Dream WorLD

Steve Jobs

2008-10-31T01:41:00.000-07:00

He had, according to one former colleague, an "athletic, bouncy swagger, weight balanced towards the tips of his toes - rather like a boxer, aggressive and elusively graceful, or like an elegant jungle cat ready to spring at its prey". Steve Jobs is a man who inspires superlatives. This week he launched Apple's iTunes digital music store in London, with a little help from the singer Alicia Keys. It was the latest of his brainchildren to be presented over here, a year after its successful launch in the US.

Jobs is a co-founder of Apple, the man behind the astonishing success of the computer animation firm Pixar - of Toy Story and Finding Nemo fame - a billionaire regarded as a visionary in the industry. Yet compared with Bill Gates he is practically unknown.

"Partly it's because Bill Gates has a lot more money," says Alan Deutschman, the author of The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, a book that recorded Jobs' triumphal return to success after being ousted from the company he formed.

"There's an aura to being the richest person in the world that a mere billionaire like Steve Jobs doesn't have," Deutschman says. "Also, Microsoft has extraordinary reach as a company and far more people know its products than Apple's: 400 million people use Microsoft Office, for instance. Gates's position in both business and philanthropy makes him something vaguely like a chief of state when he visits places like India or China."

Born to an Egyptian Arab father and an American mother in Green Bay, Wisconsin, 49 years ago, Steven Paul was adopted soon after his birth by Paul and Clara Jobs, who lived in Mountain View in Santa Clara, California. He grew up in northern California at a time when the state was at the centre of two separate universes: technological innovation and the psychedelic music scene that was taking over from the British pop boom of the 60s.

Both worlds clearly had a major impact on Jobs, who never seems to have lost the attitude of west coast libertarianism still reflected in his dress style - he was wearing, as usual, his trademark black turtleneck and blue jeans this week - and his open affection for the music iTunes is now purveying. "It all comes down to artists," he said this week of iTunes's 700,000 songs, which can be downloaded legally for 79p a time. "That's why we do this. It's for the music."

Bob Dylan remains his favourite artist and he has described meeting Dylan as one of the high points of his life.

After completing high school in Cupertino in northern California, Jobs went north to study physics, literature and poetry at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but dropped out after one term. Back in California and already interested in computers, he became a regular at the now legendary Homebrew Computer Club, along with another young man, five years his senior, with his own visions of the future: Steve Wozniak.

In 1976, when Jobs was 21, he and Wozniak started their own business, the Apple Computer Company, which at the time was based in Jobs' family garage. According to legend Jobs sold his prized Volkswagen campervan to finance the original design. With a mission to produce affordable personal computers the long-haired, bearded pair went to market with the Apple I shortly afterwards. A local company ordered 25 of the prototype and the pair were on their way. The almost instant success of Apple I and its sister Apple II launched them. By the age of 25 Jobs was worth $165m.

Apple was the first landmark in Jobs' career but by 1985 he was on his way out after John Sculley, who had joined the company from Pepsi-Cola, decided it was time to drop the pilot. Four years later Jobs returned with another computer company, NextStep, which never achieved the success of Apple but reminded people that he was far from a finished force who would be content to live out his life on the millions he had accumulated during his career.

What was later hailed as Jobs' second coming started with his involvement in Pixar, the animation company he bought from the Star Wars director, George Lucas, and renamed. The hit movie Toy Story instantly established it as one of the key players in Hollywood, a success only amplified last year with the release of Finding Nemo.

Pixar made Jobs a billionaire. But more significantly his triumph there also reminded people of his ability to divine the technological future. Apple, which was by then starting to taste stale, if not exactly rotting, asked him to return. He came back in 1997 and within a year the ailing company was once more posting handsome profits.

Deutschman says the most interesting thing he learned about Jobs when researching the book was how close he had sailed to the wind. "Even though he made a fortune from Apple, I learned that he nearly blew it all on his follow-up ventures, Next and Pixar, and he very came close to giving up his business career entirely before Pixar ultimately emerged as a success."

Gil Amelio, the chief executive and chairman of Apple who was sacked by Jobs after the latter's return, has a less rosy picture of his former employer. "He is one of those magnetic, charismatic personalities that light up a room," he wrote in On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple. "But his invaluable contributions can be largely overshadowed by the dissension he sows."

In his brief time at the helm, Amelio was to find that Jobs could be unpredictable. "That's the way it went with Steve - flip-flopping from a soaring high, when he was an absolute delight to be around, to a mood of extreme anger or intense gloom that excluded any rational or civil conversation. I would get to see so many varieties of moods that I never knew exactly who I would be facing."

Amelio said Jobs' return to Apple had created in the business media "a groundswell equivalent to one that would be created for a resurrected Eva Peron".

If Jobs' two stints with Apple, his founding of NextStep and his involvement with Pixar represent his first four ages, his latest venture may turn out to be as influential as any of them. Since the emergence of high-speed internet the music industry has complained that it is on the brink of being brought to its knees by the pirates of downloading. The holy grail being hunted by hundreds of companies has been a way to harness the desire for music on the internet and turn it into profit. Jobs believes that iTunes is the answer.

But then Jobs does not believe in underselling his companies. "This will go down in history as the turning point for the music industry," he told Fortune magazine at the launch of iTunes in the US last year, when the company was proudly debuting unreleased material from Dylan and such bands as the Eagles, who had never previously allowed their songs to be used in this way. "This is landmark stuff. I can't overestimate it." This week he described the launch in London and other European capitals as "bringing the digital musical revolution around the world", and he is characteristically bullish about seeing off existing rivals in Britain.

Journalists who have followed Jobs' career have also seen the mercurial side of his personality when he has walked out of interviews, irritated at the line of questioning and refusing intrusions into his personal life. The patience of Jobs is not legendary.

"We can't have a heroic figure without a fatal flaw," was the assessment of David Plotnikoff, writing a profile earlier this year in Jobs' local paper, the San José Mercury news. "Jobs ... exudes arrogance of a certain blastfurnace intensity that people find hard to overlook ... With Jobs, it was never enough to say 'we're right on this and they're wrong'. No, it was always 'we're right on this and they're idiots'."

But Plotnikoff added: "There is simply no way the Mac could have been born without that supreme confidence." If there has been a theme to Jobs' success it has been his genius, as it were, for finding other geniuses and promoting their brilliance.

Married to Laurene Powell since 1991, Jobs has four children and is a vegetarian with a keen interest in organic farming and art. His sister Mona Simpson, whose existence he discovered only when they were both grown-up success stories, is the novelist and author of Anywhere But Here and The Lost Father. His own story seems far from over. The latest chapter, which was unveiled in London this week, may already be a huge success, but the challenge facing Jobs will be coming up with his next innovation.

"It's easy to copy ideas in computers and consumer electronics," says Deutschman, "so Apple has to continue to stay far enough ahead of the pack that it has some lead time to profit before others come charging in, and the company needs to maintain the fierce loyalty of its core followers."

arts.guardian.co.uk

Managing IT for Business Value

2008-10-31T01:23:00.000-07:00

spend a lot of time talking with Microsoft customers around the world, and one thing I consistently hear is that the growing complexity of today's computing systems is driving up costs and limiting the potential of information technology to work on the toughest business problems. In fact, a study by the consulting firm Accenture reported that IT professionals spend up to 70 percent of their time maintaining existing systems.

The IT world of today is dramatically different than it was just a decade ago. IT systems are much more complex, with computers and software distributed throughout the organization and often around the world. Employees rely on laptops, mobile phones and smart handheld devices to stay in touch with the people and information they care about. Security technologies and policies are required to keep company data safe and ensure that critical systems can run without disruption. Partners and suppliers use powerful Web services to connect their business processes and work more efficiently. And customers have come to expect real-time information about inventory, billing and shipping delivered securely over the Web.

As computing has rapidly extended beyond the "back office," it has added significant value across organizations--from information insight to sophisticated business analysis. Yet, with this vast new capability has come increased complexity. Today, many business customers try and cope with this through IT outsourcing and additional layers of management software, which often add complexity and inflexibility.

I believe our industry has a responsibility, and an opportunity, to dramatically simplify the computing environment by seamlessly weaving together all of the devices, services and multiple layers of software into a coherent, efficiently managed technology framework.

By designing computing systems that can be managed much more easily--or even manage themselves--we can vastly increase efficiency, reduce business overhead, and empower IT managers to spend more time making computers really work for their company--connecting business processes, empowering employees and creating real business value.

Dynamic Systems Initiative

Over the past several years, Microsoft, in partnership with other IT industry leaders, has been making significant investments in an effort we call the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI). The goal is to build a comprehensive set of solutions for the Windows platform that can help automate the design and management of the increasingly complex and distributed computing systems that customers need today. Doing this will free up valuable IT resources to work on higher-value projects, and make computing simpler and more cost-effective for organizations large and small.

Specifically, DSI is about doing three things really well:
•

Building software development tools that help IT managers and software-development teams design computing systems that are inherently simple and inexpensive to manage. We call this "design for operations."
•

Enhancing the Windows operating system platform with powerful management technologies suited for complex and constantly-changing IT environments, such as automated deployment, configuration and monitoring.
•

Building easy-to-use, scalable solutions that cover every aspect of the management experience, with real-time feedback on system performance and a high level of automation.

Windows Server 2003 is at the core of DSI, and is already helping customers become much more productive and efficient by solving basic manageability problems.

Building on this foundation, we have developed technologies and services that further simplify deployment, management and security. One of our most important manageability solutions, Systems Management Server 2003, helps companies efficiently deploy and manage their software in a systematic way, so they no longer have to individually ensure that every server and PC has the right set of applications. Microsoft Operations Manager 2000 improves performance and streamlines management by identifying "IT health" issues automatically--so IT teams can identify problems and solve them quickly and efficiently.

We are also working to create a continuous feedback loop of information between developers, IT administrators and end-users, so that software developers get real-time information on the performance of their applications, allowing them to more accurately identify problems and solve them faster. We have built this kind of error-reporting technology into many of our major products, and it has driven tremendous improvements in our own software quality. With our Corporate Error Reporting tool, for example, large companies can now put the same technology to work on their own custom-built applications.

For software developers, we are building technologies that help them work more closely with IT managers to envision and design applications that work well in today's distributed and complex computing environments. We are designing the Visual Studio 2005 system of development tools to make it easier to build management into applications from the ground up, ensuring that they are simple and inexpensive to operate after they are deployed.

Through the Microsoft Operations Framework, we are offering guidance that helps organizations develop an optimal management strategy. And we are offering a series of services and solutions built on our management technologies through a program called Microsoft Solutions for Management.

Customers like Motorola are realizing significant benefits from these technologies. By using Windows Server 2003 and these powerful management solutions, Motorola estimates it saved 247,000 hours and $11 million in annual software deployments in 2003. Motorola was able to significantly consolidate and simplify its computing network and increase performance and efficiency of its Web servers. Software updates that previously took months to roll out can now be completed in less than a week.

Partnering for Management

The success of the Dynamic Systems Initiative requires a collaborative effort among Microsoft, our partners and standards organizations, to ensure that we are meeting customers' diverse needs. We are building our management solutions so they can integrate more easily with the diverse platforms, applications and tools that IT managers use today. For instance, we have created a framework that enables customers to use the capabilities of Microsoft Operations Manager to ensure the health and performance of their Windows computers, while continuing to use existing management systems.

We are working with partners to make it possible for Microsoft customers to manage UNIX, Linux and Mac computers in conjunction with Systems Management Server 2003, and to manage hardware devices such as desktops and servers through solutions that update hardware-based software components using the same familiar interfaces that an administrator would use to update software applications.

We are collaborating with partners to make existing business applications easier to manage on the Windows platform. For example, we're collaborating with Siebel Systems to make it possible to manage their eBusiness applications using Microsoft Operations Manager.

We are also engaging across the industry to learn how we can continue to evolve and further improve our management solutions. At last month's DSI Design Preview in Silicon Valley, a wide range of customers and partners gave us valuable feedback that is helping shape future generations of our management platform.

The Management Roadmap

Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative is fundamentally about helping customers optimize their IT investments, while simplifying, and lowering total cost of ownership. We are committed to delivering value through smart software that enables customers to manage their own environments--creating the strength and flexibility that helps them optimize their IT investments.

Over the next few years, we will continue to deliver advanced solutions, such as System Center 2005, which bring our existing management tools together and add enhancements that simplify and optimize basic IT management tasks. With the next version of Visual Studio, we are giving IT managers and developers the tools they need to create and collaborate on software and services that are simple to manage. We are continuing to evolve the Windows Server System with cutting-edge advances in manageability, reliability and security, making it the best foundation for an efficient IT infrastructure.

While there's still a lot of work to be done, I believe we are making great progress, working with partners to simplify and automate the way customers can design, deploy and operate distributed systems. And we're committed to continuing to deliver improvements in our platform that will help customers do even more with less. These management improvements will help us address the issues customers face in this new era of IT--delivering the value companies want without the complexity they fear.

More information on the Dynamic Systems Initiative, including customer case studies, is available at www.microsoft.com/dsi.

www.microsoft.com

About MLM

2008-10-29T22:19:00.000-07:00

Multi-level marketing (MLM), also known as Network Marketing, is a business-distribution model that allows a parent company to market its products directly to consumers by means of relationship referrals and direct selling.

Independent, unsalaried salespeople of multi-level marketing, referred to as distributors (or associates, independent business owners, dealers, franchise owners, sales consultants, consultants, independent agents, etc.), represent the parent company and are awarded a commission based upon the volume of product sold through each of their independent businesses (organizations).

Independent distributors develop their organizations by either building an active customer base, who buy direct from the parent company, or by recruiting a downline of independent distributors who also build a customer base, thereby expanding the overall organization. Additionally, distributors can also earn a profit by retailing products they purchased from the parent company at wholesale price.

Distributors earn a commission based on the sales efforts of their organization, which includes their independent sale efforts as well as the leveraged sales efforts of their downline. This arrangement is similar to franchise arrangements where royalties are paid from the sales of individual franchise operations to the franchisor as well as to an area or region manager. Commissions are paid to multi-level marketing distributors according to the company’s compensation plan. There can be multiple levels of people receiving royalties from one person's sales.
Contents

Legitimacy

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish legal and reputable MLMs from illegal pyramid or Ponzi schemes. MLM businesses operate in the United States in all 50 states and in more than 100 other countries, and new businesses may use terms like "affiliate marketing" or "home-based business franchising". However, many pyramid schemes try to present themselves as legitimate MLM businesses.

In the most legitimate MLM companies, commissions are earned only on sales of the company's products or services. No money may be earned from recruiting alone ("sign-up fees"), though money earned from the sales of members recruited is one attraction of MLM arrangements. If participants are paid primarily from money received from new recruits, or if they are required to buy more product than they are likely to sell, then the company may be a pyramid or Ponzi scheme, which is illegal in most countries.

New salespeople may be asked to pay for their own training and marketing materials, or to buy a significant amount of inventory. A commonly adopted test of legality is that MLMs follow the so-called 70% rule which prevents members "inventory loading" in order to qualify for additional bonuses. The 70% rule requires participants to sell 70% of previously purchased inventory before placing new orders with the company. There are however variations in interpretations of this rule. Some attorneys insist that 70% of purchased inventory should be sold to people who are not participants in the business, while many MLM companies allow for self-consumption to be a significant part of the sales of a participant [1].

The European Union's Unfair Commercial Practices Directive explictly includes self-consumption as legitimate[2].

In a 2004 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Staff Advisory letter to the Direct Selling Association states:

The amount of personal consumption in any multi-level compensation business does not determine whether or not the FTC will consider the plan a pyramid scheme. The critical question for the FTC is whether the revenues that primarily support the commissions paid to all participants are generated from the purchase of goods and services that are not simply incidental to the purchase of the right to participate in a money making venture.[3]

In a 2007 Wall Street Journal interview, FTC economist Peter Vander Nat stated, "If people are buying because they want to use a company’s products, those sales can count as retail"[4]

The FTC offers advice for potential MLM members to help them identify those which are likely to be pyramid schemes.[5]

[edit] Compensation plans

Companies have devised a variety of MLM compensation plans over the decades.

* Stairstep Breakaway plans This type of plan is characterized as having representatives who are responsible for both personal and group sales volumes. Volume is created by recruiting and by retailing product. Various discounts or rebates may be paid to group leaders and a group leader can be any representative with one or more downline recruits. Once predefined personal and/or group volumes are achieved, a representative moves up a step. This continues until the representative..."breaks away" from their upline. From that point on, the new group is no longer considered part of his...upline's group - hence they are a "breakaway". [6] Stairstep Breakaway plans are not level based.
* Unilevel plans This type of plan is often considered the simplest of compensation plans. Uni-Level plans pay commissions primarily based on the number of levels a recipient is from the original representative who is purchasing the product. Commissions are not based on title or rank achieved. By qualifying with a minimum sales requirement, representatives earn unlimited commissions on a limited number of levels of downline recruited representatives. [6]
* Matrix plans This type of plan is similar to a Uni-Level plan, except there is a also limited number of representatives who can be placed on the first level. Recruits beyond the maximum number of first level positions allowed are automatically placed in other downline (lower level) positions. Matrix plans often have a maximum width and depth. When all positions in a representative's downline matrix are filled (maximum width and depth is reached for all participants in a matrix), a new matrix may be started. Like Uni-Level plans, representatives in a matrix earn unlimited commissions on limited levels of volume with minimal sales quotas. [6]
* Binary plans: A binary plan is a multilevel marketing compensation plan which allows distributors to have only two front-line distributors. If a distributor sponsors more than two distributors, the excess are placed at levels below the sponsoring distributor's front-line. This "spillover" is one of the most attractive features to new distributors since they need only sponsor two distributors to participate in the compensation plan. The primary limitation is that distributors must "balance" their two downline legs to receive commissions. Balancing legs typically requires that the number of sales from one downline leg constitute no more than a specified percentage of the distributor's total sales. [7]
* Hybrid plans are compensation plans that are constructed using elements of more than one type of compensation plan.

[edit] Criticism of MLM

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a decision, In re. Amway Corp., in 1979 in which it indicated that multi-level marketing was not illegal per se. However, Amway was found guilty of price fixing (by requiring "independent" distributors to sell at the low price) and making exaggerated income claims.[8]

The FTC advises that multi-level marketing organizations with greater incentives for recruitment than product sales are to be viewed skeptically. The FTC also warns that the practice of getting commissions from recruiting new members is outlawed in most states as "pyramiding".[5] In April 2006, it proposed a Business Opportunity Rule intended to require all sellers of business opportunities—including MLMs—to provide enough information to enable prospective buyers to make an informed decision about their probability of earning money.

In March 2008, the FTC removed Network Marketing (MLM) companies from the proposed Business Opportunity Rule:

The revised proposal, however, would not reach multi-level marketing companies or certain companies that may have been swept inadvertently into scope of the April 2006 proposal.[9]

Criticisms have been raised against various MLM programs for being cult-like in nature. Some MLM programs feature intense motivational programs, which can be hard to distinguish from cult propaganda. So-called corporate cults are businesses whose techniques to gain associate commitment and loyalty are in some ways similar to those used by traditional cults. Amway associates are sometimes cited as an example of such devotion.[10]

-wikipedia-

Electronic Business

2008-10-29T22:14:00.000-07:00

Electronic Business, commonly referred to as "eBusiness" or "e-Business", may be defined as the utilisation of information and communication technologies (ICT) in support of all the activities of business. Commerce constitutes the exchange of products and services between businesses, groups and individuals and hence can be seen as one of the essential activities of any business. Hence, electronic commerce or eCommerce focuses on the use of ICT to enable the external activities and relationships of the business with individuals, groups and other businesses [1].

Louis Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, in his book, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? attributes the term "e-Business" to IBM's marketing and Internet teams in 1996.

Electronic business methods enable companies to link their internal and external data processing systems more efficiently and flexibly, to work more closely with suppliers and partners, and to better satisfy the needs and expectations of their customers.

In practice, e-business is more than just e-commerce. While e-business refers to more strategic focus with an emphasis on the functions that occur using electronic capabilities, e-commerce is a subset of an overall e-business strategy. E-commerce seeks to add revenue streams using the World Wide Web or the Internet to build and enhance relationships with clients and partners and to improve efficiency using the Empty Vessel strategy. Often, e-commerce involves the application of knowledge management systems.

E-business involves business processes spanning the entire value chain: electronic purchasing and supply chain management, processing orders electronically, handling customer service, and cooperating with business partners. Special technical standards for e-business facilitate the exchange of data between companies. E-business software solutions allow the integration of intra and inter firm business processes. E-business can be conducted using the Web, the Internet, intranets, extranets, or some combination of these.

-wikipedia-

Valentino Rossi

2008-10-29T21:50:00.000-07:00

Valentino Rossi (born February 16, 1979[1] in Urbino) is an Italian professional motorcycle racer and multiple MotoGP World Champion. He is one of the most successful motorcycle racers of all time, with 8 Grand Prix World Championships to his name. According to Sports Illustrated, Valentino Rossi is one of the highest earning sports personalities in the world, having earned an estimated $34 million in 2007.[2]

Following his father, Graziano Rossi, Rossi started racing in Grand Prix in 1996 for Aprilia in the 125cc category and won his first World Championship the following year. From there, he moved up to the 250 cc category, again with Aprilia, and won the World Championship in 1999. He won the 500 cc World Championship with Honda in 2001, the MotoGP World Championships (also with Honda) in 2002 and 2003, and continued his streak of back-to-back championships by winning the 2004, 2005 after leaving Honda to join Yamaha, before regaining the title in 2008.

Valentino Rossi was born in Tavullia, Urbino. Son of Graziano Rossi, a former motorcycle racer, he first began riding at a very young age.[3]

Rossi's first racing love was go-karts. Fuelled by his mother, Stefania's, concern for her son's safety, Graziano purchased a go-kart as substitute for the bike. However, the Rossi family trait of perpetually wanting to go faster prompted a redesign; Graziano replaced the 60cc motor with a 100cc national kart motor for his then 5-year-old son.[4]

Graziano attempted to forge documents in an attempt to get Valentino's junior kart licence one year before he was legally allowed (he was nine at the time), but ultimately failed.

Rossi won the regional kart championship in 1990.[5] After this, he took up minimoto and before the end of 1991, he had won numerous regional races.[3]

Although minimoto was for fun[citation needed], Rossi continued to race karts and finished fifth at the national kart championships in Parma. Both Valentino and Graziano had started looking at moving into the Italian 100cc series as well as the corresponding European series, which most likely would have pushed him into the direction of Formula 1. However, the high cost of racing karts led to the decision to race minimoto exclusively[citation needed]. Through 1992 and 1993, Valentino continued to learn the ins and outs of minimoto racing.

Rossi soon started to outgrow minimoto; a proper motorcycle was required. In 1993, Rossi acquired a Cagiva Mito 125 cc motorcycle, which was damaged in a first-corner crash no more than a hundred meters out from pit lane[citation needed]. He finished ninth that race weekend.

Although his first season in the Italian Sport Production Championship was varied, he achieved a pole position in the season's final race at Misano, where he would ultimately finish on the podium. By the second year, Rossi had been provided with a factory Mito by Cagiva team manager Claudio Lusuardi and he managed to win the Italian title.

In Rossi's youth one of his heroes was the late former WRC Champion Colin McRae. Rally legend McRae taught Rossi the basics of driving a rally car [6] and the two competed against each other at Monza in 2005, with McRae driving a Skoda Fabia WRC and Rossi a Subaru Impreza WRC, with Rossi winning. [7]

[edit] The World Championship era

In 1994, Aprilia by way of Sandroni, used Rossi to improve its RS125R and in turn allowed Rossi to learn how to handle the fast new pace of 125 cc racing. At first he found himself on a Sandroni in the 1994 Italian championship and continued to ride it through the 1995 European and Italian championships.

Rossi had variable success in the 1996 World Championship season, failing to finish five of the season's races and crashing several times. Despite this, in August, he won his first World Championship Grand Prix at Brno in the Czech Republic on an AGV Aprilia RS125R. He finished the season in ninth position. Rossi treated it as a learning process and refined his skills enough to completely dominate the 125cc World Championship in the following 1997 season, winning 11 of the 15 races.

By 1998, the Aprilia RS250 was reaching its pinnacle and had a formidable team of riders in Valentino Rossi, Loris Capirossi and Tetsuya Harada. But even with a fast bike and experienced championship-winning teammates, Rossi struggled in his first season in 250cc. Rossi considered 1998 the toughest year of his career, due to the persistent pressure to perform that he felt from Aprilia, the media and effectively everyone around him[citation needed]. The death of two of his friends in a car accident also took a toll. Again, he found himself learning the ways of his new bike in the first season, concluding the 1998 250cc season in second place, only three points behind the champion Capirossi. In 1999, however, he won the title, collecting 5 pole positions and 9 wins.

Rossi was rewarded in 2000 for his 250cc World Championship by being given a ride with Honda in what was then the ultimate class in World Championship motorcycle racing, 500cc. Jeremy Burgess had shown him the NSR500 and was convinced that the pairing of it with Rossi would bring nothing but success. Retired 500cc World Champion Michael Doohan, who also had Jeremy Burgess as chief engineer, worked with Rossi as his personal mentor in the first year at Honda. It would also be the first time Rossi would be racing against fierce rival, Max Biaggi. Although the two had never raced against each other, they were both Italian, both charismatic and talented, and oftentimes compared to one another by the racing press. Through a series of inevitable comparisons, well-timed and semi-inflammatory comments from each racer, and ever greater accomplishments on the track, an intense rivalry had developed between them. It would take nine races before Rossi would win on the Honda, but like his previous seasons in 125 and 250, it was a warm-up to a dominant second season. In his first season in the 500cc class, Rossi finished 2nd to American Kenny Roberts, Jr., with Max Biaggi finishing in 3rd place.

Rossi won his first 500cc World Championship in 2001 (winning 11 races) in the final year for the 500s. In the following year, 500cc two-strokes were still allowed, but 2002 saw the beginning of the 990cc four-stroke Moto GP class, after which the 500cc machines were essentially obsolete.

Also that year, Rossi teamed with American rider Colin Edwards for the Suzuka 8 Hours endurance race aboard a Honda VTR1000SPW. The pair won the race despite Rossi's lack of experience racing Superbikes.

[edit] MotoGP
Rossi riding his Honda RC211V MotoGP bike.

Inaugural year for the MotoGP bikes was 2002, when riders experienced teething problems getting used to the new bikes (or dealing with the inferior 500 cc bikes). Rossi won the first race and went on to win eight of the first nine races of the season, eventually claiming 11 victories in total.

It was more of the same in 2003 for Rossi's rivals when he claimed nine pole positions as well as nine GP wins to claim his third consecutive World Championship. The Australian GP at Phillip Island in 2003 is considered to be one of Rossi's greatest career moments due to unique circumstances. After being given a 10-second penalty for overtaking during a yellow flag due to a crash by Ducati rider Troy Bayliss, front runner Rossi proceeded to pull away from the rest of the field, eventually finishing more than 15 seconds ahead, more than enough to cancel out the penalty and win the race.

[edit] From Honda to Yamaha

There was much speculation during the second half of the 2003 season about Rossi's plans for the future. Most suspected that he would succeed in his bid to claim a third consecutive title and wondered where the amazingly talented Italian would go in the future. There were even rumors that he would attempt a career in rally cars after he had competed in a Peugeot 206 WRC rally car at the 2002 Rally of Great Britain (although he drove the car into a ditch). His contract with Honda was up at the end of the year and there were rumors that Rossi had become somewhat disillusioned with his ride at Honda. His tenure at Honda had effectively run its course; he had provided Honda with a 500 cc World Championship as well as consecutive MotoGP World Championships, he had helped perfect the RC211V into a formidable, almost unstoppable racing machine and considering Honda's reluctance to pay top dollar to secure his services in 2004, seemed to have overstayed his welcome.

Partnered with increased skepticism that the reason for his success was the dominance of the RC211V rather than Rossi's talent, it was inevitable that Honda and Rossi would part. Mid-season rumors pointed towards a possible move to Ducati, which sent the Italian press into a frenzy; the concept of the great Italian on the great Italian bike seemed too good to be true. Ducati did indeed try to seduce Rossi into riding their MotoGP bike, the Desmosedici, but for numerous reasons Rossi passed the offer up. Critics say that compared to the other manufacturers, Ducati had a significant way to go before being competitive even with Rossi at the helm. This proved to be the truth with Ducati's lackluster performance in the 2004 season, which had actually been worse than their inaugural year in MotoGP in 2003.

In his 2005 autobiography, "What If I'd Never Tried It?", Rossi offers another reason for choosing Yamaha over Ducati, saying that the mindset at Ducati Corse was a little too similar to the one he was trying to escape from at Honda.

Ultimately, Rossi signed a two-year contract with rivals Yamaha reportedly worth in excess of (U.S) $12 million; a price no other manufacturer, even Honda, was willing to pay.

Rossi's move to Yamaha would be a baptism of fire. His fiercest critics claimed that on an inferior machine (the Yamaha YZR-M1), Rossi would not be able to recreate his World Championship wins of the previous years, especially with increased development of the RC211V and the likes of Max Biaggi and Sete Gibernau on Hondas. The RC211V was a superior machine in almost every aspect although it was guaranteed that the gap would shrink with the defection of Rossi and Jeremy Burgess (chief mechanic for Rossi at Honda, whom Rossi had also convinced to join). The 2004 season would give Rossi the ability to show everyone, especially his critics what he was made of and provide him with an opportunity to prove that it was his talent rather than his bike that won him his championships.

With the traditional first race of the season at Suzuka off the list due to safety considerations, the 2004 season started at Welkom in South Africa. Rossi shone through to claim first blood in his new team colors and somewhat silenced some of his critics who thought the Yamaha would still play second fiddle to the Honda. Rossi would go on to claim 8 more GP wins during the season, battling Sete Gibernau ferociously until Rossi eventually closed the door on Sete's hopes in the penultimate race of the season at Phillip Island. Gibernau and Rossi had become bickering enemies during the course of the season; whereas in previous seasons they had been competitive but friendly rivals, various disputes arose during 2004 which led to their falling apart. Rossi would continue to rub salt into the wound for both Gibernau and Honda by winning the ultimate race of the season at Valencia. It was a painful blow to both Gibernau and Honda; Gibernau, so close to a World Championship, and Honda, starting to become aware of what they had let go. Valentino Rossi ended up with 304 points to Gibernau's 257, with Max Biaggi 3rd with 217 points.

In 2005 Grand Prix motorcycle racing season, Rossi captured his 7th World Championship and 5th straight MotoGP Championship. He finished with a total of 367 points, an incredible 147 points ahead of 2nd place finisher Marco Melandri (220 pt), and Nicky Hayden finishing 3rd with 206 points.
Rossi congratulates Hayden on the 2006 MotoGP title.

The 2006 MotoGP season started off with Rossi, once again, being the favorite to take the Championship, but he had trouble in the first half of the season. Rossi finished 14th in Jerez, making an amazing comeback after Toni Elias pushed him at the very first corner, and had a pair of DNFs in Shanghai and Le Mans due to tyre and electronic problems respectively. Nicky Hayden held the points lead throughout most of the season, but Rossi was slowly working his way up the points ladder. It wasn't until Motegi when Rossi finally grabbed 2nd in the points race behind Hayden. In the Portuguese Grand Prix, the second to last race of the season, Hayden was taken out by his teammate, Dani Pedrosa, and did not finish the race. This led to Rossi taking the points lead with only one race left in the season. Rossi crashed early in Valencia, the last race, and Hayden went on to win the 2006 MotoGP Championship. Rossi finished the season in 2nd place.

Valentino Rossi returned to MotoGP for the 2007 season riding the new Yamaha YZR-M1 800 cc. In the first race in Qatar he came second to Casey Stoner on the Ducati Desmosedici. In the second round of the season Rossi won the Race with Dani Pedrosa in second place and Colin Edwards in third giving both Yamaha riders podiums. Casey Stoner returned to winning ways in the third and fourth races of the season at the Turkish and Chinese grand prix on his extremely quick Ducati, which has enjoyed a top speed advantage over the rest of the field. Another reason for Stoner's consistency during the 2007 season in comparison with Rossi's mixed results is the advantage Ducati's tyre supplier, Bridgestone, appears to have over its rival, Michelin, who supply tyres for Rossi's factory Yamaha.

Rossi's lowly 10th position at Turkey was put down to a defective tyre and while he managed to bounce back to a second place on the podium at China, a poor tyre recommendation from Michelin was blamed for his 6th place finish in the wet French grand prix at Le Mans. Bridgestone riders took all 3 places on the podium at the French tyre giant's home race, and Rossi went on the record to say that Michelin must urgently address various weaknesses. Indeed it seemed they paid heed to their wake up call when Rossi cruised to victory at his home race, the Italian grand prix at Mugello, ahead of Dani Pedrosa, also Michelin-shod on his factory Honda. Championship leader Casey Stoner was beaten to the last podium place at Mugello by Brazilian veteran Alex Barros on a satellite Ducati with Bridgestone tyres.

Rossi's grip on the championship loosened slightly at Catalunya and Donington, finishing second and fourth respectively to winner Casey Stoner, however the Assen race was won by Rossi who charged through the field from 11th on the grid after a poor wet qualifying session to challenge and eventually beat Casey Stoner to the chequered flag by 1.5 seconds. At the half-way point of the 2007 season Rossi was the closest challenger to Casey Stoner's title aspirations, trailing by 21 world championship points. In the month of June, commonly called "Rossi's month" with races consisting of Mugello, Catalunya, Donnington Park and Assen, both Valentino Rossi and Casey Stoner have scored 83 points each; 2 x 1st place, 1 x 2nd place and 1 x 4th place. This has been done in conditions favourable to the Italian manufacturer and in some cases left Rossi on the fourth row with a point to prove.

Sachsenring saw a disastrous performance from the Italian. After qualifying fourth on the grid, whilst Stoner took pole, Rossi had to use raceday to his advantage. Come Sunday, Rossi lined up with a fever of 102 degrees and dropped down to 8th by the end of the first lap. A pass on Randy De Puniet at the tight Omega corner saw Rossi lose the front, catch it then lose it completely and skid off into the gravel where his right hand clip on was damaged leaving him out of the race on lap 6. Luckily problems for Bridgestone in the blistering heat saw Stoner finish 5th stretching his championship lead by 11 points to 32 ahead of "The Doctor". A visit to Laguna Seca for the USGP, Rossi finished 4th place behind Stoner, Vermeulen, and Melandri respectively.

The end to the summer break in the 2007 season landed the MotoGP paddock at Brno, with various new changes to the Fiat Yamaha. Qualifying 6th for the race start on Sunday morning after struggling in free practice, Rossi spent his rear Michelin early on in the race chasing Capirossi to make it up to 5th. Eventually tyre issues got the best of the 7 times world champion and Rossi crossed the finish line in 7th, a whole 22 seconds behind 1st place man Casey Stoner. This now leaves Rossi 60 points behind the Championship leader with only 150 points up for grabs.

Misano saw Rossi starting from 2nd on the grid behind Casey Stoner. An engine failure five laps in resulted in Rossi falling 85 points behind Stoner as he finished first.

A start from 3rd on the grid in Estoril ended in a no holds barred race with Pedrosa as they both accelerated out of the last corner sideways for Rossi to take the race win and gain 9 points in the World Championship on Stoner who finished in third.

A wet race confused the front runners at Motegi as the track dried out quickly with everybody still on wet tyres. Rossi fought his way to first and whilst in front of Melandri, put in some impressive lap times. A late bike change got the Doctor back out in second behind Capirossi, but cold intermediate tyres ended in Rossi running off the track at the end of the back straight, another pit stop put Rossi back out in 13th with nothing else to do but watch Stoner take the World Championship.

For 2008 Rossi changed to Bridgestone tyres. The season started slowly with a fifth place finish in Qatar, but he took his first win in Shanghai, and also won the next two races. Mid-season, Stoner's Ducati seemed too strong for him, but Rossi took many second places, excluding the Dutch round at Assen, where he crashed on the first lap and finished 11th. He then won at Laguna Seca after a fierce battle with Stoner who crashed but continued for a few laps before retiring. Stoner crashed out from the lead in next two races and failed to score, while Rossi won both. After winning a rain-shortened race in Indianapolis, once again completing the achievement that he has won in every current circuit in the calendar, he needed only third place in Motegi to clinch title. He won at Motegi too, his first win there with a four-stroke bike, clinching his first title in 800cc MotoGP, sixth in premier category, and eighth in total.

[edit] Intense rivalries

Earlier in his career Max Biaggi was, for all intents and purposes, considered Rossi's arch-nemesis. At one time his website didn't even have Max's name; instead a glaring "XXX XXXXXX" was placed wherever his name should have appeared. Although they hadn't even raced against each other until 2000, the rivalry between the two had been growing since the mid-'90s. Rossi has always considered himself a better rider than Biaggi and the Roman has always considered himself far superior to the crown prince. The rivalry has started to die down over recent years due to Vale's consecutive World Championships and Biaggi's struggle to find support and a consistent rhythm with his races. Biaggi looked to improve on recent results with a ride with Honda's factory team in 2005. However, he was off the team and unemployed once the 2006 season rolled around.

In his autobiography "What If I Had Never Tried It", Rossi makes a number of claims about the reasons for his rivalry with Biaggi, and some of the incidents which led to its escalation.

Rossi largely blames the media and their desire to publicise a rivalry between the pair for the eventual severity of the rivalry. Any quotes that the media got out of the pair were twisted and made to seem far more serious and insulting than they had been meant. Rossi also says that he is simply too honest. He had merely disagreed with the claims Biaggi made about why he wasn't winning races - Biaggi blamed the bike, the tyres, the engine, and Rossi felt that Biaggi should have accepted that sometimes he was the one at fault. They simply have very different outlooks on motorcycle racing, dealing with the media, and life in general. When the media get involved, it is basically a recipe for disaster.

During one incident at Suzuka in 2001, Rossi alleges that Biaggi elbowed him on the straightway at 220 km/h to prevent him from overtaking. This caused Rossi to lose a lot of time and drop several places, but he managed to make up the time and eventually overtook Biaggi to win the race. As he overtook Biaggi, he took his left hand from the handlebars of his bike and gave Biaggi the middle-finger. The press, according to Rossi, took Biaggi's side as usual, and excused Biaggi's elbow as necessary - Rossi's overtaking move had been dangerous and Biaggi had to intervene to prevent a collision. Rossi was vilified for the "vulgar gesture", and he felt that this was entirely unfair.

By the time the 2001 season had moved to Barcelona, the animosity from Suzuka had festered and was built up so much by the media that it threatened to blow out of control. After the race (which Rossi won), the pair got into a fist-fight before the podium presentation. The tension was evident in the press conference, although the media hadn't yet found out what had happened. The Dorna officials took Rossi and Biaggi aside immediately after the press conference and ordered them not to talk about the incident, and to play it down. Neither rider was sanctioned for the incident. Rossi maintains that afterwards he kept his word and didn't speak to the journalists, but Biaggi apparently broke his word and talked to the journalists.

At the next Grand Prix in Assen, Honda organized a press conference to put the events of Barcelona behind them. Rossi and Biaggi shook hands in front of the media, and that effectively ended the feud. After that, although they have had run-ins on track, the media frenzy surrounding them and any incidents off-track calmed down.

Rossi's main rival in the 2003/2004/2005 seasons was Sete Gibernau, riding with Team Gresini's Movistar Honda team on a satellite RC211V in 2004 and then on an all but in name factory RC211V, which Gibernau helped to develop, in 2005. Initially they were quite friendly in the paddock and off - Gibernau partied on occasions with Rossi at the Italian's Ibiza villa - but a souring in their relationship began in the 2004 season and culminated in the "Qatar Incident" that same season when Rossi's team was penalized for "cleaning" his grid position to aid in traction, along with Honda Pons' Max Biaggi, and both riders were subsequently forced to start from the back of the grid. A number of teams, including Gibernau's Team Gresini and the official Repsol Honda factory team, appealed successfully to race direction for Rossi to be sanctioned. Rossi and his chief mechanic, Jeremy Burgess, insisted that they were doing nothing more than what many others had done before when faced with a dirty track and Rossi accused Gibernau of being behind the move to appeal for a sanction, something the Spaniard categorically denied. Since then the two have not spoken and Rossi seemed to resolve to use the incident to apply psychological pressure on Gibernau. He is said to have sworn that after the Qatar race, which Gibernau won while Rossi crashed out after rising to 6th position, he would do everything to make sure that Gibernau never stood on the highest step of the podium again. This determination on the part of Rossi might go some way towards explaining his harsh inside passing manoeuver on Gibernau in the final corner of the first round race of the 2005 MotoGP World Championship at Jerez, which resulted in a Rossi win and Sete claiming second after they both touched and Gibernau was forced into the gravel. The Movistar Honda rider was visibly displeased, with clearly unhappy body language during post-race celebrations and a terse response in the post-race press conference. Rossi offered a handshake to Sete which he accepted. Rossi said in the post-race press conference that he understood that Sete was angry but that at the end of the day, "these are the races." Gibernau remained visibly angry, but sportingly said that he simply wanted to move on to the next race and not get caught up in the feud.

As a comparison, a very similar incident occurred at the Qatar GP of 2004 when Rossi collided with Alex Barros when Rossi attempted to outbrake the Brazilian into the first corner, after colliding with Barros he instantly raised his hand in apology.

Gibernau retired from Grand Prix racing after an unsuccessful, injury blighted 2006 season with Ducati and he never won another race after Qatar, prompting some in the Spanish and Italian motorcycle racing media to explain this fact by way of reference to the "Qatar curse".

In 2007, Casey Stoner emerged as a true rival for Rossi. Coupled with a very fast Ducati, the young Australian won the first race of the year, followed by many more victories resulting in his claiming of the 2007 MotoGP World Championship title. Stoner's and Rossi's rivalry came to a dramatic climax at Laguna Seca in 2008, after which Casey Stoner made the comment 'I have lost respect for one of the greatest riders in history', which Rossi just shrugged off. Stoner apologized to Rossi at the next race.[8]

[edit] Nicknames

Valentino Rossi has had numerous nicknames during his racing career. His first prominent nickname was "Rossifumi." Rossi explained the etymology of this nickname as a reference and tribute to fellow rider Norifumi Abe.

His next nickname appeared some time around his days racing in the 250 cc World Championship. The nickname "Valentinik" was a reference to the Italian Donald Duck superhero, "Paperinik."

Since his dominance in 500 cc and MotoGP, Rossi has used the nickname "The Doctor." This has been attributed to his "cold and clinical dismantling of his opponents" as well as his cool and calm composure in racing compared to his frenetic days in 125 cc and 250 cc where his performance was erratic and dangerous, resulting in numerous crashes. There are two theories as to why Rossi is entitled "The Doctor", one is Rossi adopted the nickname upon having earned a degree, which in Italy entitles one to use the title "Doctor". Another, as spoken by Graziano himself, "The Doctor because, I don't think there is a particular reason, but it's beautiful, and is important, The Doctor. And in Italy, The Doctor is a name you give to someone for respect, it's very important, The Doctor... important". Although Valentino often jokes that the name arrived because in Italy, Rossi is a very common surname for Doctors. These days Rossi rarely crashes and in fact holds the record for the longest streak of consecutive podiums. From September 8, 2002 to April 18, 2004, he stood on the podium at the end of all 23 races including every race in 2003.

He has always raced with the number #46 in his motorcycle grand prix career. Rossi has stated that the original inspiration for this choice of number was the Japanese "wild card" racer Norifumi Abe whom he saw on television speeding past much more seasoned riders in a wet race. He later found out that it was the number his father had raced with in the first of his 3 grand prix career wins, in 1979, in Yugoslavia, on a 250c Morbidelli. Typically, a World Championship winner (and also runner-up and third place) is awarded the #1 sticker for the next season. However, in a homage to Barry Sheene (who was the first rider of the modern era to keep the same number), Rossi has stayed with the now-famous #46 throughout his career. The text on his helmet refers to the name of his group of friends: "The Tribe of the Chihuahua", and the letters WLF on his leathers stand for "Viva La Figa", Italian for "Hooray for the Pussy". He has so far escaped any sanctions or ultimatums that he take the letters off because the "W" in "WLF" represents the two "V"s in "ViVa". Equally obvious is his success at escaping any disciplinary action from the FIM or Dorna for having the letters so brazenly on the front neck area of his leathers. He traditionally also incorporates his favorite color (fluorescent yellow) into his leather designs. Even though Rossi's won the MotoGP title 5 times he has never put the number 1 on his motorcycle representing the World Champion, instead staying with his famous "46". However, Rossi has worn the #1 reserved for the reigning World Champion on the shoulder of his racing leathers.

Fellow motorcycle racer and former team mate Colin Edwards refers to him as The GOAT (Greatest Of All Time).

[edit] Plans for the future

Rumors abound speculating Rossi will switch from two wheels to four wheels some time in the next few years. Initially these rumours centered on Rossi switching to Formula 1 and his test drives of the Ferrari F1 car received heavy media coverage.

Most recently Rossi tested the Ferrari in 2006 on January 31, February 1, and February 2 at Valencia. The first day saw Rossi spin out on the damp track into the gravel trap ending his day. On the second day, he posted the ninth fastest time of fifteen drivers, approximately one second behind Michael Schumacher, who himself was third fastest. Rossi lapped faster than seasoned drivers Red Bull Racing's Mark Webber and David Coulthard and Toyota F1's Jarno Trulli.[9] On the final day of testing, Rossi was just a little more than a half second behind Schumacher's best time.[10] Schumacher hailed Rossi as having immense talent and said he would be perfectly capable of moving to Formula One and being competitive immediately.

On May 24, 2006, Rossi announced that he would be staying in MotoGP until he felt his work on the motorbike was "finished". Ferrari driver Schumacher said that he felt "saddened" by Rossi's decision , but supported it. Rossi subsequently signed a new contract with Yamaha for the 2007 and 2008 seasons. The two year contract was notable as after leaving Honda at the end of the 2003 season Rossi had refused to sign contracts of more than a year.

Greater than his interest in F1 is Rossi's strong passion for rallying. His first official foray into rallying came in 2002 at WRC Rally Great Britain, in which he crashed out on the second stage (first non-superspecial stage). He subsequently raced a factory Subaru Impreza car in the Rally of Monza in November 2005.

On October 11, 2006 it was announced that Rossi would enter that year's Rally New Zealand, a WRC event which was to run from November 17-19.[11] He competed in a Subaru WRC car finishing 11th out of 39. On November 26 2006 Rossi also won the annual Monza Rally driving a Ford Focus WRC car. He beat the 2005 rally victor Rinaldo Capello by 24 seconds, winning five of the seven stages on his way. He also managed to outpace former WRC Champion Didier Auriol by seven seconds in the head-to-head Master Show final. Rossi also announced at the 2006 Monza rally, that he would be entering the 2007 Rally of Great Britain, however, he later opted out. At the 2007 Monza Rally, Rossi again took first place.

Rossi has been linked with a move to both Formula One and the World Rally Championship in the past 18 months, having tested for Ferrari and competed in a number of rally events.[12]

But Rossi has decided to remain in Moto-GP; "I have a contract with Yamaha until 2008," said Rossi. "When that finishes then we will see. What I am sure about is that I will ride until I'm 31 or 32 at most. I will look for new stimuli in the next few seasons, but for now I am fully motivated."[13]. Rossi signed a new two year contract confirming he will be at Yamaha until 2010.[14] He originally planned to use the Impreza WRC2008 during his participation in the Rally GB this December,[15] but has now decided to drive a Ford Focus WRC instead.[16]

[edit] Equipment, symbols and superstitions

[edit] Helmets

Valentino Rossi has gone through numerous helmet designs throughout his career, most featuring the Sun & Moon motif, signifying (according to Rossi) the two sides of his personality. The artist of Rossi's current helmet graphics is Aldo Drudi.[17]

2004-2005 Seasons

Round 1-5 2006 Season

Round 7-16 2006 Season

[edit] Superstitions

Rossi is a very superstitious person and his pre-ride rituals are well known. Prior to riding (whether racing, qualifying, or practice), he will start his personal ritual by stopping at about 2 metres from his bike, bend over and reach his boots (thus the 2004 TV spoiler "Are you ready boots?"). Then, when arriving at his bike, he will crouch down and hold the right-side foot-peg, with his head bowed. It is not known whether he is in silent prayer, if he is getting in the correct frame-of-mind needed to ride, or paying respect to a fellow racer, family member, or friend. He will also be adjusting the fit of his leathers by standing straight up on the foot-pegs, whilst riding the pit-lane before the start of race or practice; this may merely be a matter of comfort, which has become a much-commented upon habit. He also revealed in an interview with MotoGP.com that he always puts one boot on before the other, one glove on before the other, and he always gets on the bike the same way. He also gets off the bike in the same way, swinging his right leg over the front of the bike.[18]

[edit] Personal life

In 2007, the Italian tax authorities declared Rossi was being investigated for suspected tax evasion. Having previously unsuccessfully investigated Rossi for tax evasion in 2002, the authorities announced they were investigating Rossi for undeclared revenues of 112 million euros ($160 million) between 2000 to 2004. The officials said Rossi's London residency has enabled him to take advantage of favourable tax conditions, such as only declaring earnings made in Britain and avoiding taxes on his lucrative merchandising and sponsorship contracts, commenting that Rossi had: "residency in London but is not domiciled there." It noted that in 2002, Rossi's Italian tax form declared earnings of 500 euros, while sponsorship contracts were all reported to be made out to foreign companies, but with his affairs controlled mainly from Italy.[19] In February 2008, Rossi announced that he has reached a settlement with the Italian tax authorities: He will pay 35 million Euros to close the tax case.[20]

Beyond tax scandals, Rossi tries to keep his personal life out of the public eye as much as possible, although he makes no secret of his fondness for Italian Football Club Internazionale di Milano Inter Milan.

10 Ways to Instantly Build Self Confidence

2008-10-29T20:37:00.000-07:00

Self Confidence Suit

Self confidence is the difference between feeling unstoppable and feeling scared out of your wits. Your perception of yourself has an enormous impact on how others perceive you. Perception is reality — the more self confidence you have, the more likely it is you’ll succeed.

Although many of the factors affecting self confidence are beyond your control, there are a number of things you can consciously do to build self confidence. By using these 10 strategies you can get the mental edge you need to reach your potential.
Build Self Confidence

1. Dress Sharp

Although clothes don’t make the man, they certainly affect the way he feels about himself. No one is more conscious of your physical appearance than you are. When you don’t look good, it changes the way you carry yourself and interact with other people. Use this to your advantage by taking care of your personal appearance. In most cases, significant improvements can be made by bathing and shaving frequently, wearing clean clothes, and being cognizant of the latest styles.

This doesn’t mean you need to spend a lot on clothes. One great rule to follow is “spend twice as much, buy half as much”. Rather than buying a bunch of cheap clothes, buy half as many select, high quality items. In long run this decreases spending because expensive clothes wear out less easily and stay in style longer than cheap clothes. Buying less also helps reduce the clutter in your closet.

2. Walk Faster

One of the easiest ways to tell how a person feels about herself is to examine her walk. Is it slow? tired? painful? Or is it energetic and purposeful? People with confidence walk quickly. They have places to go, people to see, and important work to do. Even if you aren’t in a hurry, you can increase your self confidence by putting some pep in your step. Walking 25% faster will make to you look and feel more important.

3. Good Posture

Similarly, the way a person carries herself tells a story. People with slumped shoulders and lethargic movements display a lack of self confidence. They aren’t enthusiastic about what they’re doing and they don’t consider themselves important. By practicing good posture, you’ll automatically feel more confident. Stand up straight, keep your head up, and make eye contact. You’ll make a positive impression on others and instantly feel more alert and empowered.

4. Personal Commercial

One of the best ways to build confidence is listening to a motivational speech. Unfortunately, opportunities to listen to a great speaker are few and far between. You can fill this need by creating a personal commercial. Write a 30-60 second speech that highlights your strengths and goals. Then recite it in front of the mirror aloud (or inside your head if you prefer) whenever you need a confidence boost.

5. Gratitude

When you focus too much on what you want, the mind creates reasons why you can’t have it. This leads you to dwell on your weaknesses. The best way to avoid this is consciously focusing on gratitude. Set aside time each day to mentally list everything you have to be grateful for. Recall your past successes, unique skills, loving relationships, and positive momentum. You’ll be amazed how much you have going for you and motivated to take that next step towards success.

6. Compliment other people

When we think negatively about ourselves, we often project that feeling on to others in the form of insults and gossip. To break this cycle of negativity, get in the habit of praising other people. Refuse to engage in backstabbing gossip and make an effort to compliment those around you. In the process, you’ll become well liked and build self confidence. By looking for the best in others, you indirectly bring out the best in yourself.

7. Sit in the front row

In schools, offices, and public assemblies around the world, people constantly strive to sit at the back of the room. Most people prefer the back because they’re afraid of being noticed. This reflects a lack of self confidence. By deciding to sit in the front row, you can get over this irrational fear and build your self confidence. You’ll also be more visible to the important people talking from the front of the room.

8. Speak up

During group discussions many people never speak up because they’re afraid that people will judge them for saying something stupid. This fear isn’t really justified. Generally, people are much more accepting than we imagine. In fact most people are dealing with the exact same fears. By making an effort to speak up at least once in every group discussion, you’ll become a better public speaker, more confident in your own thoughts, and recognized as a leader by your peers.

9. Work out

Along the same lines as personal appearance, physical fitness has a huge effect on self confidence. If you’re out of shape, you’ll feel insecure, unattractive, and less energetic. By working out, you improve your physcial appearance, energize yourself, and accomplish something positive. Having the discipline to work out not only makes you feel better, it creates positive momentum that you can build on the rest of the day.

10. Focus on contribution

Too often we get caught up in our own desires. We focus too much on ourselves and not enough on the needs of other people. If you stop thinking about yourself and concentrate on the contribution you’re making to the rest of the world, you won’t worry as much about you own flaws. This will increase self confidence and allow you to contribute with maximum efficiency. The more you contribute to the world the more you’ll be rewarded with personal success and recognition.

July 25th, 2007 by John WesleyPrint This Post Print This Post

Putra Sampoerna the eagle from indonesia

2008-10-28T19:20:00.000-07:00

Putra Sampoerna (Indonesian: Putera Sampurna) (born 13 October 1947, Schiedam, Netherland) is an Indonesian billionaire, referred to as one of the Indonesian oligarchs. In March 2005 he was listed by Forbes Magazine as the 3rd richest Indonesian and one of the richest people in the world with an estimated fortune of $1.7 billion. Sampoerna is most famous outside of Indonesia as the owner of Mansion, a Gibraltarian gambling giant and for his contributions to Chinese enterprises in Shanghai and Hong Kong, reflecting his Chinese origins.

He was the owner of Sampoerna cigarettes company before he sold it to Phillip Morris for $5.4 billion. The sale made him the richest man in Indonesia with $3 billion, netting almost 2 billion US dollars, due to his majority shares at Sampoerna. Putra Sampoerna is also a sponsor of the Putera Sampoerna Foundation which gives scholarship for Master's Degree study abroad for a select number of qualified Indonesians who completed most of their educational training in Indonesia. He pledged USD 150 million to Putera Sampoerna Foundation. His son, Michael Sampoerna help to run his business empire Sampoerna Strategic. His eldest daughter, Michelle Sampoerna, is the Chairman of Sampoerna Foundation. Currently his business interests in Indonesia include Sampoerna Agro (Palm Plantation).

[edit] Other interests and activities

Sampoerna is known as a fan of soccer and is often seen in the stadium at every games; in 2006, after Manchester United owner Malcolm Glazer was seen giving Sampoerna a contract at the Carling cup final, rumors circulated that he was considering investing in or purchasing a Soccer team. Also love to have a punt and is not very good at it it would seem as he lost well over 200 million dollars with it failed betting exchange in Gibraltar, he is now trying to do a sportsbook with the same head of ops that he had in Gibraltar lose lost well over 30 million GBP.

He owns his own private Boeing 747-300 known as "The Purboyo" due to its paint scheme.

Of Chinese background, Sampoerna is a firm supporter of Chinese causes, and has funded several building projects in his own neighbourhood in Shanghai, Hong Kong and in Tokyo.

He owns ten superyachts. The Biggest is Sampoerna Jaya, previously owned by Budi Santoso, is 125.277 meters long and carries a 36 meters yacht on board, a helicopter, speedboat and jet skis.[citation needed]

In early 2008, Mr. Sampoerna purchased 14,000 acres of land west of Fulshear, Tx for as estimated $1 billion.

In Sept 2008 there was speculation that Sampoerna was preparing a bid to buy Tottenham Hotspur Football Club

-- wikipwdia --

Warren Buffet

2008-10-28T19:18:00.000-07:00

Warren Edward Buffett (born August 30, 1930) is an American investor, businessman, and philanthropist. He is one of the world's most successful investors and the largest shareholder and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.[3] He was ranked by Forbes as the richest man in the world during the first half of 2008, with an estimated net worth of $62.3 billion.

Often called the "Oracle of Omaha",[4] Buffett is noted for his adherence to the value investing philosophy and for his personal frugality despite his immense wealth.[5] His 2006 annual salary was about $100,000, which is small compared to senior executive remuneration in comparable companies.[6] When Buffett spent $16.7 million of Berkshire's funds on a business jet in 1989, he jokingly named it "The Indefensible" because of his past criticisms of such purchases by other CEOs.[7] He lives in the same house in the central Dundee neighborhood of Omaha that he bought in 1958 for $31,500 and today, it is valued at around $700,000.[8]

Buffett also is a notable philanthropist. In 2006, he announced a plan to give away his fortune to charity, with 83% of it going to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.[9] In 2007, he was listed among Time's 100 Most Influential People in The World.[10] He also serves as a member of the board of trustees at Grinnell College.[11]
Early life and Benjamin Graham

Warren Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska on 30th August 1930, to Leila (Stahl) and Howard Buffett. As the son of a local stockbroker, it is likely that he was exposed to markets at a very young age.
Benjamin Graham(1894–1976)
Benjamin Graham(1894–1976)
Benjamin Graham
(1894–1976)

Phil
Fisher
(1907–2004)

One of his influential mentors was Benjamin Graham. Graham’s philosophy had such an impact on Buffett that he enrolled in Columbia Business School to study directly under him. In Buffett’s own words: “I’m 15 percent Fisher and 85 percent Benjamin Graham”.[12] As Buffett often would say about Graham’s teachings: “The basic ideas of investing are to look at stocks as business, use the market's fluctuations to your advantage, and seek a margin of safety. That’s what Ben Graham taught us. A hundred years from now they will still be the cornerstones of investing”.[13]

[edit] Political connections

Buffett has been a supporter of the Democratic party for many years. In addition to other political contributions over the years, Mr. Buffett has formally endorsed and made campaign contributions to Barack Obama's presidential campaign. On 2nd July 2008, Mr. Buffett attended a $28,500 per plate fundraiser for Mr. Obama's campaign in Chicago hosted by Mr. Obama's National Finance Chair, Penny Pritzker and her husband, as well as Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett.[14]

During the second 2008 U.S. presidential debate, candidates John McCain and Barack Obama, after being asked first by presidential debate mediator Tom Brokaw, both mentioned Buffett as a possible future Secretary of the Treasury. [15]

Later, in the third and final presidential debate, Obama mentioned Buffett as a potential economic advisor.

[edit] Writings

Warren Buffett's writings include his annual reports and various articles. In his article "The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville", Buffett condemned the academic position that the market was efficient and that beating the S&P 500 was "pure chance" by highlighting a number of students of the Graham and Dodd value investing school of thought. In addition to himself, Buffett named Walter J. Schloss, Tom Knapp, Ed Anderson (Tweedy, Brown Inc.), Bill Ruane (Sequoia Fund, Inc.), Charles Munger, Rick Guerin (Pacific Partners, Ltd.), and Stan Perlmeter (Perlmeter Investments) as having beaten the S&P 500, "year in and year out".

On September 29, 2008, Bantam Books released The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life written by Alice Schroeder.[16] This book is notable because it is the first biography written with Buffett's cooperation.[17]

[edit] Personal life

Mr. Buffett married Susan Thompson in 1952. They had three children, Susie, Howard, and Peter. The couple began living separately in 1977, although they remained married until her death in July 2004. Their daughter Susie lives in Omaha and does charitable work through the Susan A. Buffett Foundation and is a national board member of Girls, Inc.

In 2006, on his seventy-sixth birthday, he married his never-married longtime-companion, Astrid Menks, who was then sixty years old. She had lived with him since his wife's departure in 1977 to San Francisco.[18] Ironically, it was Susan Buffett who arranged for the two to meet before she left Omaha to pursue her singing career. All three were close and holiday cards to friends were signed "Warren, Susie and Astrid".[19] Susan Buffett briefly discussed this relationship in an interview on the Charlie Rose Show shortly before her death, in a rare glimpse into Buffett's personal life.[20]

He remains an avid player of the card game bridge, and has said that he spends twelve hours a week playing the game.[21] He often plays with Bill Gates and Paul Allen.[citation needed]

In 2006, he sponsored a bridge match for the Buffett Cup. Modeled on the Ryder Cup in golf, held immediately before it, and in the same city, in the event, a team of twelve bridge players from the United States took on twelve Europeans.

In 2006, he auctioned his 2001 Lincoln Town Car[22] on eBay to raise money for Girls, Inc.[23]

Warren Buffett works with Christopher Webber on an animated series with DiC Entertainment chief Andy Heyward. According to information presented by Buffett at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting on May 6, 2006, the series will feature Buffett and Munger in roles and the series will teach children healthy financial habits for life. Cartoon drawings of Buffett and Munger were displayed throughout the events during the weekend as well as in a special animated movie from Heyward, displayed before the meeting.

Buffett has described himself as agnostic when it comes to religious beliefs.

In December 2006 it was reported that Mr. Buffett does not carry a cell phone, does not have a computer at his desk, and drives his own automobile,[24] a Cadillac DTS.[25]

In 2007, he auctioned a luncheon with him that raised a final bid of $650,100 for a charity.[26]

Buffett's DNA report revealed that his paternal ancestors hail from northern Scandinavia, while his maternal ancestors most likely have roots in Iberia or Estonia.[27]

[edit] Historical timeline
Education:

Woodrow Wilson High School, Washington, D.C. in 1947[28]
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 1947–1949
B.S. University of Nebraska, 1950
M.S. in Economics, Columbia University, in 1951.

Employment:

1951–1954 Buffett-Falk & Co., Omaha - Investment Salesman
1954–1956 Graham-Newman Corp., New York - Securities Analyst
1956–1969 Buffett Partnership, Ltd., Omaha - General Partner
1970–Present Berkshire Hathaway Inc, Omaha - Chairman, CEO

1943: (13 years old)

* Buffett filed his first income tax return, deducting his bicycle and watch as a work expense for $35 for his work as newspaper delivery boy.[29]

1945: (15 years old)

* In his freshman year of high school, Buffett and a friend spent $25 to purchase a used pinball machine, which they placed in a barber shop. Within months, they owned three machines in different locations.

1949: (19 years old)

* In 1949, he was initiated into Alpha Sigma Phi Fraternity while an undergraduate at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His father and uncles also were Alpha Sigma Phi brothers from the chapter at Nebraska, to which Warren eventually transferred.

1950: (20 years old)

* Buffett applied for admission to Harvard Business School, but was turned down.[30]
* Buffett enrolled at Columbia Business School after learning that Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, two well-known securities analysts, taught there.

1951: (21 years old)

* Buffett discovered Graham was on the board of GEICO insurance at the time. After taking a train to Washington, D.C. on a Saturday, Buffett knocked on the door of GEICO's headquarters until a janitor allowed him in. There, he met Lorimer Davidson, the vice president, who was to become a lasting influence on him and life-long friend.[31] They talked for four hours about the insurance business. Davidson recalled that he found Buffett to be an “extraordinary man” after fifteen minutes.
* Buffett was graduated from Columbia and wanted to work on Wall Street. Both his father and Ben Graham urged him not to. Buffett offered to work for Graham for free, but Graham refused.[30] He purchased a Sinclair Texaco gas station as a side investment, but that venture did not work out as well as he had hoped. Meanwhile, he worked as a stockbroker. During that time, Buffett also took a Dale Carnegie public speaking course. Using what he learned, he felt confident enough to teach a night class at the University of Nebraska, "Investment Principles." The average age of the students he taught was more than twice his own.

1952: (22 years old)

* Buffett married Susan Thompson.

1953: (23 years old)

* Susan and Warren Buffett had their first child, Susan Alice Buffett.

1954: (24 years old)

* Benjamin Graham offered Buffett a job at his partnership with a starting salary of $12,000 a year. Here, he worked closely with Walter Schloss.
* Graham, who was a tough man to work for, was adamant that a stock provide a wide margin of safety after weighting the trade-off between its price and intrinsic value. Graham’s demand that a stock be worth more than its price made sense to Buffett, but it also made him question whether the criteria were too stringent, causing them to miss out on some big winners that had more qualitative values.[30]
* Susan and Warren Buffett had their second child, Howard Graham Buffett.

1956: (26 years old)

* Benjamin Graham retired and closed his partnership.
* Buffett's personal savings were now over $140,000.

* Buffett returned home to Omaha and created Buffett Partnership Ltd., an investment partnership.

“ I’ll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive. And there’s fantastic brand loyalty. ”

—Warren Buffett[32][33], 1987

1957: (27 years old)

* Buffett had three partnerships operating the entire year.
* Buffett purchased a five-bedroom stucco house in Omaha, in which he still lives, for $31,500.

1958: (28 years old)

* Susan and Warren Buffett had their third child, Peter Andrew Buffett
* Buffett had five partnerships operating the entire year.

1959: (29 years old)

* Buffett had six partnerships operating the entire year.
* Buffett was introduced to Charlie Munger.

1960: (30 years old)

* Buffett had seven partnerships operating the entire year.
* The partnerships were: Buffett Associates, Buffett Fund, Dacee, Emdee, Glenoff, Mo-Buff, and Underwood.
* Buffett asked one of his partners, a doctor, to find ten other doctors who would be willing to invest $10,000 each in his partnership. Eventually, eleven doctors agreed to invest.

1961: (31 years old)

* Buffett revealed that Sanborn Map Company accounted for 35% of the partnerships' assets.
* Buffett explained that in 1958, Sanborn sold at $45 per share when the value of the Sanborn investment portfolio was $65 per share. This meant buyers valued Sanborn at "minus $20" per share, and buyers were unwilling to pay more than 70 cents on the dollar for an investment portfolio with a map business thrown in for nothing.
* Buffett revealed that he earned a spot on the board of Sanborn.

1962: (32 years old)

* Buffett became a millionaire because Buffett's partnerships, in January 1962, had in excess of $7,178,500 of which over $1,025,000 belonged to Buffett.
* Buffett merged all partnerships into one partnership.
* Buffett discovered a textile manufacturing firm, Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett's partnerships began purchasing shares at $7.60 per share.

1965: (35 years old)

* When Buffett's partnerships aggressively began purchasing Berkshire, they paid $14.86 per share while the company had working capital (current assets minus current liabilities) of $19 per share. This did not include the value of fixed assets (factory and equipment).
* Buffett took control of Berkshire Hathaway at the board meeting and named a new president, Ken Chace, to run the company.

1966: (36 years old)

* Buffett closed the partnership to new money.
* Buffett wrote in his letter “unless it appears that circumstances have changed (under some conditions added capital would improve results) or unless new partners can bring some asset to the partnership other than simply capital, I intend to admit no additional partners to BPL.”
* In a second letter, Buffett announced his first investment in a private business — Hochschild, Kohn and Co, a privately owned Baltimore department store.

1967: (37 years old)

* Berkshire paid out its first and only dividend of 10 cents.

1969: (39 years old)

* Following his most successful year, Buffett liquidated the partnership and transferred their assets to his partners. Among the assets paid out were shares of Berkshire Hathaway.

1970: (40 years old)

* As chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, began writing his now-famous annual letters to shareholders.

1973: (43 years old)

* Berkshire began to acquire stock in the Washington Post Company. Buffett became close friends with Katharine Graham, who controlled the company and its flagship newspaper, and became a member of its board of directors.

1974: (44 years old)

* The SEC opened a formal investigation into Warren Buffett and one of Berkshire's mergers due to possible conflict of interest. Nothing ever came of it.

1977: (47 years old)

* Berkshire indirectly purchased the Buffalo Evening News for $32.5 million. Antitrust charges started.

1979: (49 years old)

* Berkshire began to acquire stock in ABC. With the stock trading at $290 per share, Buffett's net worth neared $140 million. However, he lived solely on his salary of $50,000 per year.
* Berkshire began the year trading at $775 per share, and ended at $1,310. Buffett's net worth reached $620 million, placing him on the Forbes 400 for the first time.

1987: (57 years old)

* Berkshire Hathaway purchased 12% stake in Salomon Inc., making it the largest shareholder and Buffett the director.

1988: (58 years old)

* Buffett began buying stock in Coca-Cola Company, eventually purchasing up to 7 percent of the company for $1.02 billion. It would turn out to be one of Berkshire's most lucrative investments, and one which it still holds.

1990: (60 years old)

* Scandals involving Greenberg and John Gutfreund (former CEO of Salomon Brothers) surfaced.

1999: (69 years old)

* Buffett was named the top money manager of the twentieth century in a survey by the Carson Group, ahead of Peter Lynch and John Templeton.[34]

2002: (72 years old)

* Buffett entered in $11 billion worth of forward contracts to deliver U.S. dollars against other currencies. By April 2006, his total gain on these contracts was over $2 billion.

2004: (73 years old)

* His wife, Susan, died.

2006: (75 years old)

* Buffett announced in June that he gradually would give away 85% of his Berkshire holdings to five foundations in annual gifts of stock, starting in July 2006. The largest contribution would go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.[35]

2007: (76 years old)

* In a letter to shareholders, Buffett announced that he was looking for a younger successor, or perhaps successors, to run his investment business.[36] Buffett had previously selected Lou Simpson, who runs investments at Geico, to fill that role. However, Simpson is only six years younger than Buffett.

2008: (77 years old)

* Buffett became the richest man in the world, worth $62 billion according to Forbes,[37] and $58 billion according to Yahoo[38]. Bill Gates had been number 1 on the Forbes list for 15 consecutive years.

[edit] Public stances
Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles. (October 2008)
This section may require restructuring to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please discuss this issue on the talk page. (August 2008)

* Buffett emphasized the non-productive aspect of gold in 1998 at Harvard: "It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head." In 1977 Buffett was also quoted as saying about stocks, gold, farmland, and inflation: "stocks are probably still the best of all the poor alternatives in an era of inflation - at least they are if you buy in at appropriate prices."[39]
* Buffett stated that he only paid 19% of his income for 2006 ($48.1 million) in total federal taxes, while his employees paid 33% of theirs, despite making much less money.[40]
* Buffett believes that the U.S. dollar will lose value in the long run. He views the United States' expanding trade deficit as an alarming trend that will devalue the U.S. dollar and U.S. assets. As a result it is putting a larger portion of ownership of U.S. assets in the hands of foreigners. This induced Buffett to enter the foreign currency market for the first time in 2002. However, he substantially reduced his stake in 2005 as changing interest rates increased the costs of holding currency contracts. Buffett continues to be bearish on the dollar, and says he is looking to make acquisitions of companies which derive a substantial portion of their revenues from outside the United States. Buffett invested in PetroChina Company Limited and in a rare move, posted a commentary[41] on Berkshire Hathaway's website stating why he would not divest from the company despite calls from some activists to do so. (He did, however, sell this stake, apparently for purely financial reasons.)
* Buffett believes that the world is nearing its maximum capacity of oil production and that gradually depleted oil fields could reduce the amount produced.[42]
* Buffett believes government should not be in the business of gambling, believing it to be a tax on ignorance.[43]
* Buffett's speeches are known for mixing business discussions with humor. Each year, Buffett presides over Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting in the Qwest Center in Omaha, Nebraska, an event drawing over 20,000 visitors from both United States and abroad, giving it the nickname "Woodstock of Capitalism".[44]
* Berkshire's annual reports and letters to shareholders, prepared by Buffett, frequently receive coverage by the financial media. Buffett's writings are known for containing literary quotes ranging from the Bible to Mae West,[45] as well as Midwestern advice, and numerous jokes. Various websites extol Buffett's virtues while others decry Buffett’s business models or dismiss his investment advice and decisions.
* Buffett favors the inheritance tax, saying that repealing it would be like "choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics".[46] In 2007, Buffett testified before the Senate and urged them to preserve the estate tax so as to avoid a plutocracy.
* Buffett has endorsed Barack Obama for president[47] and intimated that John McCain's views on social justice were so far from his own that McCain would need a "lobotomy" for Buffett to change his endorsement.[48]
* Buffett has called the 2007—present downturn in the financial sector "poetic justice".[49]
* In his letter to shareholders in March, 2005, Warren Buffett predicted that in another ten years’ time the net ownership of the U.S. by outsiders would amount to $11 trillion. “Americans … would chafe at the idea of perpetually paying tribute to their creditors and owners abroad. A country that is now aspiring to an ‘ownership society’ will not find happiness in - and I’ll use hyperbole here for emphasis - a 'sharecropper society’.”
* Author Ann Pettifor has adopted the image in her writings and has stated: "He is right. And so the thing we must fear most now, is not just the collapse of banks and investment funds, or of the international financial architecture, but of a 'sharecropper society, angry at its downfall."[50][51][52]

[edit] Philosophy On Wealth

From a NY Times article: "I don't believe in dynastic wealth," [Warren Buffett] said, calling those who grow up in wealthy circumstances "members of the lucky sperm club." Source: Greg Mankiw's Blog, On Lucky Sperm, July 01, 2006 Buffett has written several times of his belief that, in a market economy, the rich earn outsized rewards for their talents. The following is taken from one of Buffett's articles: "A market economy creates some lopsided payoffs to participants. The right endowment of vocal chords, anatomical structure, physical strength, or mental powers can produce enormous piles of claim checks (stocks, bonds, and other forms of capital) on future national output. Proper selection of ancestors similarly can result in lifetime supplies of such tickets upon birth. If zero real investment returns diverted a bit greater portion of the national output from such stockholders to equally worthy and hardworking citizens lacking jackpot-producing talents, it would seem unlikely to pose such an insult to an equitable world as to risk Divine Intervention. "How Inflation Swindles the Equity Investor" by Warren E. Buffett, Fortune May 1977 #

[edit] Philanthropy

In June 2006, Buffett gave approximately 10 million Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (worth approximately USD 30.7 billion as of 23rd June 2006)[53] making it the largest charitable donation in history and Buffett one of the leaders in the philanthrocapitalism revolution.[54] The foundation will receive 5% of the total donation on an annualised basis each July, beginning in 2006. Buffett also will join the board of directors of the Gates Foundation, although he does not plan to be actively involved in the foundation's investments.[citation needed]

He also announced plans to contribute additional Berkshire stock valued at approximately $6.7 billion to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and to other foundations headed by his three children. This is a significant shift[citation needed] from previous statements Buffett has made, having stated that most of his fortune would pass to his Buffett Foundation.[citation needed] The bulk of the estate of his wife, valued at $2.6 billion, went to that foundation when she died in 2004.[55]

His children will not inherit a significant proportion of his wealth. These actions are consistent with statements he has made in the past indicating his opposition to the transfer of great fortunes from one generation to the next.[56] Buffett once commented, "I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing".[57]

The following quotation from 1988, respectively, highlights Warren Buffett's thoughts on his wealth and why he long planned to re-allocate it:

"I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It's like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die. (Lowe 1997:165–166)

On 27th June 2008, Zhao Danyang, a general manager at Pure Heart China Growth Investment Fund, won the 2008 5-day online "Power Lunch with Warren Buffett" charity auction on eBay with high bid of $2,110,100. Zhao had the right to dine with 76-year-old Buffett, at New York's Smith & Wollensky Steakhouse, and invite up to 7 companions for the private lunch and can ask Buffett anything at all, except what he's buying or selling. Auction proceeds benefit the San Francisco Glide Foundation. In 2007 Mohnish Pabrai dined with Buffett.[58][59]

Buffett also helped Dow Chemical pay for its $18.8 billion takeover of Rohm & Haas. He thus became the single largest shareholder in the enlarged group with his Berkshire Hathaway, which provided $3 billion, underlining his instrumental role during the current crisis in debt and equity markets.[60]

---wikipedia---

Bill Gates the success dreamer

2008-10-28T19:12:00.000-07:00

William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born October 28, 1955),[3] is an American business magnate, philanthropist, the world's third richest person (as of February 8, 2008),[2] the second richest American (as of October 10, 2008),[4][5] and chairman[6] of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8 percent of the common stock.[7] He has also authored or co-authored several books.

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Although he is admired by many, a large number of industry insiders criticize his business tactics, which they consider anti-competitive, an opinion which has in some cases been upheld by the courts.[8][9] In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.

Bill Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in January, 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect. In June, 2006, Gates announced that he would be transitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work at Microsoft and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He gradually transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie, chief software architect and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer. Gates's last full-time day at Microsoft was June 27, 2008. He remains at Microsoft as a part-time, non-executive chairman.

Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. His family was upper middle class; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way, and her father, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president. Gates has one older sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had dropped his own "III" suffix.[10] Early on in his life, Gates's parents had a law career in mind for him.[11]

At thirteen he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school.[12] When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students.[13] Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he commented on it and said, "There was just something neat about the machine."[14] After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.[15]

At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when it went out of business. The following year, Information Sciences Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success."[14] At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.[16]

Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test[17] and subsequently enrolled at Harvard College in the fall of 1973.[18] Prior to the mid 1990s, an SAT score of 1590 was equivalent to an IQ of about 170 (roughly the one in a million level),[19] a figure that would frequently be cited by the press.[20] While at Harvard, he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer, whom he later appointed as CEO of Microsoft. He also met computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou at Harvard, with whom he collaborated on a paper about algorithms.[21] He did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard[22] and spent a lot of time using the school's computers. He remained in contact with Paul Allen, joining him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974.[23] The following year saw the release of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates and Allen saw this as the opportunity to start their own computer software company.[24] He had talked this decision over with his parents, who were supportive of him after seeing how much Gates wanted to start a company.[22]

Microsoft

Main articles: History of Microsoft and Microsoft

BASIC
MITS Altair 8800 Computer with 8 inch floppy disk system

After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.[25] In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen was hired into MITS,[26] and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS in Albuquerque in November 1975. They named their partnership "Micro-soft" and had their first office located in Albuquerque.[26] Within a year, the hyphen was dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was registered with the USPTO.[26]

Microsoft's BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked into the community and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter saying that MITS could not continue to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software without payment.[27] This letter was unpopular with many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that software developers should be able to demand payment. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems.[26] The company moved from Albuquerque to its new home in Bellevue, Washington on January 1, 1979.[25]

During Microsoft's early years, all employees had broad responsibility for the company's business. Gates oversaw the business details, but continued to write code as well. In the first five years, he personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, and often rewrote parts of it as he saw fit.[28]

IBM partnership

In 1980, IBM approached Microsoft to write the BASIC interpreter for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC. When IBM's representatives mentioned that they needed an operating system, Gates referred them to Digital Research (DRI), makers of the widely used CP/M operating system.[29] IBM's discussions with Digital Research went poorly, and they did not reach a licensing agreement. IBM representative Jack Sams mentioned the licensing difficulties during a subsequent meeting with Gates and told him to get an acceptable operating system. A few weeks later Gates proposed using 86-DOS (QDOS), an operating system similar to CP/M that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products had made for hardware similar to the PC. Microsoft made a deal with SCP to become the exclusive licensing agent, and later the full owner, of 86-DOS. After adapting the operating system for the PC, Microsoft delivered it to IBM as PC-DOS in exchange for a one-time fee of $50,000. Gates insisted that IBM let Microsoft keep the copyright on the operating system, because he believed that other hardware vendors would clone IBM's system.[30] They did, and the sales of MS-DOS made Microsoft a major player in the industry.[31]

Windows

Gates oversaw Microsoft's company restructuring on June 25, 1981, which re-incorporated the company in Washington and made Gates President of Microsoft and the Chairman of the Board.[25] Microsoft launched its first retail version of Microsoft Windows on November 20, 1985, and in August, the company struck a deal with IBM to develop a separate operating system called OS/2. Although the two companies successfully developed the first version of the new system, mounting creative differences undermined the partnership. Gates distributed an internal memo on May 16, 1991 announcing that the OS/2 partnership was over and Microsoft would shift its efforts to the Windows NT kernel development.[32]

Management style
Bill Gates giving his deposition at Microsoft on August 27, 1998

From Microsoft's founding in 1975 until 2006, Gates had primary responsibility for the company's product strategy. He aggressively broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft achieved a dominant position he vigorously defended it.

As an executive, Gates met regularly with Microsoft's senior managers and program managers. Firsthand accounts of these meetings describe him as verbally combative, berating managers for perceived holes in their business strategies or proposals that placed the company's long-term interests at risk.[33][34] He often interrupted presentations with such comments as, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!"[35] and, "Why don't you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps?"[36] The target of his outburst then had to defend the proposal in detail until, hopefully, Gates was fully convinced.[35] When subordinates appeared to be procrastinating, he was known to remark sarcastically, "I'll do it over the weekend."[6][37][38]

Gates's role at Microsoft for most of its history was primarily a management and executive role. However, he was an active software developer in the early years, particularly on the company's programming language products. He has not officially been on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100 line, but wrote code as late as 1989 that shipped in the company's products.[37] On June 15, 2006, Gates announced that he would transition out of his day-to-day role over the next two years to dedicate more time to philanthropy. He divided his responsibilities between two successors, placing Ray Ozzie in charge of day-to-day management and Craig Mundie in charge of long-term product strategy.[39]

Antitrust law violations

Further information: United States Microsoft antitrust case and European Union Microsoft competition case

Many decisions that led to antitrust litigation over Microsoft's business practices have had Gates's approval. In the 1998 United States v. Microsoft case, Gates gave deposition testimony that several journalists characterized as evasive. He argued with examiner David Boies over the contextual meaning of words like "compete," "concerned," and "we."[40] BusinessWeek reported:

Early rounds of his deposition show him offering obfuscatory answers and saying 'I don't recall,' so many times that even the presiding judge had to chuckle. Worse, many of the technology chief's denials and pleas of ignorance were directly refuted by prosecutors with snippets of e-mail Gates both sent and received.[41]

Gates later said that he had simply resisted attempts by Boies to mischaracterize his words and actions. As to his demeanor during the deposition, he said, "Did I fence with Boies? ... I plead guilty. Whatever that penalty is should be levied against me: rudeness to Boies in the first degree."[42] Despite Gates's denials, the judge ruled that Microsoft had committed monopolization and tying, blocking competition, in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.[42]

The European Union Microsoft competition case is also a case brought by the European Commission of the European Union (EU) against Microsoft for abuse of its dominant position in the market (according to competition law). It started as a complaint from Novell over Microsoft's licensing practices in 1993, and eventually resulted in the EU ordering Microsoft to divulge certain information about its server products and release a version of Microsoft Windows without Windows Media Player.

Appearance in ads

Bill Gates decided in 2008 to appear in at least 1 commercial in a series of ads to promote Microsoft. This commercial, co-starring Jerry Seinfeld, is a 1 and a half minute talk between strangers as Seinfeld walks up on a discount shoe store (Shoe Circus) in a mall and notices Bill Gates buying shoes inside. The salesman is trying to sell Mr. Gates shoes that are a size too big. Mr. Seinfeld begins to inform him about a pair of shoes called Conquistadors that run "a little tight" and sells him on them in a size 10 (whereas the store clerk was attempting an 11). As Mr. Gates is buying the shoes he holds up his discount card, this card uses a slightly altered version of his own mugshot of his arrest in New Mexico in 1977 for a traffic violation [43]. As they are walking out of the mall, Jerry Seinfeld asks Bill Gates if he has melded his mind to other developers, after getting a yes, he then asks if they are working on a way to make computers edible, again getting a yes. Most critics are still in debate over the exact meaning of this commercial saying that it is too vague to make sense to them. Though some say that it is an homage to Mr. Seinfeld's own show about "nothing"(Seinfeld). [44]

Personal life

Gates married Melinda Gates (née French) from Dallas, Texas on January 1, 1994. They have three children: Jennifer Katharine(1996), Rory John(1999) and Phoebe Adele(2002). Bill Gates' house is a 21st century earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. According to King County public records, as of 2006, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $125 million, and the annual property tax is $991,000. Also among Gates's private acquisitions is the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci, which Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994.[45] Gates is also known as an avid reader, and the ceiling of his large home library is engraved with a quotation from The Great Gatsby.[46] He also enjoys playing bridge, tennis, and golf.[47][48]

Gates was number one on the "Forbes 400" list from 1993 through to 2007 and number one on Forbes list of "The World's Richest People" from 1995 to 2007. In 1999, Gates's wealth briefly surpassed $101 billion, causing the media to call him a "centibillionaire".[49] Since 2000, the nominal value of his Microsoft holdings has declined due to a fall in Microsoft's stock price after the dot-com bubble burst and the multi-billion dollar donations he has made to his charitable foundations. In a May 2006 interview, Gates commented that he wished that he were not the richest man in the world because he disliked the attention it brought.[50] Gates has several investments outside Microsoft, which in 2006 paid him a salary of $616,667, and $350,000 bonus totalling $966,667.[51] He founded Corbis, a digital imaging company, in 1989. In 2004 he became a director of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company headed by long-time friend Warren Buffett.[52]

Philanthropy

Further information: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Gates began to realize the expectations others had of him when public opinion mounted that he could give more of his wealth to charity. Gates studied the work of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller and in 1994 sold some of his Microsoft stock to create the William H. Gates Foundation. In 2000, Gates and his wife combined three family foundations into one to create the charitable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is the largest transparently operated charitable foundation in the world.[53] The foundation is setup to allow benefactors access how its money is being spent, unlike other major charitable organizations such as the Wellcome Trust.[54][55] The generosity and extensive philanthropy of David Rockefeller has been credited as a major influence. Gates and his father have met with Rockefeller several times and have modeled their giving in part on the Rockefeller family's philanthropic focus, namely those global problems that are ignored by governments and other organizations.[56] As of 2007 Bill and Melinda Gates were the second most generous philanthropist in America, having given over $28 billion to charity.[57]

The foundation has also received criticism because it invests the assets that it has not yet distributed, with the exclusive goal of maximizing the return on investment. As a result, its investments include companies that have been criticized for worsening poverty in the same developing countries where the Foundation is attempting to relieve poverty. These include companies that pollute heavily and pharmaceutical companies that do not sell into the developing world.[58] In response to press criticism, the foundation announced in 2007 a review of its investments to assess social responsibility.[59] It subsequently cancelled the review and stood by its policy of investing for maximum return, while using voting rights to influence company practices.[60]

Recognition

Time magazine named Gates one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th century, as well as one of the 100 most influential people of 2004, 2005, and 2006. Time also collectively named Gates, his wife Melinda and alternative rock band U2's lead singer Bono as the 2005 Persons of the Year for their humanitarian efforts.[61] In 2006, he was voted eighth in the list of "Heroes of our time".[62] Gates was listed in the Sunday Times power list in 1999, named CEO of the year by Chief Executive Officers magazine in 1994, ranked number one in the "Top 50 Cyber Elite" by Time in 1998, ranked number two in the Upside Elite 100 in 1999 and was included in The Guardian as one of the "Top 100 influential people in media" in 2001.[63]

Gates has received honorary doctorates from Nyenrode Business Universiteit, Breukelen, The Netherlands in 2000,[64] the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 2002, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan in 2005, Harvard University in June 2007,[65] and from Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, in January 2008.[66] Gates was also made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) from Queen Elizabeth II in 2005,[67] in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor.[68]

In November 2006, he and his wife were awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle for their philanthropic work around the world in the areas of health and education, particularly in Mexico, and specifically in the program "Un país de lectores".[69]

-- wikipedia --

How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates

2008-10-28T19:05:00.001-07:00

Lesson 1: Choose Your Grandparents Carefully
Sequoia National Park, California

"There are three ways to make money. You can inherit it. You can marry it. You can steal it."
-- conventional wisdom in Italy

William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III.

In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars.
Lesson 2: Choose Your Parents Carefully
Redwood. King's Canyon National Park, California.

"A young man asked an old rich man how he made his money. The old guy fingered his worsted wool vest and said, "Well, son, it was 1932. The depth of the Great Depression. I was down to my last nickel. I invested that nickel in an apple. I spent the entire day polishing the apple and, at the end of the day, I sold the apple for ten cents. The next morning, I invested those ten cents in two apples. I spent the entire day polishing them and sold them at 5 pm for 20 cents. I continued this system for a month, by the end of which I'd accumulated a fortune of $1.37. Then my wife's father died and left us two million dollars."

William Henry Gates, Jr. and Mary Maxwell were among Seattle's social and financial elite. Bill Gates, Jr. was a prominent corporate lawyer while Mary Maxwell was a board member of First Interstate Bank and Pacific Northwest Bell. She was also on the national board of United Way, along with John Opel, the chief executive officer of IBM who approved the inclusion of MS/DOS with the original IBM PC.

Remind your parents not to send you to public school. Bill Gates went to Lakeside, Seattle's most exclusive prep school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1760). Typical classmates included the McCaw brothers, who sold the cellular phone licenses they obtained from the U.S. Government to AT&T for $11.5 billion in 1994. When the kids there wanted to use a computer, they got their moms to hold a rummage sale and raise $3,000 to buy time on a DEC PDP-10, the same machine used by computer science researchers at Stanford and MIT.

Note: Recall that in the 1980s we venerated Donald Trump and studied his "art of the deal". If Donald Trump had taken the millions he inherited from his father and put it all into mutual funds, you'd never have had to suffer through one of his books. But he'd be just about as rich today.
Lesson 3: Acquire Research Results by Hiring and Buying
Cows and Church. Tingstade (northern Gotland). Conventional (loser) economic wisdom holds that monopolies should spend heavily on research because they are in a position to capture the fruits of the research. But if you want to become as rich as Bill Gates, you have to remember that it is cheaper to wait for a small company to come up with something good and then buy them. In the old days, antitrust laws kept monopolies from buying potential competitors. But not anymore. When Microsoft products were threatened by network computers and Web-based applications, they simply bought WebTV and Hotmail.

Another good strategy is to hire the right people. Some of the guys who wrote Microsoft Windows had previous worked on window systems at Xerox PARC. So Xerox paid for the research; Microsoft paid only for development.

In the long run a tech company without research probably can't sustain its market leadership. So you'll eventually need to build something like research.microsoft.com (check out netscan.research.microsoft.com to see some interesting online community research).
Lesson 4: Let Other People Do the Programming
South Island, New Zealand If you're a great engineer, it can be frustrating to rely on other people to translate your ideas into reality. However, keep in mind that the entire Indian subcontinent is learning Java. And that if Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Sun products simply worked and worked simply, half of the world's current IT workers would be out of a job. You're not going to get rich being "just a coder." Especially working in painful low-level imperative languages such as C or Java. It might be worth writing your own SQL queries and HTML pages since these tend to be compact and easier than precisely specifying the work for another person to do. But basically you need to get good at thinking about whether a piece of software is doing something useful for the adopting organization and end-user. Bill Gates does code reviews, not coding.

[If you aren't sure that you need to be filthy rich and like to do some coding, see this old misguided article for more about what it might mean to be a great software engineer.]
Lesson 5: Train your new CEO
Garden. Getty Center. Los Angeles, California. If you're an intelligent curious person it can be painful to run a company of more than 50 people. You spend more time than you'd like repeating yourself, sitting in boring meetings, skimming over long legal documents in which you know there are errors but aren't sure how serious, etc. The temptation is to hand over the reins to the first "professional manager" who comes along. And that's what the standard venture capitalist formula dictates. But Bill Gates didn't do that. He hired Steve Ballmer in 1980 and gave him the CEO job 20 years later. Making money in the software products business requires domain expertise and a commitment to solving problems within that domain. Great tech companies are seldom built by non-technical management or professional managers who aren't committed to anything more than their paycheck. Adobe is another good example. The two founders were PhD computer science researchers from Xerox PARC who were passionate about solving problems in the publishing and graphics world. They are still guiding operations at Adobe.

Note that this is a principle that Old Economy companies have long understood. Jack Welch joined GE in 1961 and became CEO 20 years later. Sometimes an Old Economy company may pull in a few outsiders to senior positions but, because they have such stable bureaucracies underneath, they can more easily afford this than startups.

See Charles Ferguson's High Stakes, No Prisoners (1999) for a longer explanation of how hired-gun CEOs manage to kill software products companies.
Lesson 6: Focus on Profit

"At Hewlett-Packard, people, materials, facilities, money, and time are the resources available to us for conducting our business. By applying our skills, we turn these resources into useful products and services. If we do a good job, customers pay us more for our products than the sum of our costs in producing and distributing them. This difference, our profit, represents the value we add to the resources we utilize."
-- David Packard in The HP Way

Remembering to make a profit was tough in the dotcom 1990s but it turns out that Hewlett and Packard's ideas were right. Most of the management teams at dotcom businesses, by being disorganized, unintelligent, and ignorant, were subtracting value from the resources that they controlled.

How does one make money in the software products business? Simple. The necessary step is to build something that becomes part of information systems that generate value for organizations and end-users. Once you've created value you can extract a portion in lots of ways. You can be closed-source and charge a license fee. You can be open-source and charge for training, service, support, and extensions. But if you aren't getting your software product into important information systems, you don't have a prayer, no matter how slick your marketing materials.

If you're creative and diligent the software products business is extremely lucrative. If you're losing money, ask yourself what you're doing wrong. The answer is probably "plenty".
Lesson 7: Let the Venture Capitalists Schmooze Wall Street ...
... but don't let them run your company. A profitable Microsoft Corporation brought in venture capitalists (VCs) at the last minute. They didn't need or spend the money but used the VCs to boost their valuation at the initial public offering, thus getting more money for the shares that they sold. Venture capitalists are dangerous because even the most successful might not know anything about business. Remember that there are tens of thousands of venture capitalists in this world. Assuming that they make random choices of companies in which to invest there will be a Gaussian curve of performance. Some firms will do consistently better than average even if everyone is guessing. Imagine that thousands of monkeys are flipping coins; some of the monkeys will get 10 heads in a row. These are the monkeys that will be celebrated for their insight. These are the monkeys whose track records will lead to uncritical cheerleading by underwriters and public investors. In bull markets such as we had in the 1990s nearly all the monkeys will be fairly consistent winners. But remember your next-door neighbor who made money in the stock market in 1985. He convinced himself that he had special insight and ability when actually he was only holding high-beta stocks in a rising market. So his foray into the commodities futures market wiped him out in the crash of '87.

Bottom line: successful software products companies spend most of their time listening to their customers and users rather than to venture capitalists.

[See "Money, Money, Money (and Investing)" for how the Gaussian curve works for mutual fund managers and also read Princeton Professor Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street.]
Lesson 8: Self-Esteem is Not Job 1
Gentility, politesse, decorum, and high self-esteem are wonderful. You can achieve all of these things within your organization. And then watch it be destroyed by competitors where frank and, if necessary, harsh criticism is encouraged. Technical people, even (and especially) those fresh out of school are always convinced that whatever they've developed, no matter how hare-brained, is perfect. It takes a technical person with good judgement to notice the flaws and it may require repeated and increasingly harsh delivery for the, uh, pinhead to realize his or her mistake.

Example: I once encountered a group of 6 people who called themselves "engineers." To solve what they thought was a new problem, they were going to build their own little database management system with their own query language that was SQL-like without being SQL. I pointed them to some published research by a gang of PhD computer scientists from IBM Almaden, the same lab that developed the RDBMS and SQL to begin with in the 1970s. The research had been done over a five-year period and yet they hadn't become aware of it during several months of planning. I pointed them to the SQL-99 standard wherein this IBM research approach of augmenting a standard RDBMS to solve the problem they were attacking was becoming an ISO standard. They ignored it and spent another few months trying to build their enormously complex architecture. Exasperated, I got a kid fresh out of school to code up some Java stored procedures to run inside Oracle. After a week he had his system working and ready for open-source release, something that the team of 6 "engineers" hadn't been able to accomplish in 6 months of full-time work. Yet they never accepted that they were going about things in the wrong way though eventually they did give up on the project.

An 1994 New Yorker article about Microsoft relates "If he strongly disagrees with what you're saying, [Gates] is in the habit of blurting out, 'That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard!'". Jennifer New, a former Microsoft contractor, writes "Meetings with Bill or one of his top people are often replete with a barrage of expletives and other disdainful comments." (Salon, September 1997) My friends who work or have worked at Microsoft tell similar tales. But how different is this from other elite organizations?

When I arrived at MIT as a first-year graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, I asked a professor for help with a research problem. He said "The reason that you've having trouble is that you don't know anything and you're not working very hard." A friend of mine was a surgery resident at Johns Hopkins. He complained to one of his teachers that he was having trouble concentrating because he'd been up all night for several nights in a row. The professor replied "Oh... does your pussy hurt?" According to Business Week, Jack Welch "encouraged near-brutal candor in the meetings he held [at GE]".

The bottom line: self-esteem is great but beware of creating a cozy home for unproductive people with bad ideas.

-- philip.greenspun.com --

How to become a great CEO

2008-10-28T19:02:00.000-07:00

--What does it take to become a great CEO? Much more than it did even 5 years ago to be sure. The rapidly changing global landscape and the evolving complexity of business makes the job of CEO something that is only well-suited for a rare few. For these reasons sustainable success at the C-suite level is an elusive thing in today's business world. With the average tenure of a CEO being less than 5 years it is critical for executives to understand what it takes to beat the odds. In today's column I'll examine the characteristics that a CEO must posses in order to maintain his or her position and remain in control for as long as they choose.

The job of CEO is all about managing expectations. Put simply a CEO’s shelf life will be equal to their ability to align vision with execution. A CEO must be able to focus on deploying the necessary resources at the right time to achieve to desired results. By exhibiting strong leadership skills a good CEO will manage talent, performance, change, innovation, influence, rapport, and messaging to consistently drive an enterprise forward regardless of circumstances. In my book “Leadership Matters…The CEO Survival Manual” I offer more than 200 pages of insights for CEOs, but if you don’t have time to read the book and still want to insure longevity as a CEO, work towards a mastery of the following characteristics:

1. Integrity: Always do the right thing regardless of sentiment and never compromise your core values. If you cannot build trust and engender confidence with your stakeholders you cannot succeed. No amount of talent can overcome illegal, immoral or otherwise ill-advised actions. A leader void of integrity will not survive over the long-haul.

2. Excellent Decision Making Skills: As a CEO you will live or die by the quality of the decisions you make. When you’re the CEO good decisioning is expected, poor decisioning won’t be tolerated, and great decisioning will set you apart from the masses.

3. Ability to Focus: If you cannot focus you cannot perform at the level necessary to remain in the C-suite for very long. The ability to do nothing more than understand, and lock-onto priorities will place you in the top 10% of all executives.

4. Leveraging Experience: Inexperience, a lack of maturity, needing to be the center of attention, not recognizing limitations, a lack of judgment, an inferior knowledge base, or any number of other common mistakes made by rookie CEOs can cause your house of cards to fall. If you don’t have the experience personally, hire it, contract it, but by all means acquire it. Great CEOs surround themselves with tier-one talent and the best advisors money can buy. They don’t make uniformed or ill-advised decisions in a vacuum.

5. Command Presence: Great CEOs possess a strong presence and bearing. They are unflappable individuals that never let you see them sweat (unless of course it serves a purpose). Everything from how they carry themselves to how they speak and dress messages that they are in charge.

6. Embracing Change: Great CEOs have a strong bias to action. They don’t rest upon past accomplishments and are always seeking to improve through change and innovation. In today’s fast paced and competitive environment those CEOs who don’t openly embrace change will often be shown the door prior to the expiration of their initial employment contract.

7. Brand Champions: Great CEOs understand branding at every level. They seek to build not only a dominant corporate brand, but also a strong personal brand. CEOs that are not well branded on a personal basis, or who let their corporate brand fall into decline will not survive.

8. Boundless Energy: Great CEOs have a boundless amount of energy. They are positive in their outlook, and their attitude is contagious. A low energy CEO is not motivating, convincing or credible.

9. Business Acumen: Great CEOs have a deep understanding of the business and a strong orientation toward profit. Great CEOs possess what often appears to be a sixth sense or an almost instinctive feel for what the company needs to do to make money and remain competitive.

10. People Acumen: Great CEOs have a nose for talent…They understand how to recruit, develop and deploy talent while focusing on applying the best talent to the best opportunities. They also know when it’s time to make changes and cut losses as needed.

11. Organizational Acumen: Great CEOs know how to engender trust, know when and how to share information, and are expert listeners. They develop strong and positive corporate cultures driven to performance by aligned motivations. They can quickly diagnose whether the organization is performing at full potential, delivering on commitments, and whether the company is changing and growing versus just operating.

12. Curiosity: Great CEOs possess a powerful motivation to increase their knowledge base and to convert their learning into actionable initiatives. They question, challenge, confront and are never accepting of the status quo.

13. Intellectual Capacity: Great CEOs are also great thinkers both at the strategic and tactical level. They are quick on their feet and know how to get to the root of an issue faster than anyone else. I’ve never met a great CEO who wasn’t extremely discerning.

14. Global Mindset: Regardless of the geographical boundaries of the current business model great CEOs think globally. Limited thinking results in limited results. Whether global thinking is applied to capital formation, supply-chain issues, business development, strategic partnering, distribution, or any number of other areas, those CEOs who don’t grasp the importance of thinking globally will not endure. Great CEOs are externally oriented, hungry for knowledge of the world and adept at connecting developments and spotting patterns.

15. Never Quit: Great CEOs refuse to lose…They have an insatiable appetite for accomplishment and results and while they may reengineer or change direction they will never lose sight of the end game.

http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/1108253/29231040
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CEO vs. CIO: Can This Marriage Be Saved?

2008-10-28T18:59:00.000-07:00

A chief executive officer of a major industrial company in the U.S. heartland was speaking to an audience of chief information officers a year ago, discussing the role of the chief information officer in the modern corporation. In the middle of his speech, straight-faced as can be, he observed, “My CIO is probably my most essential manager. Without him, I don’t know where our company would be.”

The audience laughed. In fact, their laughter was more spontaneous and contagious than it was at any other time during that daylong seminar. The irony, of course, was that the attendees were completely unaware that the CEO was dead serious. For this assembly of CIOs, the idea that a CEO would call one of their number “essential” was, well, laughable.The unfunny truth is that CEOs and CIOs too often act as though they are partners in an enormously uncomfortable marriage. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been some improvement, even significant improvement, in this relationship in recent years. In fact, at an increasing number of companies, there has been a growing emphasis on integrating IT operations into the most vital aspects of the business and on ensuring that technology plays a key role in future success. In a Booz Allen Hamilton survey of CEOs conducted in August 2000, 70 percent of respondents said that leveraging e-business is the most important or a very important issue on their agenda. And 89 percent of CIOs questioned at the same time indicated that there had been a clear, bona fide expansion of their responsibilities in the previous 24 months.

Still, in our experience, this progress is occurring generally only in large and established companies with enlightened management. In most organizations, there still is a long way to go before the CEO and CIO find common ground. It’s not that chief executives are Luddites who are ignorant about the potential impact of technology on their companies. That charge could perhaps have been leveled a decade ago. But most CEOs are now well aware that improved productivity (even if it can’t be easily measured) from advances in technology was the underpinning of the nation’s longest economic expansion. And many have accepted the conclusion that the Internet is forcing a reinvention of the way their companies do business with consumers, suppliers, and partners, and is fundamentally altering how their employees communicate with one another.

The problem is that most CEOs are interested in technology only to the extent that it adds value to the organization. To them, CIOs are experts only in technology and service delivery. Some other executive — the CFO, a business unit head, a sales manager, for example — has to point the CEO in the right direction before computers, networks, BlackBerrys, PDAs, mobile databases, and any other technology become integrated with the strategic direction of the corporation.

CIOs, of course, are not blameless in allowing this perception — this breakdown in the marriage, so to speak — to take hold. Although they often say that they aspire to more strategic involvement, few technology chiefs are skilled enough to align their agenda with their company’s agenda, and, just as importantly, with the business landscape in which their company must operate. CIOs should be defining technological initiatives in terms the business understands — speeding products to market, enabling growth, and reading costs and risks. If CIOs adopted that kind of approach, top management might be inspired to take them more seriously as partners in developing the company’s strategic direction.

Rather than embrace this opportunity, however, most CIOs tend to view themselves as corporate victims, shut out of the executive suite and seat of power through no fault of their own. This perception, which inevitably feeds a vicious circle, has a clear impact on CIOs’ careers: CIO longevity in the job averages less than two years, and the reason almost half of all CIOs wind up fired is that they fail to establish good working relationships with their CEOs and the rest of the management team. No wonder many in the industry believe that “CIO” stands for “career is over.”

The losers in this corporate family standoff are frequently the companies themselves. When CEOs and CIOs treat each other as if they’re from different planets, companies are potentially deprived of an essential component of any business plan: the ability to link the latest technology smartly and innovatively to the company’s strategic priorities. Imagine the missed opportunities from this troubled relationship — the unrealized benefits in customer relations, supply chain, inventory, and marketing; the internal knowledge networks allowing corporate sites around the world to share information in real time with one another that are never built; the mobile databases or distributed data channels that no one dares even consider; the potential efficiencies and improved productivity that never materialize.

Tally that up and it’s clear how costly the gap between CEOs and CIOs is to many companies. In the pages that follow, we explore what’s gone wrong between chief executives and chief technologists and why these relationships are constantly foundering. Our goal is to define a plan for making the marriage work.

We begin by identifying the three critical areas that need the most attention:

* Organization: This involves how the CEO structures the management of a company — especially where the CIO sits in the decision-making flow. Organization also comprises how skillfully the CIO uses his or her executive position to align the technology agenda with corporate strategic mandates and to produce a return-on-investment program that matches the business conditions in which the company is operating.
* Communication: Going beyond how CEOs and CIOs simply communicate with each other, this encompasses the way CEOs convey the importance of technology and of the chief technologist to the management team. This is crucial because the CIO relationship with management peers is frequently even more strained than the relationship is with the CEO. Communication includes how persuasively and intelligently CIOs express the technology agenda to the press, industry executives, investors, and employees in light of the company’s business, sales, manufacturing, and marketing plans.
* Process: This entails where the chief technologist fits in the procedural makeup of the company and specifically deals with how much management control the CIO has over technology projects once they’re slated for business units. Does the CEO trust the CIO only enough to let him or her be the head of the team that plugs in the machines? Does the CEO grant the CIO and the business unit chief co-responsibility for the nontechnological corporate decisions that have to be made when implementing a new technology?

Technology and the Org Chart
To leverage technology to the greatest degree and to integrate it with the company’s strategic business goals, it’s essential that the chief executive include the CIO among his or her closest advisors and decision makers. Different companies have different ways of formalizing the structure, but whatever the configuration is, the CIO must be an equal to the business unit heads. The reason for this goes well beyond just giving the CIO more visibility in the organization so he or she can proactively implement new technologies, although that is a possible by-product of this arrangement. More important, it’s a way to ensure that senior management — the top dozen or more executives at the company — set the IT priorities for the organization together. If they all “own” the technology agenda, then the resistance to carrying it out — for instance, concern among business units that technology is a cost item that will hurt their P&L results long before it helps — will be mitigated. After all, if the CEO and every other top manager agree that a $150 million effort to provide wireless connectivity for the sales force is a desirable project that will keep the company’s plants at the cutting edge of efficiency, the head of the sales unit could hardly be penalized for working with the CIO to carry out the plan.

Of course, this structure requires greater strategic acumen from the CIO than many have yet demonstrated. Often, in fact, CIOs have to demonstrate their skills as strategists even before they are elevated to peer roles with other executives. (See “The Four Roles of the CIO,” at the end of this article.) In short, the CIO has to help the CEO justify remaking the organization to include the chief technologist among the top decision makers. To do this and eventually participate in the company’s agenda setting, the CIO has to learn to frame his or her technology solutions in a business construct and to balance them against other business priorities. For instance, that wireless sales network may have to be weighed against the option of hiring additional sales staff. The CIO can’t just argue for the technology in a vacuum; the CIO has to champion it by comparing it to the other choices that the company has and by using his or her unique expertise to describe the transformational opportunities specific to the company that the technology offers. For example, to make a case for recommending mobile access to data for existing salespeople, a CIO may have to work closely with the sales chief to jointly produce a concrete proposal with clearly delineated reasons — everything from hoped-for strategic outcomes, to improvements in productivity, to cost versus return — that the proposal will bring more revenue to the company in the next year or so than will adding 10 more people to actually sell the products.

That kind of cooperation between CIOs and business unit heads is rare. In fact, the wide gap between CIOs, CFOs, and other business managers may have a larger negative impact on corporate performance than the chasm between CIOs and CEOs. Understanding the importance of strategic technology in today’s business environment and how essential it is to continue to expand technological resources (even though this can be costly) is difficult for many nontechnical managers who are focused on the bottom line. It’s part of CIOs’ burden to tear down the wall between themselves and their peers in the executive suite — and it’s to their benefit to do so. As long as that wall exists, we believe it is virtually impossible to improve decision making involving technology implementation and to convince CEOs to view CIOs as trusted managers.

It’s also important for the CEO to view the parts of the CIO’s organization devoted to providing infrastructure services (e.g., company networking, systems management) differently than other “business-facing” departments. The former are not strategic activities — frankly, they’re more akin to utilities than core businesses — and it’s unfair to judge them on the basis of return on investment. They’re requirements and costs of doing business. By failing to separate IT service from IT strategy — and comprehend that the CIO is ultimately responsible for both — CEOs often grow frustrated with their chief technologists, confused as to whether they should be asked to provide merely utility or something much more critical than that. The answer is, CIOs need to manage both, and for the relationship between CEOs and CIOs to work, that unique dynamic has to be understood.

In some companies, typically outside the United States, the problem of distinguishing between the nuts-and-bolts aspects and the strategic aspects of the CIO’s job is mitigated by an organizational structure in which the corporation is run by a management board or an executive committee. Under this collective management approach, generally the person on the board responsible for IT is a nontechnologist — a senior executive — who has already proven his or her skills in the business and with whom the CEO is usually comfortable sharing tactical decisions. This nontechnical “CIO,” in turn, usually oversees an IT executive, for example, a senior executive VP or general manager whose job it is to lead the day-to-day IT organization according to the policies of the management board; in other words, to direct all the traditional procurement, software management, and infrastructure activities.

Barclays PLC, the giant international banking group, illustrates this organizational setup well and is evidence of how effectively this structure can facilitate an enduring and positive relationship between the CEO and the CIO. Not only is Barclays the U.K.’s leading Internet bank — for both consumers and businesses — but it is also completely overhauling its core technology infrastructure to offer new retail services to customers nimbly, without long, drawn-out launches. This endeavor has been greatly enhanced by the relationship CIO David Weymouth enjoys with CEO Matthew Barrett on the company’s Group Executive Committee. Mr. Weymouth is a 24-year veteran of Barclays, a nontechnologist who took over the bank’s vast technology operations (with a budget well over $2 billion) in 2000. Mr. Weymouth’s initial reaction to the importance of having a CIO on the Group Executive Committee is that it stretches the CIO’s role considerably, because it “forces me to create the strategy as well as deliver on it. I’m in the beginning of strategy generation, where there’s a competition for resources, human and monetary. And like any other member of the Executive Committee, I have to compete for them.”

This has given Mr. Weymouth a keen appreciation for the politics and priorities of business planning that are required for IT projects — and a deeper understanding that successful technology strategies, like all other critical ventures at a company, must be championed by a manager who has to build consensus and convince peers to agree on the plan. Being part of the executive board meetings forces a CIO to fit the technology to the corporate strategy, Mr. Weymouth says, and it imposes a discipline on the CIO to produce strict return-on-investment estimates for every project he or she recommends. “I can’t get away with anything but the most rigorous calculations,” Mr. Weymouth says. “Sometimes it has to do with value creation and what that’s worth compared to the cost of the project, and sometimes it’s simply careful benchmarks that can be tracked very closely to see if we’re meeting them. But either way, before I suggest anything, I know I have to justify it, and ultimately that ensures that the technology we implement will help the company to the maximum degree.”

All of this has impressed CEO Mr. Barrett, who has staked much of Barclays’s future on using technology to deliver significant benefits internally and externally (to customers). “We don’t get lots of detailed memos that say do this and do that,” Mr. Weymouth says. “He tells us that providing the best service to the market is important, and that technology is important to providing the best service. That’s the strategic framework, and my job is to work with the Group Executive Committee to devise IT answers that fit it.”

Bridging the Communication Gap
In contrast, the merger of the Union Pacific Corporation and the Southern Pacific Rail Corporation was a marriage made in hell. In 1996, Union Pacific, the U.S.’s No. 1 railroad, paid $4 billion to purchase Southern Pacific, in hopes of gaining a stronger foothold in the Southwest. But within a few months of the deal’s completion, hundreds of abandoned freight trains were strewn throughout Texas as Union Pacific lost track of entire cargoes of plastics, chemicals, coal, and grain. Some deliveries ran as much as 40 days late. And Union Pacific customers — the nation’s biggest shippers — suffered more than $2 billion in lost sales in the two years following the acquisition. Union Pacific itself fell nearly $700 million in the red in 1998. The main culprit: Union Pacific’s ambition had outstripped its common sense. Southern Pacific, a troubled railway for years, had been monitoring its trains with an outsourced computer network that was so ancient it was being held together with the logistics equivalent of baling wire. Unaware of this, Union Pacific tried to impose its more sophisticated, organized, and up-to-date tracking system on Southern Pacific’s creaky enterprise, and the result was one of the worst debacles in railroad history.

But as bad as the merger was — and although Union Pacific is profitable again, it only now is getting Southern Pacific under control — the deal and its aftermath highlighted a far worse dysfunctional relationship in the Union Pacific family: Chief Information Officer L. Merill Bryan, Jr. was not among Chief Executive Officer Richard Davidson’s inner circle of advisors. In fact, Mr. Davidson hadn’t told Mr. Bryan about the purchase of Southern Pacific until after it was completed, even though numerous other top executives — even some sales and marketing managers — had sat in on some of the negotiations and had been asked by Mr. Davidson for their opinions.

In hindsight, Mr. Bryan says that had he been included in merger discussions, he would have warned top management that Southern Pacific’s computer systems couldn’t handle the complicated logistical strains of a modern railroad. And although he might not have recommended against the deal, he could have tallied up the millions of dollars it would cost to integrate Southern Pacific within the Union Pacific system, which could have put Union Pacific in a strong position to cut the price of the acquisition.

The repercussions of the large gap between CEO and CIO at Union Pacific were a very public embarrassment for the railroad company. But in perhaps less visible and quieter ways, this same relationship-on-the-rocks scenario, placing the CEO and CIO at opposite ends of the executive corridor, is being played out — with similarly costly results — at a large number of companies around the world.

The message is clear: Communication drives organization. Creating a management and decision-making structure at a company that includes a significant role for the CIO is only the beginning; after that, a CEO must strongly communicate support for not only the CIO, but also the technology that the CIO represents. Otherwise, turf battles between business units and technology champions will inevitably break out.

There are many ways for a CEO to publicly express backing for the CIO and mend the relationship. One is to put the CIO on the calendar for regularly scheduled meetings — once a week or so, or at least as frequently as the CEO meets alone with the head of sales, marketing, manufacturing, and the like. This is not just a formality. It’s a chance for the CEO to question the CIO about technological initiatives that are suited to the company’s current plans and those not even announced, and it’s an opportunity for the CEO to share private corporate information, such as the existence of ongoing merger discussions, and elicit the CIO’s opinion. On the flip side, it gives the CIO a platform to show that he or she is ready for managerial strategizing.

Another way for a CEO to communicate support for the CIO is for the CEO to equate the organization’s success with the implementation of the most advanced and highly leverageable technology; in other words, to make it clear that this dedication is one way the company can outrank its competitors. Simply investing in technology, however, is not enough. The CEO’s commitment must be grounded in targeting specific value opportunities created by technology. That, for instance, is what occurred at Kinko’s Inc., which has transformed itself from a campus-oriented copying center into a web of “branch offices” for small businesses fully outfitted with the latest networking, communications, and document-production technology. Kinko’s has also launched Kinkos.com, which lets people design brochures, business cards, and other materials online and place an order to pick them up at a nearby retail store. CEO Gary Kusin, facing rivals that range from stores like Mail Boxes Etc. to major manufacturers like Xerox, Canon, and Kodak, has said at numerous investor and analyst meetings that the current technology initiatives are just the beginning for Kinko’s — faster equipment, wireless access, and more sophisticated networking with customers are all in the works — and that the company’s future success depends on doing much more.

Defining a company as technologically savvy can pay big dividends for a CEO. It attracts investors and analysts because it paints an image of a company discarding old business models to create a modern organization taking the kinds of intelligent risks needed to succeed and add value to the company in today’s complex business environment. And that’s where the CIO’s communication responsibilities come in. If the chief executive is a technology champion — someone willing to bridge the gap that separates the executive suite from the technologists’ bullpen at many companies — then the CIO must become the CEO’s very visible partner in this effort. CIOs may not have had the chance to develop internal managerial skills, but they must acquire them in order to present business rationales and carefully calculated return-on-investment scenarios. Similarly, CIOs must develop the ability to articulate to the press, industry leaders, Wall Street, and nontechnical employees the company’s core technology vision and how what flows from this vision will impact the organization’s financial and operating performance.

At most companies, CIOs are not public faces and usually aren’t complaining about it. They may eagerly speak at a technical conference arguing an engineering point relating to a wireless network they’re installing, but we can’t recall the last time a CIO appeared on a quarterly earnings analyst call to describe how the just-completed customer relations telecommunications system will impact revenue and profits in the coming year. That just exacerbates the suspicion among CEOs that their chief technologists are not business leadership material because such a large part of the job of any corporate executive is publicly advocating the company’s vision and strategic priorities. Kinko’s Chief Technology Officer Allen Dickason calls it being a translator and readily admits that it is a critical part of his job and, equally important, an essential skill if the relationship between him and the CEO is to be productive and respectful. “I have to be able to explain in plain English the details of the technology strategy that the CEO is alluding to,” he says. “If I can’t translate the excitement and the innovation in plain words — not techno-babble — that anyone can understand, whether they’re a business unit head or an investor at a road show, then I’m failing in the communication aspect of my job.”

Process Management
Process is the most difficult part of the CEO–CIO relationship to navigate. Even with the best intentions, it can take a long time to truly integrate the CIO into the core activities of the company’s business units — in other words, to make certain that the CIO is involved in day-to-day supervision of the numerous processes driving the company that are linked to technology, whether customer relations management, factory floor automation, sales and marketing database development, or something else.

Most CEOs are too “hands-off” to recognize whether this level of coordination between the CIO and the business units is occurring. The relationship can be crucial to the company’s success, however. It’s certainly necessary to ensure that technology expenditures — often among the costliest budget items — are not wasted and, in fact, are leveraged throughout the organization. But most CIOs are too unskilled in company politics and too uncomfortable with nontechnical performance benchmarks to deftly insert themselves into strategic corporate processes, those that go beyond simple networking. And that’s where the CEO–CIO relationship breaks down. The CEO neglects how technology is being implemented at the company — no matter how supportive of technology that CEO is. And the CIO often is unable to be an aggressive tactical manager.

One of the few examples of a company that has successfully bridged this gap is a Midwestern industrial giant, whose CEO has demanded that when the CIO heads an initiative, he is responsible not only for developing and installing the system itself, but also for managing (or comanaging with the business unit chief) the value that the system brings to the company. For instance, the CIO tackled this dual role when redesigning the company’s customer-service system through the first few stages of its launch by having customer-service staffers report directly to him as well as to the head of the business unit. This way, the CIO had supervisory-level access to the employees’ frontline input about the technology, and he could continually assess without interference or bureaucratic struggles which areas of customer service improved or failed under the new system. Based on these results, the CIO was able to fine-tune the technology to meet certain company performance and value benchmarks that he measured himself, not just technical specifications.

This type of hands-on process management by a CIO of a business unit and this degree of cooperation between a CIO and a business unit head, although tremendously valuable, is extremely rare, primarily because most CEOs don’t endorse that level of CIO involvement. Without it, though, we’ve found that a disturbing cycle has set in at many companies, in which business unit heads are avoiding the CIO and hiring outside help to design non-mission-critical applications. Kept out of the stream of ideas at the process level of the company, the CIO is unable to efficiently leverage the new technology across the company or, importantly, pollinate technological concepts throughout the corporation. This, in turn, makes the CIO seem even less knowledgeable and capable of strategic management.

Of course, the CIO may exacerbate the situation. Frequently, when the IT group is asked to do something quickly, such as turn around a marketing campaign in days to respond to a competitor’s actions, it reacts by saying the project could take months. Frustrated by this response and knowing they don’t have that long to wait, the business units go elsewhere to get the campaign off the ground. Eventually, this disconnection between business units and the CIO comes back to haunt the company in the extra costs to pay outsiders to do what IT staffers should be doing, the maintenance and support headaches, and the difficulty in keeping track of equipment purchases and technology inventory.

To stop this spiral, CEOs must be vigilant, making sure, for instance, when a business unit head proposes an initiative involving technology, even in an offhand conversation, that the CIO is included in the discussion. One way to accomplish this is to discourage making key process-oriented decisions outside the scope of executive committee meetings.

As with everything else related to healing the fractured relationship between CEOs and CIOs, however, both sides must participate. Once he or she has the CEO’s imprimatur, the CIO has to foster the process relationship with business units by providing demand-management strategies that help scope, model, and prioritize technology expenditures. This way the business unit head has a good idea at the beginning of the budget year what the expected technology costs will be and can decide, with the CIO, how to spread the limited money available. If something unexpected occurs, such as a sales effort that wasn’t anticipated, the CIO, closely involved as he or she would be with the day-to-day activities of the business unit, can move funds from another department to this project — and, importantly, gear up IT staff to tackle it in crisis mode — or pitch the executive committee for a larger budget.

Perhaps the CIO who has most successfully made process management the centerpiece of his job description is John McKinley, chief technology officer of Merrill Lynch & Company. He showed his stripes soon after he joined Merrill in 1999 by guaranteeing that, in six months, the company would have an online presence that would rival those of Schwab and E-Trade, two of the many Web brokerages that were making Merrill look like a dinosaur with its old-fashioned telephone and in-person approach to trading stocks. Mr. McKinley assembled a team of 30 people, many of them borrowed from the business units that would be involved with the Web site, and had constant discussions with business unit heads about how the site should look and operate. The team met the deadline, in large part, says Mr. McKinley, because the consensus management approach ensured that many parts of Merrill’s organization felt they had a hand in building the site and, thus, wanted it to succeed. But only a few people — Mr. McKinley and some of the key business unit heads who would be involved with the online initiative — made the final decisions about how to proceed.

Mr. McKinley, with unwavering backing from CEO David Komansky, has continued to ably find the seam in the process at Merrill and deftly maneuver his way into close working relationships with every business unit, even when he anticipates (and finds) resistance. Earlier this year, Mr. McKinley boldly pitched Merrill business unit heads on a new commitment to technology, even as the company was about to initiate a round of firings. His strategy is for the business units to use their limited technology budgets to build customer retention programs; he argues that it’s far less expensive to generate more business from existing clients than to acquire new ones. Some of Mr. McKinley’s ideas include enhanced customer relationship management databases, more client self-service programs both on the Web and off, and new products like a Net-based portfolio analysis service to help customers assess their investments.

“Projects fail — no business unit would consent to them — unless they have a financial and company value benchmark to meet,” Mr. McKinley said a few years ago in an interview. “If it’s not a sustainable model financially, it’s a waste of resources. In the early days of e-business, people said, ‘You can’t measure Web profitability and return on investment.’ Well, everything can be measured. Ultimately, if you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it.”

Spoken like a CIO to whom corporate process is not an alien concept.

A Brighter Future
In the last five years, CEOs and CIOs have demonstrated that they can work together in any number of industries in a variety of circumstances. The CEO whose public commitment to his CIO drew a round of laughter at that seminar ran a company in which every strategic initiative had a technology component. In the face of difficult conditions in the CEO’s industry, the transformation of his company through technology is one of the few positive operational achievements keeping manufacturing and sales operations from collapsing.

Similarly, the CIO who steps up to the challenges of building and maintaining a strong relationship with the rest of the management team will soon realize the competitive advantage of information technology. Tactical attempts to bridge the distance in this relationship by improving organization, communication, and process are just the beginning. But they’re essential first steps toward the increased revenue, efficiencies, cost cutting, and innovation that can potentially result from a healthy partnership.

And who knows? Maybe then, no one will laugh.

The Four Roles of the CIO

The office of the CIO has one desk and at least four different chairs. At different times and in different situations, the CIO is called upon to be a strategist, a business advisor, an IT executive, and an enterprise architect. These four roles require substantially different skills, and each one is critical to ensuring the success of IT in supporting and enabling the business.

The Strategist is on the senior executive team and helps define and structure the business. The strategist understands the opportunities presented by technology as well as its costs and risks. The successful strategist will translate IT’s potential into meaningful financial and business capabilities and evaluate the future payoff of uncertain technologies.

The Business Advisor is a peer to the business unit heads and helps translate IT’s value to and impact on day-to-day business processes and practices. The advisor’s primary objective is the delivery and capture of value, which, in turn, requires tight linkages to each business unit’s strategy and processes. The successful advisor will translate IT investments into tangible, realizable, measurable benefits. At the same time, the advisor will translate, communicate, and deliver value in ways that can be understood by the businesses. Key focus areas are process and organization redesign, business case development, application delivery, rollout, and training.

Because IT organizations can be large and complex, with responsibility for managing and ensuring 24/7 operations across a broad range of infrastructure, including networks, desktops, mainframes, telecommunications, and application development, the IT Executive is accountable for skills, training, assets, investments, reliability, and the security of all systems. This executive manages the cost and performance of a broad array of external service providers, contractors, and outsourcers. Such fiscal demands stretch the traditional IT skill set, and the job resembles program management for a major product platform.

The Architect creates an enterprise architecture that optimizes investment, enables growth, and ensures linkage to the extended enterprise. And he or she does so without sacrificing security or reliability. The architect’s key challenges are maintaining scalability to flex with the business, introducing technologies, and driving system migration planning and sunsetting of legacy systems.
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