Posts Under: Business and Management

Zooming in on Zappos

March 25, 2011 • Business and Management • 1 comment

Zooming in on Zappos Tony Hsieh
Tony Hsieh, CEO and Chief Happiness Officer of Zappos.com (courtesy of Sunni Brown)

UPDATE: 28 November 2020 — Tony Hsieh has tragically passed away in a house fire at the age of 46. May he rest in peace.

Few companies are as zealous as Zappos in ensuring that excellence is ingrained into every single process, person and policy of the organisation.

Radical and almost ruthless in their quest for the holy customer grail, Zappos is famous for legendary strategies which few of their competitors dare to take up.

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The Premium on Corporate Coherence

March 6, 2011 • Blog, Business and Management • no comments

I was listening to HBR’s Ideacast recently and came across an interesting idea by Booz & Company’s Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi urging companies to “have the discipline to focus intensely on what they do best”. Titled the “Coherence Premium”, the central thesis of Leinwand and Mainardi is that “sustainable, superior returns accrue to companies that focus on what they do best”.

Gaining the Coherence Premium can be done if a company aligns and interlocks internal capabilities (or core competencies ala Hamel and Prahalad) with the right external market position. This can be graphically represented as follows:

Image source

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Who Should You Hire?

January 3, 2011 • Business and Management • 1 comment


Courtesy of Diverse Connections

One of the key strategies in the Human Resource function of any organisation is to hire the right people at the right price.

While human capital are the most important assets in any organisation, the process of recruitment is often more like a “hit and miss” strategy which usually depend on the following factors…

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5 Success Lessons from an Alien Species – The Javan Myna

November 7, 2010 • Business and Management • no comments


Singapore’s Most Common Bird – the Javan Mynah (photo by Ong Xin Rui from the Birds of NUS)

That bird above, the Javan Myna (Acridotheres javanicus), is the most common bird species in Singapore. You can see its black feathered wings with dashes of white fluttering everywhere around our island.

The Javan Myna has an amazingly liquid voice that allows it to imitate a range of calls into its repertoire, emanating through its characteristically yellow beak. It nests practically everywhere – on buildings, on trees, in padi fields, in drains, in roofs – and is abundantly successful in almost every habitat.

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