Geopolitics - Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - Comments
The Medvedev doctrine and the American strategy
Georges Friedman of Stratfor checks in on the implications of the Georgian conflict. It’s becoming clear that the Russians shifted their policy and decided to act on a large scale. Time will tell if the Americans will also shift their views. In any events, the geopolitical situation is much more unstable now than it was before the confrontation. This is a long-term fact to take into account for any scenario.
THE MEDVEDEV DOCTRINE AND AMERICAN STRATEGY
By George Friedman
The United States has been fighting a war in the Islamic world since 2001. Its main theaters of operation are in Afghanistan and Iraq, but its politico-military focus spreads throughout the Islamic world, from Mindanao to Morocco. The situation on Aug. 7, 2008, was as follows:
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by Julien Le NestourMost Popular Content
- The Medvedev doctrine and the American strategy
- MP: Knowledge of cognitive biases needed to sustain competitive advantage
- The relevant user groups for targeted IT Investments (part 1)
- MP: Mac OS adoption rate in the enterprise increases and accelerates
- MP: Digital media explodes in supply
- MP: Announcing the MP series
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Enterprise X.0 - Aug 29, 2008 12:34 - Comments
The relevant user groups for targeted IT Investments (part 1)
Cut access to Facebook? Roll-out the iPhone? Deploy wikis and blogs? All are investment decisions and all should be based on cold economic analysis. They rarely are. For a simple fact: the end-users are either indiscriminately put in one single bag (”the Employees”) or they are put into the existing organizational boxes. Both approaches are wrong and usually result in misunderstanding and wrong investments.
What is needed is to slice and dice the users population according to a few simple economic principles. This allows to accurately surface the different business cases and make an informed choice when choosing to invest or to pass.
Let’s look at it in a threefold post:
- what typologies can we use to distinguish employees’ economic situation (part 1)?
- what are the relevant groups that appear (part 2)?
- what guidelines for action can be deducted (part 3)?
This goes right against Minto’s Principles but I want to split this piece in three and in that order. Should be the exception.
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Enterprise X.0, Fundamental Shifts - Aug 28, 2008 13:13 - Comments
MP: Mac OS adoption rate in the enterprise increases and accelerates
THE GIST
Gist: The business market share of Mac systems is increasing and this trend is accelerating. The current marketshare is of 4.5% (see exhibit section below).
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Strategic Shifts - Sep 1, 2008 15:04 - Comments
MP: Knowledge of cognitive biases needed to sustain competitive advantage
THE GIST
Gist: Neuroeconomy, neurofinance, behavioral economics and so on… All the fields at the crossroad of cognitive or neuro- sciences and other scientific disciplines are increasingly productive. The academics in these fields seek to understand how the brain is processing the information needed to make a decision. As it turns out, we must do with scores of “Cognitive Biases” that stem from our brain design and shape all of our perceptions and choices.
Impossible to eliminate, hard to even consciously correct, you can no longer ignore them: an increasing proportion of businesses have incorporated them into their decision making processes (ie these processes have been designed to correct any bias). If you don’t do it as well, you will soon lag your competitors.
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Musings - Aug 5, 2008 16:36 - Comments
How the energy-rich rely on Schlumberger
Fairly good FT article on SLB which I’m passing on but won’t comment ;-)
Andrew Gould is quietly becoming one of the most powerful men in the oil industry, so much so that he feels compelled to reassure the world’s biggest energy groups that he has no intention of making them redundant. “We do not, cannot and would not replace what oil companies do with things we can’t do,” says the chief executive of Schlumberger, the world’s largest oil services group, in a rare interview.
Yet the list of things Schlumberger cannot do has shrunk so dramatically that many national oil companies (NOCs) can now forgo the costly and politically tricky step of forming partnerships with international oil companies to tap their own oilfields. For the likes of ExxonMobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell, that means losing the most lucrative part of their business – the part they have relied on to achieve growth in production, revenue and reserves for much of their existence.
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Investments, Musings - Jul 30, 2008 10:46 - Comments
Actual Merrill CDO Sale: 5.47% on the Dollar
From Barry over at TBG:47% on the dollar
Less than five and half cents on the dollar? That’s an even cheaper sale than originally advertised.
What this transaction actually accomplishes is getting the paper — but not the full liability — off of Merrill’s books.
How very Enron-like !
The behavior of the I-banks is getting boring, tiring and surprisingly predictable, even in this market context. You would suppose they would learn some day. Apparently, that day hasn’t come yet.
Source: Actual Merrill CDO Sale: 5.47% on the Dollar
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Geopolitics - Sep 3, 2008 4:24 - Comments
The Medvedev doctrine and the American strategy
Georges Friedman of Stratfor checks in on the implications of the Georgian conflict. It’s becoming clear that the Russians shifted their policy and decided to act on a large scale. Time will tell if the Americans will also shift their views. In any events, the geopolitical situation is much more unstable now than it was before the confrontation. This is a long-term fact to take into account for any scenario.
THE MEDVEDEV DOCTRINE AND AMERICAN STRATEGY
By George Friedman
The United States has been fighting a war in the Islamic world since 2001. Its main theaters of operation are in Afghanistan and Iraq, but its politico-military focus spreads throughout the Islamic world, from Mindanao to Morocco. The situation on Aug. 7, 2008, was as follows: