Transcripts

Stephanie Yeh:
The art of timing is about being at the right place at the right time all the time.

Stephanie Yeh, co-author of the book, The Art Of Business…

These companies that we've researched they all have some kind of road map that tells them where they need to be and when. For instance Intel knows exactly when it has to put out its next chip. And the chip after that because they have this law called Moore's Law that tells them according to the way society uses technology, how fast chip capacity will double.

Interestingly all of the great companies Stephanie researched started small.

Take Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart's been much maligned in the press lately that they're this big behemoth company. But the thing is that they started out tiny. They went into little one-horse towns that other companies like Kmart and Target didn't want to go into. When Wal-Mart first started out Sam Walton had a tiny, tiny advertising budget. So what he would do is he noticed that Kmart put out weekly circulars so some of their stores would go and take the circulars paste them up at the front of the stores and put huge signs saying, " We will meet or beat these prices." Basically what they did is leverage Kmart's entire advertising budget that way.

And great companies cultivate a culture where everyone is looking out for ways to make the company better, Southwest Airlines for example.

There was a flight attendant who said, "You know we've got these logos on these in-flight trash bags…" and they said, "we don't need these logos we know we're Southwest Airlines." Went to the president Colleen Barrett said, why don't you take these logos off and Colleen Barrett said, "what a great idea." That saved the company $300,000 a year.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.