Ellison Chair in International Floriculture
Ellison Chair in International FloricultureTeaching, Research, Extension and Service

Get ready for the future…

by

Whether these changes are good or bad depends in part on how we adapt to them, but ready or not, here they come!

  1. The Post Office. Get ready to imagine a world without the Post Office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills.
  2. The Check. Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with cheques by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to process cheques. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the cheque. This plays right into the death of the post office. If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by mail, the post office would absolutely go out of business.
  3. The Newspaper. The younger generation simply doesn’t read the newspaper. They certainly don’t subscribe to a daily delivered printed edition. That may go the way of the milkman and the laundry man. As for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an alliance. They have met with Apple, Amazon, and the major cell phone companies to develop a model for paid subscription services.
  4. The Book. You say you will never give up the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages. I said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes. I wanted my hard copy CD. But I quickly changed my mind when I discovered that I could get albums for half the price without ever leaving home to get the latest music. The same thing will happen with books. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview chapter before you buy. And the price is less than half that of a real book. And think of the convenience once you start flicking your fingers on the screen instead of the book, you find that you are lost in the story, can’t wait to see what happens next, and you forget that you’re holding a gadget instead of a book.
  5. The Land Line Telephone. Unless you have a large family and make a lot of local calls, you don’t need it anymore. Most people keep it simply because they’ve always had it. But you are paying double charges for that extra service. All the cell phone companies will let you call customers using the same cell provider for no charge against your minutes.
  6. Music. This is one of the saddest parts of the change story. The music industry is dying a slow death. Not just because of illegal downloading. It’s the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to get to the people who like to hear it. Greed and corruption is the problem. The record labels and the radio conglomerates simply self-destruct. Over 40% of the music purchased today are “catalog items,” meaning traditional music that the public is familiar with. Older established artists. This is also true on the live concert circuit. To explore this fascinating and disturbing topic further, check out the book, “Appetite for Self-Destruction” by Steve Knopper, and the video documentary, “Before the Music Dies.”
  7. Television. Revenues to the networks are down dramatically. Not just because of the economy. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their computers. And they’re playing games and doing lots of other things that take up the time that used to be spent watching TV. Prime time shows have degenerated down to lower than the lowest common denominator. Cable rates are skyrocketing and commercials run about every 4 minutes and 30 seconds.
  8. The “Things” That You Own. Many of the very possessions that we used to own are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them in the future. They may simply reside in “the cloud.” Today your computer has a hard drive and you store your pictures, music, movies, and documents. Your software is on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install it if need be. But all of that is changing. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their latest “cloud services.” That means that when you turn on a computer, the Internet will be built into the operating system. So, Windows, Google, and the Mac OS will be tied straight into the Internet. If you click an icon, it will open something in the Internet cloud. If you save something, it will be saved to the cloud. And you may pay a monthly subscription fee to the cloud provider. In this virtual world, you can access your music or your books, or your whatever from any laptop or hand held device. That’s the good news. But, will you actually own any of this “stuff” or will it all be able to disappear at any moment in a big “Poof?” Will most of the things in our lives be disposable and whimsical? It makes you want to run to the closet and pull out that photo album, grab a book from the shelf, or open up a CD case and pull out the insert.
  9. Privacy. If there ever was a concept that we can look back on nostalgically, it would be privacy. That’s gone. It’s been gone for a long time anyway. There are cameras on the street, in most of the buildings, and even built into your computer and cell phone. But you can be sure that 24/7 “They” know who you are and where you are, right down to the GPS coordinates, and the Google Street View. If you buy something, your habit is put into a zillion profiles, and your ads will change to reflect those habits. And “They” will try to get you to buy something else. Again and again. All we will have that can’t be changed are Memories.

Something to think about in terms of how you are going to do business in the future. Most of these changes are already taking place. If you want to experience an amazing look back at the history of technology, then this 13 minute video about IBM will give you a glimpse of how far we have come.

Source: http://hosted.verticalresponse.com/170199/e3d1e3c75e/1624501208/3c0beed1a4/

Super Bowls ads disappoint

by

This pretty well sums it up:

“The sorry state of advertising affairs was certainly on display at the Super Bowl ad fest. The few commercials that worked were simple and straightforward. They started with a basic premise about the product and they drove it home in a compelling and uncomplicated way. But way too many ads were so complicated and elaborate that I couldn’t tell what the product was trying to get across.”

Missed the commercials or just want to find out about which ones were the most liked and which ones had the best best brand recall (hint: they don’t always match up)…click here for the analysis from Advertising Age. Probably a few implications for the green industry, huh?  Also interesting is the use of social media to pre-release the ads and also in measuring effectiveness.

Last call for this year’s National Floriculture Forum

by

The EXTENDED early-bird registration for the next National Floriculture Forum on March 10-11, 2011 in Dallas, Texas ends today!

The registration link is on the main NFF website, but you can go directly to the registration page for the meeting by going to https://agrilifevents.tamu.edu/events/details.cfm?id=679.  After today, the registration fee increases to $150.

Information regarding the host hotel (Omni Dallas Park West Hotel) is also included on the registration page (click here). The hotel cutoff date is next Wednesday, February 16, 2011 but it is recommended that you register and secure your hotel room NOW to assist us in the planning efforts and to ensure that you obtain a space in the room block!

Please register as soon as possible because the sooner you register, the easier it is in terms of scheduling buses, meals, etc. so please do this next week if possible!

For the agenda and other meeting details, please refer to the meeting website at http://ellisonchair.tamu.edu/2011nff/. Many thanks and we look forward to seeing you at the NFF next month!

Charlie Hall and Terri Starman
Texas A&M University
Co-Hosts of the 2011 National Floriculture Forum

Doing More with Fewer

by

Excellent post by Mark Perry regarding the increases in worker productivity…



Perry reported last week that real GDP finally increased above its pre-recession level in the fourth quarter of 2010, and the $13.38 trillion of real GDP (2005 dollars) was the highest-ever quarterly output in U.S. history, slightly higher than the previous record of $13.36 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2007 (see top chart above).

But here’s what’s really amazing and is illustrated in the bottom chart: The U.S. produced slightly more output in Q4 2010 (by 0.14%) than in Q4 2007 when the recession started, but with 7.2 million fewer workers (almost 5%)!  Read more here at The Enterprise Blog.

The younger companies are, the more jobs they create, regardless of their size.

by

The popular perception that small businesses create most of America’s jobs has been the focus of heated debate for three decades. However, the more telling characteristic for predicting job creation is the age of the firm, not its size, according to a new study by John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, and Javier Miranda. In Who Creates Jobs? Small vs. Large vs. Young (NBER Working Paper No. 16300), the researchers conclude that the younger companies are, the more jobs they create, regardless of their size.

Of course, all startup firms operate in a volatile “up or out” environment. After five years, many of these young companies are “out” — they fail and, as a result, destroy nearly half of the jobs created by all new companies. Nevertheless, the surviving firms continue to ramp “up,” growing faster than more mature companies, and creating a disproportionate share of jobs relative to their size.

“Firm startups account for only 3 percent of employment but almost 20 percent of gross job creation,” the authors write. “[T]he fastest growing continuing firms are young firms under the age of five,” the authors conclude.

In this study, which relies on data from the Census Bureau, the authors confirm that smaller companies created more jobs than larger companies during 1992-2005. But the importance of firm size depends very much on the assumptions one makes about the base year of the analysis, the number of employees used to define “small”, and other factors. The real driver of disproportionate job growth, they find, is not small companies, but young companies. It is the startup firms that generate the surge of jobs that earlier research attributed to small companies.

Indeed, grouped in traditional ways, businesses tend to create jobs in proportion to their importance in the economy. Thus, large mature firms — those more than ten years old and with more than 500 workers — employed about 45 percent of all private-sector workers and accounted for almost 40 percent of job creation and destruction in this study.

Managers paying more attention to sustainability (outside the green industry, that is)

by

How much are top managers paying attention to sustainability questions?

According to respondents to the second annual Sustainability & Innovation Global Executive Study — a collaboration between MIT Sloan Management Review and the Boston Consulting Group — the answer depends on how much they know about it. The more they know, the more they pay attention.

People who identify themselves as sustainability “experts” are more than two times as likely as sustainability “novices” to say that sustainability is “already a permanent fixture and core strategic consideration.”

The Question: What is the status of sustainability on the agenda of top management?

Cuts of the survey pool show several variances in how sustainability is assessed. For instance, respondents at very large companies indicated sustainability was a much bigger concern than those at smaller companies.

Results across the survey suggest that for experts whose businesses have already begun acting on sustainability-driven strategies, sustainability is a sort of perpetual motion machine — the more they do, the more they learn, the more advantages they achieve, and the more they realize that there is more to do.

These findings probably come as no surprise to Jessica L. Bier and James Hacker, of Deloitte Consulting LLP. In a piece published today at environmentalleader.com, “Raising the Level of Sustainability: Stakeholder Alignment and Cultural Change,” Bier and Hacker write, “One of the major challenges in making a sustainability program truly sustainable is stakeholder engagement, both internal and external.”

Their main point: “meaningful behavior change is more likely to occur when people are both enlisted in the solution and when they know their performance is being measured.”

Some experts have told MIT SMR that the gap between sustainability “embracers” and “cautious adopters” presents a challenging and consequential question for CEOs. Does the divergence of opinion between experts and novices reflect a fundamental disagreement about sustainability’s significance? Or do those opinions simply illustrate how views naturally evolve as managers learn more (or as they begin to get measured by new metrics, as Bier and Hacker suggest)?

If the differences come from how much information leaders have, then there are easy-to-spot educational solutions. But if they come from a fundamental disagreement about sustainability’s significance, then it’s harder to say how leaders can change an organization’s cultural viewpoint.

==

Survey statistics and analysis from “First Look: The Second Annual Sustainability & Innovation Survey,” which appears in the Winter 2011 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.

How to keep those resolutions

by

It’s mid-January. Have you made any progress toward your New Year’s resolutions yet? If you are like the majority of people, the answer is, probably not. There is hope though. You can make accomplishing your resolutions easier by doing two things:

1. Write them down. You are more likely to achieve goals if you set objectives and put them on paper. Be specific about the stepping stones that will get you to the end result.

2. Invite peer pressure. Share your resolutions with others — family, friends, or a trusted colleague. Not wanting to disappoint someone can be good motivation.

Harvard Business Review Blog Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “How to Keep Those New Year’s Resolutions” by Steve Martin.

2010 Business Year in Review

by

Care to take a guess at the top events affecting businesses in 2010? The struggling economy was voted the top business story of the year by U.S. newspaper editors surveyed by The Associated Press. The rest, as they say, is history.

1. Economy struggles: Climbing out of the deepest recession since the 1930s, the economy grows at a healthy rate in the January-March quarter. Still, the gain comes mainly from companies refilling stockpiles they had let shrink during the recession. The economy can’t sustain the pace. The lingering effects of the recession slow growth. The benefits of an $814 billion government stimulus program fade. Consumers cut spending in favor of building savings and slashing debt. Businesses hesitate to hire. Cities and states lay off workers. Growth slows through spring and summer. Unemployment stays chronically high. In May, the number of people unemployed for at least six months hits 6.8 million — a record 46 percent of all the unemployed. Pointing to the deficits, Congress resists backing more spending to stimulate the economy. The Federal Reserve seeks to fill the void by announcing it will buy $600 billion in Treasury bonds to try to further lower interest rates, lift stocks and coax consumers to spend. As the year closes, the economy makes broad gains. Factories produce more. Consumers — the backbone of the economy — return to the malls. Congress passes $858 billion in tax cuts and aid to the long-term unemployed. Yet more than 15 million Americans are still unemployed. Economists say a full economic recovery remains years away.

2. Gulf oil spill: An explosion at a rig used by BP kills 11 workers and sends crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. The spill devastates the fishing and tourism industries along the Gulf Coast and causes environmental damage that may last for decades. BP sets up a $20 billion fund to compensate fishermen, restaurateurs and others whose livelihoods were damaged. The oil giant still faces civil charges and a criminal investigation by the Justice Department and lawsuits from hundreds of individuals and businesses. BP’s stock market value shrinks by more than $100 billion after the April 20 disaster before bouncing about halfway back.

3. China’s rise: China passes Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy. The World Bank says it could surpass the United States by 2020. China’s gross domestic product is spread out over 1.3 billion people — amounting to about $3,600 per person. That compares with GDP in the U.S. of about $42,000 per person. In Japan, it’s about $38,000 per person. China’s thirst for raw materials and other products helps the rest of the world recover from the recession. Still, the U.S. and Europe complain that China gives its exporters an unfair competitive edge by keeping its currency artificially low.

4. Real estate crisis: Housing remains depressed despite super-low mortgage rates. The average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage dips to 4.17 percent in November, the lowest in decades. But home sales and prices sink further. Nearly one in four homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, making it all but impossible for them to sell their home and buy another. An estimated 1 million households lose their homes to foreclosure, even though the pace slows after evidence that lenders mishandled foreclosure documents. Some did so by hiring “robo-signers” to sign paperwork without checking their accuracy.

5. Toyota’s recall: Toyota’s reputation for making high-quality cars is tarnished after the Japanese automaker recalls 10 million vehicles for sudden acceleration and other problems. Toyota faces hundreds of lawsuits alleging that some models can speed up suddenly, causing crashes, injuries and deaths. Toyota blames driver error, faulty floor mats and sticky accelerator pedals for the unintended acceleration. The uproar damages its business. Toyota’s U.S. sales rise just 0.2 percent through November in a year when the industry’s overall sales climb more than 11 percent.

6. GM’s comeback: General Motors stock begins trading again. It signals the rebirth of a corporate icon that fell into bankruptcy and required a $50 billion bailout from taxpayers. GM uses some proceeds from its November initial public offering to repay a portion of its bailout. (Washington still holds about a third of GM’s stock.) GM’s recovery helps rejuvenate the industry. Sales of cars and light trucks rise 11 percent through November compared with the same period in 2009. Shoppers who had put off replacing their old cars return to showrooms.

7. Financial overhaul: Congress passes the biggest rewrite of financial rules since the 1930s. The law targets the risky banking practices and lax oversight that led to the 2008 financial crisis. The law creates an agency to protect consumers from predatory loans and other abuses, empowers regulators to shut down big firms that threaten the entire system and shines more light into markets that have eluded oversight. Republican critics say the law goes too far, imposing burdensome rules that will restrict lending to consumers and small businesses.

8. European bailouts: Greece and Ireland require emergency bailouts, raising fears that debt problems will spread and destabilize global markets. European governments and the International Monetary Fund agree to a $145 billion rescue of Greece in May and a $90 billion bailout of Ireland in November. The bailouts require both countries to slash spending, triggering protests by workers. Investors fear that debt troubles will spread to Spain, Portugal and other countries, weaken the European Union and threaten the future of the euro as its common currency.

9. Facebook growth: Facebook tops the 500 million user mark. It expands its dominance of social media and further transforms how the world communicates. If it were a country, Facebook would be the world’s third-largest. Facebook tightens its privacy settings after criticism that personal information is being disseminated without users’ knowledge or permission. Founder Mark Zuckerberg is named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” and is the subject of a high-profile movie about Facebook’s creation.

10. iPad mania: Apple Inc. unveils the iPad, bringing “tablet” computing into the mainstream and eroding laptop sales. Apple is expected to sell more than 13 million iPads this year. The iPads sell about twice as fast as iPhones did after their 2007 introduction. The price of Apple stock rockets more than 50 percent in 2010. Competitors scramble to try to catch up. They include the Dell Streak, BlackBerry PlayBook, the Samsung Galaxy Tag and HP Slate.