Leave it to your mildly deluded host to write a post about a topic on which he has almost no specific information. Nevertheless, if I can’t brainstorm at tumbledry, where can I brainstorm? (“In your own head, you’re saying” I know, but that’s not the point we’re debating.) The topic today: business. My qualifications: slim. Forecast: stormy, with a chance of incorrect conclusions.

I’ll begin with an analogy of stars… many stars burn happily throughout their lives, and then expand to a giant blob that is lower in density: a red giant. As the cycle continues:

The star then evolves into a degenerate form, recycling a portion of the matter into the interstellar environment, where it will form a new generation of stars with a higher proportion of heavy elements.

I think this is the life-cycle companies should follow. Join me down this crazy theoretical road, won’t you?

Consider a large multinational corporation: like a star, it had to begin somewhere… usually with a great product (a star makes light, but can not sell it… this is the biggest joke on the star ever). Great products: Sandpaper. Model-T. Television broadcasting. Light bulbs. Selling a product rapidly, the business expands and goes through a growth period. Quality of management then becomes crucial, and the business can be grown another couple orders of magnitude beyond its successful start. Like the star, the company burns brightly. Cash on hand then funds new business units, and the array of products grows and grows and grows. The multinational corporation ends up with huge number of OK products. Suddenly, General Electric owns NBC, and you’ve got a red giant — it’s a gargantuan obstreperously bright object in the sky, but it doesn’t burn very brightly.

Clearly, this is a problem. You have a lumbering giant of a company that pushes on sheerly due to inertia — the numbers are bigger, but the innovations are smaller. The truth is (and just ask why giant IBM was beaten by tiny Microsoft), true innovation must be coupled with an agile business environment (easily moved, cheap to run, limits on formal training, with highly qualified individuals), which is antithetical to many (most?) corporate environments. What’s the solution?

As stars do: Expand, then contract. I think that’s the path for a giant of a business to remain successful, yet this does take some accepted practices and tosses them out. I’ll explain: consider Ford Motor Company. Beaten into the pavement for years by fierce competition from companies producing a higher quality product, Ford is struggling to get back to profitability. They’ve expanded, that’s true. I think that now they need to contract. I don’t mean layoffs and meaningless restructuring. No…

I mean dismantle. No “spin-offs,” segmented acquisitions, unfair lay-offs. Dismantle.

What are you left with? The agile business I cited before. You’ve got an R&D lab or two, folks with years and years of experience, and no shareholders to answer to. You’ve got all the pieces of a successful start-up. Oh, and billions of dollars in cash. See, there’s this idea that businesses should grow, grow, grow… and then just keep right on growing until they collapse under their own weight. This is unsustainable. Sell it off, fund the pensions of the good people who put in the years, and break the thing up. Instead of paring down the enormity just to allow the business to crutch on for a few more decades, the business could radically constrict just as a star does, thereby seeding future enterprises.

So you’ve got this enormously well-funded laboratory in the shell of an old Ford building — and they say “what’s the future of transportation?” They’ve got a good shot at figuring it out. If they think it’s electric, well then they can innovate like crazy people and push out a product ASAP. There’s no “core business” crap to fall back on — sink or swim.

I don’t know, there are some big holes here and this technique wouldn’t work everywhere (perhaps not even in the example given), but the part of the message I am confident in is the need for a paradigm shift in philosophies about large businesses — they needn’t go on forever, and crashing into the floor of the market isn’t the only way for them to disband.

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I debated on whether to post this and then thought “hey, it’s Friday… here we go!” So: Woman stuck after two years on toilet:

An American woman’s body had became attached to her boyfriend’s toilet after she sat on it for two years, police in Kansas said.

“She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body,” said Bryan Whipple, the sheriff of Ness County.

It appeared Pam Babcock’s skin had grown around the toilet seat, he added. “It is hard to imagine. … I still have a hard time imagining it myself.”

In the annals of weird news, this one rates pretty high up there. Incidentally, I already had a tag for “toilets.” I wonder what else I’ve blogged re: toilets.

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The BMW Isetta, particularly the Iso Isetta Turismo, is probably the cutest little car I’ve ever seen…

Because of its egg shape and bubble-like windows, it became known as a bubble car—a name later given to other similar vehicles. Other countries had other nicknames: In Germany it was das rollende Ei (the rolling egg) or the Sargwagen (literally “coffin on wheels”; the name apparently came from the small (or rather nonexistent) distance between the passengers and oncoming traffic). In France it was the yogurt pot. In Brazil it was the bola de futebol de fenemê (football (soccer) ball of a truck), and in Chile it is still called the huevito (little egg).

Huevito! Huevito! ¡It rolls this way!

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I’ve tried to reproduce the inflection present in this actual performance by comedian Mitch Hedberg:

I eat a lot of sandwiches, who doesn’t man, sandwiches are easy to eat. But I hate sandwiches at New York deli’s, too much fuckin’ meat on the sandwich. It’s like a cow with a cracker on either side.

“What would you like sir?” “A pastrami sandwich.” “Anything else?” “Yeah, a loaf of bread and some other people.”

“What kind of bread?” “Rye… no, fuck, banana… you got banana bread?” “What kind of cheese?” “Cottage.” “Get the fuck out! I’m not makin’ a banana bread, pastrami, cottage cheese sandwich. That will severely ruin my reputation.”

You’ve just got to hear this to get the full effect. I’ll go look up an audio file… aha, this should do it. Brings back memories of hanging out in Dan’s dorm room, playing Burnout 3: Takedown, and listening to Mitch on the stereo.

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The best comment from yet another video featuring Tom Cruise acting strangely would be the first one: “Sweet Georgia Brown is that man nutty.” Couldn’t agree more myself.

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