Leon de Magistris, Mr. Romney’s longtime stylist, says his customer prefers a “very controlled” look for his hair, which is the subject of speculation and debate on the Internet.

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Romney’s Image Expert, the One for His Hair, Anyway

Amazon announced Thursday that it has launched the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library for owners of its e-reader who are also subscribers to its Amazon Prime service. Prime members can borrow one book a month, with no due dates. Users are allowed to have one book out at a time, the company said in a press release. All notes, bookmarks and highlights made on the borrowed book will still be there if the customer later purchases or re-borrows the book. Read full article > >

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Amazon launches Kindle lending library

The past year’s relationship between Apple and newspaper publishers proves the old adage that love is blind. It’s clear from the new Apple app policy that love needs more time to prove itself. Apple’s new iTunes subscription policy throws a wet blanket over the efforts of leading brand newspapers to develop apps for the iPad platform. It is a wakeup call for publishers seduced by the beauty of the iPad, the simplicity of iTunes and the brand of Apple. The careful calculus that will emerge depends more now on audience and engagement than blind faith in one company. Wipe the slate clean and here’s what news publishers need: Data That Drives Business Model Options : The ability to capture customer data, manage the customer relationship, work toward an advertising model and generally control their own destiny when it comes to emerging business models. Policy That Works Across Platforms : The ability to incorporate smartphone and tablet app subscriptions with print and Web subscriptions in a platform-agnostic, multimedia “newspaper anywhere” strategy. What worries publishers is the additive effect of the Apple policy. Publishers are being told to live with a 30 percent cut for Apple and that they won’t own the customer relationship and how to price/promote their apps. Combined, the Apple policy now impacts the newspaper business model beyond tablets. What the new Apple policy does is treat all of the world’s 10,000+ daily newspapers the same. The fact is, the elite newspapers have robust CRM systems that are excellent at capturing and managing customer data. On the other hand, many publishers don’t have such systems and iTunes is the perfect service to sell subscriptions. I’d like to see flexible improvements to the Apple policy that take into account these different levels of publisher. When the iPad emerged last year, newspaper publisher optimism about the product, the platform and Apple itself defied P&Ls, market demand, and pretty much every credo by which newspapers live. Such is the case when love is blind. Last year, I visited newspapers in Europe, Latin America, the South Pacific and South Asia long before the iPad was released in their countries. It was one of those great creative moments when they proudly showed off their apps often read by only a few hundred business travelers that bought the tablet overseas. There was no market, but there was a lot of faith. It was a badge of honor. If the rules announced this past week existed one year ago, what you would have seen is a more rational, cautious approach to iPad app development by newspaper publishers. As it is, Apple changed the rules. Shame on us. The new subscription policy doesn’t kill the newspaper industry’s relationship with Apple, but it does deflate the irrationality of the relationship. In one swoop, Apple went down the path to being just another vendor serving the news industry — albeit one in too privileged a position for many countries’ antitrust laws. And publishers will respond in kind. They’ll look anew at their app strategy and take a more platform-agnostic approach. They’ll look more carefully at tablets in general versus the iPad specifically. There will be new energy and enthusiasm for HTML5 alternatives and tablet competitors — such as Google’s One-Pass service announced this week. Publishers will still work with Apple, but they’ll check their pockets before they leave the room next time. It will be a more sane, more sober relationship moving forward. And that’s probably a good thing. Our faith in Apple has been shaken. We can make up, we can make it work, and we can move forward. But the relationship may never be the same again.

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Newspapers Fall Out of Love With Apple Over Subscription Policy

Ford’s new all-electric Focus and their Chief Creative Officer on thinking globally and making drivers happy Not the least in Ford’s recent brand revival was today’s launch of the electric-only Focus at CES—both heralding the latest in Ford’s tech innovations and bucking traditional auto show debuts. We got a sneak peak last night of the new model (arriving in showrooms this fall) and learned about the advancements in charging that come with it. The new vehicle charges in just over three hours, about twice as fast as the Nissan Leaf, and a smart charging feature allows users to leverage fluctuations in electricity pricing by programming when they want to charge. With the new Focus, an updated version of MyFord Touch includes electric-only features, and a companion mobile app will help monitor the car’s status and performance. These progressive tech developments, reflections of the brand’s understanding that people and their technology evolve much more quickly than traditional auto design cycles do, are part of a series of continued enhancements by Ford allowing drivers to control more of their mobile apps through MyFord Touch and Ford Sync AppLink . (These features are currently available on the 2011 Focus and coming next on the 2012 Mustang, which will also offer voice-activated navigation.) To learn more about the role of design within Ford’s corporate and product evolution, on a visit to their headquarters last year we sat down with J Mays, Group Vice President of Global Design and Chief Creative Officer, who shared his thoughts on how the brand is moving forward. Tell us about designing for a global market. For years, Americans just didn’t buy five-door cars, because they only liked four-doors. And Europeans only like five-doors. As we started to launch the Fiesta (and we’re getting the same feedback on the Focus), it turns out that new four-door, designed primarily for Asia Pacific and the United States, is getting a lot of attention in Europe. Just the opposite is happening in the U.S. We designed a four-door for the American and age-specific market, and suddenly everybody is going, “Yeah, but actually the five-door is really cool and I’d like that.” That’s a real cultural shift that has to do with a different generation, one that’s getting their information off the Internet. Everybody just wants the best design. We’ve gone from being seven brands with 360,000 people in the company to two brands essentially—really one brand with a small domestic brand, Lincoln—with about 170,000 people. We’re not developing three Focuses anymore, we’re developing one. How does this impact your customers? You can imagine the amount of money that we save there, It allows you to put more into the car that allows the customer to have surprise and delight. How has this shift affected your job? I used to describe my job as an inch deep and a mile wide because I’d just go around and sort of sprinkle fairy dust on stuff and never have time to really delve into it. Now that everybody is focusing on Ford globally, it allows me to be an inch wide and a mile deep. What does this mean for Ford’s many regional design centers? We’re not Ford of Europe design anymore. We’re not Ford U.S. design. We’re just Ford global design because—this sounds a bit stupid—but we’re a small enough company that we can get away with that now. How has technology facilitated that global design process? Read more of the interview after the jump . It’s just one more tool. Most of us in leadership positions in design at Ford have come out of university at a time when there wasn’t any such thing as PowerWalls or even two dimensional or three dimensional design. We’ve easily made the transition, but probably what it does more than anything is allow us to speed up the development process. What is the number one problem you look to solve designing for the global market? Making people happy. What we’re constantly looking for is that thing that will make people say “I want a Ford because I hear they’re fun to drive.” There’s the mechanical side of it; they have to be better handling cars with great quality, fast engines, great fuel economy and super aerodynamics. But that’s just kind of what you have to do to be able to be a producer of automobiles. To sell something and make a brand that’s got long-term sustainability, you’ve got to have something that brings people back time and time again. Has what and how you hear from consumers helped the design process? Our understanding of the kind of questions we should be asking the consumer has changed, because a contingency within Ford five or six years ago said the customer is the most important thing. And I would go, “Yeah, the right customer is.” So we’re customer-informed, but we’re not customer-driven. We have to know who our customer is, but we’re brand driven. We know our cars are fun to drive, they’re going to look fun to drive, feel fun to drive, smell fun to drive, and the customer that we need and the customer we want to sell to wants to be looking for a car that fulfills that criteria as well. (Let me) use the Fiesta as an example. We’ve now sold over a million of them, and if you look at it compared to the last generation Fiesta, that’s about a 50% improvement. We were going to sell it to this fictitious 23-year-old Italian woman named Antonella. We laid out the entire sort of cultural map of who Antonella was. We knew she lived with her parents, we knew she liked style, we knew all the things that were important to her. That’s the customer-informed side of it and you overlay that with the fun to drive part. Fun to drive doesn’t mean in the BMW, “ultimate driving machine” way; it means what are the elements that for Antonella makes this car fun to drive. What role does design play within the company? Right at the top. If you look at the programs that we released—from Fiesta to Focus to what will be the new Mondeo, in fact the current Mondeo—if you judge those against the competition, we’ve got design leadership in every one of them. Has the role of design kind of shifted at all? I think where we are—and I credit Jim Farley—we have great brand focus so we know who we are as a brand now. I’ve been with the company now 12 years and I’d say for six of those twelve years we weren’t quite sure. We were some things in the U.S., we were a slightly different thing in Europe. Engineering is there not for us to make it less ugly. Engineering is there to help us design and deliver the brand message. We use design as a communication tool to convey a message to the customer, whatever that message may be. So engineering helps us as a means to an end to deliver that. But design we consistently say is going to always have a leadership position. I haven’t driven a lot of Fords in the last several years, I was surprised how much I enjoyed driving them. It’s shocking to most people, I think. I arrived at Ford in ’97 and said at the time, based on my Audi experience, I said this is going to definitely take us 10 to 12 years before we can turn this brand around. And it’s turned around for completely different reasons than I thought it would. Had we not had the financial crisis of 2008, the Toyota meltdown and all these other problems, it would not have had Americans in particular scratching their head and going “Gee, maybe I should have another look at Ford.” Everybody was really happy that we didn’t take a loan from the U.S. government, and it was any number of things that got us on their list to possibly look at. But once they got into the car they were like “Wow, these are really good cars!” So that was the big surprise. What we’ve done now at Ford, through a combination of product and sort of big cultural change, is that we’ve gotten on the shopping list. And now we’ve got to just start ratcheting it up, but we feel pretty confident about that.

Excerpt from:
An Interview with J Mays

Why do tech companies coined the “great ones” by the press so often falter within a year or two of such accolades? How often does the accolade signal apogee — that the company has begun bumping downhill into strategic atrophy? Could insightful attention identify or even reverse this trend, especially as other business sectors move more rapidly through boom and bust? The May 1983 issue of BusinessWeek carried a cover story on the “massive overhaul” of Digital Equipment Corporation, then the nation’s second-largest computer company. Its CEO and founder, Ken Olsen, drew kudos on “three key pieces of this restructuring now falling into place.” On management: “Olsen is streamlining an overgrown corporate bureaucracy and decentralizing decision making.” On standardization of Digital’s product lines: “They can communicate easily with each other,” especially in contrast to the fragmented product lines of IBM, Wang, and Hewlett Packard. On marketing: Olsen “is working hard to develop closer ties with customers, organize new distribution channels, and launch more innovative promotions.”   But within the year, third quarter sales took a dive, earnings sank 75 percent, and the stock price lost 20 percent one afternoon. Though the incident proved temporary, it portended the beginning of a bumpy downhill ride, culminating with Olsen’s ouster in July 1992. A similar pattern was forming at IBM in February 1983, as John Akers was named president and COO. A month later, he told a group of large customers he had few worries: IBM’s factories were “sold out,” the long-running antitrust suit “almost settled.” This was a sunny time brightened by victories over plug-compatible mainframes, peripherals, minicomputers, leasing companies, and the Justice Department. Press stories mostly glowed when Akers became CEO two years later. But his first year was dimmed by weak profits; his second produced the worst showing in 40 years. In January 1987, a cautiously upbeat Fortune interview portrayed Akers as a “decisive, non bureaucratic executive” who spotlighted field sales for the shortfall: “IBM got out of touch with its customers. It persisted in trying to sell them products when what they wanted was solutions.” But in fact, the problem was the product line as much as the sales reps. Absent decisiveness at the top, IBM’s products (and pricing) grew increasingly uncompetitive until early 1993 when John followed Ken into exile. In hindsight, both events occurred near the beginning of long-term decline. Why wasn’t this moment identified as an apogee by press and pundits? Four factors recur: First, a focus on previously beaten competitors rather than the decisive winners of the future; Second, a cost structure and business model that couldn’t compete against the newest firms; Third, undue faith in new technology that let management sidestep the difficult decision to upend their business model; Finally, sales forces morphed from greatest assets to heaviest anchors. Competition : For Digital in 1983, management viewed its main competition as the other East Coast minicomputer companies, notably Data General, Wang, Prime and, of course, IBM. But most of them were doomed. Much more dangerous was the 1982 appearance of Sun Microsystems with Unix as its operating system and soon afterwards, a stripped-down computer architecture that quickly eclipsed the minicomputers. Sun doubled hardware throughput every two years — twice as frequently as the seniors. Unix drew the developers of scientific and engineering software bought by the labs and universities where Digital once dominated. For IBM executives, the competition was the minicomputer companies and the doddering old-line mainframers like Burroughs and Univac. A breakthrough in circuit and cooling technology helped Big Blue repel the newer mainframe “plug compatible” companies that used IBM’s operating systems — notably Amdahl and the Japanese — at least temporarily. But flabby indecision halted momentum, reviving the competition. Mainframe revenues cratered from $13 billion in 1990 to a projected $7 billion for 1993 as Akers left the scene. The salaried reps at Digital went unpenalized for fruitless noodling with old buddies while business was being lost. Business Model : Streamlining Digital’s “overgrown bureaucracy” backfired. The subsequent revenue shortfall occurred when the newly disoriented product groups couldn’t even coordinate the entry of new orders. That quirk was soon corrected, but organizational infighting continued, deflecting attention from Digital’s outdated business model. Much more was spent on sales, marketing, and overhead than the new competitive environment allowed. Newcomers like Sun brought a ten percentage point cost advantage; the new personal computer companies enjoyed twenty points. The only recourse was massive downsizing. For Digital’s Ken Olsen, the emotional burden proved too much, leaving the chore to his successor. IBM faced the same problem. But staff restructuring was delayed by the company’s outdated “full employment policy.” Akers’s efforts, when finally exerted, were too little, too late. At the apogee, the press simply missed the existing necessity or cultural difficulty of fundamental business restructuring. New Products : Digital had recently delivered its new VAX computer family and downplayed or discontinued the hardware designs and operating systems of its fragmented, older product line. Product standardization was one of the positives applauded by BusinessWeek , especially in contrast with the mid-range mess at arch competitors IBM, Wang, and Hewlett Packard. But this single-mindedness also helped convince Olsen and his lieutenants to dismiss Unix and Microsoft’s software as “me too operating systems” with insufficient differentiation or profit potential — ultimately a fatal error. Meanwhile, IBM relished the public’s receptivity to its new personal computer and the Microsoft relationship formed around OS/2. But consumer markets are won by snappy user interfaces and a close connection with the vast community of independent software vendors. IBM’s focus on business computing left as little chance for success in that sphere as a tractor maker would have in Formula One racing. As the relationship with Microsoft fell apart, I was deluged with email from big company technical staffs expressing their outrage at the world’s failure to acknowledge the superiority of IBM’s OS/2. Maybe they were right, but it didn’t matter. Kids wanted the PC with the most games. Their parents wanted the same systems in their offices that they used at home. End of story. Volume wins as Microsoft always understood and the press often missed. Field Sales : A properly trained and motivated sales force can be a company’s biggest asset. In 1983, IBM’s sales force was its “crown jewel” and the source of all its CEOs. Digital’s representatives were unsalaried engineers encouraged to spend time understanding the customer’s problem without ever overselling the product. Both were signatures of company excellence. Both would soon be beaten by the hungrier field forces of Sun and the new breed. By the mid-1980s, surveys showed the complacent IBM representatives spent only 30 percent of their time with customers. No wonder, given IBM’s ingrown and unproductive incentives, rewards, and metrics at the time. Half the people awarded trips to the annual sales bash in Hawaii didn’t even have sales quotas. Over at Digital, a similar story emerged. The salaried reps went unpenalized for fruitless noodling with their old buddies in the engineering and laboratory cubicles even while that business was being lost to Unix. And even though they were now supposed to sell business systems to enterprise CIOs. So they were slaughtered by Sun’s hungry hordes, never even engaged IBM in corporate offices. “Developing closer ties with customers”? Not the right customers. For the rest of the 1980s, most observers and perhaps even management didn’t notice. To rewind the film: Digital’s sales downdraft a few months after the media’s glowing report wasn’t fatal in itself, but did signal the onset of an organizational paralysis that would retard the company’s viability against new competitors, blur its view of new technologies and delay the restructuring of business model and sales force. Similarly, IBM’s new CEO did not make the decisive corrections in product line, cost structure, and sales organization needed for company survival, whatever the journalist’s impression. “Prior success handicaps change,” wrote an insightful McKinsey partner some years ago. Today’s mantra would be “prior success strangles change,” even while it repeatedly dupes press and pundits frozen in the past.

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Apogee and Atrophy: Lessons From the Past for Today’s Tech Titans

I have been in love with newspapers my whole life. For eight years, I shared my breakfast table with the New York Times . It’s always been there, waiting on my driveway until I wake up enough to be able to absorb its thoughtful news stories, art reviews, opinions and, after a cup of coffee, its crossword puzzle. The other day, I divorced myself from the Times forever. And, I have to say, I’m glad it’s over — even though I admit I’ll miss that old Grey Lady. The end of my ill-fated love affair with the Times started innocently enough earlier this month. Since I love the Times so much, I decided I would share the joy of “all the news that’s fit to print” with my parents. As a Christmas present, I ordered a subscription for my mother and father, who live in another city. On December 1, I went online to the www.nytimes.com, gave them my credit card and entered my parents’ address. There was nothing to indicate when the new subscription would start, so I told my mother to call me if she didn’t get a paper by December 6. She received nothing, not even an e-mail confirming the order. (I had provided my mother’s e-mail address and phone number as the primary contact.) A little chagrined, I called the New York Times . The customer service clerk said the subscription was there but wasn’t scheduled to start until December 10. I was a little surprised it would take nine days to start a new subscription, but so be it. “I’m very sorry you were treated this way. At the New York Times , we pride ourselves on our customer service.” 
No newspaper arrived on December 10. I called the Times again on December 10. This time, I started taking names. Jill told me the computer showed the subscription was supposed to start on December 14. She didn’t know anything about a December 10 start date. OK. I told her I was getting very impatient, and if my parents didn’t get a paper on December 14, the Times would lose not just one (my parents), but two subscribers (plus myself). Jill assured me she was sending a note to the carrier, and the subscription would start on time. Come December 14, no paper.

 The next day, I called the Times again, and this time spoke to Tara, who said the subscription was scheduled to start on the 18th. I told her, “No.” Jill had said December 14. Tara admitted she could see where Jill had sent a note to the carrier to start on December 14, but she couldn’t explain why that didn’t happen. I asked her if my parents could get a “missed paper” delivered that day. She said she would put the order in, and a paper would be delivered between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. I asked if she could call the carrier and confirm. She said she would get in trouble if she did that. I reminded her she was already in trouble.

 Come 2:15 p.m., no paper. 

I called Times again that afternoon. I spoke to Jennifer, who told me the computer showed the paper was scheduled to start on December 18. I got pretty angry, I admit. I told her I wanted to cancel both the not-yet-started subscription and my own. She said she would do everything she could to keep me as a subscriber. I asked her if she could get a paper to my parents by the next day. She said she couldn’t do that. I told her to begin the cancellation process.

 Jennifer then transferred me to a supervisor. Melissa told me the paper was scheduled to start December 18. I got angry again. She said she saw nothing in the computer that said the subscription was scheduled for December 10 or December 14; it had always been scheduled for December 18, she said. I asked her if she knew Jill. She said she did. I told her to ask Jill why she said the paper would start on December 14. “I didn’t make those dates up,” I said (yelled, actually). She asked if I had specified a start date. I said I was never given that choice, either online or on the phone. I asked if it was normal to start a subscription 18 days after it was ordered. She said that normally it took 3-5 days, but online it usually took a little longer. After Melissa scolded me again for not specifying a start date, I told her to just cancel both subscriptions. She said my paper would stop the next day — it did — and I got angry all over again. I asked, “How is it possible to cancel a subscription in less than 24 hours but not be able to start one for 18 days?” She again chided me for not specifying a start date.  I said goodbye. 
I called Arthur Sulzberger’s office (a number I kept from when I was national president of The Newspaper Guild). I didn’t ask to speak to him; I just wanted to air a complaint. They had a “customer care representative” named Myra call me back. Myra offered to cut my subscription price in half. This was before I pointed out I had already canceled. Still, she couldn’t guarantee a paper to my parents before December 18. She apologized and said, “I’m very sorry you were treated this way. At the New York Times , we pride ourselves on our customer service.” I laughed. She asked if there was anything else she could help me with. I said no. I thought that was the end of this customer service nightmare. I was wrong. There is a final chapter. December 17, after I woke up on the second day of no New York Times at my breakfast table, my mother called. Guess what showed up in their driveway? The paper. I told her to enjoy reading it and to let me know if she could complete the crossword puzzle.

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My New York Times Divorce