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【速度】
【计时一】
Eurozone economy shrinks a bigger-than-expected 0.6 percent in Q4 as Germany falters
By Associated Press
BERLIN — The recession across the economy of the 17 European Union countries that use the euro deepened in the last three months of 2012 as Germany faltered in the face of anemic demand across the debt-ridden region.
Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office, said Thursday the eurozone economy shrank by 0.6 percent in the final quarter of 2012 from the previous three-month period. The decline was bigger than the 0.4 percent drop expected in markets and represented the biggest fall since the first quarter of 2009 when the global economy was in its deepest recession since World War II.
The eurozone has now contracted for three straight quarters — a recession is officially defined as two quarters of negative growth. It’s not alone in struggling to post growth — figures earlier showed Japan in recession, too, and the U.S. economy has shown signs of weakness, with its economy flat in the final quarter of 2012, according to Eurostat.
The worry for European policymakers is that output is declining not just in the weaker, debt-laden economies such as Greece and Spain, where governments have been aggressively increasing taxes and cutting spending. Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, shrank by a quarterly rate of 0.6 percent in the fourth quarter as demand for its exports fell. France, Europe’s second-biggest economy, also saw output drop by 0.3 percent. Both economies are now one quarter away from recession.
In total, the Eurostat figures show that seven euro countries are in recession — Greece, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, the Netherlands, Portugal and Finland.
【字数266】
【计时二】
There are hopes, though, that the fourth quarter of 2012 will mark the low point for the eurozone, and Germany in particular. In the first few weeks of 2013, there have been some indications that the eurozone may be over the worst as the financial markets have become less febrile with regard to the region’s debt woes.
ING economist Carsten Brzeski said the German figures were disappointing but that there was “no reason to start singing the blues on the German economy.” He noted improving confidence indicators and rising factory orders and industrial production.
“There is increasing evidence that the economy should pick up speed again very quickly,” he said.
France, however, appears to be a greater cause for concern as its economy faces a number of headwinds that don’t exist to the same extent in Germany. The French government has to keep a tight leash on its finances, unemployment is around 10 percent and its exporters are struggling, not least in the auto sector, with both Peugeot-Citroen and Renault struggling.
Though many analysts think France’s recent structural reforms will help make the economy more competitive, any tangible gains will not be seen for a while.
“Unfortunately, their positive impact on competitiveness, employment and activity will take time to materialize and will do little to mitigate economic pain in the short term,” said Herve Goulletquer, an analyst at Credit Agricole CIB.
Alongside the debt reduction efforts that governments are pursuing across the eurozone, the region’s exporters are also having to contend with a currency that has been rallying on foreign exchange markets, potentially making their products less competitive in the international marketplace.
Thursday’s downbeat figures offered some respite though, as the euro fell sharply against a broad range of currencies. The currency was 0.9 percent lower at $1.3325 and down 1 percent at 124.07 yen
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【计时三】
Obama’s plan to save the middle class: Redistribution now, education later.
By Ezra Klein
[attachimg=1024,720]114275[/attachimg]
My colleague Jim Tankersley writes that “there are two kinds of middle-class Americans struggling today. There are the people who can’t find work or can’t work as many hours as they’d like. And there are full-time workers who can’t seem to get ahead. In Tuesday’s State of the Union and its response, there wasn’t much for either group — at least when it comes to their biggest problem.”
That problem is that growth has stopped benefitting the middle class, at least to the degree that it used to. “A point of increased growth today simply delivers fewer jobs across the economy and less money in the pockets of middle-class families than an identical point of growth produced in the 40 years after the Second World War,” Tankersley writes.
This is among the scariest realities of the modern American economy. It used to be enough that we grew. But in recent years, a growing economy hasn’t been enough to lift all incomes. Growth was healthy throughout the George W. Bush years, for instance, but it all seemed to accrue in the bank accounts of the very wealthy. I call this the conehead economy: We keep growing, but all the wage growth seems to happen amongst the top 1 or 2 percent.
This accounts for the Obama administration’s obsession with inequality. As Jared Bernstein, the former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, told Zach Goldfarb, “we’ve gotten to the point that inequality is blocking opportunity.”
The question, of course, is what can be done?
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【计时四】
Tankersley doesn’t give enough credit, I think, to the Obama administration’s actual answer: Redistribution to save the middle class now and education to help it grow later. Their theory, put simply, is that if the economy isn’t going to share the gains of growth naturally, then it’s the government’s job to step in and make sure the rising tide lifts all incomes.
To that end, the Obama administration has been among the most explicitly redistributive presidencies in modern memory. The health-care law taxes the rich to give health care to the poor. The post-”fiscal cliff” tax code features higher taxes on the rich than we had under President Bill Clinton and lower taxes on the working class than we had under President George W. Bush. The stimulus included a raft of redistributive measures, like the expanded Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Obama administration has successfully fought to keep them even after the rest of the law expired.
And Obama’s State of the Union continued the trend. He proposed raising yet more revenue from the rich. He proposed ensuring universal access to pre-kindergarten for families with low or moderate incomes. He proposed raising the minimum wage to $9.00, its highest inflation-adjusted level since 1981. He proposed passing the American Jobs Act, which wouldn’t just restore the payroll tax cut — it would double it. He proposed tying federal student aid to various measures of college affordability and quality as part of a bid to keep secondary education from becoming too expensive for most Americans to afford.
Even if all this passed, would it be sufficient to ensure that the gains of growth are widely shared? That’s harder to say. Inside the Obama administration, the optimistic example is the Clinton years, in which growth really was widely shared.
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【剩余部分】
[attachimg=668,327]114276[/attachimg]
Median family income — adjusted for inflation — rose from $57,866 in 1991 to $66,259 in 2000. By 2008, however, it had fallen to $64,264. Obama’s top economists find it implausible that the American economy underwent a deep, structural transformation over that period such that the shared growth of the Clinton years is no longer possible.
Their basic view is that the economy has been battered by a terrible recession and a series of unwise and regressive policy choices. The hope is that if we can just get the economy back on its feet and reconfigure policy so it’s much more redistributive and much more focused on helping working Americans, we’re likely to find that growth can be more widely shared, more easily, than we think. And if we can upgrade the nation’s educational system at the same time, then the next generation will hopefully have less need for redistributive policies to share growth because they’ll be better able to navigate the demands of the modern economy.
That’s the theory you see the Obama administration pursuing over these last few years. It’s the theory that they’re trying to continue to pursue in their second term. Whether it’ll work — in fact, how much of it will even pass — remains an open question.
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【计时五】
The Web’s New Monopolists
Just because Facebook and Google are innovative now doesn’t mean they won’t strangle growth and harm us all—if we let them
By Justin Fox
[attachimg=615,452]114277[/attachimg]
Ask Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of the social network Twitter and the mobile-payment start-up Square, what his two companies have in common, and he has a quick answer: “They’re both utilities.” Mark Zuckerberg might agree: he spent years trying to convince people that Facebook is not a social network but a “social utility.”
It’s an intriguing choice of words for such of-the-moment entrepreneurs. Utilities tend to be boring, slow-growing beasts. They also—and this is the more important point—tend to be monopolies that are either regulated heavily by governments or owned outright by them.
Indeed, once they get beyond a certain size, technology companies do become wary of the word. Google has been called a utility by lots of people, but you won’t hear the company’s executives using the term (at least, I couldn’t find any examples). And Zuckerberg, when asked in 2010 whether, as a utility, Facebook ought to be regulated, said he hadn’t meant the word that way at all: “Something that’s cool can fade. But something that’s useful won’t. That’s what I meant by utility.”
Yet there are lots of useful things in the world—clothing, breakfast, this issue of The Atlantic—that no one would ever think of calling a utility. Yes, there is an innocuous class of computer software known as utilities. But what companies like Twitter, Square, and Facebook—not to mention Google, Amazon, and Apple—aspire to, and in some cases have achieved, is a status similar to that of traditional utilities like Ma Bell. They attempt to position themselves such that customers can’t get around them, or can’t afford to leave them. And when they succeed, they start appearing to some customers, would-be competitors, and regulators like scary monopolies that somebody needs to do something about.
【字数324】
【剩余部分】
The connection between attractive business opportunity and monopoly is not new. Pursuing a “short run” monopoly, the economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote in 1942, is what profit-seeking enterprises do—in the process, driving significant innovation and economic growth. In the 1970s, the business-school discipline of strategy arose as the study of how to build and defend these short-run monopolies—a sort of mirror image of the antitrust classes long found in law schools. “Strategy is antitrust with a minus sign in front of it,” says the Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu, who has taught both subjects. That is, strategy tries to maximize what antitrust tries to minimize.
What is new is that the path from looking for an edge to being attacked as a monopoly has gotten a lot shorter—and that gaining a monopoly seems such a plausible goal within some of the fastest-growing parts of the economy. Standard Oil had been in business for 36 years when the Justice Department sued it for antitrust violations; AT&T for 97. By comparison, Microsoft was just 15 when federal regulators started looking into its business practices, 23 when Justice sued. Google, a mere 14 years old, is already under antitrust investigation.
Then there’s Facebook, which turns 9 in February. The company has not yet been the target of significant antitrust attention. But its ubiquity and reach into users’ daily lives give it a status that—socially if not economically—really does feel like that of a monopoly utility. Every tweak Facebook makes to its privacy settings or its look sparks heated public discussion. Last summer, the company had to agree to regular audits of its privacy policy, mandated by the Federal Trade Commission. One even hears occasional calls (meant more as thought experiments than as serious policy proposals, but still) for it to be nationalized.
Today’s technology entrepreneurs are well aware of the tight link between profit and monopoly. Few are as open about it as the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, who has described monopoly as the natural goal of any smart tech entrepreneur. But everybody gets the basic idea. “There’s a joke in Silicon Valley,” says the UC Berkeley economist Carl Shapiro: “?‘You know you’ve really made it when you’ve got antitrust problems.’ That’s the sign of success.”
The modern theory of monopoly began its rise in the mid-1980s, when a handful of scholars—Shapiro among them—noted some salient characteristics of a fast-growing new industry. Many information-technology businesses, observed Stanford’s W. Brian Arthur, benefit from increasing returns: as they make more of something, the cost per piece keeps falling. This is especially true of software, for which the cost per piece moves quickly to zero. (Increasing returns had been deemed in the late 19th century to be the mark of a natural monopoly, an industry that would inevitably be dominated by one entity.)
Another trait that characterized many technology businesses, these same scholars observed, was lock-in, or prohibitive switching costs. Companies that committed to getting their mainframe computers from, say, IBM would eventually find switching to another provider hugely expensive and disruptive. (Later, with the PC, Microsoft was able to shift the lock-in from hardware to software.)
But most intriguing of all was the enormous power of network effects. A telephone “without a connection at the other end of the line … is one of the most useless things in the world,” AT&T President Theodore N. Vail wrote in the company’s annual report in 1908. “Its value depends on the connection with the other telephone—and increases with the number of connections.” In 1980, Bob Metcalfe, an inventor trying to persuade people to buy his $5,000 Ethernet cards, which connected computers in a local area network, came up with a formula that expressed the value of a network as the number of connections squared. The specifics of “Metcalfe’s Law” have frequently been challenged, but the basic idea that networks add value exponentially as they grow has not.
For society as a whole, though, these phenomena can have a dark side. In a famous paper, the Stanford economic historian Paul David described in 1985 how the ubiquitous QWERTY keyboard layout had been devised mainly to prevent jamming of primitive typewriter mechanisms. Later, as typewriters improved, there were repeated attempts to supplant QWERTY with configurations that allowed for faster typing. But by then the layout’s high switching costs had made it an impregnable standard. Economic forces, wrote David, “drove the industry prematurely into standardization on the wrong system.”
Brian Arthur borrowed the term path dependence from physics to describe this predicament, and wove it into an alarming story about how technology standards develop and get locked in even when there may be better options. The saga of Sony’s Betamax, which purportedly delivered better picture quality but lost out to VHS as the dominant videocassette, was told and retold. Research by other economists soon muddied the tales of both VHS and QWERTY—they may not have been such obviously inferior technologies after all. But the behavior of Microsoft, which by the early 1990s was using its market power to shove aside innovative competitors like Apple, WordPerfect, and Lotus, certainly seemed like an example of technology heading down the wrong path.
【字数872】
【越障】
Rethinking the Function of Business Functions
by Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi
Business units come and go, but finance, HR, IT, marketing, legal, and R&D are forever. Nonetheless, many CEOs and top executives struggle with their functional organizations, and some question whether the established functional model is still relevant. In their view, functional priorities are all too often in conflict with — or not fully supportive of — the strategic needs of the business.
The challenge for the functional model today is that companies don't need to build generic functional strengths. They need to build more specific, bespoke capabilities that are part of the inherent identity of the company, and hard for anyone else to duplicate.
For example, Walmart doesn't succeed just because of a strong operations group. It has built impressive capabilities that include logistics, inventory processes, buying standards, real estate practices and labor models — most of which it created for itself. Similarly, Amazon doesn't succeed because its people apply broad marketing expertise. It has sophisticated functions that together manage user-generated content, the in-depth tracking of consumer buying behavior, and the innovation of new features based on the resulting insights. No other company does these things the same way these two companies do.
In nearly all industries, the expertise needed to differentiate a company and win in the marketplace is much more complex than it was in the past. If a company wants to be better than anyone else, at something relevant to its customers, its specialists must be more efficient, technically proficient, and creative than ever before.
Therefore, it is crucial to be clear about the capabilities your organization most needs to stand apart. Too often we see functional leaders and staff struggling because this is not well defined. Imagine trying to use the objective of being "innovative" as a criterion for the multitude of investments a company must make around product launches and R&D.
Unfortunately, when the company isn't coherent — when its strengths are not linked explicitly to its strategic focus — most functions end up trying to keep up with an overlong list of "really important priorities." This is an unwinnable proposition.
How can you tell when the functional model is not working well? Typically, you will see functions being good at many things, but great at nothing. These functional teams struggle to meet the short-term needs of all their constituents, juggling an endless (and often conflicting) list of demands from line units. They talk about the long-term requirements to build true differentiation, but never seem to get the time or resources for them, and thus fail to gain the type of advantage that is required for success.
Indeed, mono-functional excellence will almost never guarantee success. The most distinctive, differentiating capabilities are almost always cross-functional. P&G's vaunted ability to launch breakthrough products isn't just a matter of R&D; it requires an integration of competencies, including consumer insights, engineering, external partnerships and brand marketing. Similarly, IKEA's capability in creating and selling stylish but utilitarian furniture combines functional expertise in design, sourcing, manufacturing, packaging, logistics, the design of customer experience in its retail stores, and cost management; all of these reinforce each other.
This type of capability requires a higher level of cross-functional collaboration than many specialists are used to. But if the functional model is obsolete, what might replace it? There are several possible solutions, each with strengths and weaknesses.
Many companies try to build complex capabilities by assembling small-scale functional teams — committees of people from the relevant professional groups to tackle particular problems. These are relatively easy to organize and they can make a genuine difference in solving cross-functional problems.
Unfortunately, however, most cross-functional teams fall far short of delivering truly differentiating capabilities. They rarely have the time to resolve the different ways of thinking that people bring from their professional specializations. When the team members first come together, they tend to misunderstand one another. The teams are also limited by their conflicting functional priorities and sometimes a lack of clear accountability. Many of these teams will dissolve once the project is over, and their members may not work together again. They therefore have little incentive to overcome these hurdles.
Permanent cross-functional teams tend to fare better. A growing number of innovation groups bring together disparate functional skills (typically R&D, marketing, IT, and customer insight) to launch new products or services, and then keep the teams together afterwards. Frito-Lay Inc., for example, set up a unit like this in the early 1980s; merchandising, IT, and supply chain worked together to develop the company's celebrated direct-store-delivery capability, enabled by handheld devices that Frito-Lay developed itself. Similarly, Pfizer Consumer Healthcare (since sold to Johnson & Johnson) set up communities of practice in the early 2000s, made up of lawyers, health professionals, and marketing experts who could help spread key ideas and best practices to brand and product groups around the world.
We've recently seen a more robust cross-functional construct emerge, one with an overarching organizational structure, based on building and maintaining a distinctive capability. Members of these capabilities teams are assigned permanently to them, reporting there rather than through a functional hierarchy. For example, a retail bank might have a single large group overseeing its remarkable capability in customer management — professionals who were formerly part of marketing, back-office operations, IT, sourcing, and legal organizations would all report to the same part of the hierarchy, all working together to maintain and improve the way their bank serves consumers and small businesses.
This approach links the organization's specialists more directly to the capabilities that support the company's core strategy, lifting them to a new level of accountability and reward above the status they would have had in functions like supply chain, finance, or marketing. One early variant of this approach, rapidly taking hold in technology-oriented companies, is the "strong-form" product management team — in which multifaceted product launches are overseen by a single leader, who coordinates all the activities involved in a product launch and has the final responsibility for the outcome. A few of these cross-functional groups are even gaining representation on their company's executive team. Their leaders are officers with titles like Chief Risk Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, and Chief Growth Officer.
Different companies will find different paths, but every company will need to reconsider the functional organization as its primary way of managing specialized expertise. The most farsighted functional leaders are not just waiting for these changes to affect them. They are helping evaluate the current state of their company's capabilities system, and suggesting ways to bring it closer to its potential. This is part of the functional leader's new mandate as a strategic partner for the enterprise: delivering not what individual constituents demand, but what the enterprise needs.
【字数1118】
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发表于 2013-2-14 22:21:32
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, wal-mart. Good function model help to link all experts capicity to benefit the strategy. 