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Balaji Viswanathan, Founder Zingfin.com Votes by Mark Savchuk, Oliver Emberton, Greg Self, and 3469 more. In January 1914, Henry Ford announced a radical decision. He increased the worker wages from $2.34/day to $5/day and reduced the working time from 9 hours to 8 hours per day. Other businessmen derided Ford as a socialist, while common public heralded him as a hero. People even prodded him to run for a President. Even today, Ford's 5 dollar workday is widely remembered in the US. Newspapers had a field day. Ford's PR also worked the press to make this move as an egalitarian one (to make the workers rich enough to buy Ford's cars).

Question Stats Latest activity 33m ago This question has 22 monitors with 1538497 topic followers. 748,495 views on this question. 5551 people are following this question.

Business move, not just an egalitarian one

While this was probably the most generous pay hike in corporate history, Henry Ford was no fool. By the end of 1914, Ford's 13000 workers made 260,000 cars annually while the entire rest of the industry with 66000 workers produced only 280,000 cars. Ford's workers were 5 times more productive ! (Although a part of it is owed to the assembly line innovation introduced a few years before this). Within 2 years of this radical pay rise, Ford's profit jumped 200% to $60 million/year. In another 5 years, Ford was rolling out Model - T's every 24 seconds (in the initial years it took 12 hours)!! Henry Ford's $5-a-Day Revolution and Henry Ford and the Model T: A Case Study in Productivity (Part 2)

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Until that time, factory workers were meant to be squeezed and thrown out. Labor was not seen as an asset back then. In a single move, he created a new corporate workforce and heralded the creation of the American middle class. Concepts such as 8-hour days and HR departments owe their existence partly to the ideas generated from this. 1. Employee turnover: Until 1914 Ford hired 300 men a year for every 100 jobs. There were a massive worker turnover as the tired and bored workers kept shifting jobs. Now, Ford provided an offer that was too good for the workers. The best of the workers were both motivated to stay and work. 2. Absenteeism dropped. Until then, factory workers randomly dropped out of work in the middle. They had little to lose, since they were so poorly paid. This absenteeism severely affected the assembly lines. No amount of force/threats worked. But, now they had golden handcuffs. 3. Massive movement of smart labor to Detroit. Soon word got around and there was a gold rush in Detroit. Within 24 hours, 10000 men queued up outside Ford's factories. Ford could now be very picky and hire from the best who would dramatically improve efficiencies in the automobile industry. 4. Skyrocketing productivity: The workers got into a rhythm as they were not shifting jobs any more and that meant they were moving up the learning curve. Ford could now introduce advanced processes without worrying too much about training expenses. The industry was changed and a new era of workers with a low turnover appeared in US corporations. There is so much present corporations can learn (especially in countries like India, where we are still in the pre-Ford era when it comes to our manufacturing mindset).
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36+ Comments Share (24) Thank Report 17 May Saurabh Jindal, Internet, Traveling, Football Votes by Karan Kumar, Manoj Memana Jayakumar, Ankit Bisht, and 1161 more. 1. Colgate Palmolive: Earlier, toothpaste tubes had a small opening of about two millimeters for squeezing out the paste. The company was hard pressed to increase its sales and revenue. It initiated an open competition to suggest anything that could facilitate or increase their sales. One person came up with a suggestion to just increase the size of the tubes opening. It was considered to be a dumb and irrational idea. However, it was implemented on a trial basis. And as they say, rest is history. The whole rationale behind increasing the diameter was to increase volume consumption. The inherent characteristics of a smaller diameter opening restricted the volumetric consumption of the toothpaste. With the increase in size, consumption increased, decreasing replacement cycle, and thereby increasing sales. 2. Swan Vesta: An employee of Swan Vesta, the match company, went to senior management and told them that he could think of a way they could save themselves millions of pounds in production costs. He would reveal this to them if they agreed to give him some large share of the savings they made. They got the whole thing agreed with a solicitor, so that if they indeed were able to save millions, he'd make his cash. He then told them to put the sandpaper on only one side of the matchbox. They saved millions and he got his share. This is why Swan matches have sandpaper on only one side of the box. 3.El Cortez Hotel: The famous El Cortez Hotel in San Diego decided to install an additional elevator to better serve their guests. Engineers drew up plans cutting holes through each floor of the hotel. A janitor, who was concerned with this, made the comment that this would make a great deal of mess. The janitor was told not to worry because the hotel would be closed to guests during the construction. The janitor suggested, "You could build the elevator on the outside of the hotel." At the time, this architectural concept had never been done before, but after investigation by the engineers, it proved an idea that was worth developing, and is now commonplace in buildings today worldwide. The janitor's idea saved the El Cortez thousands of dollars in guest revenue, employees from losing salary, and major clean-up costs related to the construction of the new elevator. 7+ Comments Share (5) Thank Report 10 May Matt Richardson, Programmer and musician Votes by Aaquib Al Hossain, Aditya M Rao, Alberto Saenz Gomez Tello, and 652

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more. How Richard Branson started Virgin Atlantic. In 1979, while on vacation with his fiancee in The British Virgin Islands, he was catching a flight to Puerto Rico which ended up cancelled. Richard decided to phone up some charter companies and chartered a plane for $2,000. After splitting the cost between the available seats, he grabbed a blackboard and wrote: VIRGIN AIRWAYS: $39 for a single flight to Puerto Rico. He walked around the airport terminal and soon filled every seat. When they arrived in Puerto Rico a passenger reportedly said: "Virgin Airways isnt too bad smarten up the services a little and you could be in business".

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Birth of Virgin Atlantic Also talked about in his book: "losing my virginity" but I don't have it to hand. 3+ Comments Share (6) Thank Report 15 May Vivekanandan Jai, Nolanite, Huge fan of Batman Votes by Sameer Gupta, Betsy Megas, Andy Lee Chaisiri, and 4631 more. #From Page on Cracked "Back in the 1970s, liquid hand soap was sold by one guy: Robert Taylor, and his small company Minnetonka . It was his invention, and he knew he was on to something big. Test audiences loved the product and, despite barely having enough resources to do so, Minnetonka decided to go all in and make a push to take the product nationwide. There was only one problem: Nothing he was selling could be patented. The concept of liquid soap wasn't new, and simple pumps had been around since the dawn of civilization. As a result, Taylor knew several huge soap manufacturers were ready to happily steal his idea the very moment it looked like it could succeed on a large scale. Armed with superior resources and the ability to quickly R&D an imitation product, the industry giants were ready to crush tiny Minnetonka. Taylor, however, was ready for this. Before any other company had the chance, Taylor decided to go shopping one day and bought a few plastic pumps. And by a few we mean FUCKING ALL OF THEM. There were only two companies nationwide manufacturing those little pumps, and Taylor ponied up $12 million -more than the total net worth of his company at the time -- and ordered 100 million of them , effectively buying every single pump these two companies would be able to manufacture for the next year or two.

Anyway, without the part required to dispense the soap, there was nothing the major companies could do but sit and watch Taylor slowly own the entire market. His product would become known as SoftSoap , Two years after his little stunt, Colgate-Palmolive would be forced to just buy SoftSoap from Taylor ... for $61 million."
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29+ Comments Share (45) Thank Report 16 May

Salman Ahmed Votes by Rohankant Tatelu, Sameer Gupta, Sriram Vamsi Ilapakurthy, and 1454 more. Excerpt from the book: "What they don't teach you at Harvard Business School." Several years ago I met a Venezuelan oil and shipping businessman by the name Rafael Tudela. As I have come to know, respect, and admire him, he has impressed me as the quintessential street-smart executive. He has built a billion-dollar business from scratch in less than twenty years. He seldom deals in written contracts because his word is his bond. He has always made his own breaks. And his principal business, which is oil speculation, relies on his constant process of seeing opportunities where no one else does and taking advantage of them. In other words, Rafael Tudela is a genius at taking the edge. One of the best illustrations of this of how he has the facts, knows what people want, and figures out a way to give it to them- is the story of how he got in the oil business in the fist place. In the mid 1960s, Tudela owned a glass manufacturing company in Caracas, but, a petroleum engineer by training, he longed to be in the oil business. When he learned from a business associate that Argentina was about to be in the market for a $20 million dollar supply of butane gas, he went there to see if he could secure the contract. If I could get the contract, he told me, then I`d start to worry about where I`d get the butane. When he a glass manufacturer operating alone with no previous connections or experience in the oil business- got to Argentina, he discovered his competition was formidable: British Petroleum and Shell Oil. But feeling around a little bit he also discovered something else: Argentina had an oversupply of beef which they were desperately trying to sell. By knowing this one fact his first edge, so to speak- he became at least an equal to Shell and BP. If you will buy $20 million of butane from me, he told the Argentine government, I will buy $20 million of beef from you. Argentina gave him the contract contingent upon his buying the beef. Tudela then flew to Spain, where a major shipyard was about to close down from lack of work. It was a political hot potato and an extremely sensitive issue for the Spanish government. If you will buy $20 million of beef from me, he told them, I will build a $20 million supertanker in your shipyard. The Spanish were ecstatic and delivered a message to Argentina through their ambassador there that Rafael Tudela`s $20 million of beef should be sent directly to Spain. Once again he had found the edge and taken it. Tudela`s final stop was in Philadelphia at the Sun Oil Company. If you will charter my $20 million supertanker, which is being built in Spain, he told them, I will buy $20 million of butane gas from you. Sun Oil agreed, and Rafael Tudela fulfilled his desire to get in the gas and oil business. 22+ Comments Share (101) Thank Report 8 Jun Roberto De Leon, CEO of two princesses ;-) Votes by Sameer Gupta, Marc Bodnick, Jesse Lashley, and 4258 more. Puma paying Pele to tie his shoes in the middle of the field seconds before the kickoff of the World Cup final in Mexico (1970)... The camera made a close up and the whole world realized that the best player back then was wearing Puma shoes... Life changed for Puma after that event... http://articles.latimes.com/2012... 9+ Comments Share (14) Thank Report 12 May Nate Waddoups, curious person

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Votes by Oliver Emberton, Caroline Zelonka, Dave Cheng, and 2441 more. In the late 80s or early 90s, AT&T had a long-distance service, and a corresponding marketing campaign, called 1-800-OPERATOR. The ads were on TV every day... You'd call that number to get access to better-than-average long-distance calling rates. Someone at MCI (AT&T's biggest competitor, back in the day) realized that many people can't spell "operator" properly. So MCI registered 1-800-OPERATER. MCI made a fair amount of money while AT&T continued to pay for the marketing campaign. (In the mid-1990s, I worked for a (now defunct) company that did some software development for MCI. This story was related to me by a co-worker who had dinner with some MCI people while they were visiting to discuss a business proposal.) Edit: I'm honored that over 2000 of you found this little anecdote worthy of an upvote, but I feel a little guilty, because Salman Ahmed's answer is much better, and has barely over 100 votes so far. Please give it a look.
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16+ Comments Share (9) Thank Report 9 May Dinesh Mallika, Dreamer Votes by Caroline Zelonka, Andy Lee Chaisiri, Jesse Lashley, and 1140 more. A 27-year-old fax machine saleswoman took a scissors to her pantyhose. Today she sits on this list as the youngest self-made billionaress:

Sara Blakely was 27 working for a company selling fax machines door-to-door, and then one day she had her a-ha moment. She was going to a party and needed footless pantyhose to go with her outfit, so she cut the feet off her pantyhose and bam: problem solved. Somewhere in there, shed been praying to the universe to give her an idea that will help her make millions and touch peoples lives. Shed abandoned the idea, but when she was watching the Oprah show and heard our dear O say that she too cut off the feet of her pantyhose, the spark was rekindled,

almost as a confirmation that she should go ahead with her idea. When Sara began to research undergarments for women and how theyd been made for the last 50 years, she was astonished. From the absurd sizing protocols (only one average waist measure was used on all the products, regardless of the size of the garment), to how products were tested (on manikins not real people), Sara saw that the undergarment industry needed a female perspective insights from a real woman wearing these items to shape the product development direction so the products were useful, effective, and as comfortable as possible. She broke the mold, and developed a completely new approach to developing womens undergarments. Sara had only $5,000 in savings on that fateful day when she cut the feet off of her stockings in order to wear them under her white pants for a more flattering look (and thus, realized the world needed a new undergarment product that would be comfortable yet flattering to the female form). From that $5,000 she embarked on designing a prototype, securing a manufacturer, naming the product, legally protecting her product, and getting the word out to potential buyers.

She stayed at Danka, working 9 to 5, but spent her evenings and weekends meticulously researching pantyhose design and existing patents. When the time came to try and get her prototype made, shed drive back and forth from her home in Atlanta to North Carolina, where she got used to hearing no once more, this time from the owners of hosiery mills. Blakely called and visited one North Carolina hosiery mill after another, searching for a manufacturing partner who would make a prototype. She was rejected consistently, until one mill owner who had dismissed her idea summarily called back with some good news: he had told his daughters about her idea and they convinced him to help Blakely. Blakely didnt resign from her role at Danka until the age of 29, two years after she first conceived of the idea for Spanx. She learned to subsist on minimal sleep and kept her sideline gig from her colleagues, having early batches of her footless pantyhose delivered to her home while she was at her day job. She didnt turn in her resignation letter until she was absolutely sure her start-up was on the right track. She quit Danka and two and a half weeks later she was on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Blakely made her product to stand out in hosiery departments, her packaging would have to pop. So she eschewed traditional beige and white packaging for bright red.

Blakely spent two years visiting every department store that sold Spanx, rallying

sales people by educating them about the product and teaching them how to sell it. Her footless hosiery invention revitalized an industry and answered the prayers of women everywhere who wanted to look better in all of their clothes. Today Spanx is to slimming undergarments what Kleenex is to tissues: a brand that stands for the category. In recent months four Wall Street investment banks separately valued Spanx at an average $1 billion, a sum Forbes corroborated with the help of industry analysts. Blak ely owns 100% of the company, has zero debt, has never taken outside investment and hasnt spent a nickel on advertising. At 41 shes the youngest woman to join Worlds Billionaires list without help from a husband or an inheritance. 9+ Comments Share (18) Thank Report 24 May Shishira Somashekar, Engineer by chance, human being by choice Votes by Balaji Viswanathan, Aashish Katta, Tanmay Mathur, and 589 more. Securities scam of 1991

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Harshad Mehta was an Indian stockbroker who grabbed headlines for the notorious BSE security scam of 1991. He was Born in a lower middle-class Gujarati Jain family.

In the early 1990s, the banks in India had to maintain a particular amount of their deposits in government bonds. This ratio was called SLR ( Statutory Liquidity Ratio). Each bank had to submit a detailed sheet of its balance at the end of the day and also show that there was a sufficient amount invested in government bonds. Now, the government decided that the banks need not show their details on each day, they need to do it only on Fridays. Also, there was an extra clause that said that the average percentage of bond holdings over the week needs to be above the SLR but the daily percentage need not be so. That meant that banks would sell bonds in the earlier part of the week and then buy bonds back at the end of the week. The capital freed in the starting of the week could then be invested. Now, at the end of the week many banks would be desperate to buy bonds back. This is where the broker comes in. The broker knew which bank had more bonds (called plus) and which has less than the required amount (called short). He then acts as the middleman between the two banks. Harshad Mehta was one such

broker. He worked as a middle man between many banks for a long time and gained the trust of the banks senior management. Lets say that there are two banks A (short) and B (plus). Now what Harshad Mehta did was that he told the banker at A that he was dealing with many banks and hence did not know who would he deal in the end with. So he said that the bank should write the cheque in his name rather than the other bank (which was forbidden by law), so that he could make the payment to whichever bank was required. Since he was a trusted broker, the banks agreed. Then, going back to the example of bank A and B, he took the money from A and went to B and said that he would pay the money on the next day to B but he needed the bonds right now (for A). But he offered a 15 % return for bank B for the one day extension. Bank B readily agreed with this since it was getting such a nice return Now since Harshad Mehta was dealing with many banks at the same time he could then keep some capital with him at all times. For eg. He takes money from A on Monday,and tells B that hell pay on Tuesday, then he takes money from C on Tuesday and tells D that hell pay on Wednesday and the money he gets from C is paid to B and as a result he has some working capital with him at all times if this goes on with other banks throughout the week. The banks at that time were not allowed to invest in the equity markets. Harshad Mehta had very cleverly squeezed some capital out of the banking system. This capital he invested in the stock market and managed to stoke a massive boom.

This strategy can also be explained in another way 1) Ready Forward (RF) What is Ready Forward ? The RF is in essence a secured short-term (typically 15-day) loan from one bank to another. Crudely put, the bank lends against government securities just as a pawnbroker lends against jewelers. The borrowing bank actually sells the securities to the lending bank and buys them back at the end of the period of the loan, typically at a slightly higher price. In a ready-forward deal, a broker usually brings together two banks for which he is paid a commission. Broker was not supposed to handle the cash or the securities.

Loophole of Ready Forward At any point of time, there would be banks wanting to sell their securities (like bonds/shares) for cash and there would be banks wanting to buy securities by offering cash. He used to act as a middleman between such banks. Suppose SBI wanted to sell securities and ICICI wanted to buy securities. He would go to SBI and assure them that he will find a buyer, take their securities and ask for 1 week time for this process. Then, immediately, he wil go to ICICI and tell them that he will find a seller and take their cash and ask for 1 week time. Doing this way, he ended up having both the securities and liquid cash for 1 week (which was illegal but banks did that because he had gained their trust). Since he would deal with multiple banks, he would tell SBI that he will pay on Monday, then go to Canara bank and say he will pay them on tuesday and so on. It was such a sophisticated pipeline process, the next Monday when he was supposed to pay to SBI, he would make a deal with IDBI, get their money and pay it to SBI, hence getting a breathing time of another week and the cycle would continue. Phew!! This was the Ready Forward loophole.

2) Bank Receipts (BR) what are Bank Receipts ? Securities were not traded in reality in a ready forward deal but the seller gave the buyer a BR which is a confirmation of the sale of securities. A BR is a receipt for the money received by the selling bank and pledges to deliver the securities to the buyer. In the meantime, the securities are held in the sellers trust by the buyer. Loopholes of Bank Receipts The next loophole he picked was the Bank Receipt. In the above example, you saw how one bank would give securities and another would pay cash for such securities. But in banking system, assets would usually not move but only circulated through receipts. A bank would not give securities, but would give a bank receipt of the securities which would be trusted by the next bank and treated as securities

itself.He got fake bank receipts from banks and took the fraud to next level. This way, he made sure he always had crores of rupees as liquid cash and aggressively invested them in stock market, creating an artificial boom and continued making more money. He took the price of ACC from 200 to 9000.Thats an increase of 4400% .The market went up like crazy and the bulls were on a mad run is believed that It was later revealed that Mehta used the replacement cost theory to explain the reason for the high-level bidding. The replacement cost theory basically states that older companies should be valued on the basis of the amount of money that would be needed to create another similar company. Since he had to book profits in the end, the day he sold was the day when the market crashed. The same day Vijaya Bank chairman committed suicide by jumping from the top of the banks office. The chairman knew that when it would become public that he had written cheques in the name of Mehta, he would be dead meat.One rather unknown fact about this scam is that there was a very important player in this scam who managed to keep a very low profile. That man was Nimesh Shah. He was just as involved as Harshad Mehta but he knew how to keep out of the hands of the law. Nimesh Shah still deals in the stock market and is known to be a heavy player. Harshad Mehta is now dead. It is rumored that when he died, he still had 10% of ACC shares with him. The scam was exposed by Sucheta Dalal, a columnist of the newspaper The Times of India, who later got Padmashri award for exposing this scam. When the banks realized they were taken for a ride and started demanding the cash immediately. But there was no money. It was all a fraud. The stock market collapsed. Millions of innocent stock traders went bankrupt. Bank Chairmen started quitting their jobs taking responsibilty. Chairman of Vijaya Bank committed suicide by jumping from top of his bank building. Harshad Mehta was charged with hundreds of criminal cases. There is a hindi movie named "Gafla" based on Harshad Mehta's life story and the way in which he exploited the system. Allegations of payment of bribe to India's Prime Minister Mehta again raised a furore in 1995 when he made a public announcement that he had paid INR 1 crore (US$182,000) to the then Congress President and Prime Minister, Mr P.V. Narasimha Rao, as donation to the party, for getting him off the scandal case. Last days of Harshad Mehta A few years later, Mehta made a brief comeback as a stock market expert and started providing investment tips on his website and in a weekly newspaper column. He worked with the owners of a few companies and recommended the shares of those companies only. When he died in 2002, Mehta had been convicted in only one of the 27 cases filed against him. What attracted the taxmans attention was Mehta's advance tax payment of Rs 28-crore for the financial year 1991-92. Another eye-catcher was his extravagant lifestyle. There were news that he also held secret seminars on stock market for a huge fee for the elite in Rotary clubs during his last years. IT department has itself admitted that they are still unaware of how much money Harshad Mehta amassed during this scam and they are unware of where it is hidden and who is handling the money now. sources: My views Harshad Mehta Harshad Mehta
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18+ Comments Share (10) Thank Report 16 May Anirvan Lahiri, Founder & CEO, InsightSplash Votes by Sriram Vamsi Ilapakurthy, Geordie Keitt, Vamsi Krishna Tellakula, and 852 more. This is my favourite story about business, period. I know of it second hand - I got it from my college professor who said he heard it from the hapless MBA in the story. It could be apocryphal but even then is a wonderful story.

So, the story is about this bright MBA from one of the IIMs, for long the premier management training institutes in India, who interviewed for a job with Russi Mody (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... ) the legendary chief of Tata Steel. Early in the interview, Mody asked the MBA, what could he contribute to Tata Steel. The MBA whipped out a recent Tata Steel P&L statement, presented some financial ratios that were out of line and said that he could help by identifying these and other inefficiencies. Mody asked him what exactly would he change to bring the ratios in line. The MBA said in comparison to their competitors, Tata Steel was spending an inordinate amount on employee benefits like housing and education subsidies. That would be a great place to start seeking efficiencies. Mody admitted to being impressed; he could see that the young man seated in front of him had been taught well. But he had a question. He asked: Tell me this. My revenues depend on my steel output and my output depends on my workers. Most of them are rural, not very educated, Hindus and they believe in Karma. Specifically they believe that any effort they put in this life will only be rewarded in their next life. And their fate in this life is predetermined by their actions in their past life. How then will you motivate these guys to produce more? The MBA had prepared well for his interview but this was a total curveball. He thought, he hemmed, he hawed and finally admitted defeat. Mody came to his rescue. He said this is how we will do it. I will take my workers' kids, especially the daughters, and give them the finest education that money can buy. This way when they grow up, they will need to be married into a social strata that is higher than that of her parents. Doing so will take a lot of dowry and saving up for that dowry, that is what is going to motivate my workers, that is what is going to drive my productivity. So what you say is a needless expense, I say is a vital strategic investment in our future, apart from being a good thing to do and the right thing to do. Note 1: the specific words are obviously mine, that is why I have not put anything in quotes. Note 2: I love this story because it to me represents the best of capitalism - profit maximising behaviour aligned with shrewd strategy and long term vision resulting in shareholder and social value creation. It is the polar opposite of the short term, financial engineering that so many companies fall victim to. 11+ Comments Share (5) Thank Report 9 May Michael Burghardt Votes by Caroline Zelonka, Karan Kumar, Jan Leadbetter, and 708 more. Oakley sent a pair of shades to the Chilean miners who were stuck in the mine. They sent them to protect their eyes from the sun after not having been exposed to it for a very extended period of time. When the miners emerged from the dark mine, the extremely extensive media coverage filmed and talked about how each one of them was wearing a pair of Oakley sunglasses. Oakley Gets Projected $41 Million In Exposure From Chilean Miners
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4+ Comments Share (2) Thank Report 10 May Manas Jha, knows the value of money. Votes by Sameer Gupta, Nitesh Goyal, Srikanth Krishnan, and 447 more. Before 1977, the net worth of Reliance Industries was approximately INR 1 Million. By 1983, it had jumped up to more than INR 1 Billion. Today, the net worth of Reliance is about $90 Billion (INR 4,930 Billion). Dhirubhai Ambani, the founder, was known for his brilliant management skills and his uncanny ability to tackle stock markets. This one particular strategy of his is my personal favorite: On 18th March 1982, the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) crashed and the stock prices of all major companies, including Reliance, fell by nearly 10%. A bear cartel (group of stock brokers) from Calcutta decided to take advantage of this opportunity, and started to short sell the shares of Reliance. Now for those who don't know, here is how the system of short selling works- You borrow 100 shares of a company (from your friend) at a price of x each, and

immediately sell them for a total of 100x. Subsequently, the share prices drop to, say, 0.9x. Now, you buy 100 shares (with your own money) for a total of 90x. You return these shares to your friend, who has to accept them even though the market price of these shares as dropped. Since you sold those shares for 100x, you earn 10x in profit. A group of stock brokers commonly referred to as "The Friends of Reliance" started buying these short sold shares. The bear cartel was under the belief that the buyers won't have enough money to complete the transactions and would have to reach a settlement based on the Badla trading system. The bear cartel short sold 1.1 Million shares in all. (The Badla trading system essentially worked as follows- If you didn't have enough money to buy the shares, you asked someone else to buy them for you. When you had enough money, you paid the amount back to the guy who bought them for you, plus an interest which was decided by the BSE.) So The Friends of Reliance kept on buying the short sold shares till the day of settlement (April 30, 1982), and the share price of Reliance was maintained at INR 152 per share. On the day of the settlement, the Calcutta based brokers were shocked when The Friends of Reliance declared that they indeed had enough money to buy the shares (which was given to them by Dhirubhai Ambani himself), and they demanded the shares from the bear cartel. In case of non-settlement, they demanded a penalty of INR 35 per share from the bear cartel, which was ridiculously high. So, the bear cartel had to buy the required shares themselves (remember, the share prices hadn't dropped) on the very day of the transaction in order to complete the transaction. Thus, they failed to earn a single rupee. At the same time, due to such a huge number of shares (1.1 Million) being bought on a single day (i.e. April 30), the demand of the shares increased drastically, and the price of a single reliance share jumped from INR 152 to above INR 180 within half an hour. The rest, as they say, is history.

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A true genius. 9+ Comments Share (1) Thank Report 10 May Janak Shah, made an iPhone app!!! http://bit.ly/j... Votes by Oliver Emberton, Caroline Zelonka, Nikhil Joshi, and 1331 more. Apples iPod needs no introduction. If anyone wants a device to listen to music on the move this is usually where they go. But it wasnt always this way. Does anybody remember the Archos? The Zune? Or Sonys MP3 Walkmans? The preiPod market had a lot of devices, and none came out top, it looked like the market would be commoditised, until apple swooped in and monopolised it. There are many reasons that the iPod was so successful, the product was top notch, theres no doubting that. However theres one other usually overlooked tactic

that Jobs implemented which helped the iPod go viral. Nowadays Social Media Gurus talk about making your product inherently shareable. That is to say make it as easy and simple as possible for customers to show their friends that they love your product. Usually by sharing something on Facebook or Twitter. This is a good piece of advice; if you design shareability into your product from the beginning it will help you down the line. With the iPod, Jobs accomplished this offline. He made the product inherently shareable without relying on any social network. How? Well, when it launched, the iPod was the coolest thing around. But the problem was you kept it in your pocket. This meant you couldnt show everyone how cool you were. It also meant other people couldnt see that all the coolest people owned iPods. All anyone could see was the earphone lead. The black earphone lead. Because every music player in the world back then had a black earphone lead. So Jobs did the opposite. iPods became the only music players with white earphone leads. Even if you couldnt see the iPod, you knew what it was. All the coolest people had white earphone leads. In fact, even the advertising concentrated on the white earphone leads, not the iPod.

It was so successful that youd see people using their old, non-iPod, MP3 players with white iPod earphones that theyd actually gone out and purchased separately. Everyone knew exactly what those white earphones were connected to. Jobs had the foresight to understand the power of this one minor change, the colour of his earphones. 13+ Comments Share (6) Thank Report 21 May Adrian John Cartwood, I answer Quora questions about money Votes by Siva Viknesh, Raghav Kher, Sajith P Surendran, and 562 more.

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If by "shrewdest, smartest maneuver" means making yourself unbelievably rich whilst personally influencing the US economy so strongly that you were asked to "please stop" by the President of The United States himself, then the stock market

antics of Jesse Livermore, once justifiably regarded as the World's Greatest Stock Trader, certainly qualifies. TL;DR

After greetings were exchanged, President Wilson began. Mr. Livermore, it has come to our attention that you have cornered the Chicago cotton futures market. Is that true?

Yes, Mr. President, I said.

Now we know what a smart fellow you are, and the price of cotton is nice and low now, and you have properly figured out that the projections for cotton demand in the next little while is high as the nation comes back from war and prosperity begins in earnest.

Yes, Mr. President, I said.

We know you understand about inflation, Mr. Livermore, and with you having a corner on cotton you can pretty much name your price as the demand grows, the secretary of agriculture said.

And we dont want inflation Mr. Livermore. Higher prices in something as important as the cotton market will be very bad while the nation is trying to get on its feet, dont you think? the president added.

Yes sir, I said.

Let me ask you a question, Mr. Livermore, a question that has my full interest. Yes sir, I said, and waited. Why? Why did you corner the cotton market?

To see if I could, Mr. President. You cornered the entire United States cotton market, to see if you could, Mr. Livermore? the secretary of agriculture blurted.

Yes sir. It got out of hand a little at first, and then I wanted to see if I could do it, thats all.

Well, Mr. Livermore, what would it take for you to undo it, before the other traders really find out whats happened here and start to drive up the price? the president asked.

Nothing sir, just you asking me here today, that will do it. How, how will you do it? the secretary asked. Ill sell it just like I bought it, in an orderly way, and I will sell only for what I basically paid for it. Im not interested in anything that will hurt the country.

We shook hands and I lived up to my promise. But I always have to smile when I think of this story. Nobody except the secre- tary of agriculture and the president

and myself ever knew about what had happened.

And now you too, son. [Source: Jesse Livermore: World's Greatest Stock Trader: Richard Smitten: 9780471023265: Amazon.com: Books ]
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And, now you too, Quora :) 8+ Comments Share (3) Thank Report 15 May Ashwin Raja Votes by Deepak Mehta, Hitesh Thakkar, Vladimir A. Frolov, and 123 more. The Shampoo Sachet model in India One of those revolutionary ideas of repackaging a product in smaller volumes that changed the way FMCG companies looked at positioning a product. ' Back in 1983 an Indian company by the name CavinKare was the first to start selling Shampoos in small sachets apart from the bottles. This way they made it more affordable to rural and common population. Through clever marketing schemes, they took the P&Gs and Unilevers of the world by surprise - they had become a household name in rural South India. More than 80% of the Shampoo currently sold in India are from Sachets, which is pretty incredible. Source : The inspiring success story of CavinKare

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2+ Comments Share Thank Report 20 May Yehong Zhu, Recovering Optimist Votes by Seb Paquet, Alfredo Morgen Wiria, Samrat Roy, and 127 more. What's the best way to create instant brand-recognition and stand out in a monopolistically competitive market? Inimitable design. Enter the Coca-Cola bottle.

In 1894, Mississippi shop owner Joseph A. Biedenharn began bottling Coca-Cola after he was impressed by its sales. He sold the drink to his customers in a common, unexceptional glass bottle called a Hutchinson.

Original Coca-Cola Hutchinson bottle However, nearly two decades down the line, bottlers worried that a straight-sided bottle wasnt distinctive enough, since Coca-Cola was becoming easily confused with copycat brands. So, in 1915, the Coca-Cola Company launched a competition among its suppliers to create a new bottle for their beverage. They wanted a bottle that would distinguish Coke from all other bottles. They wanted a bottle which a person could recognize even if they felt it in the dark, and so shaped that, even if broken, a person could tell at a glance what it was. Earl R. Dean was the bottle designer and supervisor at the Root Glass Company of Terre Haute, Indiana. While brainstorming ideas for the bottle, he decided to base it on the kola nut, one of the key ingredients of the soda. Though he wasnt able to find any information on the nut in question, he was inspired by a gourd-shaped picture of a cocoa pod in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Faced with the upcoming scheduled maintenance of the mold-making machinery, over the next 24 hours Dean sketched out a concept drawing. After explaining how he could transform the shape of the pod into a bottle, it was approved by his boss the next morning.

Earl R. Dean's 1915 concept drawing Dean then proceeded to create a bottle mold and produced a small number of bottles before the glass-molding machinery was turned off. He was able to secure a design patent in November 1915*.

One of the small number of original contour-shaped prototypes During the 1916 bottler's convention, Dean's contour bottle was chosen over other entries and was on the market the same year. By 1920, the contour bottle became the standard for the Coca-Cola Company. Today, the contour Coca-Cola bottle is one of the most recognized packages on the planet..."even in the dark!".

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*The original prototype never made it to production since its middle diameter was larger than its base, making it unstable on conveyor belts. Dean later resolved this issue by decreasing the bottle's middle diameter, resulting in the design we know and love today. Sources: [1] Coca-Cola [2] CocaCola Bottles History : Green Glass & Old CocaCola Bottles [3] The Evolution of the Coca-Cola Contour Bottle - The Dieline 1 Comment Share (4) Thank Report 10 Jun David Fry, CTO, Fry Communications, entrepreneur... Votes by Jon Mixon, Marc Bodnick, Domhnall O'Huigin, and 9329 more. Herbert Dow founded Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan when he invented a way to produce bromine cheaply. He sold the chemical for industrial purposes all over the US for 36 cents per pound at the turn of the 20th century. He couldn't go overseas, however, because the international market was controlled by a giant German chemical cartel that sold it at a fixed price of 49 cents per pound. It was understood that the Germans would stay out of the US market so long as Dow and the other American suppliers stayed within its borders. Eventually Dow's business was in trouble and he had to expand. He took his bromine to England and easily beat the cartel's fixed price of 49 cents per pound. Things were okay for a while until a German visitor came to Michigan and threatened Dow that he had to cease and desist. Dow didn't like being told what to do and told the cartel to get lost. Shortly thereafter German bromine started appearing for sale in the US for 15 cents per pound, way below Dow's price. The cartel flooded the US market, offering the chemical way below their own costs, intending to drive Dow out of business. But Dow outsmarted them. He stopped selling in the US market entirely and instead arranged for someone to secretly start buying up all the German bromine he could get his hands on. Dow repackaged it as his own product, shipped it to Europe, and made it widely available (even in Germany) at 27 cents per pound. The Germans were wondering 1) why wasn't Dow out of business and 2) why was there suddenly such demand for bromine in the US?? The cartel lowered its price to 12 cents and then 10 cents. Dow just kept buying more and more, gaining huge market share in Europe. Finally the Germans caught on and had to lower their prices at home. Dow had broken the German chemical monopoly and expanded his business greatly. And customers got a wider range of places to buy bromine at lower prices. Dow went on to do the same trick to the German dye and magnesium monopolies. This is now the textbook way to deal with predatory price cutting. Source: Herbert Dow, the Monopoly Breaker
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Himanshu Yadav, BITS-Pilani, Middle class Indian, Ent... Votes by Oliver Emberton, Caroline Zelonka, Brett Hellman, and 854 more. On his return to Apple in 1997, Steve's move to crush his ego at the right time and get Apple to partner with Microsoft marked the beginning of the mother of all comebacks by any company till date.

At the end of March 1997, Apple announced a quarterly loss of $708 million. Three months later, Amelio resigned and Jobs took over as interim CEO. Once again in charge of Apple, Jobs struck a deal with Microsoft to help ensure Apple's survival. Under the arrangement, Microsoft invested $150 million for a nonvoting minority stake in Apple, and the companies agreed to "cooperate on several sales and technology fronts." A passage from Walter Isaacsons Jobs biography about how Steve Jobs got Bill Gates to save the company with a $150 million investment this is Jobs speaking: I called up Bill and said, Im going to turn this thing around. Bill always had a soft spot for Apple. We got him into the application software business. The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. So I called him and said, I need help. Microsoft was walking over Apples patents. I said, If we kept up our lawsuits, a few years from now we could win a billion-dollar patent suit. You know it, and I know it. But Apples not going to survive that long if were at war. I know that. So lets figure out how to settle this right away. All I need is a commitment that Microsoft will keep developing for the Mac and an investment by Microsoft in Apple so it has a stake in our success.

Under Jobs' guidance, Apple quickly returned to profitability, and by the end of 1998, boasted sales of $5.9 billion. The rest, as they say... is history!

6+ Comments Share (9) Thank Report 9 May Stefan Von Imhof, sn o Votes by Abhishek Ghose, Kshitiz Mishra, Ankit Sethi, and 157 more. Sometimes, companies make an extremely shrewd business move that is harmful to society. A great example is the General Motors streetcar conspiracy . In 1936, a a consortium of companies with automobile interests, including GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and Phillips Petroleum & others, established three front companies: National City Lines, Pacific City Lines, and American City Lines The strategic goal of these new front companies was to acquire local transit systems throughout the country, which at the time were primarily streetcar & lightrail lines, tear them up, convert them to bus operations, and encourage further American dependency on the automobile.

And it worked. Boy, did it work. By 1945 the consortium successfully acquired rail lines in numerous cities, most famously the Los Angeles Railway . The Yellow Cars, as they were called, were retired, the tracks were torn up, and by 1963 the entire system had been completely dismantled.

The rest is history. GM and Firestone have certainly reaped the rewards of an automobile-dependent nation. But the United States, and especially the city of Los Angeles, have never recovered. A good move for those companies, but at a horrible cost to society.

Follow me on Facebook
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and Twitter .

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Neil Bhakta, and I mean business. Votes by Sameer Gupta, Oliver Emberton, Caroline Zelonka, and 1603 more. From a recent tweet: "Today I interviewed a trader, who'd forecast earnings for a food company by ordering a weekly muffin in order to count the invoice number." Anthony Goldbloom
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20+ Comments Share (7) Thank Report 7 May Ian Crosby, CEO @ Bench.co, Top Quora reader 2013. Votes by Seb Paquet, Marc Bodnick, Diana Cretu, and 303 more. How about making $1.1 billion in a few weeks? George Soros did this in 1992 by forcing England to devalue its currency.

At the time, the Bank of England (BoE) was guaranteeing the exchange rate of the British Pound against other currencies. It would buy Pounds on these exchanges to create artificial demand and maintain its target exchange rate. The problem with this strategy is the BoE had a limited amount of currency it could use to keep buying British Pounds. George Soros made a bet that he could short sell more pounds than the BoE would be willing to buy. He was right. Our total position by Black Wednesday had to be worth almost $10 billion. We planned to sell more than that. In fact, when Norman Lamont said just before the devaluation that he would borrow nearly $15 billion to defend sterling, we were amused because that was about how much we wanted to sell. - George Soros, Oct. 26, 1992 In the end, George Soros didn't need to commit his full $15 billion. By the time he short sold $10 billion, other currency investors observed the imminent devaluation, and sold British Pounds in droves. On September 16, 1992, the Bank of England ran out of funds to prop up its exchange rate. This date is now known as "Black Wednesday." It caused the Pound to drop in value by over 20% in a few weeks.

With his $10 billion in short sold pounds, George Soros earned $1.1 billion. To this day he is known as "The man that broke the Bank of England."

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Source: George Soros 7+ Comments Share (3) Thank Report 15 May Isaac Lewis, short the world Votes by Seb Paquet, Diana Cretu, Balaji Viswanathan, and 2727 more. Edit: this is the story as I originally heard it from Clayton Christensen. Apparently it is inaccurate, see this answer: Dell: Is Clayton Christensen's characterisation of DELL's relationship with Asus essentially true? Dell computer used to outsource the manufacturing of their motherboards to a Taiwanese company. Then, one day that little company presented Dell with a new offer: they could start assembling whole computers for Dell. For Dell, this meant higher profitability: they'd have the same revenue, but with a lower cost base. For some reason the Taiwanese didn't seem to care as much about profitability, only cash. But that's probably because they're still a bit backwards in Asia and don't have any Harvard Business School-educated MBAs to teach them otherwise. Anyway, that arrangement worked out well. One day the company came back to Dell with a new offer: they could take over Dell's entire supply chain. For Dell, that meant even lower costs, and so even better profitability. After that arrangement was put into practice the company came back to Dell and offered to start designing computers for them. Brilliant! Dell could now focus on its core competency, branding, and let the Taiwanese do all the unglamorous work of actually building the damn things. After that arrangement was put into practice the company took another trip to the US, but this time they didn't visit Dell. They went to Best Buy, and offered them PCs that were as good as Dell's but at a significant discount. By the way, that company's name was ASUS.

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28+ Comments Share (25) Thank Report 17 May David Margines Votes by Oliver Emberton, Karan Kumar, Jonathan Reem, and 361 more. Enron used to pay networks of hobos / homeless people around the country to hop on coal trains, count the cars and see how full each car was. Soon Enron was able to forecast with great accuracy where all the coal in the country was. This helped them predict / hedge on coal prices with greater accuracy than the rest of the market. 5+ Comments Share (1) Thank Report 7 May Tim Bushell, for the pleasure of knowing what put ... Votes by Seb Paquet, Balaji Viswanathan, Swaathi Kakarla, and 150 more. In 1914 Spendan Lewis took over the branch of Peter Jones in Sloane Square, one of the first department stores, and part of the family business. It wasn't doing very well and Spendan realised that the problem lay in the staff. Instead of implementing a round of layoffs, recruitment and training, Spendan enacted one of the shrewdest moves in business. He created - in a few small steps - the John Lewis Partnership - making every employee a partner in the company. This was not the only thing. He reduced hours, and improved working conditions.

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Incentivised, the staff immediately improved their standard of customer service. Today John Lewis, along with the Waitrose chain of supermarkets, are one of the most consistent and successful retail companies in the UK. By combining high quality products with passionate customer service the store has remained profitable - almost without competition. For most employees the yearly share of profits is a significant addition to the salary. As a part time employee of Waitrose (while at university) that bonus saved my financial bacon a couple of times.

Not all employees are partners. You must be over 18, of course. There were other exceptions as well. I worked with one staff member who had declared himself bankrupt. As such he was not allowed, under UK law, to join a business partnership. I mention this to illustrate that this is no gimmick - staff really are part owners of the business. Without affecting profitability, products are sourced using fair trade principles, from sustainable farmers, and with little compromise on quality. That's what you get when an entire work force owns the reputation of the company. It was a stunning business decision that built a durable retail chain. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J... Some interesting reads: The partnership has its own constitution: Our Constitution The partnership is run by committee: John Lewis Partnership - Governance 4+ Comments Share (2) Thank Report 14 May Simon Brown, Dog Worshipper Votes by Seb Paquet, Saniya Bhutta, Sammy Mdhra, and 128 more. After reading "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins I would have to say the shrewdest scheme in the history of business has been perpetrated by successive US governments and directed by the CIA. This is a scam of massive proportions involving various countries, governments and corporations and has fleeced a number of poor countries of trillions of dollars since the first success with the Iran coup of 1953. The rich in those countries get richer, the poor drown in debt, and the US drags in riches beyond belief.

This interview gives an idea of how this hideously sociopathic plan and scam works.

AMY GOODMAN: Its good to have you with us. Okay, explain this term, "economic hit man," e.h.m., as you call it. " JOHN PERKINS: Basically what we were trained to do and what our job is to do is to build up the American empire. To bring to create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact weve been very successful. Weve built the largest empire in the history of the world. Its been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. Its only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort. This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that. AMY GOODMAN: How did you become one? Who did you work for? JOHN PERKINS: Well, I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nations largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations. The first real economic hit man was back in the early 1950s, Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy, who overthrew of government of Iran, a democratically elected government, Mossadeghs government who was _Time_s magazine person of the year; and he was so successful at doing this without any bloodshed well, there was a little bloodshed, but no military intervention, just spending millions of dollars and replaced Mossadegh with the Shah of Iran. At

that point, we understood that this idea of economic hit man was an extremely good one. We didnt have to worry about the threat of war with Russia when we did it this way. The problem with that was that Roosevelt was a C.I.A. agent. He was a government employee. Had he been caught, we would have been in a lot of trouble. It would have been very embarrassing. So, at that point, the decision was made to use organizations like the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. to recruit potential economic hit men like me and then send us to work for private consulting companies, engineering firms, construction companies, so that if we were caught, there would be no connection with the government. AMY GOODMAN: Okay. Explain the company you worked for. JOHN PERKINS: Well, the company I worked for was a company named Chas. T. Main in Boston, Massachusetts. We were about 2,000 employees, and I became its chief economist. I ended up having fifty people working for me. But my real job was deal-making. It was giving loans to other countries, huge loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay. One of the conditions of the loan lets say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia or Ecuador and this country would then have to give ninety percent of that loan back to a U.S. company, or U.S. companies, to build the infrastructure a Halliburton or a Bechtel. These were big ones. Those companies would then go in and build an electrical system or ports or highways, and these would basically serve just a few of the very wealthiest families in those countries. The poor people in those countries would be stuck ultimately with this amazing debt that they couldnt possibly repay. A country today like Ecuador owes over fifty percent of its national budget just to pay down its debt. And it really cant do it. So, we literally have them over a barrel. So, when we want more oil, we go to Ecuador and say, "Look, youre not able to repay your debts, therefore give our oil companies your Amazon rain forest, which are filled with oil." And today were going in and destroying Amazonian rain forests, forcing Ecuador to give them to us because theyve accumulated all this debt. So we make this big loan, most of it comes back to the United States, the country is left with the debt plus lots of interest, and they basically become our servants, our slaves. Its an empire. Theres no two ways about it. Its a huge empire. Its been extremely successful. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions Global Intelligence Gate: From Confessions of an Economic Hit Man to the Stratfor Corporation 3+ Comments Share (1) Thank Report 17 May Abhay Jain, Exploring Self 66 Votes by Sushant Saraswat, Divya Shikha Singh, Aditya Chauhan, and 62 more. Big TV promo takes off on Bhartis teaser ad (DTH services launch, Mumbai)

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A teaser ad by a strong new entrant has been completely hijacked by an equally aggressive rival. Over the last few weeks, a 10-second commercial of a plush red sofa was running with a voice-over which announced, See you home...soon. The ad in question was a pre-launch campaign for Bharti Airtels DTH foray. Even as viewers were left guessing as to what the advertisement was trying to sell to consumers, Reliance Communications Big TV was quick to spot an opportunity here by releasing its own 10-second commercial. The setting was similar with a red sofa and a voice-over that said, See you home soon, except that this time the ad was accompanied with a Big TV logo, announcing all features like 32 cinemas and 200+ channels . Clearly, the Big TV commercial took full advantage of the curiosity level that was created by Bharti Airtel, so much so, that viewers started to think the teaser ad actually belonged to Big TV. 1 Comment Share Thank Report 16 May Shyam Ravilla, Learning the art of healing 59 Votes by Pratik Hire, Abdul Basit Suhail, Vikram Rout, and 55 more.

Nike's response to NBA banning Air Jordans Nike introduced the Air Jordans in 1985-86. At that time the NBA had a rule that the basketball shoes should be predominantly white. .

As you can see that was not the case. So Michael Jordan was fined $5000 per game for wearing these. Phil Knight the owner of Nike asked Jordan to keep wearing them and promptly reimbursed the fine. ( A mere pittance compared to the hundreds of millions he has since made from the Air Jordan brand) The ban and Jordan 's flouting the ban made the shoes wildly popular. They even made a commercial out of it

This helped kick start the Air Jordan campaign, and MJ' s subsequent rise to superstardom firmly cemented it's place as the best selling basketball shoes of all time. NBA has since revoked the above mentioned rule, otherwise we wouldn't have crazy shoes like these

Comment Share Thank Report 6 Jun Vibhore Jain, Quoraholic 28 Votes by Jagruti Jain, Sumit Bhamboo, Praveen Singh, and 24 more. Navy Cut Cigarettes. It might not be one of the most shrewdest, smartest business maneuver in the history but it does make into my list of one of the best moves by a company to increase the sales of their product. The history of John Player & Sons is pretty long but they were the ones who first came out with the Navy Cut Cigarettes.

The story goes something like this: Back when cigarette packaging was not so common, the sailors had the habit of taking a mixture of tobacco leaves and binding them with string or twine. The tobacco would then mature under pressure and the sailor could then dispense the tobacco by slicing off a "cut". Since these cuts were made manually, there were of different lengths. These sailors used to smoke tobacco during their fixed-time interval breaks and as expected either they were not able to finish it, or they finished it too fast. As a result, the number of sailors who smoked decreased. This is when Players stepped into the market with the optimum lengths of the tobacco cuts. The number of smokers increased and since then the cigarettes have been known as Navy Cuts.

1+ Comments Share Thank Report 25 May Siddhant Gupta, The crazy one, the misfit, the rebel,... Votes by Piyush Khemka, R Praveen Kumar, Janaki Thakkar, and 98 more. Coca cola came to India and realised that their biggest competition is thumbs up, then owned by parle drinks. Then offered a merger with Parle and were turned down. Knowing the scope of the competition, they bought over all the bottling plants that Parle used. Parle didn't have enough money to start their open plant. So now Parle went back to Coke for the merger. They said they weren't interested in a merger and took over thumbs up.
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4+ Comments Share Thank Report 15 May Kaushik Lakshman, Engineer with varied interests 99 Votes by Zubin Rada Krishnan, Pritesh Desai, Swaathi Kakarla, and 95 more. The story of DeBeers, the diamond company could probably fit the bill. A marketing campaign to create the idea that a diamond ring is a must have for marriage proposals, and selling this to the American youth in the 1930s there by making that the way of life, that it is today. They've also done anything they can to try and maintain monopoly until very recently. I'll share a link. It's a tad negative, so take that with a pinch of salt, but it contains the story of DeBeers http://blog.priceonomics.com/pos... 4+ Comments Share Thank Report 11 May Zahid Hussain, Zed, Alphabet Votes by Abhimanyu Bhosale, Kamal Gaur, Sandeep Hari, and 113 more. A trader on a fairly busy street was selling oranges with a sign-board that read: Fresh Juicy Oranges; 3/- a piece; 10/- for 3. People who read this had this urge to prove him wrong by buying 3 oranges one after the other for 9/- than his combined package deal of 10/Needless to say, he managed to sell his whole stock in record time. Sometimes, irrationality can help you better than any regression based pricing models. 4 Comments Share Thank Report 28 May Neeraj Menta, e-commerce enthusiast Votes by Karanbir Singh Dhillon, Pratik Hire, Ankit Mehta, and 126 more.

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Value of metal > Price of coin --> Melt them and sell !
Early in the 1950s, officials in the treasury of the Arabian kingdom of Yemen noticed something funny happening to their countrys currency. The main unit of money, a solid silver coin called the Rial, was disappearing from circulation. They traced the disappearing coins south to the trading port of Aden, then a British colony and military bastion commanding the entrance to the Red Sea and southern approaches to the Suez Canal. Inquiries found that an Indian clerk named Dhirubhai Ambani, then barely into his twenties, had an open order out in the marketplace of Aden for as many Rials as were available. Ambani had noted that the value of the Rials silver content was higher than its exchange value against the British pound and other foreign currencies. So he began buying Rials, melting them down, and selling the silver ingots to bullion dealers in London. The margins were small, but it was money for jam, Dhirubhai later reminisced. After three months it was stopped, but I made a few lakhs [a few hundred thousands] of rupees. I dont believe in not taking opportunities. 1+ Comments Share Thank Report 18 May Arjun Subramaniam, Knowledge is Power Votes by Seb Paquet, Jason McFarlane, R Praveen Kumar, and 111 more. Operation Bear Hug - IBM In the early 1990s, IBM was in a deep crisis. For the first time in its history, employees were being laid off by the thousands and revenues collapsed like nobody's business ( Pun...get it? )

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Most agreed at the time that the company as it had been - a technology integrator with its hands in everything from giant data centers to consumer printers - had to change into something else. Except new CEO Lou Gerstner. He believed that the company had to survive.

Off started "Operation Bear Hug." 50 managers from IBM were sent around the world to meet with at least 5 customers in person - A rather surprising empathy program from one of the least emotionally demonstrative companies in the Fortune 500. The goal of the managers was not to market IBM products - Instead, they were to listen to consumer concerns and see how IBM could help. Their 200 executive reports had to do the same thing. That "empathic" connection to real-world customers helped the managers see matters from a consumer point of view, whether a certain product or service added value or destroyed it. It also revealed some real gold mines, which IBM capitalized on in a flash. The managers discovered that large corporate clients were interested in the Internet but largely unsure on how to use it effectively. Beyond selling products, IBM realized that it could make a major impact by providing the infrastructure to help large, growing enterprises use the power of the Web to their own advantage. This resulting "e-business" initiative was successful beyond their wildest dreams, putting them on the path towards recovery and long-term growth in the future. Gerstner's style of leadership and his dogged attention to the consumer and their needs eventually brought a new and less arrogant face to the company. By his second year at IBM, the company was back on track, setting off a decade of unprecedented earnings growth and double-digit revenue. Its leaders had the courage to take on that challenge because they had seen their customers face-toface. This maneuver eventually has made IBM the futuristic, technologically advanced company that we know it as today. [1] http://designmind.frogdesign.com... Comment Share (2) Thank Report 30 May David O'Donnell Votes by Jordan Leigh, Rohun Ati, Nikhil Kodilkar, and 116 more. Peyton Manning purchased a chain of 21 Papa John's pizza stores in Colorado just two weeks before voters approved an ammendment legalizing recreational marijuana use within the state.
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7+ Comments Share Thank Report 14 May Chris Grayson, Minister of Propaganda at Telepathy

Votes by Caroline Zelonka, Johannus Vogel, Mark Savchuk, and 481 more.

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Martin Sorrell made a shrewd observation and then executed on it with an unrelated brilliant maneuver. His observation was that the money in advertising was really in media management, and if an advertising entity owned enough agencies, they could pool their media dollars and turn the tables on media outlets (mostly TV broadcasters) with the leverage of scale. Martin had just spent 10 years with advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, in 1985 he was the group financial director in charge of acquisitions, when he departed to start his own venture. To execute his plan, he looked for a publicly listed company whose asset value was greater than its stock price. He found a mark in a sleepy company, Wire Plastic Products, who primarily made shopping carts. He staged a successful hostile takeover, then liquidated the company's assets to raise cash. He used the shell as a holding company and the cash raised to acquire advertising agencies. To this day it keeps the name, merely abbreviated to WPP. Through acquisitions over the years WPP now owns such legendary advertising agencies as J. Walter Thompson, Ogilvy & Mather, Young & Rubicam, GREY Advertising among them, is the world's largest communications holding company, controlling the world's largest pool of media dollars. Sorrell, since having been knighted Sir Martin Sorrell, is now a billionaire. 10+ Comments Share (7) Thank Report 13 May Prakul Agarwal Votes by Pratik Hire, Arushi Agarwal, Valerie Raelynne, and 44 more. This is one of my favorite business stories showing power of vision and enterprise. In 1980's Bill Gates was approached by IBM to write an operating system for their to be launched Personal Computer (PC). Bill gates bought "QDOS" (an Operating System) from some Tim Paterson for around $50,000, heavily modified it, named it MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) and sold to IBM rights to use MS-DOS forever for a one-time fees of around $80,000 (which was quite cheap for IBM). However Bill Gates convinced IBM into letting Microsoft retain the rights to market MS-DOS separate from IBM PC. IBM accepted the deal, believing money was to be made on hardware. The new PC was a spectacular success and inspired a lot of companies like HP, Dell, Compaq into producing their own PC's, copying IBM's architecture. Guess from whom they licensed their operating System? Yes, Microsoft! Soon All the companies started undercutting each other on hardware prices, while Microsoft and Bill Gates made fortune licensing newer versions of MS-DOS softwares to all the companies. Longer Version : Many wouldn't know but it was IBM that made "Personal Computer" (PC) as we know it . In the 1970's IBM was a market giant which made large mainframe computers (80% share) for large corporations. To ship this product fast, IBM (despite its 340,000 employees) decided to use help from other companies and some off-the shelf components. This lead to creation of an open architecture which anyone could copy. IBM originally gave choice of 3 Operating System software with each new PC: P-System ($450), CP/M-86 ($175) and Microsoft-DOS ($60).

Needless to say MS-DOS went on to become most selling OS. Story of Microsoft and IBM collaboration In 1980, IBM first approached Bill Gates of Microsoft , to discuss the state of home computers and what Microsoft products could do for IBM. Gates gave IBM a few ideas on what would make a great home computer, among them to have Basic written into the ROM chip. Microsoft had already produced several versions of Basic for different computer system beginning with the Altair , so Gates was more than happy to write a version for IBM.Gary Kildall As for an operating system (OS) for an IBM computer, since Microsoft had never written an operating system before, Gates had suggested that IBM investigate an OS called CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers), written by Gary Kildall of Digital Research. Kindall had his Ph.D. in computers and had written the most successful operating system of the time, selling over 600,000 copies of CP/M, his operating system set the standard at that time. The Secret Birth of MS-DOS IBM tried to contact Gary Kildall for a meeting, executives met with Mrs Kildall who refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement. IBM soon returned to Bill Gates and gave Microsoft the contract to write a new operating system, one that would eventually wipe Gary Kildall's CP/M out of common use. The "Microsoft Disk Operating System" or MS-DOS was based on Microsoft's purchase of QDOS, the "Quick and Dirty Operating System" written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products, for their prototype Intel 8086 based computer. However, ironically QDOS was based (or copied from as some historians feel) on Gary Kildall's CP/M. Tim Paterson had bought a CP/M manual and used it as the basis to write his operating system in six weeks. Sources: 1 - The Road Ahead by Bill gates 2- Putting Microsoft on the Map 3 - Did Bill Gates Steal the Heart of DOS? PS - Like most people in India I got and learnt Computer using Microsoft Products for a long time. And yes they were *cheap* and easy to use (unlike Apple and Linux that that i now get to use). I Believe it was Bill Gates's Genius somewhere which helped create that a reality. So i am a big fan , unlike what the answer might suggest ! :) 48 3+ Comments Share (2) Thank Report 17 May Thomas Goodwin, The older I get, the more I find don'... Votes by Andrew Boysen, Nikita Thakrar, Geordie Keitt, and 97 more. "sent from my blackberry" (The automatically generated signature) ----------EDIT: I thought it was quite obvious how profound this impact was and the genius, but I think I am wrong. The genius of it was that it was basically a very subtle viral campaign spreading the word about the power of mobile email. At the time Blackberries were very much for the most senior executives and held some real prestige. So this message was a campaign that effortlessly. 1) Told the recipient that the person who sent the message was able to get mobile email. 2) Informed the person reading the message that the note was composed on a mobile device and therefore could be forgiven for typos and brevity. 3) Told the world about the power of Blackberry as a mobile email solution. 4) Built the blackberry brand. A great combination of a marketing campaign propagated by users but also carrying intrinsic value to the user. You could easily disable the function, but you would choose not too. YES- as others have pointed out Hotmail did a similar thing, but this was clearly a viral campaign with no benefit to anyone except Hotmail.
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5+ Comments Share Thank Report 10 May Brian W Allen, Whereof one cannot speak... Votes by Caroline Zelonka, Rashid Mansoor, John Phileas, and 155 more. Bill Gates negotiating with IBM to let Microsoft retain the rights to sell MS-DOS operating system separate from IBM . 4+ Comments Share Thank Report 7 May Christine Sy, wishes she could come up with a cleve... 82 Votes by Ross Cohen, Dhruv Kumar, R Praveen Kumar, and 78 more. Real estate mogul Tom Barrack buys the Fukuoka Dome - Japan's Yankee Stadium - based on a calculation that the titanium in its retractable roof alone was worth the purchase price (hey, if it doesn't work out as a stadium, you can always sell it as scrap metal!). 2+ Comments Share Thank Report 8 May Krishna Keshab Kumar Votes by Karan Kumar, Vijay Gaikwad, Chaitanya Kota, and 155 more. Google buying Android and making it Open Source:

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This bold move by Google completely changed the Smartphone scenario in the world.. 75% market share, 750 million+ activated devices, and an angry Steve Jobs.. They couldn't have done better..!! ;) 4+ Comments Share (8) Thank Report 15 May Nitish Singh 89 Votes by Matt Wasserman, Rambo Lisbon, Kar Tong Tan, and 85 more. The full panning out of its effects is still to be seen, but in my opinion launching Google Fiber is a pretty smart move by Google. Let's look at the very basic features: Connection speed 100 times faster than today's broadband Similar pricing to other network providers Now coming to the "not so obvious" genius of Google here: Providing low cost Internet, not only an additional revenue stream; it enhances Google's advertising business. More time people spend on the Internet, more ads they are exposed to, more money Google makes Adding to this, when the competitors like AT&T, Verizon etc rush to slash their prices / boost their Internet speed to compete with Google; it, only in turn, boosts the advertising revenue for Google - AT&T Announces Intent to Build 1 Gigabit Fiber Network in Austin Also in pipelines are the free wifi hotspots by Google. The competitors are already falling in the trap - Time Warner Cable combats Google Fiber with free WiFi hotspots Don't even get me started on the potential amount of data Google will capture from all this usage. So, in my very personal, speculative opinion, Google Fiber is a very shrewd and brave (as is, setting up in network business is majorly capital intensive) business decision boosting the core business of Google - Advertising. 6+ Comments Share (1) Thank Report 16 May Harsh Snehanshu, Author. Pan-India Traveller. Young In... Votes by Matt Wasserman, Ryan D'souza, Geordie Keitt, and 134 more. Today, I saw this video by Coca Cola and after ending this video with a smile, I

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realized what a brilliant and smart marketing maneuver it is.

Almost everyone in my friendlist has shared this video Within few hours of releasing this video, it has crossed 20000 views. The target market of this video is one of the most populated markets of Asia, and what better way there could be to promote itself against its valiant competitor PepsiCo than by winning the hearts of the customers, without really indulging in explicit marketing. 9+ Comments Share (1) Thank Report 21 May Anonymous Votes by Eric Mansfield, Danilo Stern-Sapad, Siddharth Ravikumar, and 77 more. Let's say your name is Bob Smith, and one day you find out that the company you work for has registered the domain name Page on BobSmithSucks . We're guessing you'd be more than a little hurt. But companies do this all the time. Here's why. Open up another tab in your browser and try to go to Page on Verizonsucks . You'll find nothing there. Odd, considering a company the size of Verizon has more than a few angry customers. Verizonblows, same thing. If you do a domain lookup, you will find that both of those insulting domains are owned by ... Verizon.

When Verizon was formed in the late '90s as a result of a merger between Bell Atlantic and GTE and the company came up with the name, the first step was of course to register Verizon.com . But they also thought to grab Page on Verizonsucks and others like it. Back in 2000, 2600 Magazine noticed this and, out of curiosity, registered the domain "Verizonreallysucks"(Can't put a dotcom because Quora displays it as DOMAIN ERROR). They immediately got a letter from Verizon's attorney's insisting that they turn over the domain, arguing that since it contained the company's name, it was a trademark violation. It turned out Verizon didn't have a legal leg to stand on, but registration of critical domains has now become standard operating procedure ... to keep you from getting them. Any common domain that could host consumer complaints about a company is grabbed by that company before the angry customers can.

When WikiLeaks was threatening to publicize internal documents from Bank of America, the company bought hundreds of domains for all of the company brass. That's why CEO Brian Moynihan now works for a company that owns Page on Page on BrianMoynihansucks (and Page on BrianMoynihanBlows , etc.).

But that just squelches some criticism. If you want to be really smart about it, you make it so that you can actually profit from it. For instance, you've seen ads around the Internet for acai berries, the latest weight loss supplement. They usually have this lady's face on them:

You probably think it's a scam, and if so, the first step is to go to Google and search for "acai berry scam." You'll find that one of the first results is in fact an MSNBC news story pointing out that there is no magical berry that will replace diet and exercise. But that news story is sandwiched by links that are in fact sites that sell acai berries ... all with headlines clearly intended to trap people looking to call bullshit on the product.

You'll find that any kind of negative search for a weight loss program or supplement will give you the same. You've heard ads everywhere for the P90X workout program. If you Google the phrase "P90X doesn't work," the first page of results is full of sites selling P90X, while filling their text with that negative phrase in order to soak up skeptical Google searches. In fact, there are companies that for a fee, will bury criticism of your company by pushing negative websites to the third or fourth page of search results. There is a term for the practice: reverse SEO. Of course, capitalizing on consumer hatred extends beyond the online world, and examples tend to be hilarious. if you remember the late '80s, you remember famous NFL linebacker and asshole Brian Bosworth. After being drafted by the Seahawks in 1987, he didn't waste any time drawing up a storm of controversy before his first ever NFL game against the Denver Broncos. "The Boz" spent the week before the game trash-talking and hinting that he was going to injure local golden boy John Elway. The result was that Bosworth was greeted by a stadium full of irate fans verbally abusing the rookie for three straight hours and wearing T-shirts bearing anti-Bosworth slogans. Who sold those anti-Boz shirts? You can guess: it was Brian Bosworth's own clothing company !

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Now that's what I call Smart maneuvering ! 3+ Comments Share Thank Report 17 May Pritesh Desai, Entrepreneur. Loves designing websites Votes by Karan Kumar, Abhay Jain, Ritwik Sahoo, and 92 more. Steve Jobs booked up all the airway cargo space during the launch of iMac during Christmas time. The competitors couldn't get their product to the market quickly and iMac became the fastest selling computer ever. Edit: Apparently it was Tim Cook's idea. "1998 immediately after Tim Cook's recruitment, Apple bought $100mn worth of

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holiday season air freight months in advance - this was led by Tim and totally left Compaq and others gasping for air (cargo). Tim was held in high regard by Jobs for totally frustrating all other PC makers. iMac was an astounding success, but everyone knew delivering in time was key to making it a mainstream product." 2+ Comments Share Thank Report 12 May Jonny Samson Votes by Janak Shah, Cristian Streng, Jeff Meyerson, and 87 more.

The Steve Jobs emails that show how to win a hard-nosed negotiation
The US governments price-fixing lawsuit against Apple goes to trial next month in New York. Ahead of its court date, the US released emails that purport to show Apple was the ringleader in a scheme to set artificially high ebook prices with some of the largest American publishers, which have already settled the case. The emails have mostly been viewed in the context of the lawsuit, but they also provide an extraordinary view of high-stakes negotiation between the leaders of two powerful firms, Apple and News Corp. They start far apart, but over the course of five days, Apples then-CEO Steve Jobs successfully pulls the son of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch over to his side. Jobs was a famously hard-nosed negotiator who won these kinds of battles all the time. Before book publishers, there was the movie industry. And before that, music record labels. But most of those negotiations were hidden from view. What follows are the emails released last week along with some context; spelling and grammar have been preserved from the originals. * * *

News Corp.s opening move

It was a Friday morning, January 22, 2010. Apple was preparing to release its newest product, a long-rumored tablet computer, the following week. Part of the iPads appeal was supposed to be the vast array of media that could be consumed on it, but one of the largest American publishers, HarperCollins, was holding out from signing a deal to sell its ebooks in Apples iTunes store. Those were the stakes as Eddy Cue , Apples head of iTunes and the App Store, visited executives of HarperCollins and its parent company, News Corp. The substance of that meeting was conveyed in an email sent to Cue later that day by Brian Murray, the CEO of HarperCollins. It detailed the publishers opening bid in the negotiation, with five days remaining until the iPads unveiling. Eddy, Thanks for coming in again this morning. Weve talked over the proposal and I want to make sure that you have a summary of the deal that HarperCollins would be willing to do in your timeframe. 1. Pricing: We need flexibility to price on a title by title basis outside the prescribed tiers in the contract. We will use our best efforts to meet the tiers we discussed. 2. MFN ["most favored nation" status]: In the event that HarperCollins and Apple disagree on a consumer price for a title, HarperCollins needs the ability to make that title available through other agents who support the higher price. 3. Commissions: We need a lower commission on new releases for the economics to work for us and our authors. We believe a 30% commission will lead to more authors asking for ebooks to be delayed a result that will not work for Apple or HarperCollins. 4. The new release window: We need to have flexibility on the agency window. We believe this window should be 6 months rather than 12 months in the event that one or more large retailers do not move to an agency model. Leslie will be sending Kevin a contract that reflects these points in the event you wish to move forward on these terms. Thanks Brian

Those terms were never going to fly with Apple, which had successfully signed deals with HarperCollinss rivals, like Penguin (a division of Pearson) and Simon & Schuster (part ofCBS). Those deals would allow Apple and the publishers to set prices for new ebooks at $12.99three dollars higher than the typical rate at that time on Amazonand take a 30% cut of each sale. But HarperCollins wanted the freedom to set its own prices and worried that $12.99 per ebook would hurt its sales on the new iPad as well as the Kindle. It also didnt want to give up 30%. To back up its position, James Murdoch, a high-ranking News Corp. executive, forwarded Murrays email to Apples then-CEO Steve Jobs, and included the following note: Steve, 91 Thanks for... (more) 1 Comment Share (2) Thank Report 27 Jun Ron Tan, Entrepreneur Votes by Haoting Chow, Anvesh Killamsetty, Raghava Rayudu, and 38 more. Debbie, founder of Mrs. Fields, first baked cookies in her kitchen with the hope of making it into a business. She was discouraged by almost everyone including her husband. "Your business won't work", many said. Coincidentally, her husband stashed a few cookies into his bag to bring to his meeting for his snack. During the meeting, her husband's associate grabbed a piece and quickly raved about it to several people. Upon hearing this, Debbie's confidence skyrocketted, so she immediately opened her first store with money only from her back pocket. Sadly, she virtually had zero customers in the first week. She put on her mittens, brought out the hot tray from the oven, stepped out of the store and started serving to people outside the streets. Her sales grew dramatically from that point on. Mrs. Fields Cookies is now a famous worldwide brand. 42 1+ Comments Share Thank Report 22 Aug Andre Gonsalves, ADGMastering.com Votes by Maxx A. Melendez, Erick Coser, Venelin Mitkovski, and 120 more. During the late 90's, Jay-Z noticed the clothes he wore in his videos and referenced in his songs would become popular. One such company he wore and rapped about was Iceberg History, which were famous for the Snoopy shirts. Jay-Z approached Iceberg for a sponsorship but was turned down as the European designer believed Jay-Z had nothing to do with their growing sales. Jay-Z stopped referencing the brand as well as wearing it in videos and started his own clothing line Rocawear. This was at the exact time, the urban apparel space was taking off. Needless to say, today Rocawear has sales of over $700 million. And I'm not even sure if Iceberg is still around. Interestingly, Jay-Z has sold the rights to Rocawear for $204 million, while still keeping his stake in the company. Which pretty much means Jay doesn't have to operate the company at all, just rap about it and advise the marketing team from time to time.
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3 Comments Share (2) Thank Report 16 May Amaury Fernandez, Studying money management and life Votes by Sameer Gupta, Gareth Michael Jones, Michael Lee, and 92 more.

One of the smartest maneuvers Ive seen in business comes in the form of two somewhat simultaneous decisions made by Warren Buffett. First Decision Please consider the following table:

In this table, I want to emphasize that: (a) Buffett started to earn money from an early age, and (b) had an uncanny ability of compounding his net worth. In other words, he wasnt ordinary and was admittedly aware of his talent and supremely confident in his abilities. In 1969, at age 39, Buffett was coming off one of his best years as an investor. Hed become somewhat of a local celebrity, his net worth hovered in the $25 million range, and most of his investment partners could not have been more satisfied. Also, it didnt hurt that the stock market was experiencing the greatest bull market since the 1920s. In the midst of this, Buffett was uneasy because in staying true to his discipline in following yet evolving his investment methodology he was having a difficult time finding opportunities to put his and his investors money to work in intelligent ways; stocks seemed mostly overvalued to him. Peter Lynch, the successful former mutual fund manager of Fidelitys Magellan Fund, described what happened next. What makes him [Buffett] the greatest investor of all time is that during a certain period when he thought stocks were grossly overpriced, he sold everything and returned all the money to his partners at a sizable profit to them. The voluntary returning of money that others would gladly pay you to continue to manage is, in my experience, unique in the history of finance."

Buffett gave his investment partners some insight into his thinking in an October 1967 letter: My own personal interests dictate a less compulsive approach to superior investment results than when I was younger and leanerI am out of step with present conditions. On one point, however, I am clear. I will not abandon a previous approach whose logic I understand (although I find it difficult to apply) even though it may mean forgoing large, and apparently easy, profits to embrace an approach which I dont fully understand, have not practiced successfully, and which, possibly, could lead to substantial permanent loss of capital. A few years later, the 1973-74 bear market marked one of the worst stock market downturns of the twentieth century and Buffett, who had taken a step back to gain perspective, was well positioned to take advantage of the opportunity.

Second Decision Warren Buffett began buying shares in Berkshire Hathaway on December 12, 1962 at $7.50 a share. His initial intention was to flip his shares for a relatively quick profit, but changed his mind upon having some problems with Berkshires president, Seabury Stanton, and ultimately bought enough Berkshire stock to control the company. Buffetts investment in Berkshire Hathaway would go down as arguably the worst investment of his career. He would later explain: So I bought my own cigar butt, and I tried to smoke it. You walk down the street and you see a cigar butt, and its kind of soggy and disgusting and repels you, but its freeand there may be one puff left in it. Berkshire didnt have any more puffs. So all you had was a soggy cigar butt in your mouth. That was Berkshire Hathaway in 1965. I had a lot of money tied up in the cigar butt. I would have been better off if Id never heard of Berkshire Hathaway. 96 Why? Berkshire Hathaway was undervalued for the wrong reasons; nine years of losses and had closed more than a dozen textile plants over the previous decade The textile business in the US at that time was not a good business and was going downhill; in large part as a result of foreign competition, which was squeezing profit margins to the point of no return Berkshires financial position was unlikely to improve What came next? Heres an overview of some of the tactics used by... (more) 4+ Comments Share (3) Thank Report 6 Aug Wray Rives, Wray Rives CPA CGMA is a Certified Pu... Votes by Rob Hood, Jean Paul Valdez, Vamsi Krishna Tellakula, and 83 more. I worked with a company once who got their start selling refrigerated beer boxes in the early 40's.

At that time everyone used an ice box because refrigeration was not very common. The iceman would go around town every day selling blocks of ice to stores and restaurants so they could keep things cold. They were having a difficult time convincing people to spend $500 for a refrigerated unit because the typical cost of ice was about 50 cents a day, so they hired an electrician to rig up a coin operated meter that could be connected to the power supply on the beer box. When you put two quarters in the meter it allowed electricity to flow to the beer box for 24 hours. Then they followed the iceman around town and when he left they would go in to the store or restaurant and ask "how much did you spend on ice today?". It was usually 50 cents, so they would tell the store owner that they would give him a beer box and all he had to do was put two quarters in the meter each day and he would never have to buy ice again. Then after 5 years the shopkeeper would own the beer box. 87 The present value of fifty cents a day for five years works out to selling a beer box that retailed for $500 for a little over $800. 4+ Comments Share (2) Thank Report 25 Jul Dan Pepper, 11 startups and counting. 65 Votes by Ann Yael Scott, Emma Wayne, Jaspal Singh, and 61 more. The Pac-Man defense as coined by the late Bruce Wasserstein . Excerpt: The Pac-Man defense is a defensive option to stave off a hostile takeover in which a company that is threatened with a hostile takeover "turns the tables" by attempting to acquire its would-be buyer. A major example in U.S. corporate history is the attempted hostile takeover of Martin Marietta by Bendix Corporation in 1982. In response, Martin Marietta started buying Bendix stock with the aim of assuming control over the company. Bendix persuaded Allied Corporation to act as a "white knight ," and the company was sold to Allied the same year. The incident was labeled a "PacMan defense" in retrospect. And.. The name refers to the star of a video game Pac-Man , in which the hero is at first chased around a maze of dots by 4 ghosts. However, after eating a "Power Pellet" dot, he is able to chase and devour the ghosts . The term (though not the technique) was coined by buyout guru Bruce Wasserstein . Internationally, perhaps the best-known case was that of Porsche and the Volkswagen Group , in which Porsche slowly acquired stake in the much larger Volkswagen Group, eventually to the point of owning over 50% of the company in 2009. However, later that year when the two companies announced an official merger, it was announced that Volkswagen would be the surviving partner. 2+ Comments Share Thank Report 8 May Girish Meena, I was taught business Votes by Lim Jin Hui, Shridhar Kulkarni, Praveen Shivapur, and 37 more.

Western Union's take over by Jay Gould

During later half of the 19th century Western Union had absolute (almost) monopoly in the Telegraph business in much of the United States. In order to maintain status quo, they generally bought any competitor who threatened their monopoly in the business. Western Union bought out smaller companies rapidly, and by 1860 its lines reached from the East Coast to the Mississippi River , and from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River . In 1861 it opened the first transcontinental telegraph . ... The company enjoyed phenomenal growth during the next few years. Its capitalization rose from $385,700 in 1858 to $41 million in 1876. American robber baron Jay Gould will play them at their own game and boy the way he will do it! In 1878, Jay Gould started a telegraph company that was in direct competition to Western Union's telegraph business. Since Western Union wanted to enjoy the monopoly they simply bought this company and paid a hefty sum of money to Jay Gould for it. Jay Gould would lay low for a while but before late he was at it again. Just a couple of months after his company was acquired by Western Union, Jay Gould opened another company to compete with Western Union. Western Union again did the same, they bought him off. The pattern will repeat itself again. Jay Gould opened 3rd company to compete against Western Union, Western Union was about to buy him off but this time before they could do that, our man Jay Gould staged a successful take-over of the Western Union. In the end, by 1881 Jay Gould took complete control of the firm. How was this a shrewd move, you ask? As Robert Greene of "48 Laws of Power" puts it, He had established a pattern that had tricked the companys directors into thinking his goal was to be bought out at a handsome rate. Once they paid him off, they relaxed and failed to notice that he was actually playing for higher stakes. The pattern is powerful in that it deceives the other person into expecting the opposite of what you are really doing. 41 Reference: The 48 Laws of Power: Robert Greene: 9780140280197: Amazon.com: Books Western Union Jay Gould Dark Genius of Wall Street Comment Share (1) Thank Report 17 May Stefano Sala Votes by Anmol Dureha, Aditya Lesmana, Achal Gupta, and 52 more. This goes back to the glorious days before the internet, and became a standard example of guerrilla-marketing: a dial-a-pizza service that would give you a 20% discount if you handed them upon delivery a competitor's ad (including phone number) taken from the Yellow Pages. The logic behind it was that next time you had to order a pizza, you would have had access to one less competitor of theirs... Just brilliant. Comment Share Thank Report 4 Sep Joris Peels, 3D printing community manager, consul... 94 Votes by Caner Ahmet, Lim Jin Hui, Chaim Shia, and 90 more. A friend of mine used to do business with a Russian trader in the mid 90's. A

friendly flash cash dealmaker with a firm handshake kind of guy. He was buying up overstock from him, He used to do deals with him every year for years and it was easy money for the trader giving him 200k revenue (with very low margin) a year in Deutschmarks. But, all of a sudden the Russian trader stopped calling him. They met a few months later socially and my friend asked him, so whats been keeping you busy? I thought our deals were extremely profitable for you? "Well....I've got this new business. We go to the Czech Republic and there a network of people collects and buys empty Coca Cola bottles. (In Europe such bottles are recycled and have a deposit on them. So you pay an extra 20 cents when you buy the bottle and get it back once you return it.) We then put these bottles in trucks and drive them to Germany. Then a network of people goes to the supermarkets and returns the empty Czech bottles to the German supermarkets. The bottles are indistinguishable once the labels are removed. In the Czech Republic the deposit is 20 cents, in Germany it is 1 DMark. The trader made at least 500,000 Dmark net in a few months on an arbitrage opportunity he spotted in empty used Coke bottles. And I keep thinking of the production manager at the bottling plant in the Czech Republic wondering why there were so few bottles comming back while the guy in Germany is seeing an increase. I wonder if they ever found out? 5+ Comments Share Thank Report 16 May Hermann J. Stern, CEO Finance research firm Obermatt 41 Votes by Anmol Dureha, Souz Minai, Dhruba Jyoti Chatterjee, and 37 more. Installing an employee into a mobile makers executive board and getting him back by buying the entire company on the cheap. 4 Comments Share (1) Thank Report 4 Sep Hunter McCord 60 Votes by Marc Bodnick, Anurag Kataria, Jason McFarlane, and 56 more. Nike in 1984 after posting its first ever loss spent all it's marketing dollars on an unproven NBA rookie. His name: Michael Jordan. Nike as a company made revenues in 1983 of about $867 million the year before signing Jordan. This year 2013 they are on track to do about $24 Billion dollars in revenue. The signing of Jordan put Nike on the map and the huge growth of Air Jordan sales helped propel Nike into other major sports such as Football, Baseball, and Golf.

4+ Comments Share Thank Report 16 May Selvakumaran Subramaniam, Born in Manchester of South India, 54 Li... Votes by Sriram Vamsi Ilapakurthy, Trusha Parekh, Uthara Padmanabhan, and 50 more. This is not a business maneuver but definitely one of the shrewdest and smartest moves which increased the number of children who got their education in my state of Tamil Nadu in India.

Here goes the story: K. Kamaraj is one of the pioneers of education in Tamil Nadu . He was the chief minister (Equivalent of a Governor in the US) for three terms from 1954 to 1963.

His main focus was on educating the young generation. Under his leadership, the government opened 12000 new schools and made sure that no village is left with out a primary school. Poverty was quite wide spread and people avoided sending their children to school because they could make them earn some money for living instead of spending time at school. K. Kamaraj realised this and came up with a genius of an idea which was to provide at least one meal to the children at school. It was a great idea and it encouraged parents to send their wards to school as they also got food there. This scheme widely known as Midday Meal Scheme was the first of its kind in India. In Tamil Nadu, during British regime the education was only 7 percent. But in Kamaraj's period it reached 37%. This scheme has been in practice till date. If you were to ask my parents, they always say that kids in their generation owed their education to this man! That was one of the reason why he was so popular among the public. Today Mid Day Meal is the worlds largest school feeding programme reaching out to about 12 crore children (120 million) in over 12.65 lakh schools/EGS centres (1.2 million) across the country. Sources: Mid Day Meal Scheme Official Site , Wikipedia: Midday Meal Scheme 1+ Comments Share Thank Report 21 May Chaitanya Kota, Am imperfect. And I love being it :) 36 Votes by Omkar Nisal, Sam Boosalis, Debdatta Basu, and 32 more. I can't call it a maneuver..but I read something like. That unknown insurance warrior who called `Insurance for Death' as "Life Insurance " 1+ Comments Share (1) Thank Report 18 May Glen Golub 57 Votes by Jack Wei, Silambarasan Madanakumar, Abdalla Alkadhimi, and 53 more. A con artist in Phoenix approached Hyatt about a multi-million dollar property that was for sale. The two parties reached a deal and the con artist wrote a check for the deposit which promptly bounced. He wrote a new check without a date on it and convinced them to hold onto it for just a couple days til he could make it good. When it became apparent several days later the check would probably never clear, Hyatt informed him they were backing out of the deal. The con artist took them to court.

In court the judge ruled that because they took an undated check and agreed to hold onto it until such time that the check would be good, the contract was still valid and both parties were still bound by the terms until the check becomes good. Hyatt ended up having to pay him a million dollars just to get out of the agreement. 4 Comments Share Thank Report 19 Sep Doug Allsebrook 73 Votes by Nathan Dintenfass, JSwaroop Repaka, Stephanie Vardavas, and 69 more. This is another story about Henry Ford, but this time, hes not the shrewd businessman. Instead, its his suppliers, the Dodge brothers. When Henry Ford went to start the Ford Motor Company we know today, he had already started one car company that had gone bankrupt (the Detroit Automobile Company), and walked away from another (the Henry Ford Company, which eventually changed its name to the Cadillac Automobile Company). He needed cash to start again, and he needed a supplier of parts. So in 1903, he made a deal with John and Horace Dodge. They provided him with $7,000 worth of automobile parts and $3,000 cash in exchange for 10 percent ownership of the Ford Motor Company. The Dodge brothers were also to receive all of Fords assets if Ford went bankrupt again. The car was the Model T, and Dodge manufactured every part of it except the rubber tires and the wooden seats. It sold well, and the first year, the Dodge brothers received $10,000 in dividends. So the Dodge brothers were making money two ways: once by selling parts to Ford, and again by owning stock in the successful company. This arrangement continued until 1914, when Ford completed a new plant in Detroit. The new plant meant he no longer needed parts from the Dodges as he intended to make his own. Ford offered to lease Dodges plant and run it himself, but the Dodge brothers had another idea. They knew all of the strengths and weaknesses of the Model T. Over the years, theyd suggested improvements to it to Henry Ford, but he never agreed to them. So the Dodge brothers now decided to build their own car to compete with the Model T, and incorporate all the improvements the Model T didnt have. To bankroll the venture, they had their profits from their dealings with Ford, plus the ongoing dividends from their ownership of Ford stock. Not surprisingly, Ford was not happy that his profits were now bankrolling his competitor, so he announced that hed stop paying dividends. This hurt him personally as he owned 51% of his company. The Dodge brothers sued and got $19 million in back dividends. In 1918, the Dodge brothers sold their Ford stock for $12,500 per share, bringing in $25 million. They had also received about $10 million in dividends between 1903 and 1909 alone. Remember that their original investment was just $10,000 in parts and cash. Because the Dodge brothers made so much money from their business ventures with Henry Ford, business historians consider their investment to be the most profitable in the history of American commerce. Comment Share (1) Thank Report 28 May Joseph Carpenter 74 Votes by Andy Lee Chaisiri, Tanvir Aslam, Kamal Gaur, and 70 more. Years ago I heard about an old guy who sold heavy construction equipment. He was a high school dropout but very street smart. He had a couple of bulldozers he was selling. One was a smaller version that was cheap and efficient. The other was a huge monster dozer with all sorts of bells and whistles that no one really needed and was much more expensive than the smaller version, but also much more profitable. Needless to say the smaller version was the most popular at the time. But the old guy knew human nature so he gave the dozers new names...the smaller one he renamed the "Little Dick" and the bigger one "The Big Dick". Now of course no bulldozer driver wanted to be accused of driving a "Little Dick" and so sales of the more expensive, and profitable, "Big Dick" soared and the old guy made a fortune. 1 Comment Share Thank Report 21 May

36 Paul Stregevsky, Science and Technology Writer Votes by Shailesh Pandit, Abhimanyu Bhosale, Siva Krishna Shushanth S, and 32 more. In 1992, Borland International and Lotus Software were locked in mortal combat to win market share. Borland, the scrappy newcomer, was selling its spreadsheet software, Quattro Pro, for the same price as Lotus 1-2-3: a hefty $495. But in a bid to win over Lotus users, Borland would let you buy the software for just $99.95 if you'd mail them Page 1 from the Lotus 1-2-3 manual. Seeing a jujutsu opportunity, Lotus acted quickly: It offered to mail Page 1 to anyone who wanted it; the more, the merrier. The result? For a few weeks, nearly everyone--even people who were not Lotus loyalists--grabbed Borland's $500 software for $100. 5+ Comments Share Thank Report 21 May Fred Landis, Investigative Reporter 69 Votes by Oliver Emberton, Jack Yu, Jordan Hughes, and 65 more. A Brazilian kid who was a student in the US and took a job with Costco. He returned to Sao Paolo and his family opened the first Costco-style store in South America. The first year they made over $100 million US. 5+ Comments Share Thank Report 7 May Bhargav Golla, Student 16 Votes by Sundar Lakshmanan, Amit Kumar, Omkar Nisal, and 12 more. The right package The Sachet Revolution by Chik Shampoo which changed the way FMCG giants like P&G and Unilever looked at developing markets like that of India. Chik packaged shampoo in small sachets and sold it at a mere 0.5 rupees and the shampoos moved from shelves in departmental stores to every store in nook and corner of India. All Mr. Ranganathan did was, reaching to the common man. Comment Share (1) Thank Report 20 May Arjun Satya, undergraduate @IITB 44 Votes by Omkar Nisal, Ajeet Khhabya, Abhirut Gupta, and 40 more. I don't know whether I should call it a maneuver or not,but here it is:-

Predictive Analytics Company 'Target' Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did. Shocked? Well don't be. These cookie-based data analytics companies monitor your internet searching and website browsing to predict what kind of person you are or what is your current situation. They collect these raw data to segment you in a particular category based on your demographics and psycho-graphics and then forward these information to ad-serving companies that expose you to the advertisements that are relevant to you and there are chances that you might click them. As for what happened in the above news, here it is. Pole works for Target. "[Pole] ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Poles colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date." As Poles computers crawled through the data, he was able to

identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a pregnancy prediction score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

"One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23 and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. Theres, say, an 87 percent chance that shes pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August."

So Target started sending coupons for baby items to customers according to their pregnancy scores. Duhigg shares an anecdote so good that it sounds made up that conveys how eerily accurate the targeting is. An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager: "My daughter got this in the mail! he said. Shes still in high school, and youre sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?
"The manager didnt have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the mans daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again." "On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. I had a talk with my daughter, he said. It turns out theres been some activities in my house I havent been completely aware of. Shes due in August. I owe you an apology." via- How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did 1 Comment Share Thank Report 19 May Lewis Lin, CEO of Impact Interview. Impact Inter... Votes by Andy Lee Chaisiri, Adarsh Hegde, Ashton Lee, and 39 more.

Eat24 reduced their marketing costs 90% by advertising where no else would dare tread: porn sites. Clever insight, fantastic results, and a talented creative execution team. For the full story, read their Sept 9 blog post: How to Advertise on a Porn Website 43 2+ Comments Share Thank Report 12 Sep

16 Lakshay Verma, I read everything I see. Votes by Omkar Nisal, Sam Boosalis, Yash Gandhi, and 12 more.

Twelp Force by Best Buy Twelp Force (i.e. Twitter help force) is a real-time Twitter-based customer care service, managing every day the requests of consumers who face technical difficulties or are in need of advice. The channel is collectively managed by more than 3,000 Best Buy employees, through a help desk account. Imagine youre in the company boardroom, and you propose to let every single one of your thousands of employees offer advice to customers on the Internet. Although most of your employees may offer advice in the company stores on a daily basis, isnt allowing all of them to do it on the Internet a huge risk? Wouldn't everyone in the boardroom look at you like you were insane? Best Buy decided to take this risk using Twitter. The gamble appears to have paid off. Any Best Buy employee can sign up using his or her own personal Twitter account, and whenever they add the hashtag #twelpforce the tweet gets added to the Twelpforce feed. No tweet is added to the feed without the hashtag. To ensure employee accountability and allow customers to build a relationship with a specific employee, each tweet posted on Twelpforce includes a signature at the end indicating the personal Twitter account of the employee. Of course, not all employees sign up using their personal account. They can create a new account with a name like TwelpFromBob to use just for Twelpforce contributions. How does this work? To understand how this thing works, let's look at examples directly from the Twelpforce feed: On July 23 @DespicableP tweeted: @twelpforce Do you have any suggestions on fashionable ipod speak ers? A few hours later, this tweet showed up on the Twelpforce account: @Despicable P This speak er dock by iHome is one of my personal favorites: iHome - Speak er System - Black via @agent1834 In addition to recommendations, members of the Twelpforce answer tougher customer service questions. Check out the following exchange, for example, from July 22: @TWELPFORCE Hi, I am having problems with the geo location on my iphone i am WAY off where I really am. anything I can do to correct it? @PhoeLam have you turned on the GPS function? It will drain more battery, but be more accurate. via @bernierjohn @PhoeLam Under Settings->General->Location Services (On/Off) Turn on for better Location via @bernierjohn

In an age where most customer service hotlines consist of button pushing your way through five different menus just to reach the smooth jazz hold music, its nice to know that there are real human beings on Best Buys Twitter account who want to help. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R... Sources: 1. http://mirskylegal.com/2010/08/b... 2. https://twitter.com/twelpforce 2+ Comments Share Thank Report 18 May Arvind Prabhakar 24 Votes by Vinay Sharma, Ritesh Sharma, Kartik Bhatia, and 20 more. When the competition between Coca-Cola and Pepsi was at it's peak and each company was trying to best the other somehow, one company came up with an idea that nearly crushed the other. It was Coca-Cola which came up with stroke of brilliance by which their sales skyrocketed. What was this idea? Vending Machines! Yes, vending machines. Coke installed vending machines everywhere you can imagine, in offices, lobbies, cafes, schools, colleges, any other place you can imagine. Their idea was, whenever someone is thirsty they should have access to Coke more easily than they have access to water. And it worked! Comment Share (1) Thank Report 23 May Ben Austin, Digital Marketing & Communications 27 Votes by Prathamesh Karve, Rohil Philip, Siva Krishna Shushanth S, and 23 more. When Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1994, Netscape was the largest web browser in terms of market share. Hard to believe, but if you downloaded a copy of Netscape Navigator in 1996, the default "front page" of the browser would feature things such as press releases announcing that Archer Daniels Midland had licensed 200 copies of Netscape Navigator. Hooray! Nobody at Netscape seemed to see the value of that front page, its advertising revenue, putting any message of value there (like a guide to the Internet?), or charging for others to access the space. So Yahoo! did something shrewd -- they came in as a pair of goofy guys, silly name, and -- "can we put our web directory on your front page?" Netscape said yes, and Yahoo!'s traffic burst began. The most amusing chapter was this -- Google did the same thing right back at Yahoo! less than a decade later. Two guys, silly name, and -- "can we serve our results to your customers?" Yahoo! said yes. The rest is history. 2 Comments Share Thank Report 29 May Richard Tabassi, Renaissance Ape, Occasionally Witty Biped 81 Votes by Seb Paquet, Natalie Friedberg, Stephen Jordan, and 77 more. Henry Ford Again. Created a rumor he was leaving Ford to start another company, devalued the stock, and bought the entire company and took it private. In 1915, James Couzens resigned from the Ford Motor Company, recognizing that it Henry's company, and that no one else's opinion would ever matter as much. In 1916, Ford antagonized the other shareholders by declaring a paltry dividend, even in the face of record profits. In response, the shareholders sued, and in 1919 the Michigan Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that it was unreasonable to withhold fair dividends under the circumstances. The Ford Motor Company was forced to distribute $19 million in dividend payments. In his own response to the escalating feud, Henry threatened publicly to leave the company and form a new one. He even made plans and discussed the next car he would produce. Fearing that the worth of Ford stock would plummet, the minority shareholders

suddenly became eager to sell; agents working surreptitiously for Henry Ford quietly bought up lot after lot of shares. The sellers did not receive all that the shares were worth, because of the rumors, but they each emerged with a fortune. James Couzens, the most wily of the lot, received the highest price per share, and turned to a career in the U.S. Senate (he won his race, unlike the old boss) with $30 million in the bank. Ford gained complete control of the company at a cost of $125 million -- $106 million of the stock, plus $19 million for the court-ordered dividend -- a fantastic outlay that he financed with a $75 million loan from two eastern banks. On July 11, 1919, when he signed the last stock transfer agreement, the fifty-five-year-old mogul was so enthused that he danced a jig. The stock was divided up and placed in the names of Henry, Clara, and Edsel Ford. 4+ Comments Share (2) Thank Report 21 May Peter Johnston, For effective marketing strategies, s... 57 Votes by Mangesh Singh, Eric Pilon, Yuvraj Wadhwani, and 53 more. For years a guy called Per Lindstrom had been punting the idea of a Transatlantic balloon flight, looking for sponsorship. Then he met Richard Branson. Branson offered him the 1/4m he needed on three conditions: 1. He had full advertising rights for the balloon. 2. He had full PR rights for the crossing. 3. He could come too. Within a week he had sold subsidiary sponsorship around the balloon for 1/2 million. With them paying him before he paid a penny to Lindstrom. So he got worldwide publicity, a reputation as a daring adventurer and 1/4m (it rose to a lot more than that) in his pocket. It made Virgin a household name. 3+ Comments Share (1) Thank Report 4 Sep Hemanth Kumar Thangudu, Founder of http://leanbelts.com Votes by Ipsita Nayak, Sahil Garg, Denis Bykov, and 33 more. Charging $100 to $1000 for 'designer' glasses that cost $30 or less to manufacture. Luxottica Group S.p.A. is the world's largest eyewear company.[2] Its best known brands are Ray-Ban and Persol . It also makes sunglasses and prescription frames for a multitude of designer brands such as Chanel and Prada , whose designs and trademarks are used under license. Luxottica also makes sunglasses branded Giorgio Armani , Burberry , Stella McCartney ,Versace , Vogue, Miu Miu , Tory Burch , and Donna Karan . [3] Its prime competitor is the Safilo Group S.p.A .

Delivering the appearance of customization while remaining a monopoly. Luxottica owns 7000 retail lens shops in the USA. They sell hundreds of brands, that they've all manufactured. 37 1 Comment Share Thank Report 2 Sep Abhimanyu Bhosale, I can be whatever you want me to be. 17 Votes by Ashwini Anvekar, Kamal Gaur, Yash Gandhi, and 13 more.

I think this was the most revolutionary thing happened to the computer industry. Steve Jobs acquiring the mouse and GUI Good artists copy, great artists steal. - Steve Jobs Here, its great innovation. It was a really smart move against IBM, the tech giant at that time. It really set Apple computers apart from the rest. How? What is so smart about stealing ideas? When Steve Jobs was first shown the mouse at Xerox, he was sure this is the way people will be interacting with computers. So YES, the idea was from Xerox. Here are the instructions Jobs gave Hovey. This is what innovation sounds like: So he explains it, and he says, 'You know, [the Xerox mouse] is a mouse that cost three hundred dollars to build and it breaks within two weeks. Here's your design spec: Our mouse needs to be manufacturable for less than fifteen bucks. It needs to not fail for a couple of years, and I want to be able to use it on Formica and my bluejeans. He convinced Xerox Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars'its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away'if PARC would 'open its kimono.' Cherry on the pie Jobs got the Xerox guy, the person responsible for GUI, Mouse and lot of other things, to Apple.

1 Comment Share (2) Thank Report 19 May Chua Hsieh Li 65 Votes by Seb Paquet, Abhishek Ghose, Aditya Chauhan, and 61 more.

Nathan Rothschild's Carrier Pigeons

One of the most famous and consequential uses of real time knowledge occurred in Europe in 1815. Early in the 19th century information obtainable through communication channels about distant events was painstakingly slow to arrive. Roads were rough, unfinished, really little more than cart paths. There was no wire transmission or speedy organized courier services for delivering messages over vast distances. Word of the outcome of a battle, treaty or an important political affair could takes weeks or months to arrive where the result was most keenly anticipated. The Battle of Waterloo is possibly the most famous military engagement in history. The battle site, the tiny, remote Belgian village of Waterloo, is synonymous today with one's "final act". Waterloo became Napoleon Bonaparte's denouement. His inglorious defeat by the British forces, commanded by the Duke of Wellington, expedited his exile to the tiny island of Elba and the decline of France as a military power for almost a century.

Prussian, Austrian and Russian armies had allied to fight with the British against Napoleon. All of these great armies, moving across vast swaths of Europe terrain needed extensive provisioning, arming and logistic support to maintain troops as they girded for the great battle. This was an incredibly expensive enterprise. Massive funding was required to support the campaign. The Rothschild banking family was already famous across most of Europe for providing a secure funding source for national governments. The Rothschild's had established five branches of their enterprise. The largest, most important were based in Paris and London. The final Napoleonic war was largely funded by Nathan Rothschild of the family's London branch. This house had provided large sums to both the British and the French. The Rothschild's were famously indifferent to rulers and governments. Nathan Rothschild once famously remarked, "The man who controls the British money supply controls the British, and I control the British money supply". His goal was to profit no matter whom was in power or won a war. Nathan Rothschild knew that early knowledge of the winner at Waterloo, details of the battle, the severity of the loser's defeat would be invaluable in financially manipulating markets to profit from the result. The family had invested heavily over the decades in field agents that forwarded tips and messages, fast packet ships and trained carrier pigeons to speedily deliver notes. The arrival of the carrier pigeons in London with specific battle results from Waterloo provided Rothschild the information he needed to begin to plant rumors. Initially he spread the word that the British had lost. Investors began to adjust their bond and security positions in reaction to this negative news. Rothschild took opposite positions, and then, he strategically released the actual truthful news that Wellington had vanquished Napoleon. This enabled the family to profit on both sides of the trades. It is estimated that the Rothschild family extrapolated an increase in wealth of 20 times their pre-war capital. The foresight to train a winged air force of carrier pigeons proved fortuitous and extremely profitable for the banking house of Rothschild. The edge they enjoyed in receiving real-time information, and spectacularly profiting from the knowledge, became legendary and only increased the perception that they were a family of financial Merlin's. Their power and wealth has multiplied exponentially in the past 200 years and has been maintained to this very day. Article Source: Page on EzineArticles 4+ Comments Share Thank Report 16 May Thieme Hennis, PhD in education & technology @ tudel... Votes by Marc Bodnick, Seb Paquet, Uthara Padmanabhan, and 59 more. A friend of mine has a business catering parties and festivals in the Netherlands, mainly Amsterdam Area. He has grown quite substantially the last couple of years, and another person in his network wanted to enter the market as well. My friend's company was invited to write an offer for a medium sized party in Amsterdam. However, he knew that the organizer of the party was very good friends of the new competitor, and understood that his offer was only to benchmark and that the other guy would be employed for the job anyhow. Hence, he sent in a very low offer, even under their cost price, and indeed the other guy got the job. However, using my friend's company estimate, they had underestimated the real costs, and hired too few bar people and facilities, with long lines and too few drinks during the party and a very unsatisfied customer at the end. That was a very bad start for the company. 63 1+ Comments Share Thank Report 20 May Poorna Shashank, Student of life. 16 Votes by Philip Gamble, Viraj Thakkar, Ayush Baheti, and 12 more. "Pepsi: There is Noting Official About it" campaign The 1996 Wills World Cup was being played in the Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and Coke was the official sponsor for the World Cup. During the World Cup, Pepsi launched an advertising campaign which quite literally pulled the rug from under Coke and ICC.

Sample the video below containing all the ads of the campaign. All the stalwarts of cricket were mouthing "Pepsi: Nothing official about it" and Coke in spite of being the sole sponsor was left fuming in its mouth.

In spite of not being the sponsor, Pepsi's ad campaign line became the line of the World Cup. This led to ICC formulating the rule that only the official sponsor could associate itself with the ad campaigns during the World Cup. Comment Share Thank Report 1 Jun Ariel Trybuch Votes by Will Robbins, Jane Roe, Steve Pender, and 32 more. 2 brothers took a 5 gallon water jug to Italy. They went to the Vatican and during mass, the pope bless the audience, and subsequently their 5 gallon jug. They then took drops of water, placed them in pendants and sold them as water blessed by the pope, which was technically true. Made a lot of money. Love it! 36 Comment Share Thank Report 22 May Aakash Shah, Avid Tech Reader,Engineering student ... 30 Votes by Neel Borooah, Sriram Sundar, Anantpal Singh Saluja, and 26 more. Samsung Mobiles

Last fall, on a mid-September morning, amidst great hype and fanfare Apple CEO Tim Cook stepped onto the stage to reveal to the world, the iPhone 5. Simultaneously, far away, in a Wolfgang Puck restaurant in Los Angeles huddled up around laptops and TVs, were a geeky group of marketing executives, carefully tracking each new feature they introduced and monitoring the swarm of online comments via blogs and social media websites.

Two hours later, when Mr. Cook stepped off the stage, the group had already drafted a series of print, digital and Tv ads. The following week - as the iPhone 5 went on sale - the company aired their TV ad mocking the Apple fans queuing up for the new phone. The commercial went on to become the most popular tech ad of 2012, with 70 million views online. The company that remarkably pulled this off - Samsung Mobiles.

Here is the ad from Samsung that created a lot of stir in the Mobile Industry.

Here is another pic from Samsung's marketing campaign highlighting the features of S3 over iPhone 5

Sure iPhone 5 went on to become the top selling phone and people who were gonna buy the iPhone did eventually buy it. But the ads and the campaign created a lot of buzz for Samsung and S3 went on to become the best selling Android phone ever with sales figures having crossed 50 million devices sold as of March 2013. Some people may call it over-the-top campaigning but it was very effective and to me its was Marketing Genius! Samsung's move had a very huge and a positive impact on its sales and changed the perception of people to the way they saw Galaxy devices. It also increased its brand value immensely. Today Samsung is one of the largest spenders in the Marketing Segment with huge campaigns for its Galaxy devices, the latest being the S4. Also Samsung's strategy of having a model of Galaxy devices in each price category is paying huge dividends. Yes people do argue that Samsung under-

specs every phone below the flagship line but that to me is justifiable. Samsung has managed to put a 'Smartphone' into the hands of people even in the lower strata of social order and has helped cement its place as The Largest Mobile Phone manufacturer in terms of Volume . Aided by a tight supply chain, Samsung has percolated into every corner of the globe, churning out 215 million smartphones last year and a huge credit for this goes to its Marketing Team. 1+ Comments Share (2) Thank Report 21 Jun Jorge Supelano 58 Votes by Marc Bodnick, Jaspal Singh, Bert Cattoor, and 54 more. The Coca Cola move to enter the Venezuelan market in the mid-nineties. It bought the bottling operations from Pepsi that belonged to the Cisneros family and made Pepsi go from a dominant position to have 0% market share in that country, overnight. How ethical was this move from the family (which was close friends to Pepsico's CEO? It's up to you to decide. Business lesson learned: don't put your all your critical value chain processes in the hands of one subcontractor. Coca-cola Coup Renders Pepsi Flat In Venezuela How Venezuela Is Becoming Coca-Cola Country 4 Comments Share Thank Report 14 May Ravi Janardhan, Web Analytics & SEO services 13 Votes by Hamada Kaido, Vibhav Bisht, Nalin Savara, and 9 more. The art dealer Joseph Duveen was once confronted with a terrible problem. The millionaires who had paid so dearly for Duveen's paintings were running out of wall space, and with inheritance taxes getting ever higher, it seemed unlikely that they would keep buying. The solution was the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which Duveen helped create in 1937 by getting Andrew Mellon to donate his collection to it. The National Gallery was the perfect front for Duveen. In one gesture, his clients avoided taxes, cleared wall space for new purchases, and reduced the number of paintings on the market, maintaining the upward pressure on their prices. All this while the donors created the appearance of being public benefactors. Excerpt From: 48 Laws of Power. 1 Comment Share Thank Report 14 Sep Jeff Chausse, UX Design + Product Management 53 Votes by Seb Paquet, Shailesh Pandit, Will Robbins, and 49 more. About 5 years ago, I came across a story about Jack Tramiel, head of the once great Commodore computer company. One reason Commodore systems were so cheap was because he repeatedly used the following "evil genius" maneuver: 1. Buy parts in bulk from a small company on credit 2. Neglect to pay the company for the parts 3. Wait for the company to nearly go bankrupt 4. Buy out the company dirt cheap 5. Forgive their own debts 6. Rinse, repeat. I heard this story on a video podcast called "Play Value" which is available here: Commodore 64 6+ Comments Share (1) Thank Report 21 May

23 Agrim Singh, Jack of all trades, master of (n)one Votes by Siddharth Agrawal, Athyuttam Reddy, Debasish Patra, and 19 more. The 'Share a Coke' campaign by Coca-Cola. With the world flocking to the digital space, the way we connect has started to change, and, it would seem, the more friends we gather online the fewer we see in real life. Coke needed to adapt to this changing environment and needed a campaign that would encourage people to connect with the brand both online and offline. So in 2011, Coca-Cola printed 150 of Australias most popular names on labels of Coke bottles for the first time in the brands history, to remind the Aussies not only of those people presently in their lives, but also the people they may have lost touch with, giving them a reason to connect. The multi-platform communications strategy acted as an invitation to Share a Coke with someone you know or want to know, and gave people the tools to find, connect and share. The move grabbed immediate attention and the campaign worked wonders for the company as their sales increased tremendously. Watch this video to know more about the campaign.

3+ Comments Share (1) Thank Report 21 May Geordie Keitt, somewhat relaxed Votes by John Phileas, Yash Gandhi, Mike Prozan, and 25 more. I've not "seen" this, but it's legendary that Nathan Rothschild cratered the English stock market by spreading rumors of English defeat at Waterloo. He then graciously bought up all the stock at pennies on the dollar (pound?) before the actual news of victory arrived. Nathan Mayer Rothschild 2+ Comments Share Thank Report 7 May Shreedhar Manek, Learner, Liver, Dreamer Votes by Sriram Vamsi Ilapakurthy, Pritesh Desai, Chris Grayson, and 17 more.

21

Sir Richard Branson selling a successful Virgin Records to fund Virgin Atlantic Airways in 1992.

We all know what happened to Record Labels when Napster came along. 1 Comment Share Thank Report 10 May Ipsita Nayak, Teacher and trainer 29 Votes by Koustubh Bagade, Nachiketa Dash, David Lee, and 25 more. Brands as widely differing as Maggi , Volvo , Hawai chappal and Dettol, have one thing in common for all Indians from aam admi to crorepati. All these multinational brands are also local generic names for their product groups. Yet strangely, none of the multinationals that spent crores of rupees on promoting these brands has ever chosen to leverage this invaluable advantage. Maggi Instant Noodles is a case in point. It remains the default word for instant noodles even today although it has received tough competitions of late from the other players in the market. Though Nestle didnt do (as far as I know) any targeted hard-selling, the popularity of the brand-name compliment to Nestles positioning and pricing strategy when it was launched 30 years ago. Back then, instant noodles had about as much chance of success as a wild card entry winning Wimbledon. Several attempts by other companies had failed, including one by Lipton, which was then a separate company under the Unilever

umbrella. In the late seventies, instant noodles was among Liptons many attempts to diversify from its core business of selling packaged tea (a cornflakes brand Bingo! and a tea drink called 21 were others). Liptons instant noodle offering was called Supermum, but it failed mainly because of its positioning. In a consumer market in which eating habits were conservative, Supermum was marketed as a replacement to the primary food in an Indian meal: rice and roti. Contrast this with what Nestle did with Maggi in 1984. Instead of trying to insinuate it into the main Indian meal as a cereal substitute, Nestle chose the utility route, positioning the product as a snack for children. By doing so, Nestle addressed a key concern of the average middle class Indian housewife and making it a major hit with this most important segment of consumers. The positioning has proved so durable that Nestle hasnt changed it significantly in a quarter century, though competition is inevitably eating into its market share. Another product which revolutionalized the Indian concept of breakfast is Kellogg's Cornflakes. It was something unthought of and unimagined a few decades back.Today it has found entry into millions of houses around the globe irrespective of their traditional concept of food. The strategy is simple - be the first one to do something; by the time people learn to imitate you, you will be a household name. The followers will be bound to struggle with their branding. Comment Share Thank Report 20 Jun Nigel Burwood, Dealer in books also runs Jot101 37 Votes by Wellington W. Sculley, Oliver Harper, Hassan Baig, and 33 more. It has to be the Rothschilds getting the earliest news of the British victory at Waterloo and making billions from it. Wiki explains: ...the family network enabled Nathan Rothschild to receive in London the news of Wellington's victory at the Battle of Waterloo a full day ahead of the government's official messengers. Rothschild's first concern on this occasion was to the potential financial advantage on the market which the knowledge would have given him; he and his courier did not immediately take the news to the government. It was then repeated in later popular accounts, such as that of Morton . The basis for the Rothschild's most famously profitable move was made after the news of British victory had been made public. Nathan Rothschild calculated that the future reduction in government borrowing brought about by the peace would create a bounce in British government bonds after a two year stabilisation, which would finalise the post-war restructuring of the domestic economy.[15] [16] [17] In what has been described as one of the most audacious moves in financial history, Nathan immediately bought up the government bond market, for what at the time seemed an excessively high price, before waiting two years, then selling the bonds on the crest of a short bounce in the market in 1817 for a 40% profit. Given the sheer power of leverage the Rothschild family had at their disposal, this profit was an enormous sum. The method - a relay of messengers on good fast horses! 1+ Comments Share Thank Report 30 May Chris Milas, President & Account Director @ PrintS... 54 Votes by Bheshaj Joshi, Austin Kelleher, Pritesh Desai, and 50 more. I read somewhere that when Steve Jobs came back to Apple he noticed that their competitors were ordering from the same suppliers as Apple was. Although he tried to get the suppliers to exclusively work with Apple, it didn't work. So, in order to stop the competition, he overbought supply to stall the competitors and by the time they could get any supply, their tech was old and they couldn't move it - thus forcing them out of competition. Tim Cook may have devised this plan as he was in charge of supply chain management and is probably one of the reasons why he is now CEO of Apple. BTW, if anyone can tell the story better, please comment for an update. Thanks! 4+ Comments Share Thank Report 10 May Seb Paquet, Reality Theorist, http://twitter.com/... 47 Votes by Marius Nedelcu, Tom Gillis, Arnon Ilani, and 43 more. Writer, philosopher and historian Voltaire getting rich by gaming a math flaw in French lottery

Voltaire was quite wealthy. You might assume that his riches came from the sale of his many writing pieces. You would be wrong. Voltaire won the French lottery, and lets just say he didnt do it honestly. Voltaire teamed up with a statistician at the time named Charles Marie de la Condamine. Together, they recognized a flaw in the lottery. It ran from 1728-1730 and was meant to raise money for the French government. However, Voltaire and Condamine noticed that the government was offering a sum of prize money that was far greater than what they would make by selling all the lottery tickets. To increase their odds, Voltaire and Condamine bought a number of tickets and won the lottery. Voltaires share was 1 million francs. He was set for the rest of his life and free to write and observe as he pleased. Source: Odd Statistical Snippet of the week: Voltaire and the statistician who won the lottery and proved that the earth is not round. 3+ Comments Share (1) Thank Report 25 May Seth Jeffery 19 Votes by Kirti Satish Manian, Siva Krishna Shushanth S, Saurav Sharma, and 15 more. My brother told me this morning of a shrewd business manoeuvre made by a company he used to work for. He had developed a brand new feature for their accounting software, allowing the reports that the company's developers used to have to code for their clients to now be built quickly and easily with an intuitive UI so that the clients could do it themselves. The heads of the company saw a problem with this new feature. First of all, the clients would no longer pay the accounting company for the development work of the reports, and secondly, once the competitors spot this feature they would all develop it and drive down the price of the software. So instead, the company decided to include the feature but not tell anyone about it. Instead of telling the clients they could use the feature to build their own reports, the company continued to bill them for report generation but now they could build the reports in half the time, while pretending it was taking just as long! This allowed the company to keep charging the client for the work, not let the competitors know about the feature, and give their developers extra time to focus on making the product even better! 1+ Comments Share Thank Report 13 Jun Michael Douglas 22 Votes by Stephanie Vardavas, Arjun Verma, Felipe Pires, and 18 more. I love David Fry's post about Herbert Dow. Reading it brought to mind one of the personal anecdotes of my uncle, Ted Bauland. He ran sales for Borden's when it was a dominant dairy products producer in the middle part of the last century. Selling ice cream to drug stores in the 1950's was big business as they were a major seller of ice cream cones. Unexpectedly one spring, Borden's began to lose drug store accounts. My uncle, as competitive a business person as I have ever encountered, learned that Sealtest was offering them new ice cream freezers free as an inducement to switch brands. A man who clung tightly to every dollar he made, at a hastily convened meeting of his sales managers, my uncle gave them three instructions. 1. Visit the drug store owners of all the long standing Sealtest accounts. 2. Tell them this: "I know that you are a Sealtest ice cream customer, yet I see that you don't have one of the new ice cream freezers that Sealtest is giving away to our customers. Did they not tell you about the free freezers? None of the Sealtest customers I've visited have one of those new freezers either. I can't figure out why Sealtest would not offer a free freezer to loyal and long standing customers like you. At Borden's, though, we know how to treat our customers. I'm happy to give you the same freezer to become one. 3. Finally, I don't want to give away a single freezer. Let the sales reps know that if they have to give one away they'll lose their job. (You see, my uncle was an avid poker player and loved the bluff. He wanted his reps to understand that the counter tactic was a bluff meant to wreak havoc on Sealtest - not to duplicate

the tactic of his competitor. The ante for the sales reps: their jobs. That was how my uncle liked to work - high stakes. You can be sure none of the reps winged it, and that sales managers accompanied them to ensure nothing went awry.) Not a single salesman lost his job. Within a few days my uncle received a phone call from a distraught Sealtest sales executive who insisted that he stop. My uncle agreed under these terms: return all of the accounts you took from us, and I'll stop calling on yours. Oh, and they get to keep the freezer you gave them. Borden's stopped losing drug store accounts immediately. A month later my uncle had his sales people visit the Sealtest accounts again. After admiring their new freezers, the sales reps were instructed to commend the drug store owner on his business, and for knowing the value of a good and loyal customer. They would then ask the drug store owner how important it was to him to deal with suppliers who also knew the value a a good and loyal customer. Broden's market share grew. Within a few years my uncle would join Sealtest to run sales. 4+ Comments Share Thank Report 15 Sep Joshua Landy, Likey science. Enjoy curiosities of l... 15 Votes by Gareth Michael Jones, Michael Lee, Jason McFarlane, and 11 more. In the early 1900's, Henry Huntington was supposed to own the biggest railway company in the west, Southern Pacific because it was his family's dynasty. The board booted him out, so he bought up most of the land to the south, the empty area called Los Angeles. He expanded the city as folks arrived on Route 66 to escape the dust bowl and the Great Depression in the Midwest. He built LA into the then-desert by building sub-developments and directing the railway into his new developments on land that he had sold to the developers. Brilliant! When his old competitors came after his business, he married his own aunt (not by blood, mind you, but still declass) to re-merge the family fortune and take control once more. Pretty weird story. 1 Comment Share Thank Report 28 May Ken Larson, Over 30 years in federal government p... 25 Votes by Robert S Mozayeni, Luis Francisco Hernandez, Curtis F Rodgers, and 21 more. IBM getting out of the PC business,selling it to the Chinese and getting into the large scale services business. They are now building the largest server farm in Asia just outside of Beijing.

IBM To Build Massive China Cloud Data Centers -- InformationWeek Comment Share Thank Report 7 May Josh Roybal, Talent Manager 22 Votes by Nicholas Snyder, Geordie Keitt, Tom Wills, and 18 more. This is one of my favorite music business dirty maneuver's and was the impetus that led to music mogul David Geffen becoming a Billionaire. "David Geffen was presiding over a fledgling, money-losing record company that was a minor and not particularly distinguished satrapy at the margins of Steve Ross's Warner Communications empire. Geffen's audacious goal was to hornswoggle Warner, which owned half of Geffen Records, to give up its 50 percent stake as a reward for Geffen's agreeing to a five-year contract extension with the parent company. The chief of Warner Brothers Records, Mo Ostin, was unlikely to accede to such a request, but Geffen sensed that Ross -- who had a soft spot for Geffen -- might be pliable. What Geffen did next, Tom King reports in this exhaustive and often fingerwagging biography of the entertainment mogul, was ''preposterous, duplicitous and

downright awful.'' Geffen believed that if he could pick a fight with Ostin -- a longtime mentor -- he could use the dust-up as an excuse to refuse to negotiate with him, allowing unimpeded access to the big man himself. After several aborted attempts at antagonizing Ostin, King writes, Geffen hatched a plan to alienate him through his wife. Over lunch at the Ivy, Geffen told Evelyn Ostin, ''You know, Mo really doesn't care about you that much,'' and began making provocative comments about her health and children. Mrs. Ostin walked out, and the couple would not talk to Geffen for the next year and a half. The path cleared to Ross, Geffen got the deal he wanted. Geffen Records soon embarked on a remarkable run that, five years later, would allow Geffen to put his now wholly owned company on the market for top dollar. Ross, given his rather extraordinary patronage of Geffen, figured the company was his by droit du seigneur. Geffen did little to dispel that impression. ''At the end of the day,'' Geffen told Ross's deputies, ''it's not just about money.'' Actually, it was about the equity. Geffen ultimately spurned the cash-strapped Ross, who had recently gobbled up Time Inc. Instead, he took an offer of more than $500 million in stock from MCA -- and his good fortune was only beginning. The Japanese conglomerate Matsushita made its own over-the-top bid for MCA, buying the American company for some $6.59 billion. This felicitous sequence of deals left Geffen with $660 million in cash, making him, as King writes, the single biggest beneficiary of ''a Japanese acquisition of a U.S. company in history.'' _Michael Hirschorn NYTimes Comment Share Thank Report 19 May Tekwane Mwendwa, serial enterprenuer.. 16 Votes by Gopi Nath, Karanbir Singh Dhillon, Hamza Alsbaihi, and 12 more. Kenyan billion Sameer merali was able to make a profit of 20 million $ from purchasing a kenyan telecommunication company at 0700hrs and selling it at 0900hrs on the same day in the next room to celtel international...read the full story from the link below.. THE CELTEL PURCHASE OF KENCELL - THE STORY BEHIND THE DEAL
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Comment Share Thank Report 15 May Brad Oberwager Votes by Marc Bodnick, Seb Paquet, David Haddad, and 43 more. Intel naming the 5x86 microprocessor the Pentium. Turned a commodity component into a brand leading to billions in market cap. 3 Comments Share Thank Report 15 May Sinisa Rakovic, 2x Startup Founder that is working on... Votes by Seb Paquet, Jonathan Reem, Duncandrive Fay, and 13 more. Fractional reserve banking, period. 17 3+ Comments Share Thank Report 23 May Matt Mickiewicz, Co-Founder of Hired.com & 99designs 27 Votes by Seb Paquet, Mori Yagi, Ross Cohen, and 23 more. Adding on a shampoo bottle: "Rinse... AND REPEAT". 1+ Comments Share Thank Report 22 May Shrikant Kharade 12 Votes by Uthara Padmanabhan, Lilit Khachatryan, Yash Gandhi, and 8 more. There was a time when the Colgate company wasn't doing so good. Their sales were dropping. The higher ups in the company had exhausted all of their options. Everybody had tried to come up with some solution. But nothing seemed to work. Eventually, they gathered everyone that was working in the company(including janitors,peons etc.) They were asked the question, "How do we boost our sales?" One of the janitors had this to say: "Increase the diameter of the opening of the toothpaste tube."

(In those days the openings used to be pretty small) Well, what do you know, their sales jumped up by a factor of 3! Comment Share Thank Report 17 May Atul Salgaonkar, Made some Tech + Biz contributions 38 Votes by Bryan Cheung, Abhimanyu Bhosale, Athyuttam Reddy, and 34 more. When use of chloroform "ether" as anesthesia got introduced in 1850's, many religious zealots protested its use for childbirth, saying that it was against God's will and that the religious guidelines required that the mother should deliver "through pain". However, the tide was shifting and many people -including several religiously minded priests - started seeing the relief that this magical "ether' was providing. Some of the scientists started a collaborative campaign that the phrase from the original Old Testament was incorrectly translated from the Yiddish; Correctly translated, they said, it read that mother should deliver "through effort" and not "through pain". This caught on and while not the only reason, (the use and tacit endorsement by the British Royalty helped tremendously) these techniques facilitated the wide use of this anesthetic during child birth. Later - decades later - scholars would come back and explain that the new translation was incorrect and the original was the accurate. However, by then, the practice was too entrenched to be displaced.

Reference Links: History of childbirth pain relief What a Blessing She Had Chloroform Utopian surgery? The case against anaesthesia in surgery, dentistry and childbirth Comment Share Thank Report 17 May Ninad Kulkarni 11 Votes by Abhimanyu Madiraju, Manjunath Madakasira, Himadri Roy, and 7 more. Steve Jobs Emails Show How to Win a Hard-Nosed Negotiation Steve Jobs arm twisting Harper Collins (NewsCorp) into selling their e books on the Ipad. 5 days of high stakes negotiating, all over email. 5 days before the launch of the ipad, HC dug in its heels. 1 day before the launch, they signed on the dotted line - on Apple's terms. Comment Share Thank Report 24 May Harshal Ved 46 Votes by Karanbir Singh Dhillon, Rahul Karur, Manit Shah, and 42 more. In FedEx's early days, Fred Smith Founder and CEO took the company's last $5,000 to a Las Vegas blackjack table after the shipping giant was denied a vital business loan. He ended up winning $ 27,000. Had Smith's bet gone awry, FedEx wouldn't have been able to foot a $24,000 fuel bill and the company would have died. 5+ Comments Share Thank Report 17 May Manu R Kittane, Seeker 22 Votes by R Praveen Kumar, Ajeet Gupta, Sean Coleman, and 18 more. Skype was sold to Microsoft in 2011 for a whopping $8.5 Billion. In 2010, Skype had a revenue of just $860 Million on which it posted an operating profit of $264 Million. Still, it had made a small loss of $7 Million as it already had a debt of $686 Million. Though Microsoft already had its own Skype-like-facilities in its Live, Skype was still bought for God-know-why. Though Skype is better than Live, it's hard to believe that it's around $7 Billion better, even considering Skype's payable calls which around 8 Million people make use of.

Instagram was sold to Facebook in 2012 for approximately $1 Billion ($300 Million in cash and the rest in Facebook stock). It's one of the ultimate fairy tales as the deal happened just 18 months into Instagram's existence. Though Instagram was one of the first apps to provide features that it does, since then, a lot more apps which provide better features have come up in all kinds of markets. This has decreased Instagram usage since. Also, the buy by Facebook also led Instagram to cause ripples in its relationship with Twitter leading to an eventual fall out between the two. These two are few of the shrewdest deals I've come across. Great going, Skype and Instagram ! 5+ Comments Share Thank Report 7 May Mike Benson Votes by Andrew Boysen, Abhimanyu Bhosale, Yash Gandhi, and 48 more. When Mucinex entered the US market in 2002, they made all their competition illegal. With many companies already selling guaifenesin as an expectorant, Adams Respiratory Therapeutics went through the extra step of securing FDA approval, which effectively made all competing products illegal. From Adams 2006 SEC 10-K: In 2002, the FDA approved our 505(b)(2) application for Mucinex SE as an OTC long-acting guaifenesin product. Prior to our 505(b)(2) application for Mucinex SE, only short-acting guaifenesin products had been marketed OTC, while longacting guaifenesin products were marketed as prescription drugs, despite their lack of formal approval by the FDA. Under the Durham Humphrey Act of 1951, the FDA established that no drug may simultaneously be sold as a nonprescription product and as a prescription product at the same dose for the same indication. Any products that violate this rule are subject to FDA regulatory action and removal from the market. On October 11, 2002, the FDA issued warning letters to 66 manufacturers, distributors, marketers, and retailers of single-ingredient guaifenesin extendedrelease products. The letters stated that such prescription products require FDA approval, and without FDA approval, they could no longer be marketed legally. Their 2006 SEC 10-Q clearly summarized the shrewdness of this move: This removal resulted in Mucinex SE being the only long-acting, singleingredient guaifenesin product available in the United States. Source (offline): Page on Athenaalliance 52 3+ Comments Share Thank Report 18 May Jay Bazzinotti, frustrated writer and storyteller. 16 Votes by Seb Paquet, Hunter McCord, Ernie Bornheimer, and 12 more. I have seen some sharp things. Probably the sharpest is when I worked at Cisco. Rather then post 10s of cents per share every quarter, they would work it so they only posted 1 penny over predicted results. The result was they kept stockpiling capital for the bad times, which always comes, and they looked predictable quarter after quarter. By now everyone knows Cisco's products are barely second rate compared to any competitor, but their service, marketing and business acumen make them a machine that cannot be beaten. In the end, just as Data General saw, people will get tired of Cisco's bland, out-date technology and inability to engineer it's way out of a paper bag into anything innovative in less than 5 years, but until then, they will clean up the market. As for slightly shady but still incredibly shrewd business practices, I used to work for a company (that will remain nameless) that posted gains quarter after quarter. We used to call it the "90 day bite" because every 90 days we would hold our breath and wonder what rabbit they would pull out of their hat. Each quarter it would get harder and harder to make it happen, but from the outside, it looked miraculous and the stock soared. The first time all they had to do was, on the last day of the month, ship millions of dollars of product to non existent addresses on the opposite coast and recognize the revenues before it was returned. The next time they actually had the products delivered to the addresses of people in cahoots who

actually stored millions of dollars of product on their porches for a week before returning it. Of course, by then, the revenue was recognized. Next, they had certain salesmen find abandoned warehouses and product would be shipped there for awhile and parked. Each quarter they came up with increasingly desperate and bizarre scenarios for recognizing those revenues, regardless of whether the product would come back later. These things are no longer allowed, there are new laws to prevent it, but in those days, there were all kinds of tricks like that to make it LOOK like you are actually making numbers. We would shake our heads in amazement every 90 days at each new trick, and lots of people made lots of money on the stock. But eventually, it became too difficult to do this and one quarter the entire thing collapsed in a heap, but by then, something like 4 years had gone by. The company never really recovered and is gone now, but it was a wild, fun ride while it lasted. 2 Comments Share Thank Report 23 May Ian Andrew Bell, technology entrepreneur, provocateur,... 16 Votes by Seb Paquet, Aditya Aggarwal, Aneesh Neelam, and 12 more. AOL, a virtually worthless company principally noteworthy for printing and mailing billions of CD-ROMs, merged with Time-Warner, a perennial company with actual revenue producing assets, at the peak of its stock value. In subsequent writedowns, the value of AOL within 20 months of the merger was determined to be zero. Too late for Time-Warner shareholders. Brilliant engineering by AOL's management. Comment Share Thank Report 16 May Jayant Dalmia, I like to know 13 Votes by Avinash Pothula, Pritesh Desai, Mudit Sinha, and 9 more. In order to compete with Netscape Navigator in the browser market, Microsoft released Internet Explorer as a free add-on for Windows user thus decimating the users of Navigator which used to be a paid browser at that time. 1 Comment Share Thank Report 10 May Anonymous Votes by John Phileas, Avinash Pothula, Harish Kashyap, and 4 more. A friend of mine owned a CLEC in the early 2000s. It was saddled with massive debt that it could never have survived. He went to the debt holders and offered them two choices- they take pennies on the dollar for the debt, or the only option was bankruptcy. The debt holders took his offer, and without the saddle of debt the company grew quickly, my friend sold it and he made millions. Comment Share Thank Report 7 May Marco A. Lanz, American Jingo Votes by Bryan Cheung, Sam Boosalis, Nicholas Snyder, and 17 more. The Church of Scientology receiving non-profit charitable organization status from the Internal Revenue Serivce. 21 1+ Comments Share Thank Report 18 May Alexander Bogdan, In the 5% 23 Votes by John McFarlane, David Frazier, Matt Brenner, and 19 more. While it may not be the shrewdest or smartest business maneuver listed here my vote goes to whoever came up with the idea to sell breadsticks at pizza joints. This move required no R&D, minimal if any investment (new equipment or additional ingredients, training) and instantly increased revenue. Take a product that you already sell, cut it in a different way, and make loads of cash. Shrewd, tasty, profitable. Comment Share Thank Report 4 Sep

Bud Montang 14 Votes by Aarti Dwivedi, Sam Boosalis, Hunter McCord, and 10 more. I know one that was somewhat shrewd. Coors was looking for a new marketing slogan for their light beer - Coors Light. The guys in the can plant in the 70's used to have to throw cans at one another to get someone's attention (it was that loud in the can plant). After one shift someone said "the silver bullets were really flying around tonight" meaning the unprinted cans. Someone got word of the "Silver Bullet" part of it and it has been used since with ZERO payment for the IP of the tag line. One of the most memorable, longest running marketing phrases for free. Pretty shrewd. My dad worked in the can plant and was there to see it first hand. Comment Share Thank Report 15 May David Llorens, Founder, COO, One Block Off the Grid Votes by Harsh Mittal, Pradyumna Vajjah, Prashant Gonga, and 3 more. Easy. Pet rock. No market for rocks as pets. Put googly eyes on rock. Say funny things on box. Put rock in box. Now there is a market for rocks as pets. Overhead very low - go pick up rocks. R and D costs very low. Figure out how to pick up rocks and put in box. Competition non existent. Make millions of dollars. Don't have to come up with brilliant IP or best competitors. If you live for the challenge the pet rock guy is laughing at you all the way to the bank. Can't figure out why this was not a case study in Blue Ocean. 1 Comment Share Thank Report 27 May Rohit Sudheendranath Votes by Raghuram Duraisamy, Saurabh Sachan, Pradyumna Vajjah, and 5 more. Unilever's strategy of Stamping "Kya aap Lifebuoy se haath dhoye hai? " on 2.5 Million rotis at the Maha Kumbh Mela. One of the most smartest marketing campaign I have ever witnessed ! Kumbh Mela: Of clean hands and rotis 2 Comments Share Thank Report 17 May Arun Bathey 19 Votes by Sheena Sakhuja, Hunter McCord, Shashwat Rastogi, and 15 more. A couple working in a software company in South India (Bangalore obviously), were longing to get proper North Indian food. They started to cook North Indian food for them and slowly expanding it their friends. Realizing the potential business, they started a small hotel for the people from North India, serving North India food. Now, it is a chain for restaurants with more than 25 branches in South India. All they did is, "If something you like is not available for you, then certainly there are someone looking for the same..." and the rest is history... And the restuarant chain is called as "Mast Kalandar". This is of course Smart and not shrewd... 4+ Comments Share Thank Report 22 May Phil Wolff, Assessing business strategy since 1382 Votes by Siva Krishna Shushanth S, Rodrigo Tello, Jay Mehta, and 7 more.

Steve Jobs taking back NeXT stock options from the employees for pennies to build up his stake when selling the company to Apple Inc. Ruthless, timely, worth 1.5 million Apple shares. 1+ Comments Share Thank Report 6 Sep Adithya Sundar, Clark Kent, with occasional telephone... Votes by Aditya Soni and Jayanthi Sundar. Amish Tripathi is a celebrated author in India known for his Shiva Trilogy novels. His first book The Immortals of Meluha was a best-seller and he soon became a household name. After the release of his first 2 books, in order to target the non-Hindu population also which forms a significant chunk (~20%) of the country's population, he silently included something in the preface of his 3rd book that he did not do for his first 2 books. This one.

The preface to the first 2 novels mentioned only temples while the 3rd one was more 'secular' as you can see above. Not sure about the impact of this one, but this definitely seems a shrewd and a silent marketing tactic. 3 Comment Share (2) Thank Report 5 Jun Mark Sorenson, Wharton Business School 16 Votes by Venkata Boppudi, Sahil Garg, Kartik Aneja, and 12 more. THE shrewdest business maneuver or commercial exploitation? Primark has achieved revenues of 3.5bn in the last 12 months. While its fashion sweatshops pay children in India just 60p a day. So maybe this is the shrewdest, smartest maneuver thats ever been seen in business? Since Primark opened its doors, thrifty fashionistas have been snapping its bargains. But the low-cost clothes has come at a high price for young children toiling in the store's Indian sweatshops and the reality of a supply chain that sees children as young as 11 sewing T-shirts which cost shoppers just a few pounds to buy on high streets across Europe. Their growth is often stunted by years of sitting in uncomfortable, hunched positions at the bamboo-framed workstations. The child workers have no fixed hours of work, nor is there any trade union to fight for their cause. For those who get paid at all, the combined wages of five children is less than that of one adult. Dictionary definition of SHREWD is 'piercingly cold', disposed to artful and cunning practices; tricky. Seems rather apt! 5 Comments Share Thank Report 23 May David Spanierman 13 Votes by Nikhil Kodilkar, Auun Bie, Janaki Thakkar, and 9 more. New Coke. When the old Coke was brought back it was with far cheaper HFC not cane suger. No one ever noticed and Coca Cola Inc. substantially reduced their costs...
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5 Comments Share Thank Report 14 May

Daniel So 18 Votes by Geordie Keitt, Nikhil Kodilkar, Sujoy Gupta, and 14 more. I always thought Subway hijacking Quizno's oven-baked sandwiches as one of the smartest business moves. In one fell swoop they made Quizno's one unique differentiator redundant. 4+ Comments Share Thank Report 14 May Azmir Ismail Votes by Salman Ahmed, Federico Mantian, Rodrigo Tello, and 4 more. For me, it was how Steve Jobs of Apple managed to get the music industry to agree the price of music singles downloaded from Itunes at 99 cents. Here was a company that had just moved into digital music device and distribution and managed to cow the established industry big guns (EMI, Warner, et al) to agree to HIS price. As that time, it works the other way around. Comment Share Thank Report 25 Jul Duane King, Entrepreneurial Code Monkey and Polymath. Votes by Neha Naidu, Auun Bie, Janaki Thakkar, and 13 more. Bill gates licensing - not selling - windows software. After that they needed him, and people who had grown dependent on windows now needed Bill Gates and Microsoft. 17 Comment Share Thank Report 14 May Robert Falcon, Funeral Director/ Owner 10 Votes by Srikanth Hanumanula, Siva Viknesh, Gard Orvik Nilssen, and 6 more. I opened the first affordable funeral home in Austin, TX. My firm cut the cost for cremation and funerals by 50% compared to the high priced competition. I had one competitor turn my firm into the Texas Funeral Service Commission for Solicitation allegations (we were found innocent). We had another firm turn us into the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality for operating an illegal crematory in our building (the crematory did not exist in our building). We had a local registrar turn us in to the Funeral Commission for filing death certificates past the 10 day required period (We demonstrated in court that our average filing time went from 9.3 days to 5.8 days using the same reports the registrar tried to use against us). Moral to the story- When you take business away from the muckrakers they try and use the rules they came up with to limit their competition. 4+ Comments Share Thank Report 15 May Rodrigo Tello, Architect, Designer, Musician 31 Votes by Seb Paquet, Caner Ahmet, Asaf Bartov, and 27 more. Bill Gates selling something to IBM that they didn't even have , running on a machine that they couldn't make work and saying: "Instead of 1MM I want half of that, and the disclosure that I can sell to everyone". IBM, on their arrogance, didn't see it coming: that everyone could build their own computer: HP, Compaq, Dell, Acer, and more generic machines. That was the real start of the biggest fortune ever and the rise of the original software company, Microsoft. It's overly documented. 1+ Comments Share Thank Report 16 May Nishad Shah 1 How can anyone forget the RJR Nabisco buyout by KKR & Co. The RJR Nabisco leveraged buyout was, at the time, widely considered to be the pre-emininent example of corporate and executive greed . Bryan Burrough and John Helyar published Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco , a successful book about the events which was later turned into a television movie for HBO .

Ross Johnson was the President and CEO of RJR Nabisco at the time of the leveraged buyout and Henry Kravis was the managing partner at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co . The leveraged buyout was in the amount of $25 billion, and the battle for control took place between October and November 1988. Although KKR eventually took control of RJR Nabisco, RJR management and Shearson Lehman Hutton had originally announced that they would take RJR Nabisco private at $75 per share. A fierce series of negotiations and proposals ensued which involved nearly all of the major private equity players of the day, including Morgan Stanley , Goldman Sachs , Salomon Brothers , First Boston , Wasserstein Perella & Co. , Forstmann Little , Shearson Lehman Hutton , and Merrill Lynch . Once put in play by Shearson Lehman Hutton and RJR management, almost every major Wall Street firm involved in M&A launched frenzied, literal last-minute bids in a fog of incomplete or misleading information. KKR quickly introduced a tender offer to obtain RJR Nabisco for $90 per sharea price that enabled it to proceed without the approval of RJR Nabisco's management. RJR's management team, working with Shearson Lehman Hutton and Salomon Brothers, submitted a bid of $112, a figure they felt certain would enable it to outflank any response by Kravis. KKR's final bid of $109, while a lower dollar figure, was ultimately accepted by the board of directors. It was accepted because KKR's offer was guaranteed whereas management's lacked a "reset", meaning that the final share price might have been lower than their professed $112 per share. Additionally, many in RJR's board of directors had grown concerned at recent disclosures of Johnson's unprecedented golden parachute deal. It can't get any stranger than that. Source: Wikipedia More reading: http://www.businessinsider.com/r... Comment Share Thank Report 14 Jun Siddharth Gurjar, Business fundamentalist. Votes by Olalekan Tomori, Siddharth Surana, Smit Mehta, and 3 more. Coca-cola and its play of colors to influence the brand's happy image Santa originally used to look like this:

But Coca cola wanted to promote itself as the brand of happiness and laughter. So it made Santa into this:

The rest is history :-) 1 Comment Share (1) Thank Report 15 Jun Sam Burgiss 51 Votes by Plan Maestro, Felicia Postica, Kenneth Kline, and 47 more. From The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. New chief executive of Alcoa Paul O'Neill gives his first address to investors in 1987: "I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America. I intend to go for zero injuries." The audience was confused. Usually, new CEOs talked about profit margins, new markets and 'synergy' or 'co-opetition.' But O'Neill hadn't said anything about profits. He didn't mention any business buzzwords. ... The investors in the room almost stampeded out the doors when the presentation ended. One jogged to the lobby, found a pay phone, and called his 20 largest clients. ... Within a year of O'Neill's speech, Alcoa's profits would hit a record high. By the time O'Neill retired in 2000 to become Treasury Secretary, the company's annual net income was five times larger than before he arrived, and its market capitalization had risen by $27 billion. Someone who invested a million dollars in

Alcoa on the day O'Neill was hired would have earned another million dollars in dividends while he headed the company, and the value of their stock would be five times bigger when he left. What's more, all that growth occurred while Alcoa became one of the safest companies in the world. So how did O'Neill make one of the largest, stodgiest, and most potentially dangerous companies into a profit machine and a bastion of safety? By attacking one habit and then watching the changes ripple through the organization. By targeting Alcoa's keystone habit. "I knew I had to transform Alcoa," O'Neill told me. "But you can't order people to change." "That's not how the brain works. So I decided I was going to start by focusing on one thing. If I could start disrupting the habits around one thing, it would spread throughout the entire company." How 'Keystone Habits' Transformed a Corporation 2+ Comments Share (1) Thank Report 21 May Abhishek Ghose Votes by Vijayalekshmi Kesavan, Preethi Chandur, Yash Gandhi, and 8 more. Flickr has its origins in a game called Game Neverending, a massively mutliplayer online game. One aspect of the game was that players could talk to each other online and share photos - this feature was presumably put in to promote the social aspect that the game required. To the surprise of the founders, this auxiliary photosharing service became wildly popular - realizing which they pivoted to focus on it. This was how Flickr was born (the game project was shelved).

Some articles: Flickr of idea on a gaming project led to photo website How Flickr Made It To The Next Level 1+ Comments Share Thank Report 16 May Anonymous 24 Votes by Marc Bodnick, David Haddad, Caner Ahmet, and 20 more. When eBay bought Skype for $2.6 Bn from Zennstrom and crew they did not buy all the IP - including the main peer to peer technology !!! eBay only bought the license. Then 3 years later eBay sold Skype to a bunch of investors including the original founders who ended up owning 14% of a company as a result of the 2nd sale. Then the new group sold it for $8.5 Bn to msft (not sure if everybody fully liquidated their stakes). I hope MSFT bought the IP this time around. Amazing starting a company and getting to sell it TWICE. Nice move Zennstrom and crew!!

Would love for someone to correct me.

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Comment Share Thank Report 11 May Anonymous Votes by Prakash Chandra, Liewkokk Liewkokk, Ian Rosario, and 3 more. The story of Fed-Ex In 1965, while attending Yale University, Fred Smith wrote an economics paper exploring how goods were transported in the United States. At the time, shippers focused on transporting large packages across the United States by truck or inside passenger airplanes. Smith thought that a company carrying small, essential items by plane could be a more efficient transporter than existing companies. Smith wrote the paper at the last minute and did not go into details about how to actually run such a company. His professor gave him a "C" for the work. Smith, however, never stopped thinking about creating an express delivery system

which he created in 1971. Unfortunately, three years after the company began, thanks largely to rapidly rising fuel costs, Federal Express was on the verge of bankruptcy, losing over $1 million a month.

At its low point, all the company had was $5000 to its name, which wasnt enough to continue operating as their planes needed fuel and that wouldnt cover it. Mr. Smith made a final pitch to General Dynamics for more funding, but was refused. Not to be dissuaded, instead of taking a flight home, Smith took the $5000 and flew to Las Vegas and played Black Jack that weekend with the remaining company funds. By Monday, to the shock of other higher ups in the company, FedEx had $32,000 in its bank account, which was just enough to cover the fuel for their planes and to continue operating a few days more . The company soon after was able to raise significant money and in 1976, it made its first profit and despite challenges hasn't looked back.

Fred Smith *** I copied this answer from Hunter McCord's Hunter McCord's answer to Startups: Which startups have the best stories ? *** 1 Comment Share Thank Report 23 May Raghavendra Ramesh Votes by Vishnu Jayvel, Rohil Philip, Lija Makmagic, and Aditya Desai. The unbelievable price of the IPad The thing didn't exist before that day. Less than a notebook and it's more than a phone. So how did we decide $499 was a good price? Why did it make headlines ? Good question. That was due to rumors leading up to the launch that it would cost $1,000 from sources like Apple insider.Then in the unveiling, Jobs was sure to mention how everyone expects the device to cost a thousand bucks. He plants that idea in your mind and suddenly $499 looks like a steal. This went on to make it the most sort after tablet. Comment Share Thank Report 21 May

G.T. Ozer, [Gorkem Turgut OZER] 23 Votes by Balaji Viswanathan, Marc Bodnick, Janaki Thakkar, and 19 more. Intel was known as a memory company and had developed much of the complex technology required to design and manufacture chips. By 1984, the company started to struggle because it was clear that Intel could not match the prices of its Japanese rivals in DRAM. In the end, the company exited from the memory business and refocused on microprocessors. The success of the new 32-bit 386 chips propelled Intel into being the worlds largest semiconductor company by 1992. 2 Comments Share Thank Report 14 May Michael Agyeman Votes by Seb Paquet, Bheshaj Joshi, Jay Prakash, and 3 more. I live in the Czech Republic and a few years ago, there was a thing called the Golden World Club, a system or club that was to heap businesses and business people together. Funny was, these businesses paid GWC a fee so they could, amongst themselves, have discounts for services that the individual companies rendered. Now, THAT is shrewd, making people pay so they can do something amongst themselves that they could have done even without GWC Comment Share Thank Report 5 Sep Frank Termini Jr. Votes by Jake Peterson, Tawheed Kader, Mathew Joy Maniyamkott, and 18 more. Bottled water 22 1 Comment Share Thank Report 22 Jul Daniel Cole, Co-Founder of ToolSpinner 25 Votes by Seb Paquet, Vivek Ponnaiyan, Steve Davis, and 21 more. Shrewd award goes to Enron. Watch the smartest men in the room. Manipulating the price of energy to make billions. Smart - Alka-Seltzer, created their "plop plop fizz fizz" tag line which dramatically increased their sales by simply encouraging people take two. Laundry detergent companies have successfully pulled this off as well by supplying larger cups to measure with. Positioning - Dealing with the government as a customer can be tricky. Lockheed gets my respect for ensuring that suppliers for the F-35 are located in EVERY congressional district. This is brilliant as even a whisper of cuts sets of a cry across the nation. Smart for a $320 billion dollar program. 2+ Comments Share (1) Thank Report 21 May Paul Mansfield, Father, husband, engineer and geek. Votes by John Thekkayyam and AT Diving. Some years ago my father had a contract to design and supervise the heating system for an existing mosque, a very elaborate muslim temple with thick slabs of marble for the floor, marble columns etc. The heating system would be a big headache to design and deploy, fitting it would be very difficult, and during use if it didn't deliver the heat perfectly evenly the marble could crack. So my father on being asked to submit the price put a price on everything he could think of, estimating the maximum possible cost of time and materials. And then he tripled it because he decided he didn't want the work, unless it was guaranteed to make a handsome return. Many months later he met a rival who'd also quoted for the work, and the rival won. His rival recounted many unforeseen problems (quite a few which my father, despite greater experience) hadn't expected, and clearly was regretting winning. He asked my father what he quoted, and was told about the tripling of the price, so as to lose the deal. The rival had only doubled the price, and thus accidentally "won" the deal. Comment Share Thank Report 28 May Swami Iyer, Getting no marks as an Engineering st...

Vote by Soniya Kathaith. 2 Steve Jobs' handling of the Antennagate . We are the generation that has reaped the maximum rewards of the advances in technology. One man, whose imagination,vision,creativity and management ability that particularly shaped the technosphere as it is today was Mr. Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs. His foremost motive in designing any product was to integrate all aspects of the product be it the designing, software or hardware. The determination to achieve that integration gave the world not only all those smart, suave devices, but also the very system where I sit wondering whether we have reached the pinnacle of technology. But, results were not always forthcoming. People always rave about the iPods and the iPhones, but they are unaware about the dud that was LISA and to an extent, the NeXT computer (Jobs' unsuccessful endeavours) . This is one such instance where things could have gone wrong for Apple with the iPhone 4, but for Steve Jobs' tactical genius and business sense. The iPhone 4 came out with a Steel rim on the sides of the device. It gave a completely sleek and regal look, as well as providing structural support, while serving as part of the phone's antenna. For serving as an antenna the steel rim had to have a tiny gap. But if a person covered that gap with a finger or something, there could be signal loss. The engineers felt that a clear coating would rectify the issue, but Jobs was adamant, arguing that it would spoil the look of the phone. They were asked to come up with something else, and they did. It didn't work perfectly. The iPhone 4 was released and looked wondrous, but if the device was held in a certain way, covering the gap, the connection could be lost. The probability of that happening was extremely low, but there. This is where Mr. Jobs came in, undeterred, unrelenting with confidence one can only applaud, speechless. Instead of crying wolf, pleading and asking for returns, his reaction was steely, to the point, and at the time, the most appropriate. He held a press event where his response went something like this. "We're not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy." He also added that people could return the phones if they were unhappy, or get a free bumper case from apple. He went on to discuss data that showed other mobile phones that had similar problems. The media stood stunned, his courage had blown away one and all. Not known to be the most agreeable, likable and peace friendly businessmen, this display of openness and honesty proved to be a masterstroke. The iPhone 4 was a huge success, and antennagate ended up an example of shrewd business maneuvers to post on Quora. 2+ Comments Share (2) Thank Report 26 Jun Wm Goldstein, Father of Dr. Phibes Votes by Siddharth Gv and AT Diving. Michael Corleone's tak eover of the Genco Pura Olive Oil Company. Comment Share Thank Report 25 Jul Marc Bodnick, Co-Founder, Elevation Partners 13 Votes by Mike Xie, Edwin Khoo, John Phileas, and 9 more. I'd add: Steve Case merging AOL with Time Warner at the peak Mark Cuban selling Broadcast.com stock right before it got crushed. for $5 billion and then collaring his Yahoo

2+ Comments Share Thank Report 16 May Abdul Basit Suhail, Computer Trouble Shooter Loves Movies... Votes by Austin Cameron and Navin Rajan.

Pepsi Sold Pizza Hut To Grow Sale Due to its previous ownership by PepsiCo , Pizza Hut, as with all Yum! Brands concepts, have a lifetime contract to sell Pepsi products. While Pizza Hut was owned by Pepsi, all three of Pizza Hut's major competitors--Domino's Pizza , Papa John's Pizza , and Little Caesars all sold Coca-Cola products. However, since Pepsi's divestment of its restaurant business, both Papa John's (in 2012)[11] and Little Caesars (in 2007)[12] later switched to Pepsi products themselves

Pizza Hut 3 Comment Share Thank Report 19 May Subhabrata Bera, jack of many trades and rookie at most 1 Perhaps not the shrewdest but yet it did what it was supposed to do. In Euro 2012 bookmaker Paddy Power sponsored Denmark's Nicklas Bendtner's underwear. After scoring (twice) in the group match against Portugal, the striker lowered his shorts to show his 'lucky' undies. UEFA were, however, not impressed and slapped a fine of 80,000 on the player (more the thrice the amount it fined the Russian FA over crowd trouble a few matches back). Fortunately for Bendtner, Paddy Power decided to pay the hefty fine. Publicity is good in any form it comes. And it did. The company revealed a huge jump in revenues after the incident.

Euro 2012: Bookmaker pays Nicklas Bendtner's 80,000 'underpants' fine Paddy Power boosted by Arsenal striker Nicklas Bendtner's underwear Telegraph Comment Share Thank Report 9 Jul Vince Granieri Votes by Omkar Nisal and Sam Boosalis. Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway are now too big to succeed. What I mean by that is that it's tough to grow that behemoth at the same rate as smaller companies. Somehow he does it though and his recognition that size has advantages is behind his success. Whenever there is a crisis and liquidity is in short supply, Buffet is there getting a great return on capital he invests - deals that no one else gets. For example, he lent $5 billion to Goldman Sachs and received not only a 10% annual return on the resulting preferred stock (which was itself redeemable at 10% over par), but tons of in the money warrants. No wonder he calls Berkshire the '800 number when liquidity is in short supply'.

Comment Share Thank Report 14 May Butch Adiviso, Dark Lord, Cereal Killer Votes by Kamal Morjal and Kirti Satish Manian. There is a real estate developer in my country who builds gigantic malls, condos, luxury estates and the like. About ten years back he adopted a policy where he only ever hires people who belong to one specific religious sect. Sounds tame? Well, his blue collar workers number at about 100k people. Their religion apparently doesnt allow them to strike or unionize. So the guy hires and fires people every six months, fires the same people, hires the same people so they never get out of probation and they never get their benefits. Leave it to the Chinese. 1 Comment Share Thank Report 13 Jun Mirobid Nosirov, Uzbek Marketing Guru Votes by Shreyas Saxena and Harish Kashyap. This happened in Russia 90s. The country's currency - ruble - plunged compared to US dollar. As a result, many companies with import related orders couldn't fulfill the orders. However, one of Apple resellers bought fridges for rubles in Belorussia, delivered them to India and sold them for rupies. Then, they exchanged rupies for US dollars, bought computers in the USA and delivered them to Russia. So, the company delivered the product with delay but fulfilled the order.
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Comment Share Thank Report 4h ago Mildred Lewis, Yet another writer-director. 18 Votes by Tim Bushell, Auun Bie, Paul Stregevsky, and 14 more.

John H. Johnson, founder and publisher of Negro World/Black Digest, Ebony and Jet magazines, was the first African American on the Forbes 400 list. Faced with limited interest from advertisers, Johnson started Beauty Star cosmetics, then other businesses to have something to advertise in his magazines. While he remained first and foremost a publisher after getting his start in insurance, Beauty Star eventually evolved into Fashion Fair, a travelling fashion show which launched Fashion Fair cosmetics which is still sold in major department stores. Fashion Fair has also raised more than $47 million for charity. And it all started with his mom pawning her furniture. 1+ Comments Share (1) Thank Report 21 May Ayush Kumar, Serial Accountant, Consultant,Student... Votes by Pritesh Desai, Hamada Kaido, Rodrigo Tello, and Ravi Janardhan. Steve Jobs, in 1997, crushing his ego and asking Gates to save his company. This is considered as one of the biggest and most successful comebacks of a company. 15 years down the line, Apple is the most valuable company in the world. Hail Apple. Steve, if there's a techie world up there, i'm sure you'll bring about innovation in the heaven too.

2 Comments Share Thank Report 5 Sep Paul Mulwitz, Retired Electrical Engineer, Light Pl... Votes by Nicholas Moyne, Andrew Boysen, Jason McFarlane, and 3 more. Before the "Green" decision in the mid 1980's the telephone companies provided nearly all telephone and switching equipment in the USA. The landmark decision forced the major phone companies (AT&T and GTE) to open their systems to competitive, third party, equipment. In response to this decision GTE decided to get completely out of the telephone hardware business while AT&T decided to compete with others in this product area. GTE shut the doors on their biggest manufacturing facility, "Automatic Electric" in Northlake, IL. This action cost me and many thousand others their jobs, but I think it was a very smart decision on their part. GTE management realized there was no way they could change their ways to produce competitive products. Their monopoly product development and manufacturing system was infused with endless cost increasing features. It was a basic truth in monopoly telephone equipment that the more expensive the equipment was the more profits the company made. Public utility commissions all over GTE's market areas (and the rest of the country too) allowed each utility company a certain percentage of profit compared to their costs for products. This principle also applied to virtually all government purchasing contracts in both states and the federal government. I remember one example which might help readers understand how insidious this principle was. I released a design to manufacturing that used a commercial grade digital oscillator component which was readily available from multiple vendors with a precision of the output signal of 200 parts per million. When the design was processed by the manufacturing component engineering department they changed the specification for this part to require 50 parts per million precision. Since I was the designer of the product I felt competent to insist they use the specification I originally used to reduce the component cost by several dollars (perhaps 75 percent cost reduction for this part). They refused saying the 50 PPM part was better and they would not allow my less expensive part specification to be used. GTE was very smart to realize their monopoly practices could not be easily changed to make them a competitive equipment manufacturer. They are still in business today as a telephone company and doing just fine. If they had tried to change their equipment design and manufacturing ways to become competitive they would probably have failed miserably and lost a great deal of money in the process. 1+ Comments Share Thank Report 19 Jun Adam E. Piotrowski, Did you ask a good question today? Vote by Ravishankar Kodukula. This awesome Dow / German bromine story reminded me of an example I learned about back in school. It was the classic P&G attempt to enter the bleach market in the 1980's, then dominated by Clorox. Shrewd on the part of Clorox. Here's a link to the interview in which A.G. Lafley (the CEO at the time) summarizes what Clorox did to smother a product launch by the competitor (P&G) I Think of My Failures as a Gift Share (1) Thank Report 22 May

Samannay Ghosh Votes by Kenneth Harper and Gareth Michael Jones. The criminalization of marijuana to effectively stop the agricultural industry and get the newly invented 'plastic', a product of dow chemicals a foothold in the market 1 Comment Share Thank Report 19 May Robert J. Kolker, I am the little boy who told the Empe... Votes by Nagib Meshkat, Augustus D'Souza, Chris Yee, and Amanda Sapp. Ford realized that his workers were also potentially his customers. Smart fellow. Comment Share Thank Report 21 May Bob Wan Kim, I've been working with statups for 17... Vote by Abhimanyu Bhosale. I had a thriving ecommerce store about 5 years ago. They offered to buy me out. I refused. My sales doubled every month after that. Six months later, half of my sales were returned. Seven months later, 3/4 of my sales were returned... Etc. It was my competitor. They had their subsidiaries buy all my inventory and return all my stock--with damaged packaging in six months. Six months is the maximum amount of time you can dispute a visa MasterCard transaction. Now, I background check every client / customer who seems too good to be true. Comment Share Thank Report 25 Jul Vandana Puri I wonder why Act of Oskar Schindler is not mentioned on this list.... The mere Aim of reinventing the enamelware factory with Nazi people was a pure opportunistic smart business idea first, landing him in an default Hero ACT (year 1939/1940) April 28 - Oskar Schindler, Businessman, Enemy of the Nazis, Righteous Among the Nations

1 Comment Share (1) Thank Report 18 May Anonymous Vote by Amanda Sapp. I just read an answer about someone at Colgate suggesting an increase in the diameter of the dispense tube.. I'm guessing it started way before that.. Today you might say someone has no oral hygiene if he doesn't brush his teeth twice daily but there was no such concept earlier.. Just by floating the idea of "oral hygiene" and the fact that teeth have to be brushed twice daily in the minds of the dentists, who would eventually end up convincing their patients to do so, the toothpastes' consumption would have doubled and so would the sales volume. That I believe was smart! Comment Share Thank Report 2 Jun Gursharan Sidhu 1 Sabeer Bhatia sold Hotmail to Microsoft. Comment Share Thank Report 29 Jul Vikrant Chauhan 1 Power of PR: Bernays refined and popularized the use of the press release , following its invention by PR man Ivy Lee , who had issued a press release after the 1906 Atlantic City train wreck . One of the most famous campaigns of Bernays was the women's cigarette smoking campaign in 1920s. Bernays helped the smoking industry overcome one of the biggest social taboos of the time: women smoking in public. Women were only allowed to smoke in designated areas, or not at all. If caught violating this rule, women would have been arrested.[11] Bernays staged the 1929 Easter parade in New York City , showing models holding lit Lucky Strike cigarettes, or "Torches of Freedom ". After the historic public event, women started lighting up more than ever before. It was through Bernays that

women's smoking habits started to become socially acceptable. Bernays created this event as news, which, of course, it wasnt.[citation needed ] Bernays convinced industries that the news, not advertising, was the best medium to carry their message to an unsuspecting public. P.S. He was uncle of Sigmund Freud. Comment Share Thank Report Sat Irwin Kun 1 Steve Job. Cutting down hundreds of product line to a few memorable ones which eventually revived Apple Co after he took over as interim-CEO. Comment Share Thank Report 8 Aug Anonymous 1 What the banking industry did to (a) capitalize on bubble AND the meltdown followed by (b) evading prosecution for helping to cause both. When can we read a Harvard B-School case study about it? 1+ Comments Share Thank Report 22 May Anonymous 1 The rapper 50 Cent made approximately $100 million by acquiring a large stake in Glaceau in exchange for being the spokesman for their Vitamin Water product. He and his manager opted for a large share of the company rather than a more traditional cash payment. Excerpt from the terrific article How 50 Cent scored a half-billion : In the weeks and months thereafter, Lightly [50 Cent's manager] and Oza [marketing executive at Vitamin Water's parent company] hammered out the terms of a deal. 50 Cent would take a stake in the privately owned company, one that would graduate over time and escalate if the company hit certain numbers. The two entities - 50 Cent on one hand and Glaceau on the other - signed an agreement of mutual confidentiality. Still, word got around that Lighty had negotiated something close to, but not more than, 10 percent of the value of the company. ... In May 2007, the Coca-Cola Company purchased Glaceau for $4.1 billion. In the media, initial reports put 50 Cent's cashout at $400 million, calculated by dividing the purchase amount by 50 Cent's reputed 10 percent share. But in reality, 50 Cent's take was much less. Another stakeholder needed to be paid off first - the diversified Indian conglomerate Tata had invested $677 million for 30 percent of Glaceau in 2006, and got $1.2 billion when Coca-Cola bought them out. When all the other costs had been deducted, 50 Cent was thought to have walked away with a figure somewhere between $60 million and $100 million.

Another (unrelated) story of a hip-hop artist who made tons of money by being a shrewd businessman: Beat By Dre: The Exclusive Inside Story of How Monster Lost the World Comment Share Thank Report 29 May Anonymous Vote by Amanda Sapp. Cirque de soleil transforming from an old fashioned and during circus act to a theatre show Comment Share Thank Report 25 Jul Anonymous 1 Water. Taking a basic necessity of all humans and putting it into a convenient container has become a business it itself. And is it cheap? Cheap for businesses yes, but expensive for consumers. Comment Share Thank Report 26 Jul

Haritha Gorijavolu, Student Vote by Amanda Sapp. The smartest business maneuver my friend has seen is allowing people to log into websites by using their Facebook credentials. Most of the popular sites are connected to Facebook. Most people prefer to sign in using their Facebook credentials rather than create a new account. The future of Facebook is rather secure because even if people won't open their Facebook account, they are highly likely to do a Facebook login when using other sites. Facebook is like an artificial octopus that engulfed the web and its digital tentacles are accumulating information from all popular spots of the internet. So, it has a guaranteed supply of data streams which will ensure its future viability. 2 Comments Share Thank Report 16 Jul Joe Stafura, A serial entrepreneur now entering my...

When Charles Schwab lowered commission rates after deregulation, this allow him to take advantages of the emerging technologies to lower his costs of business and make money even at the lower fees. Schwab now has well over a trillion under management. Comment Share (1) Thank Report 24 Jul Andrew McClure

Reinstalling Stevie Jobs back in '97 after 12 years of management disasters, fat egos, and plummeting margins. He cleaned house of the "dirty laundry" and supplanted them with smart clear-thinkers. Comment Share Thank Report 23 Jun Andreas Holmer

PEPSI had, for many years, been outsourcing their Thai bottling operations to a local company. These guys took care of everything from sourcing cans and bottles, to filling them, and then marketing the final product. Although I'm unsure of the details, it appears PEPSI got in to a contract dispute with their local supplier. Word has it PEPSI wanted to up their licensing fees or some such, but I'm not entirely certain. As an outsider, I can only imagine PEPSI being rather sure of itself in these negotiations. They do, after all, own one of the strongest brands in the world. And so they probably felt comfortable pushing a bit too hard. At some point negotiations broke down. Turns out the local bottling supplier had stood up to the multinational corporations. And as it turns out, the underdog had a few cards up its sleeve. Within a very short time, the local supplier introduced a new cola called EST. I looks and tastes very much like PEPSI, but it is different. And it wasn't a small rollout either; they practically blanketed the market. Their where billboards and print ads. And POS advertising was quickly switched from PEPSI to EST. almost over night, PEPSI was gone, and it it's place was this new, almost identical, drink. It's been a year or so since this all transpired and PEPSI is starting to come back. But they were gone for quite awhile. I even heard that the local supplier had used their connections to cut the off from packaging etc. So, the moral of the story, I guess, is that you can't be to sure of yourself no matter who you are.
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1 Comment Share Thank Report 3 Jul Ethan Greenspan 1 Not sure I would call this Shrewd, but definitely one of the smartest decisions I've seen. Around the time when Circuit City was failing horribly, I was interning for a little company called Systemax [SYX]. I got to know some of the management team,

and they informed me that they purchased CircuitCity.com. (Which is now labeled TigerDirect. Basically, the guys at Systemax, Global Industrial, Tiger Direct (all under Systemax at the time) purchased CircuitCity.com so they could sell unwanted merchandise for cheap without devaluing their brands. It was genius, and to this day I maintain relationships with the Leeds; I ask them for advice whenever possible, and they never disappoint. Comment Share Thank Report 25 Jul Patrick Hwung 1 Dow must of had an incredible amount of capital to soak up all that Bromine... the modern equivalent of that today would be to buy up all the physical gold on COMEX at the currently manipulated prices and wait for fiat systems to implode then create new gold based fiat at $10,000/ounce or whatever. Comment Share Thank Report 25 Jul Jeremy Lee, single 1

It's a flyers of an app which is designed for Chinese college students. But it's not just a common flyers. It says "special paper for padding the boxed meal"and "place the boxed meal here". About half of the college students eat boxed meals in daily life. So it's not a kind of rubbish but a useful thing. Comment Share Thank Report 11 Aug Alfonso Buano 1 I also want to think of a niche product n marketing or is it already too late to blossom ..... Comment Share Thank Report 28 Aug Bill Weiner, Lawyer, Film Executive - Los Angeles 1 Read "the Big Short" by Michael Lewis about the handful of guys who did their homework and figured out the subprime mortgage business and bet against it and made billions. Comment Share Thank Report 25 Jul Alexander Case, Internet Critic - Host of the web ser... 1 Microsoft getting IBM to, essentially, open the door for the Modern PC. The short version of the explanation works like this. Prior to the launch of the IBM PC, most computer manufacturers each had their own model of computer, which ran on different processors (possibly made in house, like TI's, possibly made by a

different company like MOS Technology and the Atari 800). These had different hardware specs, different video processors (if they had separate video processors in the first place), different sound chips, and often had operating systems that were built in-house. This meant that porting software between computers was extremely difficult, and which is why Microsoft got their start making compilers for BASIC and other programming languages for other computers - because people needed those compilers... badly. IBM had been working around this time about getting into the lucrative Personal Computer market. They had missed the boat on microcomputers, and were getting out maneuvered by newer companies like Apple and Commodore. According to the version I've heard, based on the suggestions of Microsoft, they built the system around Intel's more affordable 8088 processor, and using parts which were basically available off the shelf, using Microsoft's MS-DOS 1.0 operating system. They also did not sign Microsoft to an exclusivity deal. This meant when the IBM PC became successful, Microsoft was able to take their operating system to other companies and let them build a system that would effectively run any program that would run on IBM PCs - the IBM Compatible was born, in turn leading to the computer culture which we know now, where almost all desktop PCs can be modified as much as we want, and in turn, the hobbyist "build it yourself" approach to user hardware that launched the computer boom managed to survive the locked-down proprietary days of TI, Atari, and Commodore. Comment Share (1) Thank Report 25 Jun John Fossey Vote by Olalekan Tomori. When Bombardier Inc., the inventor of the snowmobile, changed their business model from "manufacturer of snowmobiles" to "manufacturer of people moving machines" and went on to become the world's largest manufacturer of passenger trains and the third largest manufacturer of aircraft. A simple change of perspective with dramatic results. The company remains highly focused on its core business, yet expanded that core business into a field that was at the time open for the taking. Comment Share Thank Report 21 May George Bradbury, Founder of bwresults.com - Exclusivel... Votes by Sairam Rangachari, Gamin Inganela, and Brian Roney. Lebron James "taking his talents to South Beach." Professional sports and the NBA are big business; when James announced in 2010 that he would depart the Cleveland Cavaliers to team up with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh in theMiami Heat, he did so on a live TV broadcast carried by ESPN. The broadcast alone, titled "The Decision" brought in $2.5 million for the Boys and Girls Club of Greenwich, CT.

James mentioned that going to the Miami Heat would allow him to win multiple championships. That happened in the 2011-2012 season, and again in 2013. He

masterminded his decision by contacting key players that used to be his rivals and talked him into joining a winning team. He also consulted with the legendary Pat Riley, president of the Miami Heat. Sports journalists were quick to call James' move to the Heat a business decision. Ken Berger of CBS Sports understood that when James said that he did not have "any hurt feelings or hard feelings" for fans of the Cleveland Cavaliers, he qualified it as a business decision. So did Jerome Foster of Bleacher Report, who wrote "professional sports is a business above all other things." Although in contract terms James actually lost some money when he arrived in Miami, he saved approximately $1.01 million in state income taxes. His televised decision helped him gain 150,000 Twitter followers in just one hour. New York brand consulting agency Interbrand estimated that James' net worth will reach $600 million over time and perhaps $1 billion after a few more NBA titles, which will put him in the same league as Tiger Woods in terms of net worth. Derision for LeBron's business decision shows sports disconnect LeBron James' Decision Was Business Not Personal, Dan Gilbert Comment Share (1) Thank Report 3 Jun Bruce Wade, US Army Veteran of the Viet Nam Era, ... 1 Back before the big-box hardware stores, there was a NW US hardware chain called Pay and Pak. The shrewd move concerns it's CEO for several years, who's contract said he could not work for another hardware retailer for a period after leaving Pay and Pak. It said nothing about starting his own retail hardware company, a glaring omission. He founded what was then known as Eagle Hardware, which pioneered the big-box concept in the NW market. Pay and Pak folded about five years later as Lowes and Home Depot captured the revenue. Comment Share Thank Report 26 Jul Margaret Ost, Born in Manhattan, returned after col... Vote by Amanda Sapp. I did something simple when I had a comedy room in NYC. I was presented with business cards, asked to pay for them by the management and they weren't really useful. So I spent more money on a custom ink stamp. My door admittance person then gave one to every person who paid the $5.00 cover charge showing them that it was good for one FREE admission next time. NOT 2 for 1. Of course most people brought a friend. Free advertising from a customer. Comment Share Thank Report 25 Jul Atchison Frazer, www.marchitexture.com Bill Gates acquiring DOS in lieu of IBM for roughly $75,000; second only to the Dutch purchasing Manhattan for $1. Comment Share (1) Thank Report 2 Jun Brad Szollose, 21st Century Agent of Change Vote by Michael Mayer. Shrewdest for me is when John Chambers, CEO of Cisco fired 3000 employees, got rid of products that were a waste of time and made Cisco's hierarchy flatter and more democratic. He did this when the stock was at $89 a share one year and the following year it plunged to $11. The Dot Com Bust almost put Cisco out of business. Mr. Chambers realized HE was the bottleneck that kept Cisco from being productive in the 21st Century. What a comeback...and not easy for a leader to give up power and authority in favor of speed. 2 Comment Share (1) Thank Report 25 Jun Virat Singh, Cereal Entree Per Noir Vote by Amanda Sapp.

selling a product under the pretext of "donating a portion of the proceeds to charity." the level of "shrewdness" could be easily abused (by not donating anything at all) and it is definitely smart because it provides consumers added incentive to purchase your product. Comment Share Thank Report 23 May Larry Mann, Born right the first time Votes by Abdul Basit Suhail, Sagar Irabatti, Geordie Keitt, and Ben Bakhshi. As Seen On TV! Typically, items were advertised on TV and also sold in stores. And then, all of a sudden, these items became so special that you could not even buy them in stores, but only on TV. And now, many stores have these items up in front, in a section called "As Seen on TV". It's back to the way it was before, except now these items have attained celebrity status! Comment Share Thank Report 3 Jun Brian Dalphonse, Professional with experience in educa... Votes by Joshua Oliver, Gareth Michael Jones, Yishi Zuo, and Amanda Sapp. Amazon.com needed additional servers to handle the holiday season. Once the season passed, the servers were mostly idle. Amazon took advantage of the servers to launch Amazon Web Services. Amazon sells space on the servers to various companies like Netflix to stream its content. This means that regardless of which source you download your movie from, Amazon Prime or Netflix, Amazon is drawing a portion of the revenue off that download. Brilliant! Comment Share Thank Report 12 Aug Joel Wishkovsky, COO of Sols 1 Have you ever visited a home with a real estate agent? Chances are they got the house key from a Supra lockbox. It owns nearly 100% of the market. The company was owned by GE but now I believe it's part of United Technologies...I worked at the facility briefly while at GE and was told by the head of the business the story of it's rise: The company made an amazing lockbox that let any real estate agent in an MLS get access to a key. The boxes are essentially given to the MLS in exchange for forcing every MLS member to pay a monthly or yearly fee. Sounds great, only the really big MLSs were playing hardball on negotiations. So the business went to all the MLS groups on surrounding towns and got them setup on good terms under 7yr contracts. At year 3 in these contracts the company went back to the big MLS organizations in metro areas and sold them the units. This time they could offer all of the real estate agents in the MLS access to the lockboxes of surrounding areas that also had the system. More sales for everyone! GE settled on a little better terms but got them on 7yr contracts. A byproduct of this was that the surrounding area agents now had access to the big MLS properties as well. It was a big deal. a few years later as the outer area MLS contracts were expiring the company had them by the balls. Sign up with us instead of the other startups in the space or you won't have access to the other surrounding area inventory. Also, it's more money now and still a 7yr contract. Pay up. They did. They rinsed and repeated this 7yr cycle where all the surrounding areas were on different parts of the contract to drive up prices and corner the market. To this day this has been my shining star example of brilliant business strategy. Comment Share Thank Report 12 Aug Richard Reubenstone, Chief Advisor, Collaborizm, new onlin... Vote by Hunter McCord. IBM's transformation about 7-10 years ago from a hardware company to a technology services company. They saw the commoditization of the computer

hardware business, and pivoted to their core strength, technological know how, and applied it to a services based model that would be definition create a dramatically higher ROI and ROE. Comment Share Thank Report 26 May Burke Files, Financial Investigator Votes by Darragh McCarthy and Amanda Sapp. The auto manufacturers getting the US cities to pull out tram lines, or buying the private tram lines and shutting them down. A clear removal of a choice. Comment Share (1) Thank Report 12 Jun Josh Clement 1 Here's something recent: The Goldman Sachs Guide To Manipulating Commodities Comment Share Thank Report 25 Jul Justin Snider, SEO Votes by Mike Prozan, Bryan Cheung, and Sam Boosalis. I don't know the specifics, but when I was in China with my girlfriend and her family they were telling me about a woman who owned all these magnificent museums stocked with her private collection of furniture and art and the like. Apparently during the 90s when the Chinese people went through a revolution of sorts and did not want to be associated with material objects people sold off all of their expensive items for pennies on the dollar (if not just giving/throwing them away). This woman bought up/acquired so many of these items that when things flip-flopped and the Chinese people became very consumed with status she had all of these gorgeous items that were worth far more than their original value and significantly more than what she paid for them. Now she's super wealthy, and married to/dating a famous Chinese actor. Comment Share Thank Report 15 May 60 Answers Collapsed (Why?) Unverified Name: Jimmy Chong, Clueless Votes by Rohankant Tatelu, Omkar Nisal, Rahul Singh, and 1048 more. Source: Ivan Krsti (How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a killing )

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How Porsche Hacked the Financial System & Made a Killing

In 1931, Austro-Hungarian engineer Ferdinand Porsche started a German company in his own name. It offered car design consulting services, and was not a car manufacturer itself until it produced the Type 64 in 1939. But things got interesting for Porsche long before then. In 1933, he was approached by none other than Adolf Hitler, who commissioned a car designed for the German masses. Porsche accepted, and the result was the iconic Beetle, manufactured under the Volkswagen (lit. peoples car) brand. Today, Porsches company is one of the worlds premier luxury car brands, while Volkswagen (VW) is itself the worlds third-largest auto maker after General Motors and Toyota. In 2005, Volkswagen found itself fearing a foreign takeover. Porsche, the company, decided to step in and start buying VW stock ostensibly to protect the landmark brand, widely fueling market expectations that it would eventually buy Volkswagen outright. Of course, this isnt quite what came to pass. For three years [2005-2008], Porsche kept accumulating VW stock without telling anyone how much it owned. Every time it purchased more, the amount of free-floating VW stock would decrease, driving the stock price up slightly; your basic supply and demand at work. Eventually the share price became high enough that, to outside observers, it wouldnt have made any sense for Porsche Search to buy Volkswagen. It would simply have cost too much. To explain what happened next, Im going to first tell you about a financial maneuver called shorting.

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Shorting
At any given point, only a certain amount of a publicly traded companys stock is floating freely in the market. The rest is held in various portfolios, funds, and investment vehicles. Now, everyones familiar with the basic idea behind the stock market: you buy stock when it costs little, and you sell it when it costs a lot, profiting on the difference. But that assumes a companys value is going to increase. What if, instead of betting a company will go up, you want to make money betting the company will go down? You can by selling stock you dont own. Say you borrow a certain amount of stock from someone who already owns it. You pay a fixed fee for borrowing the stock, and you sign a contract saying you will return exactly the same amount of stock you took after some amount of time. So, you might borrow a thousand shares of Apple stock from me (I dont actually own any, but play along), pay me $100 for the privilege, and sign an obligation to return my stock in 3 months. At the time, Apple stock is worth $10 per share. After you borrow the stock, you immediately sell it. At $10 a share, you get $10,000. Two and a half months later, another rumor about Steve Jobs health sends AAPL crashing to only $6 per share for a few hours, so you buy a thousand shares, costing you $6,000. You give me back those shares. Because you successfully bet the company would go down in value, you earned $4,000 minus the borrowing fee. This is called short-selling or shorting the stock, and the downside is obvious: if your bet was wrong, you would have lost money buying back the shares that you have to return to your lender.

Where Things Get Kinky

When Volkswagens share price exceeded the point where it made sense for Porsche to buy the company, a number of hedge funds realized that Volkswagen shares have nowhere to go but down. With Porsche out of the picture, there was simply no reason for VW to keep going up, and the funds were willing to bet on it. So they shorted huge amounts of VW stock, borrowing it from existing owners and selling it into circulation, waiting for the price drop they considered inevitable. Porsche anticipated exactly this situation and promptly bought up much of these borrowed VW shares that the funds were selling. Do you see where this is going? Analysts did. According to The Economist, Adam Jonas from Morgan Stanley warned clients not to play billionaires poker against Porsche. Porsche denied any foul play, saying it wasnt doing anything unusual. But then, last October 26th [2008], they stepped forward and bared their portfolio: through a combination of stock and options, they owned 75% of Volkswagen, which is almost all the companys circulating stock. (The remainder is tied up in funds that cannot easily release it.) To put it mildly, the numbers scared the living hell out of the hedge funds: if they didnt immediately buy back the Volkswagen stock they were shorting, there might not be any left to buy later, and it isnt their stock they have to return it to someone. If their only option is thus to buy the VW stock from Porsche, then the miracle of supply and demand will hit again, and Porsche can ask for whatever price it wants per VW share twenty times their value, a hundred times their value because theres no other place to buy. Theyre the only game in town.

Gains
Porsches ownership disclosure sent the hedge funds on such a flurry of purchases for any Volkswagen stock still in circulation that the VW share price jumped from below 200 to over 1000 at one point on October 28th, making Volkswagen for a brief time the worlds most valuable company by market cap. On paper, Porsche made between 30-40 billion in the affair. Once all is said and done, the actual profit is closer to some 6-12 billion. To put those numbers in perspective, Porsches revenue for the whole year of 2006 was a bit over 7 billion. Porsches move took three years of careful maneuvering. It was darkly brilliant, a wealth transfer ingeniously conceived like few weve ever seen. Betting the right way, Porsche roiled the financial markets and took the hedge funds for a

fortune. 15+ Comments Share (13) Thank Report 19 May One Citizen 11 Votes by Sharon Pakir Krygger, Aarti Dwivedi, Yishi Zuo, and 7 more. Let's see if anyone can top this: Adding three simple words to the instructions -doubled usage and skyrocketed sales ... Adding "rinse and repeat" to shampoo instructions. Comment Share Thank Report 15 May Scott Scott 1 Some have mentioned it already but more specifically, when Ford announced the $5 day he said that a worker should be able to affford the product they manufacture. Comment Share Thank Report 24 Jul Denislets Denislets 1 test Comment Share (1) Thank Report 22 Jul Firligned Jason 1 Quora always has some interesting information on it, and this question in particular has some really interesting and quality stories on it. Most of the Stories revolve around finding a hidden need or opportunity, finding a way to hold an industry or company by the balls (corning a market, maniuplating makets, etc), or taking advantage of the human nature. I wanted to share my favourites, so here they are. veitnam Comment Share Thank Report 5 Sep Mojojoey Wojiwoji 1 A man opened an electronic store, after a few weeks, a competitor arrived; opening a store beside and almost identical to his. having a sign that indicates low price etc and everything. a few more weeks and another opened exactly the same, at the other side claiming to have a price lower than the others. The man couldnt get much sleep thinking about his situation. and then suddenly, one night, he had an idea. his light bulb turned on! The next morning, he got the ladder and put on his very own sign. It was big enough to be noticed by people passing by. the sign said "Main Entrance". I know this is just a story scattered all over the internet, but as far as i know, its the best story of business i ever read. aside from the fact that in the Film "Don't Mess With the Zohan" by Adam S., i can recall that there was a store there with a sign saying " GOING OUT OF BUSINESS, ON SALE" Comment Share Thank Report 31 Jul JP JP Asia Comment Share Thank Report 31 May Downvoted: Craig Tucker Vote by Hendrik Little. The shrewdest maneuver I have ever seen is telling a client they can't have something when what they want is unrealistic or based on a false assumption. This is especially true when the client has unrealistic expectations of cost or scope; and while scary to do it lends credibility to you that your integrity as a professional is more important than making a quick sale. Comment Share Thank Report 16 May Jack Hanneman Vote by Plan Maestro.

Steve Case, for managing a merger between AOL and Time Warner. He knew AOL was waaaay overvalued, and he managed to turn it into a solid asset-backed stock for his shareholders. Comment Share Thank Report 21 May Nikhil Chandra, A post graduate in marketing from Uni... Vote by Mathew Joy Maniyamkott. Pepsi's Cricket World Cup Campaign Nothing Official about it, a classic example of ambush marketing. During the 1996 World Cup, although Coca Cola was the official sponsor of the tournament, Pepsi ambushed the campaign by coming up with the tagline nothing official about it. Yet another one of my fave is this yet another example of Ambush Marketing

Comment Share (1) Thank Report 24 Jul Christopher Yoder Vote by Aaron Roach. TARP Comment Share Thank Report 15 May Anonymous Votes by Imad Hashmi and Harish Kashyap. MX Newspaper, a free newspaper distributed at major train stations to the crowds of commuters has built a readership that now has sponsors paying them for the huge traffick they receive and paid nothing in advertising costs. Suggestions Pending 1 Comment Share Thank Report 7 May Matt Cauble 1 The airline industry collectively convincing the general public that it should pay extra for space that is uninhabitable. Comment Share Thank Report 30 May Sandra Del Tiempo, Bachelor of Science, Business from Oh... 1 Our company was missing our sales goals due to a competitor who was selling the 'same' product for 1/2 the price. Our President lamented to her CEO that we

couldn't hit our numbers due to this competitor. The next year, our President was replaced - with leadership from the competing company. Essentially we ransacked their best talent, gutted them and watched as they sold their products off, then fired most of the leaders we had recruited a year later. Comment Share Thank Report 17 May Janos Fejos Votes by Anmol Dureha and Kruttika Nadkarni. George Soros' break of Bank of England. Comment Share Thank Report 11 Sep Sreeraj Pengattu Votes by Mark Milotay, Anshoo Grover, Arjun Verma, and 3 more. Seen in some website.. Father : "I want you to marry a girl of my choice" Son : "I will choose my own bride!" Father : "But the girl is Bill Gates's daughter." Son : "Well, in that case...ok" Next - Father approaches Bill Gates. Father : "I have a husband for your daughter." Bill Gates : "But my daughter is too young to marry!" Father : "But this young man is a vice-president of the World Bank." Bill Gates : "Ah, in that case...ok" Finally Father goes to see the president of the World Bank. Father : "I have a young man to be recommended as a vice-president. " President : "But I already have more vice- presidents than I need!" Father : "But this young man is Bill Gates's son-in-law." President : "Ah, in that case...ok" This is how business is done!! 1 Comment Share Thank Report 5 Sep Jessica Duncan, Published Children's Author w/ a New ... 1 Not sure if this is a great answer, but it's the first one that came to mind! My dad used to be a commercial lender and VP of Business First National Bank and one time, had a client that was jerking him around about paying back his loan. During an in-person meeting to discuss loan repayment, the client started taking calls on his cell phone, in between evading the questions my dad was asking. After the third phone call, my dad grabbed the clients keys (which were on the desk) and dropped them down his pants, and started to massage them around, all while grinning like a fool. The client was shocked. He told the person he was on the phone with what his banker just did, got off the phone promptly, stopped jerking my dad around, and got a payment to him that day. Apparently the client had taken his wife's car to the meeting that day. Now mind you, I didn't actually SEE this with my own eyes, but I did get a recounting of it several times over lunch with dad the following day! Ha, he's so professional. ;) Comment Share Thank Report 19 Sep

Michael Livingstone, Founder of "Zoe Kennedy" Passionate t... Easy. Starting one, rather than dreaming about it. Then selling it at its optimum point, before natural external forces reduce its value (or saleabliity). These include emergence of competitors, recession, being outdated, being bettered by someone, being taken over, losing customers or being the victim of customer 'taste change'. I never wanted to 'run' a business. I always wanted to sell one. That is my 'endgame'. How do I do that? Easy. Start one. Comment Share (1) Thank Report 30 May Moby Duncan, A not very successful mind-reader! Vote by Sriram Vamsi Ilapakurthy. Got this one from a facebook...

Comment Share Thank Report 24 May Bhuvi Jain, Mom of two just-out-of-teen agers, writer 1 It's a story I've heard about Colgate - many years ago, when the toothpaste sales in India were not going as well as expected, the CEO offered a huge bonus to anyone who could come up with a strategy to double sales. An employee came up with the suggestion,"Simply increase the size of the mouth and people will use more toothpaste and will buy more." Needless to say, the man got his bonus and sales doubled. Comment Share Thank Report 17 May P. Michael Hutchins 1 Er, what about Bill Gates's buying DOS from IBM?!?!?!

Comment Share Thank Report 21 May Glen Robertson 1 With apologies to WIkipedia, where I extracted this paragraph, I'd argue that the shrewdest, smartest move that I've seen in business was Andrew Carnegie's sale of his steel company to JP Morgan. Not only did this transaction help strengthen a steel company, but also the free funds enabled Carnegie to fund/donate more than 160 libraries in order to empower and to educate other people. How many millions of lives were improved or empowered through this benevolent act? How many business were conceived or created based on the knowledge and insights gained from these books? Here is the extract from Wikipedia, but as someone who (eventually) used his wealth to help others, I'd say this move is one of the best. Perhaps its already been posted by others as well, and if so, my apologies for the repeat endorsement. Be well. Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, and emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1848. Carnegie started as a telegrapher and by the 1860s had investments in railroads, railroad sleeping cars, bridges and oil derricks. He built further wealth as a bond salesman raising money for American enterprise in Europe. He built Pittsburgh's Carnegie Steel Company, which he sold to J.P. Morgan in 1901 for $480 million, creating the U.S. Steel Corporation. Carnegie devoted the remainder of his life to large-scale philanthropy, with special emphasis on local libraries, world peace, education and scientific research. With the fortune he made from business, he built Carnegie Hall, and founded the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Institution for Science, Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Carnegie Hero Fund, Carnegie Mellon University and the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, among others. His life has often been referred to as a true "rags to riches" story. 1 Comment Share (1) Thank Report 25 May Anonymous 1

Comment Share Thank Report 9 Jul Ronny Gonzales 1 I was in a marketing class when coca cola announced that they were doing away with Coke... My Prof insisted that this was not pre-meditated, I disagreed. Some of the very best of the time worked for coca cola, they knew exactly what they were doing Comment Share Thank Report 22 May Shrey Tulsian, Acquiring Knowledge Votes by Gaurav Dahake and Geetika Gupta. Airtel offering 3g speed free of cost to its 2g customers for 15 days to promote customers to switch to 3g speed from snail paced 2g net

1+ Comments Share Thank Report 25 Aug Fred Driemeyer 1 Oh you techies and finance types.Ray Kroc buying the rights to the McDonalds name and system for 50k.This move made him and others billionaires and created a worldwide empire starting with a single outlet. Krocs vision and belief drove the growth.Remember this company went from one store to dow iones 500 and then to standard and poors. Comment Share Thank Report 22 May Ken Likness 1 It was listening to a lawyer describe his client as being a "shrewd businessman"; (since legally shrewd is the strongest word in the english language one can use to describe someone else without being liable for deflamation). Comment Share Thank Report 22 May Pranav Gupta, CEO, Prints Publication Pvt Ltd, the ... 1 The manoeuvre which is closest to my heart and knowledge goes no further than our own company. The basic principle of our business is to keep in view the ground realities. It is so simple and basic that does not need shrewd processes to have them managed. Comment Share (1) Thank Report 22 May Mukesh Mehta 1 Understanding a customer to fullest, and seeing him satisfied Comment Share Thank Report 22 May David Brabbins 1 Lather, Rinse, Repeat Comment Share Thank Report 29 Jun Sangram Singh, Entrepreneur, Angel Investor; BE (IT)... 1 I fancy business being a game of shrewdness more than hardwork, especially since maintaining ur position is so hard.

1. Employee retention. The Older Ambani's known for threatening senior employees lives and careers if they think of leaving. 2. Market Leadership. Is often maintained by selling at a loss, and creative accounting. Also in young businesses who often take their businesses public, the figures themselves are not correct and a lot of creative book keeping is involved. Lets not name companies in this. 3. Products and IPs. Steve jobs focus on motivating his smart workforce to generate as much IP as possible to create singular products in each categories is remarkable. Later on his unyielding focus to change industry after industry (itunesmusic, to apple store -retail,) to control the User Experience is phenomenal. 4. Creative financing. Make the vendor as shareholder in the enterprise. Both the DLF king KP Singh and smaller players like the MD of Renuka Sugar, made share holders of the Land Sellers and Sugar Cane growers respectively, to acquire market leadership in "yesteryear industries". 5. Technology. Even Lakshmi Mittal is known to redo the entire technology framework of his Steel empire every 3-5 years as using teh old technology is unviable for maintaining leadership. 6. First Mover with Vision: Kishore Biyani may be credited with the man behind the grandest vision in Indian Retail. Narayan Murthy, Premji for IT services, and Bharti Mittal for telecom. The list can go on... Thank you for reading. Comment Share Thank Report 19 May Kiran Franco, Storyteller, Day Dreamer. Vote by Sean Coleman. According to this story I have heard, Warren Buffet was to invest in Coca Cola or Pepsi. In order to find out which was more popular, he used to hang out near restaurants and eateries at night and go through garbage bins after the shops were closed. He found more Coca Cola bottles and cans compared to Pepsi and thus, invested in the former. I am not sure whether it's true...but Warren Buffett became a lot cooler in my mind after I heard this! Comment Share Thank Report 7 May Gary Stiffelman, Entertainment Attorney Votes by Seb Paquet, Ross Levin, and Kevin Kuo. The 2000 acquisition of TimeWarner by AOL in which a legendary 1926 company was acquired by a 1991 upstart. Probably the worst transaction in business history. In 2009, nine years later, the combined market cap of Time Warner stood at less than $40 billion, down from $350 billion at the time the merger was announced. 1+ Comments Share Thank Report 10 May David Fisher 1 That's easy. The tobacco industry is a classic example of this in spades. Everyday Sr. Management of tobacco companies get up and set about deliberately to promote the addiction to their products that kill 600,000 of their fellow Americans every year along with millions of gross and unnecessary and quite awful illnesses and disease. They are now promoting the addiction to cigarettes for 2 to 5 year olds in Indonesia and far east a truly great new market. And mind you, that is 600,000 of their fellow Americans. Worldwide, it is in the millions and over a 10 year period of time it is hundreds of millions of deaths. They eclipse the reign of terror that "terrorists" wish they could create. The Sr. Management of tobacco companies employ very smart people to frame issues, to control the debate and to own politicians at the State and Federal level. They are certainly one of (not the only!) groups most responsible for polluting our democracy. (Gun lobby comes to mind along with Haliburton.) And, it is not as though these guys are not rich already. They are billionaires already. They push their personal costs of living off onto their stockholders without a pause.

That this all works, continues to work, and contributes billions in tax revenues to government at all levels is a wonder of shrewdness and smart maneuvers of all time. Hats off to them for daily proving the value of free market capitalism. 1 Comment Share Thank Report 21 May Sarah Pressler 1 Marissa Mayer: Everything she does! Comment Share Thank Report 21 May Esther David 1 Hello i am Esther.i like your profile on this site and i will be delighted to have a good relationship with you.you can send me an email direct to my inbox(missestherdavid@yahoo.com ) so that i we send you my new pictures and tell you more about myself.thanks Esther Comment Share Thank Report 20 May Conan Fu 1 pure love for someone Comment Share Thank Report 16 May Aco Strkalj 1 Steve Jobs 1 Comment Share Thank Report 10 Jul Shaun Trennery Vote by Lors Soren. The addition of perforations to cling wrap. 2 Comments Share Thank Report 17 May Lexie Forman- Ortiz, One liner. Votes by Priyansh Tiwari, David Smooke, and Sam Boosalis. Giving away your product for free. Like SmartRecruiters. 1 Comment Share Thank Report 18 May Scott Wise, Jack of all trades - Master of none 1 Laying a great Business Continuity foundation... It's amazing how many businesses close their doors forever do to a silly interruption in their operations. This month is National Preparedness Month, so please, dust off that plan and update what you would do, TODAY, if anything happened. What would you do? Where would you go? What would your employees do? How will everyone get paid? Will they still have a job? What about your clients? What about... You get the idea. More often than not, it's not the CNN type of disasters that shut businesses down for good, it's the small stuff that makes your workplace un/non-productive. I'd call Trevor Mickelson at Agility, 720-490-4531. He can help guide you to obtaining information for your company. It's worth the call. National Preparedness Month Webinars Never Fail - Agility Recovery Join LinkedIn | LinkedIn Comment Share Thank Report 18 Sep Sandesh Patil, Ecommerce Enthusiast 1 Dhirubhai Ambani's creation of Reliance from scratch, building one of India's largest conglomerate.. Comment Share Thank Report 7 May

Simon Allen, If it's broken, fix it. If it's fixed... Votes by Arjun Vijay, Sachin Gupta, Robert Chokr, and Fardeen Rahaman. What a great story! I have much to learn from Mr Dow I, as the founder of barter bay, am having a bit of a problem with ebay, which wants to shut barter bay down. It says we are trying to 'Pass off' by using the name BAY, even though I, my colleagues, our Solicitors and the Intellectual Property Office here in England thought the word BAY in context was simply a word to denote an online store, the same as shop (here in GB) which is synonymous on our High Streets. We explained our view to their Lawyers, which is barter bay is not an auction site. We took advice from a suitably experienced professional before applying for the trade mark and after some deliberation, it was agreed to change our previous logo to the logo you are contesting, so as not to conflict with ebay, Ebay, eBAY (you see it is fairly difficult to avoid a potential issue when ebay (as it is now known, since October I believe), covers various posts so as to eliminate competition). There is no intention to be detrimental to ebay as an organization, indeed, I, as the driver of barter bay, have no reason to do that whatsoever. I think Mr Omidyer's creation is fantastic and I support it and what it did in creating a global market place, wholly. One consideration in this seems to me to be that of protectionism from any remote competition and protectionism in a Market Economy seems to me to be totally at odds with the underpinning rationale for a Market Economy! I also took advice from the IPO and after a brief discussion the representative of the IPO said she saw no reason or problem for attempting to register the trade mark, as there was/is no conflict, hence my attempt to register. In addition to this, I find it rather daunting that such a large global organization, from the US of all places (the greatest sales people on earth in my opinion), our 'Cousins across the pond', want to stamp this small British-based start-up from existence, when it's not in competition and even if it were, I refer to my comment above on a Market Economy. I intend to write to Mr Omidyer (and if need be Mr Obama and Mr Cameron) as I can't see for the life of my why ebay would go to such lengths to wipe barter bay from the face of the earth our respective economies need start-ups such as barter bay to assist in bringing beneficial change for the peoples of both out great nations. The response from the Lawyers was (not verbatim), drop the word BAY or we'll pursue you. They further advised us (again, not verbatim), that they have noted that barter bay uses PayPal as it's e-commerce engine (and why not, it's great!). They went on to advise us that PayPal, the entity, isn't happy with our attempting to 'pass off' ebay and will suspend our account unless we: 1. Voluntarily withdraw the UK trade mark application; 2. Immediately cease all use of the trade mark barter bay; 3. Not to register or use the trade mark barter bay or any bay formative trade mark or any trade mark similar to EBAY in the UK or the European Community, for any sort of online business, especially those that involve trading, market place services, auction service, retail/wholesale service, classified advertising services and the like; 4. Not to directly or indirectly assist, procure or enable any third party to register or use the trade mark barter bay in the UK or the European Community, for any sort of online business, especially those that involve trading, market place service, auction service, retail/wholesale service, classified advertising services and the like; 5. Not to pass off or directly or indirectly assist others to pass off any goods or services as being linked to ebay; 6. Amend the company name from barter bay limited to any not containing the bay element. This matter arose its ugly head in July and remains ongoing. So you see Mr Dows innovative thinking is sorely needed by barter bay right now. How I wish he were still in the ball game so that I could gain from his expert advice! 5+ Comments Share (3) Thank Report 7 Sep Jones Lincholn, Business Advisor

From last few many years there are many changes that happens in the business because online business take place and many business that are done internationally. Comment Share Thank Report 2 Sep Kemar Jones, Personal development coach

Votes by Siddhant Mohan and Anish Agarwal. 3 Out thinking the competition. Best move I seen. Some times the little idea in your head is worth billions you just did not realize it yet Comment Share Thank Report 3 Sep Peter Bhatt Votes by Nishant Patel and Siddhant Mohan. Indians (from all over the World) are dominating this entire Q & A Website .....EXCELLENT !! QUESTION: What's UP ?? Baat Kya Hai ?? 1+ Comments Share Thank Report 15 Aug Needs Improvement: Bassam Al-Bassam, iRead 14 Votes by Jatin Puri, Pritesh Desai, Alp Ycebilgin, and 10 more. How about this Trojan horse maneuver:

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Anonymous Votes by Garrick Saito, Swapnil Jain, David Fry, and 193 more. An Indian man walks into the New York City bank and asks for the loan officer. He tells the Loan Officer that he was going to India for some business for 2 weeks and needs to borrow $5,000. The Loan Officer tells him that the bank will need Some form of security for the loan. So the Indian man hands over the keys and the documents of the new Ferrari car parked on the street in front of the bank. The loan officer consults the president of the bank, Produces all the required items and everything check out to be OK. The loan officer agrees to accept the car as a security for the loan. The bank president and the Loan Officer had a good laugh at the Indian For keeping a $750,000 Ferrari as a security and taking only $5,000 has a loan. An employee of the bank then drives the Ferrari Into the banks underground garage and parks it there. Two weeks later the Indian returns and pays $5000 and the interest which comes to it $15.41. Seeing this, loan officer says,

Sir, we are very happy to have your business And this transaction has worked out very nicely, but we are a little puzzled. While you are away, we checked you out and Found out that you were a multi millionaire. What puzzled us was why would you bother to borrow $5000? The Indian replies "Where else in the New York City can I park my car for 2 weeks and For only $15.41 and expect it to be there when I return". This is a true incident and the Indian is none other than Vijay Mallya

This answer doesn't answer the question. 4+ Comments Share (1) Report 15 May Chris Fury 1

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A full-on broadsword. Dude had a full-on broadsword. This answer should be a comment. Comment Share (1) Report 24 Jul Prateek Chandra Jha, Esoterican
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Soufian Malih, Strategy junior consultant, web devel... 1 A Businessman walked into a New York City bank asking $5,000 loan for two

business weeks travel to Europe versus a Rolls Royce as collateral. An employee then drove the Rolls into the bank's underground garage and parked it there. Two weeks later the businessman returned, repaid the $5,000 and the interest which came to $15.41. The loan officer said, 'We do appreciate your business and this transaction has worked out very nicely, but we are a bit puzzled. While you were away we checked and found that you are a multimillionaire. What puzzles us is why you would bother to borrow $5,000?' The business man replied: 'Where else in New York City can I park my car for 2 weeks for 15 bucks?' This answer doesn't answer the question. Comment Share Report 22 May Micmic Ro, MAGAZIN JUCARII 1 MICMIC | Jucarii, Haine, Incaltaminte, Accesorii pentru copii si bebelusi This answer doesn't answer the question. Comment Share (1) Report 22 May Carlos Julian Lacayo Munoz, Poli-Sci, Economic and Social Develop... When Tywin Lannister convinced Walder Fray and Roose Bolton to betray Robb Stark at the wedding of Edmure to one of Frays daughter. This answer is a joke answer. This answer has been collapsed and locked. Comment Share Report 24 Jul Andrey Delov, Ruby/IOS - developer 1 This answer doesn't answer the question. Comment Share Report 20 May Ernesto Mandowsky 1 Not even going to read through all the BS. Just read Game of Thrones... This answer doesn't answer the question. Comment Share Report 5 Jul Bill Hendrickson Vote by Matt Hausmann. Tuft themittkemjuuyj f TDX
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This answer doesn't answer the question. Comment Share Report 7 Jul Mohamed Azzouzi 1 Wonderful This answer should be a comment. Comment Share Report 4 Sep Jullia Wilson 1
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There are no words to say it is a great question you have shared.The business world is full up with clever, sharp movers .Feel free to surf this Business Directory Australia

This answer doesn't answer the question. Comment Share Report 27 Aug William Cancroft 1 Classic manuvering.......... This answer doesn't answer the question. Comment Share Report 4 Sep Stefan Jordon 1 Thanks

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If you rae interested to share own personal information related to business, you can use @http://marketingemailsoftware.ne... . It can easily verify and send emails This answer needs to disclose relevant affiliations. Comment Share Report 4 Sep Suprabhat Tiwari, Living in the dust, Aiming for the St...
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