This article about Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant empire is a good read. It’s weird because tonight on BBC America’s Late Night With Jonathan Ross, who was the guest? Gordon Ramsay, discussing his recent facelift. And tonight on Jay Leno? Gordon Ramsay. (The BBCA show is one week behind, so we get last week’s show a week later here in the USA.) The article discusses how his empire almost went bankrupt but he saved it. What it doesn’t mention is many critics say the reason his restaurants started to falter and fail was that he didn’t spend enough time in them because he was so busy with his shows: Hell’s Kitchen (USA), Kitchen Nightmares (US and UK), and The F Word (UK).
Fake Steve Jobs today has a rare serious type post: a discussion with Randall Stephenson of ATT. This is satire mixed with a serious statement on the state of the American corporation: a real business lesson. I don’t want to spoil it all for you but there’s some revelations in there. But I’ll include a very small excerpt:
… When I say that have a hit on our hands, I’m really giving you way too much credit, because let’s be honest, the success of iPhone has nothing to do with you. In fact, iPhone is a smash hit in spite of your network, not because of it…. An American company creates a brilliant phone, and that company hands it to you, and gives you an exclusive deal to carry it and all you guys can do is complain about how much people want to use it. You, Randall Stephenson, and your lazy stupid company you are the problem. You are what’s wrong with this country … There was nothing on the line. Silence. I said, Randall? He goes, Yeah, I’m here. I said, Does any of that make sense? He says, Yeah, but we’re still not going to do it. See, when you run the numbers what you find is that we’re actually better off running a shitty network than making the investment to build a good one. It’s just numbers, Steve. You can’t charge enough to get a return on the investment.
That is a sad but true statement of corporate America. And it’ll be why Apple doesn’t let ATT have the exclusive anymore. I will continue to ignore Tiger Woods in my blog. His sole contribution to society was to make golf interesting to a wider group of people, to which I say yawn.