What's new at Lifeway? They are expanding their product/market scope, that's what:

the country's leading manufacturer of kefir and a provider of other natural and organic dairy products, today expanded its product line with a new smoothie drink called Lifeway Lassi. Lifeway's mango and strawberry versions of the traditional South Asian beverage are available in 8-oz. "Grab and Go" containers and will be distributed through select natural, specialty and ethnic food stores nationwide.

The new line is designed for Lifeway's core natural and health food markets, people who are familiar with lassi from Indian restaurants, and the large immigrant population from India where lassi is a staple sold on street corners and in vending machines. The Asian Indian community in the U.S. has surged from under 1 million in 1990 to more than 2.3 million in 2005, including a jump of 640,000 from 2000 to 2005 alone, to achieve the highest growth rate of any Asian community.

Such actions by Lifeway would clearly count toward the "N" in the "CANSLIM" investing strategy which William O'neil describes this way in his book How to Make Money in Stocks:

It takes something new to produce a startling advance in the price of a stock. It can be an important new product or service that sells rapidly and causes earnings to accelerate above previous rates of increase. Or it can be a change in management that brings new vigor, new ideas, or at least a new broom to sweep everything clean. New industry conditions- shortages, price increases, or revolutionary technologies, for example- can affect most stocks in an industry group in a positive way. In our study of the greatest stock market winnder from 1952 through 2001, we discovered that more than 95% of stunning successes in American industry met at least one of the above criteria.

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Although Michael Porter's Five Forces Model is the most well-known of strategic management theories, there is a reason that it is only one of four or five that I teach. That reason is that like all theories, there are issues of importance that it does not address either in part or in full. Point in case is the role of corporate identity, or the lack thereof, in determining firm performance. Whether or not one thinks the role is minimal or substantial, it is clear that this issue does not fall neatly within the purview of Buyers, Suppliers, Barriers to Entry, Substitutes, or Rivalry. One theory that does posit a central role for corporate identity is Gary Hamel's Business Concept Innovation framework, as outlined in Chapter 3 of his most interesting and overlooked book from 2000, Leading the Revolution.

The four major components of BCI are Core Strategy, Strategic Resources, Customer Interface, and Value Network. The Core Strategy is defined as "the essence of how the firm chooses to compete" and its three aspects are:

Mission: the overall objective of the strategy- what the business model is designed to accomplish or deliver.

Product/Market Scope: where the firm does and does not compete, i.e. which customers, geographies, and product segments.

Basis for Differentiation: how the firm competes and, in particular, how it competes differently than its competitors.

Though the words "corporate identity" are not mentioned explicitly, it is clear that these three factors are important, if not central to it. Below is an example from a recent article in The Street.com about the role of corporate identity in explaining how Wal-Mart lost its way:

Continue reading "Wal-Mart's Corporate Identity Crisis" »

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Today on the BBC I heard that over 1 million Polish citizens have left their native land to search for better jobs. Many have gone to Western Europe; so many in fact that two years ago, when the Poland joined the EU, the mythical "Polish Plumber" became a symbol for the influx of cheap labor that could suppress wages and take jobs away from workers in the more advanced member economies like France and the UK. No one thought much at the time about the dietary preferences of Polish plumbers or nurses or travel agents, let alone the impact said preferences could have on the environment . They are thinking about it now:

Tucking into a succulent turkey is the traditional way of celebrating Christmas in Britain. But to make sure tens of thousands of Poles living here do not feel homesick when they sit down for their festive dinner, one supermarket chain is selling carp. Carp is a delicacy in Poland - traditionally served up on December 24.

Sounds like the basic economic love story- When Supply Met Demand. But like all good stories, there's always a catch, in this case quite literally a catch:

Such is their appetite for the fish - generally considered inedible by Britons - that Eastern European immigrants have become embroiled in a row with English anglers over the number being caught and killed. Anglers have also demanded tough new laws to prevent poachers depleting British rivers of carp.

Continue reading "Brits Tell Fishing Poles to Stop Carping!" »

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