking tools which had been hitherto unavailable, it still had serious design flaws, and Myspace users saw Facebook as a better run and cleaner social network. That’s why we all migrated. Hartung bypasses the banalities of the user experience to examine the differences in business management approaches at Facebook and Myspace. He begins by rewinding the clock to remind us just how popular Myspace was at its peak success. If you remember, Facebook was a total nobody at that time. And then, something went awry… a change in the wind: What went wrong? A lot of folks will be relaying the tactics of things done and not done at MySpace. As well as tactics done and not done at Facebook. But underlying all those tactics was a very simple management mistake News Corp. made. News Corp tried to guide MySpace, to add planning, and to use “professional management” to determine the business’s future. That was fatally flawed when competing with Facebook which was managed in White Space, lettting the marketplace decide where the business should go. “White Space” is a relatively new management term that Hartung advocates in his book, Seizing the White Space . Wikipedia describes White Space as the area in a business’ hierarchy that exists between functions within the hierarchy, much like the unused space in your kitchen cupboard. White Space is the “handoff between functions where misunderstandings and delays occur”, where “things often fall between the cracks or disappear into black holes”. Hartung also calls White Space “a location for new thinking, testing and learning” in order to “evolve new formulae for business success free from the existing Defend and Extend culture.” Hartung then offers up the meat of his argument — that Facebook conquered Myspace not because Facebook offered better features, but because it looked to its users for ideas and then created those features : …the brilliance of Mark Zuckerberg was his willingness to allow Facebook to go wherever the market wanted it. Farmville and other social games — why not? Different ways to find potential friends — go for it. The founders kept pushing the technology to do anything users wanted. If you have an idea for networking on something, Facebook pushed its tech folks to make it happen. And they kept listening. And looking within the comments for what would be the next application — the next promotion — the next revision that would lead to more uses, more users and more growth. And that’s the nature of White Space management. No rules. Not really any plans. No forecasting markets. Or foretelling uses. No trying to be smarter than the users to determine what they shouldn’t do. Not prejudging ideas so as to limit capability and focus the business toward a projected conclusion. To the contrary, it was about adding, adding, adding and doing whatever would allow the marketplace to flourish. Permission to do whatever it takes to keep growing. And resource it as best you can — without prejudice as to what might work well, or even best. Keep after all of it. What doesn’t work stop resourcing, what does work do more. Contrarily, at NewsCorp the leaders of MySpace had a plan. NewsCorp isn’t run by college kids lacking business sense. Leaders create Powerpoint decks describing where the business will head, where they will invest, how they will earn a positive ROI with projections of what will work — and why — and then plans to make it happen. They developed the plan, and then worked the plan. Plan and execute. The professional managers at News Corp looked into the future, decided what to do, and did it. They didn’t leave direction up to market feedback and crafty techies — they ran MySpace like a professional business. And how’d that work out for them? The tendency to plan for any daring enterprise is irresistible, and critically necessary in many cases. But Hartung’s point is that innovation is a different beast from other types of business management. When you choose to innovate clever, competitive solutions to new market conditions, you have to be open to the possibility that you might create a newer business model that cannibalizes or “devalues” your current product or service. And so we arrive at the so-called Innovator’s Dilemma — do you tear down the walls of your temple to build a better temple? Or do you let someone else tear down your temple so they can build a better one? When you’re an incumbent business like Nike, Microsoft, Blockbuster, or Kodak, you probably have so much financial investment in your legacy business model that you would rather turn a blind eye to all those young upstarts who seems to understand the market much better than you. After all, you have the experience, and they don’t, right? Your staff went to Harvard and Duke and Stanford, right? Aren’t your Excel spreadsheets of ROI projections your best protection against unexpected market reversals? You’ve produced 100 movies and they haven’t, so what could these whippersnappers possibly know about the business of filmmaking? Planning is of course essential for many parts of business but, Hartung notes, you really can’t plan what people are going to respond to the most, and Zuckerberg understands that at a fundamental level. I once read an interview where the reporter noted how Zuckerberg constantly asks his colleagues, “Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently? And how do we get there?” This explains why Facebook revamps their site every six months… but also why Facebook continues to compete (and very effectively) with looming competitors like Twitter. (In passing, Netflix has also thrived from constant experimentation and listening to its users. Consequently, new features pop up on Netflix all the time that improve their service… and customers remain loyal because of that.) But this point should not be glossed over. At the heart of Facebook’s success is Zuckerberg’s willingness to “destroy” Facebook to make it better and more competitive. Facebook was once the entrant, and now it is the incumbent and will stay the incumbent for as long as Zuckerberg retains the attitude of an entrant . Incumbents face a choice of abandoning much of their expensive infrastructure to adapt to a changing market, whereas entrants face no such choice — quite the opposite, entrants have nothing to lose. They can try anything. Facebook crushed Myspace because Zuckerberg was focused on growing the user base by providing the things users asked for, rather than only providing the things that would grow the company’s bottom line. Zuckerberg’s second question, “How do we get there?” illustrates how he’s constantly experimenting and building bridges from new and radical ideas to the current and static ideas. Myspace, being too preoccupied with planning, ROI, etc., never fully understood how important adaptability was to their business model. Hartung concludes with the most important point of all: MySpace demonstrates a big fallacy of modern management. The belief that smart MBAs, with industry knowledge, will perform better. That “good management” means you predict, you forecast, you plan, and then you go execute the plan…. Big failures — like Circuit City, AIG, Lehman Brothers, GM — are full of extremely bright, well educated (Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, Wharton) MBAs who are prepared to study, analyze, predict, plan and execute. But it turns out their crystal ball is no better than — well — college undergraduates. There’s an element of ego in play here — legacy businesses are rarely humble enough to admit they can still learn from the newcomers, and that’s to be expected. It’s a convenient reaction to view emerging market developments as fads, gimmicks, or flavors-of-the-month and as such are unworthy of diluting the company’s resources by devoting extra time, money, and energy to research them. The fact is that many of these “fads” might very well be a waste of time and resources. By next year, they may have come and gone. And yet entrants view these “fads” with an open mind, and choose to tinker endlessly with them until the market reacts favorably to one of their experiments. If anything, Myspace’s spectacular failure underscores exactly how important it is to listen to others regardless of their experience or educational background. Yes, of course, experience is a factor in lending weight to someone’s ideas, but good judgment is an equally important factor, if not more so. You needn’t have had any experience producing horse-drawn carriages to make a sound judgment about how obsolete horse-drawn carriages would be with the coming automobile. Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

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Cheap Used Cars Buying- A Worth Decision

davidguide — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 16:10:00 +0000

Due to the advanced technology many upgraded features are been included in the cars so as to make them more attractive. This made the cars little expensive and slightly difficult to cut the budget and go for purchasing the new cars for sale. Hence many dealers and manufacturing companies took the advantage of selling the used cars or second hand cars or cheap cars for sale. Many leading companies buy cheap used cars for sale so as to expand the business on larger scale. The cheap used cars for sale are less in terms of money and good option to go for. The manufacturing companies like Suzuki cars for sale, Nissan cars for sale, Mitsubishi cars for sale, Hyundai cars for sale, Pontiac cars for sale and many more.

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The Used Tractors From Japan Now Can be Availed in The Easiest Manner

davidguide — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 17:18:29 +0000

Japan has long been known for the efficiency and strength of its automobiles. The Japanese automobiles have dominated the world of automobiles for a long time now. In fact the whole of the world knows that the automobiles that are produced in Japan have stood the test of time and also are a lot cheaper than those manufactured by the other companies. Japanese automobile manufacturers have not only made their mark in the world of cars and other vehicles. They have also proved themselves to be the manufacturers of the most efficient and the sturdiest manufacturers of agricultural vehicles like tractors, rice combines, and other construction machinery.

Even the used tractors from Japan are the most admired ones throughout the world. Now there are sites on the net that can help you in laying your hands on the most efficient used tractors or used compact tractors to the people all over the world. The buyer just needs to be sure about the kind of used tractor that he wants and in no time that used tractor would be made available to him. These websites act as business to business sites and operate in the most efficient manner. Just choose from the available inventory the type and the make of the used tractor that you want to purchase.

One of the most important things that needs to be understood about these sites is that the inventory that they have is updated and the latest used tractors or used tractor for sale are always added onto these sites. The buyer can rest assured that the used tractor that would be made available to him would be of the best quality. In case there are certain issues that need to be looked into then the buyer’s grievances would be properly looked into and all of them would be taken care of.

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