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Category: Business

  • Advice for Amazon

    Amazon is discovering a truism: the more successful you become, the more you're a target.

    Fulfillment shipping, courtesy of malvernsys.comIn Seattle the company is increasingly criticized for keeping a low community profile. The hometown daily recently spent four days amplifying criticism of its philanthropy and business practices, adding to a string of controversies.

    Amazon shouldn't ignore this. Remember that Microsoft focused on building its business in the 1990s, thumbing its nose at public perceptions until the Department of Justice threatened to break it up. The resulting dramatic shift in strategy arguably blunted its "hard core" edge.

    Does this mean that Amazon needs to change its culture, plaster ads all over public spaces and hire legions of lobbyists and flacks? Assuming it fundatmentally doesn't want to change, here are some suggestions:

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  • What’s the matter with Walmart

    It's tempting to shrug off the report that Walmart illegally bribed government officials abroad in order to open new stores as yet another scandal around a company with a rapacious reputation.

    Walmart smile, courtesy of cashmiracle.comU.S. companies are bound by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal to bribe foreign officials. That law originated partly in response to the 1970s scandal where Lockheed bribed Japanese officials in order to sell its L-1011 aircraft. As in that case, it looks like executives at Walmart tried to cover up $24 million in bribes to Mexican officials in order to thwart competition.

    But it's a lot more complex than that to me personally. I started my career at Panasonic, working with Japanese colleagues who did business every day in Indonesia, Tanzania, Peru and other places where there were plenty of temptations to fudge the rules. As a reporter, I wrote about Weyerhaeuser's operations in Uruguay, where it competed with less scrupulous rivals. For the right price, it's easy for officials to ignore safety warnings on pesticides or look the other way at labor violations.

    Now as a communicator I see this sort of thing as a new challenge. So far, two issues seem most interesting:

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  • Why it’s not crazy to root for Sony

    I ought to be feeling a little schadenfreude at the struggles of Sony, the legendary electronics firm that just projected its biggest ever loss of more than $6 billion.

    sony walkman, courtesy conceivablytech.com
    My first job out of college was at Panasonic (formally called Matsushita Electric) which is a bigger, older company that always had arguably better technology but lacked the marketing pizzaz of the upstart. I was taught that Sony wasn't much more than a few trendy products.

    But over the years I've been secretly hoping that Sony management would somehow find a way to integrate hardware, software and content to create a serious competitor to Apple, Microsoft and the others. That sure didn't happen. After years of drift, Sony just named a new CEO, who announced some restructuring and recalibrated direction.

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  • Keep an eye on Las Vegas

    Imagine if every city had a Tony Hsieh.

    ImagesThe founder of Zappos.com, the online retailer owned by Amazon.com, is spending $350 million of his own money to transform downtown Las Vegas into a hip urban area filled with entrepreneurs and creative types. Instead of expanding the Zappos headquarters in the suburbs, he's moving its local employees downtown and creating new infrastructure that should lure others to follow.

    The project will transform the city and could pay off both for the company and community. It hits home to me following news that Amazon itself plans to build a new 3 million-square-foot office complex in central Seattle, changing a neighborhood of mostly parking lots and low-slung buildings located between downtown and the South Lake Union neighborhood where the company is already housed in leased space.

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