Michael Moore got famous with Roger and Me, describing his 'staged' attempts to meet with Roger Smith then CEO of GM. Now another couple of documentary makers have taken on the Global Warming Lobby with Not Evil Just Wrong.  Polar bear populations have multiplied, the people are not crowding into the Empire State Building to…

John Crawley, Reuters  Published: Thursday, October 22, 2009 The biggest question in the turnaround of General Motors Co. is how it can overcome decades of insular management, the former leader of the Obama administration's autos task force said yesterday. "A successful recovery is far from assured," Steven Rattner said about GM and Chrysler Group LLC, the two…

Jerry Flint suggests that we re brand gas guzzlers, after all we as a people are not Fiat 500 size folks.  In the last few years pickup sales are down from 2.5 M per year to 850,000, a staggering decrease.  I suspect the America you will experience the next ten years will be quite  a…

Nissan is operating its two plants in the US at 44% capacity. This is emblematic of just how slow things are in the car biz these days. this is surely below its break even point. But I suspect that is true for all the car makers at this point. Plants will be running less or…

The graduate class is signing up for which project they will undertake, I will keep the tally here, remember we must have an even number in each project, two person teams.  Mila and Dorothy Wood have signed up first for the coffee shop.  Hmm, I wil update here, this will also be a good way…

We have discussed the new Cowboys Stadium in class. I thought you would find these observations from the latest Richard Russell Dow Theory Letter interesting, he is quoting Bloomberg.  I've been wondering about professional football and the NFL. How can the NFL continue to pay those HUGE salaries to players? That's going to end. An…

HP will re vive the Compaq name with a new series of larger laptops starting at $399. Frankly the smaller laptops wiht the ten inch screen make much more sense as they are so much easier to carry around, the essential point of a laptop. But deflation reigns, prices keep falling as manufacturers pull out…

Polaroid filed for bankruptcy, overwhelmed by the digital camera age. Now a firm has license to produce a product that allows a digital camera to produce an instant type photo. The article does not feature a picture of the device so I am not quite sure what the methodology is. But,  retro is in. 

This article from the Canadian Post reflects on the downfall of GM.  It also gives a vivid description of how GM worked using mangerial accounting principles, when it did work. The article seems to stop before a logical end, like exactly what is wrong and what might be fixed now but oh well. The stock…

Students tend to fixate on their 'major.'  Indeed this is a serious problem for any college of business. Student ignore or fail to seriously study classes out side their 'major.'  Yet there is no one that just does accounting or marketing or statistics all day long, indeed we need all those disciplines. I have learned…