nickshanagher

Software is eating the world. This is the title of the last chapter of The Launch Pad by Randall Stross , which is a book about how Silicon Valley invests in start-ups run by small teams of brilliant software engineers and salesmen, which then go on to change business as we know it. This book is one of the most gripping business books you could read. It is about the realities of modern entrepreneurship where 20 year old college drop outs create ideas that can disrupt any industry. I was reading Peter Blakemore’s remarks on turning 70, reflecting on his very successful career in wholesaling built on a very simple business model: buying well, knowing your staff giving great customer service and competitive prices. A simple strategy executed well. The scary thing about the Launch Pad is how Y Combinator, the school for start-ups launched by Paul Graham, is enabling digital businesses to find simple strategies that can change how your world works. Stross followed 64 teams (out of

How Philip Clarke must have been hoping for an interesting Queen’s Speech. He did not get one. Its absence meant Tesco’s worst results in 40 years were the news. But don't kid yourself. Tesco is still a great business doing lots of things right. On the front page of the Financial Times were three graphs showing how badly Tesco is doing: ·         Five quarters of no growth in UK like-for-like sales (down 3.8% in Q1 201) ·         2.0 per cent fall in market share since 2010 as measured by Kantar. Aldi is up 2.7%. Lidl 1.2%. Waitrose 1.1%. ·         Total shareholder return since March 2011 down 13.9%. Only Morrison is worse at down 16.9%. The FT says Tesco’s big stores are out of favour with consumers who are “switching to convenience stores, German discounters and online grocery shopping”. Analyst Bruno Monteyne of Bernstein told the paper that half of the like-for-like sales fall was driven by price cuts, better discipline in use of vouchers and store “disruption” (

Who could not love a book that starts: “As a child I lived in Lewis Carroll’s house in Guildford. My father, whom I adored, was a Gaelic-speaking Highlander, a classical scholar and a bigoted agnostic. One day he discovered that I had started going to church secretly. “My dear old son, how can you swallow that mumbo-jumbo? It is all very well for servants but not for educated people. You don’t have to be a Christian to behave like a gentleman! “My mother was a beautiful and eccentric Irishwoman. She disinherited me on the ground that I was likely to acquire more money than was good for me without any help from her. I could not disagree.” Written more than 50 years ago, David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man has two strengths. First, it tells you how to be successful in business. Second, he shows how great brands are created by selling the big idea to as many people as possible. In 1988 Ogilvy added a preface to explain why he wrote the book. First, to attract new c