Blog

Category: Business

Arthur C. Nielsen, Jr., 1919-2011

28 October 2011

“If you can put a number on it, then you know something,” the late Arthur C. Nielsen Jr., who died earlier this month, reportedly said his father once told him. If you use or refer to metrics, analytics and box office statistics, you are cashing in on Mr. Nielsen’s work, because he was president and chairman of the A. C. Nielsen Company founded by his father. The Nielsen Company pioneered gathering, reporting and analyzing consumer data and it still dominates such information in the entertainment industry, especially television. Arthur Nielsen, whose life began and ended in Winnetka, Illinois, became president of his father’s modest television statistics firm in 1957 and he was named chairman in 1975. According to newspaper obituaries, he took the business from making under $4 million a year to $680 million in annual revenue. The World War 2 veteran, who served as a major in the Corps of Engineers, was assigned during the war to construct a building that would function as a place to operate a machine. The machine’s purpose? To generate highly complex tables that would calculate for accuracy the metrics of firing huge artillery guns. Nielsen was fascinated and became a passionate exponent and innovator of what the company called a “measurement science.” Among those innovations are of course the famous Nielsen ratings that continue to define, frame and shape television markets. Whether they know it or not, future practitioners and pioneers in entertainment industry statistics analysis, such as my former business partner, Box Office Mojo founder Brandon Gray, gained enormous value from Mr. Nielsen’s work. He leaves behind much more than the world’s leading market research business. Art Nielsen, as he was known to his colleagues, ran, fostered and kept re-creating a technology-based business that advanced our understanding of the arts and business. Gaining knowledge of what people choose to consume helps us learn why they consume it, which helps artists produce richer, more compelling work for people to consume. By taking measure of what people consume, Nielsen’s distinguished career improved both the art of business and the business of art.

Permalink | Posted in Business, Obituaries, Television

Cars: Mazda Quits Making Rotary Engine

16 October 2011

“Mazda to stop making rotary-engine vehicles,” read the Associated Press headline. After 45 years of making the engine that powered the first and only Japanese car to win the 24-hour Le Mans endurance race, Mazda Motor Corporation, the only automaker in the world to manufacture rotary engine vehicles, recently announced that production of the rotary engine will end in June 2012. Developed by Felix Wankel in 1960 and first used by Mazda in 1967, the rotary engine costs more money and uses more fuel compared to the piston engine, but it’s lighter and quieter and uses fewer moving parts. Amid environmentalist-backed government emissions regulations and government favortism toward electric and hybrid cars, Mazda admitted in its statement that emissions dictates are a partial cause for the decision and said sales had declined. The company, which pledged to continue researching rotary engine possibilities, puts the latest edition of the RX-8 (the only Mazda model with a rotary engine) on sale Nov. 24 with a sales target of 1,000 vehicles. A small percentage of the Hiroshima, Japan-based Mazda is owned by Dearborn, Michigan-based Ford Motor Company, the only private automotive manufacturer in the United States.

Permalink | Posted in Business, Cars, News

Books: How to Win Friends & Influence People in the Digital Age

10 October 2011

On the 75th anniversary of a concise business book that’s sold more than 30 million copies, the New York-based Dale Carnegie and Associates has produced an updated version of Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends & Influence People, (Simon and Schuster, October 2011, $26/$13 on iBooks), which adds the phrase in the Digital Age to the title. Dale Carnegie (1888-1955), whom his father claimed was a distant cousin to steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie, may or may not have approved of this overhauled adaptation of his original work, written with Brent Cole, but he approached his topic, communication, with a kind of benevolent embrace of entrepreneurialism, and this version does too. Unfortunately, its theme confuses benevolence with self-sacrifice, asking in the introduction: “Aren’t we all moved by altruism?” No, we’re not.

The authors also mix up narcissism with self-interest, a common error, but if you can sift through these and other mistakes, there’s plenty of good advice, tips and encouragement for doing rational, honorable and productive business in today’s overwhelming information age. “Carnegie,” the intro asserts, “was the master of influence that is earned.” This seems at least partly true, with his simple, thoughtful insights intact, updated and integrated with today’s markets in mind. Among the gems are tales about President Lincoln and an unsent letter to General Meade in the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War, a good contrast between the story of The King’s Speech and a fallen, disgraced National Public Radio executive, and this ancient Jewish parable about a shepherd guarding 100 sheep who loses one, just one, and must decide what to do: “Does he say a prayer and hope the sheep shows up before a wolf nabs him? No, he pens the ninety-nine and goes looking. That one sheep is of such magnificent importance the shepherd cannot bear to see him left alone. Consider the message this sends to the sheep, not just the one but also the other ninety-nine who look to the shepherd for provision and protection. Now consider sending that same message to those you’d like to influence. Have you let them know just how valuable you think they are? There is great power in this simple principle, embodied regularly.”

Guiding readers through productive communications, including the use of social media, with anecdotes, tips and tools about the importance of providing encouragement, smiling, using names, listening, discussing what matters, leaving others a little better off, and other ideas, How to Win Friends & Influence People in the Digital Age blends success stories with certain notions (most, not all, of them good). Pointing to the late Steve Jobs, the book reminds us that, when he unveiled the iMac at the turn of the century, he predicted a future of the computer as a hub for video and digital cameras, music players, assorted productivity devices, and cellular phones, and he was ridiculed by critics and competitors alike. “Some of Apple’s longtime rivals,” Dale Carnegie Training writes, “called the [iMac] ‘clownish’ and ‘silly’ and the vision ‘far too grand’. The public? They embraced the vision and the life that it promised. And Apple Computer, now simply Apple, has seen its share price increase 4,856 percent. The closest competitor has increased approximately 14 percent…The difference is that Steve Jobs recognized something Dale Carnegie championed repeatedly: to influence others to act, you must first connect to a core desire within them.”

Except for bad advice about never saying “you’re wrong” to someone and the usual plea for humility, the authors generally encourage the reader to act in his self-interest and they partly define what they mean by the ability to earn trust and influence others: “…the pinnacle of this principle is not complete self-denial. Notice the principle does not read, ‘Replace your interests with others’ interests.’ It instead reads, ‘Take interest in others’ interests,’ and that is the secret of its application.” I’m not convinced that this edition is worth the price (the original version is available on Apple’s iBookstore for $5), but theirs is a decent and generally constructive lesson in positive thinking, and especially the idea of reciprocity, that people who want to succeed in today’s challenging business environment, including those who claim to live by the virtue of selfishness, should learn.

Permalink | Posted in Books, Business, Simon & Schuster

Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011

5 October 2011

One of America’s greatest businessmen died today. Apple founder and Chairman of the Board Steve Jobs was in his prime, and he went out on top of the world, exiting gracefully if prematurely due to pancreatic cancer amid a chorus of passionate expressions of love and admiration for his breathtaking achievements in business, technology, and the arts. I can’t add to the countless tributes, posts, and deeply felt bows to this American hero, and I’ve already posted about Apple here, so I’ll simply say that this longtime Apple consumer, who began using Apple’s products at a California newspaper where I was writing ad copy and designing ads before hustling my way into a writing assignment (a feature on the 50th anniversary of The Fountainhead), learned of my hero’s demise in an Apple Store in Century City, California. The location and setting, a rainy, autumn afternoon where steel towers meet the sky in an urban landscape predicated on the union of form and function, seems fitting. I had been taking a brief tutorial on Apple’s new business service, Joint Venture, from Gustavo, with another Apple associate, Chadwick, who later confirmed that Mr. Jobs was gone. I’d already been briefed on the forthcoming Apple iPhone 4S, and watched a clip from What’s Eating Gilbert Grape on AppleTV, and I was exiting the store, the busiest enterprise in the complex, when I noticed his image on a MacBook with his name and birth and death dates. When Chadwick told me, we shared a moment of sadness and I went off to be alone. With America in its darkest days, with capitalism being destroyed by our government, and with mobs of vacant hippies occupying Wall Street, Los Angeles and Boston, threatening to tear down business, the rich, and the productive, I thought: here was a man who took on the whole world and won, with honor, self-interest, and excellence and on the merits, in every sense. He brought us together, in newsrooms, stores and coffee shops, and on social media, and he knew the supremacy and simplicity of what it means to be left alone. Saying thank you isn’t enough for what he did. Steve Jobs deserves something deeper, like a prayer. Today, he died, and I am glad I was in a place he created when I heard the news. But I think I will always feel like those stores, and the neat rows of products made by the company he created, are an embodiment of something larger than life, something sacred, and something real, made by him. Steve Jobs.

Permalink | Posted in Business, News, Obituaries, Walt Disney Studios

Disney/Pixar to Re-release Classics in Theaters

4 October 2011

With its successful re-release of The Lion King in the three dimensional (3D) format (it’s near the $80 million mark in U.S. box office receipts, according to the Walt Disney Studios), Disney announced today that the Burbank, Calif.-based company will release limited theatrical engagements for four of its classic films for the first time in 3D.

In a press statement, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios said they will distribute Beauty and the Beast (January 13, 2012), Finding Nemo (September 14, 2012), Monsters, Inc. (January 18, 2013) and my personal favorite Disney picture, The Little Mermaid (September 13, 2013). “Great stories and great characters are timeless, and at Disney we’re fortunate to have a treasure trove of both,” said Disney Studios President Alan Bergman.

Beauty and the Beast (1991), the first animated film nominated for an Academy Award® for Best Picture, earning $380 million in international box office, follows the adventures of Belle, a bright young woman held against her will by a village monster. Disney/Pixar’s Finding Nemo, a father-son story of a lost fish, was the second highest-grossing film of 2003, and Monsters, Inc. (2001) featured a scary monsters in the closet tale involving a little girl meeting good and and bad monsters in a factory in Monstropolis. It grossed $527 million worldwide. The Little Mermaid is the story of a rebellious mermaid who worships man and wants to become a human in defiance of her harsh, insensitive father. The 1989 motion picture was a box office smash and restored the studio to its original animation arts glory. The Walt Disney Studios is owned by The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS), which also controls Marvel Studios.

Permalink | Posted in Business, News, Visual Arts, Walt Disney Studios

Why I Like Apple’s Logo

23 August 2011

As we near the end of what’s left of capitalist America, with impending monetary collapse caused by government-controlled economics, Apple’s logo—a symbol of the greedy and passionate pursuit of knowledge—remains America’s most powerful symbol of capitalism.

To me (and it is just me because the designer denies it), the logo represents the apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Whether it’s intended or not, the apple with a bite taken out of it is a visual reference to the idea that wanting to gain knowledge of the world around us—and acting on the desire—causes man’s fall from grace. The apple, and the company’s remarkable and historic success since Steve Jobs created Apple in California with his partners in 1976, suggests an inversion of the story from the book of Genesis. The iconic logo means the opposite of the Bible’s tale of forbidden fruit; it means that ignorance is not bliss and that wanting to gain knowledge is good, not evil—that, contrary to the notion of original sin, man is not inherently evil—that man is not inherently anything but human—and, as an image for a big business that makes money by trading in the single most unregulated industry left on earth, that one should, as an old Spanish proverb puts it: “take what you want and pay for it.”

This presumes the freedom to choose and to me it represents the American spirit of capitalism. As we descend into an economic death spiral caused not by capitalism but by its opposite, welfare statism, I’m going to look at Apple’s logo as a simple, noble symbol of the quest for knowledge and remind myself that the good is still possible—and that Apple, for now, is proof of it.

Permalink | Posted in Business, Capitalism, Culture, Visual Arts

Death of a Toymaker

29 July 2011

Today, as the nation reels from an historic debate about its astronomical debt, it seems proper to note that Hot Wheels creator Elliot Handler died this month. He was 95. If you’ve never heard of him, and I did not know his name until I read his obituary, you’ve very likely heard of what he made: besides the Hot Wheels toy cars, he made Mattel, which he founded as a home-based business, into America’s largest toy manufacturer. He was what those men and women in Washington cutting sleazy little deals over how to control our lives and punish us for being productive are not: he was a creator. Unlike Congress and the President, he made things of value.

According to USA Today, Handler started making dollhouse furniture and other wooden toys from scraps and among Mattel’s first hit products was a child-size ukulele, and I think I had one of those, or one of my siblings did, and a cap pistol. I used to play cowboys and Indians with those, too. As the paper’s obit has it, Mr. Handler’s Mattel put its entire net worth on the line, which at that time was $500,000, on sponsorship of a television program called The Mickey Mouse Club. Disney’s program for ABC was a success and the sponsorship made Mattel a household name, with annual sales growing from $5 million to $14 million in three years.

Mattel made cultural icons, such as the Barbie doll, named after his daughter (Ken was named for their son) and created by his wife, Ruth, in 1959. Later, Elliot Handler invented uniquely miniature die-cast metal vehicles with sporty designs. Mattel, based in southern California, branded them Hot Wheels and brought them to market in 1968. Hot Wheels caught on with boys and soon put the hugely popular die-cast metal Matchbox line of toy cars, a more realistic replica of motor vehicles which included ambulances, station wagons, trucks and farm vehicles, out of business. I strongly preferred Matchbox to Hot Wheels, but I used those yellowish-orange Hot Wheels tracks and loops to run my Matchbox cars all over the livingroom and I’m grateful for what Elliot Handler created. What he produced gave me hours of indulging my imagination and making up some of my first stories, which included plots from whatever I’d just read or watched on television, from spy missions to fending off Soviet attacks and Nazi counterstrikes. What he sadly leaves behind is a country in which his kind, the creator who makes money from what he creates, is no longer welcome.

Permalink | Posted in Business, Culture, News, Obituaries

Closing Borders

19 July 2011

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved bookstores. I remember discovering The Virtue of Selfishness at the Wilmette Book Shop where I grew up and asking the store’s owner, Mrs. Burmeister, a former Broadway dancer married to a businessman who was the town’s mayor, what she thought the title meant. She told me, I bought it with whatever money I’d earned shoveling snow or babysitting, and owned one of my first books. I loved the big door with the bell, the creaks in the floor, the smell of the place, and the people in the narrow aisles.

They were always alone, and, as we all easvesdropped on whatever Mrs. Burmeister and her business partner were debating at the front counter, one by one we would make our way to the cash register with a book in our hands. I brought the love of books to New York City, where I finished my first novel and discovered countless creations on bookshelves throughout Manhattan, from Animal Farm to Whose Life is it, Anyway?

It was there that I found my first Barnes and Noble and I have always been more a Barnes and Noble than a Borders bookbuyer. Their stores are better managed, their staff more attentive, their customers less intrusive, and the experience more about browsing and buying books. I like the name and the motif. Borders has fond memories for me, too, but I’m not surprised to read that they’re going out of business, liquidating their assets as early as Friday. Borders, which started in 1971 as a used book store in the Midwest, was, in my experience, lazy about protecting its own value. Stores felt more open, which was nice, and staff were friendly but they were also generally unconcerned about driving the primary purpose of the store: to sell books and stuff. People would come in and park themselves in the aisles or cafes and read for hours. An entitlement mentality took root, and every Borders seemed like a squatter’s paradise, with staff more supportive of the squatters than those unable to find a place to sit and drink a purchased coffee or walk the aisles to find a book to buy.

There are many fine memories, too, of meeting friends, dates, and colleagues in the Borders Cafe, sometimes before or after a movie screening, hearing an author speak, or just killing time before an appointment or engagement, always with an opportunity to buy a book, CD, or greeting card. I read books mostly on my iPad, or one from my library, or review copies from publishers, and I am excited about the possibilities for media in this age of new technology (as I wrote about here), but I’ll miss Borders, in all its egalitarian mess, from Wilmette to Westwood and everywhere else I’ve ever browsed their aisles. They provided a sense of place to my life, and I will forever associate certain periods, aspects, and events with certain locations, like memories embedded with certain emotions triggered by certain songs. Borders in Glendale recalls my early years in California and hearing Curtis play his guitar. Borders in Westwood means running into friends and catching up over coffee. Borders in Tustin evokes meeting a friend after class. I’ve made countless connections, and read, listened to and bought hundreds of products that have improved my life in these Borders. Now, they’re closing and it’s sad. Better choices and opportunities lay ahead, but Borders going out of business is another sign that our streets, and our times, are getting darker. I didn’t even like them at the end. I like losing them even less.

Permalink | Posted in Books, Business, Culture, News

21st Century Media

7 June 2011

The Daily With exciting developments in technology and new media, such as Apple‘s announcement about iCloud, the possibilities are truly dazzling for creating content across multiple platforms. I’ve been writing for print, broadcast, and online (and currently creating for page and screen) since the 1980s and I have never been more optimistic about the future of the arts, including journalism.

As I’ve previously observed here, there is the ominous threat of government control of the press. Whether a newspaper already heavily influenced by powerful Mormons hires a top government official to write a regular column, as recently happened in Utah, or top reporters flee journalism to work for government, as recently happened in Oregon, separation of government and the press (like separation of government and religion or government and business) is rapidly eroding. Today’s media is plastered with government bureaucrats or former politicians: shrill Chris Matthews and smarmy Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC, CNN’s sleazy Eliot Spitzer, and the parade of clowns on FoxNews that’s like a festival of 20th century fools, from Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich to Karl Rove and Sarah Palin. None honored the United States of America while in government and none have anything new and original, much less rational, to say. They represent the failed past and suggest a dark future of government-controlled media and a state of de facto censorship, whether from the left or from the right.

Companies such as Apple are changing how we produce and consume news and information in ways which may make it harder to establish a centralized press and easier to escape government controls. Apple’s new operating system for the iPhone and iPad, iOS 5, will make creating a digital newsstand more desirable, according to this media post. This Mashable piece observes that Apple’s new favorite social media, Twitter, counters Microsoft’s relationship with Facebook, and offers real market competition, which makes it harder for the state to insidiously control or seize the media. Google is reportedly now supporting certain tags which may encourage people to read work by individual writers and discourage stealing writers’ content. The New York Observer is remaking its print and online editions to feature longer articles, unveiling its new Web site tomorrow. Of course, the Observer is liberal, and some changes may also make it easier to disrupt and censor the press in certain cases, a legitimate concern given the nation’s trend toward total government control.

But opportunities exist for those willing to discover, explore, and create challenging new voices for reason and means of distribution, though Rupert Murdoch’s heavily hyped The Daily, dubbed the first magazine application for the iPad and apparently managed mostly by former New York Times staffers, which may explain why no one wants to read, let alone pay for, its content, is not likely to be one of them (incidentally, I have ideas for creating an organ of objective journalism if anyone serious is interested). To preserve a free press and the freedom of speech, we need the innovations of visionary businessmen such as Steve Jobs, who was greeted by an ovation for being a man of ability during his speech yesterday. People must be free to nurture the spirit of enterprise that is integral to restoring the lost art of objective communication.

News Corporation’s The Daily may fail, or it may not, but at least Rupert Murdoch, like former Atari video game creator Steve Jobs and Polaroid’s Edwin Land, are using what freedom we have left to manufacture technology so we can choose what to produce and consume to improve our lives. In this sense, media entrepreneurs deserve our admiration and support.

Permalink | Posted in Business, Freedom of Speech, Journalism

Lamar Hunt by David Sweet

26 May 2011

Sports writer and editor David Sweet doggedly gets down to the business of professional sports, especially the early days of pro football, soccer, and tennis, in his biographical Lamar Hunt: The Gentle Giant Who Revolutionized Professional Sports. Sweet’s account of the extraordinary son of Texas oil titan H.L. Hunt tracks his successes and failures and innovations. There are many of each.

One of them is Hunt’s founding of the defunct American Football League (AFL), forerunner to the American Football Conference (AFC) of the National Football League (NFL), with which the AFL merged to form the most successful sports league in American history. After requesting in-flight stationery from an American Airlines stewardess on a plane from Miami back to Dallas, 26-year-old Hunt jotted down his thoughts on formulating what he thought it would take to deliver pro football to Americans: three exhibition games, a 15-game schedule consisting of three teams playing eight home games and the other three teams competing in seven home games, a 60-40 split of gate revenues favoring the home team, with visiting teams choosing the larger of 40 percent or $35,000 and each football team reserving the right to two territorial draft choices. Hunt, joined by hotel businessman Barron Hilton, also planned to beat the NFL’s starting player salary by paying them ten percent more.

Chicago newspaper editor Sweet (a former and favorite editor of mine from my early newspaper days) reports these copious details, which occasionally overwhelm the narrative, with relish, marking each part of an understated career in the life of what one Sports Illustrated reporter called a “poor little rich boy”, whom he compared to someone standing up nervously in catechism class with neither force nor authority. The biography rolls out a stream of rarely discussed items from an industrial athletics archive, with such early football legends as George Blanda, George Halas, Howard Cosell, Len Dawson, Tom Landry, Don Meredith and Gale Sayers, quoted here as crediting Hunt for racial integration in pro sports.

Besides the AFL, which would have turned 50 last year, Hunt’s widely unknown achievements are impressive: the two-point conversion, the advancement of pro soccer in America, and creating the model for today’s professional tennis tour and innovative retail, amusement and stadium parks and properties. Hunt even designed the Kansas City Chiefs’ arrowhead logo, scribbling it on to a napkin. Sweet packs it all in, from Hunt’s connection to Kennedy assassin Oswald’s murderer Jack Ruby to his Christianity, which Sweet sees as providing a general moral compass that allowed him to nurture his virtues of honesty, integrity, and rationality.

Lamar Hunt combined selfish values, such as his abiding love of sports, with an ability to take risks, even when he was losing money, and earn enormous wealth, and David Sweet’s Lamar Hunt, with photos, notes and an index, capably and convincingly demonstrates that fact, though he doesn’t write it that way. Sweet credits what he calls Hunt’s humility, which is alternately supported and countered by the facts of his career in the sports industry. Clearly, the man who coined the term Super Bowl thought big, not small. So, when one former NFL commissioner asserts late in the game that Lamar Hunt did not have an ego, the reader, having consumed the abundant evidence, may conclude that Hunt merely had an ego that was healthy enough to be nourished by his own ample accomplishments.