If you really examine work that you get paid to do to earn a living, if you work for someone else when you leave the company should the work continue on. The answer invariably means you can be replaced and the question is how easy is it to replace you? In a book called Linchpin  Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin published by Portfolio or Penguin Books, NY, 2010 says you should make yourself indispensable and that way you can survive the changing nature of work. What does indispensable mean? Besides coming to work on a regular basis, what does an employer want? The ideal person is passionate about their job and tries to find workable solutions to help customers or people. Every job has defined rules to them, 95% of the time they need to be followed – in some cases it is 100% because lives are at stake, but what if your job there are no lives at stake? then there is wiggle room or creative solution making. In those instances you can make your job indispensable. There old values of being productive, coming to work are added to the art of being an artist.. An artist, and we all see a little differently otherwise our homes would all be decorated the same, the artist means there is a chance to perform or make a connection to do your art. The old formula was higher on conformity, obedience and compliance; the new formula is based on dignity, generosity and humanity with overlap between the two formulas. There are many other aspects to the theory and the book brings excellent points to it.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, while personally you can be a linchpin (and I hope you’re) the reason to read the book is another method to do research on the companies you have shares in or are thinking about in. How do managers treat their employees? what attributes of linchpin are found in the companies you invest in? The belief is a linchpin employee is a higher value added employee – ie makes more money for the company, ideally most of the employees should be, but reality is different from ideal. If you like the theory and see how human resources should be evaluated then look at companies to see if they follow the theory and make more money for them and you.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

Losing the Signal with the subtitle of the book is the spectacular rise and fall of Blackberry by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff  published by HarperCollins, Toronto, 2015 is the terrific story of the smart phone and the growth and decline of a technology company. In the world of telecom companies – the telecom companies do very similar things however the suppliers tend to be different. This was the case which allowed Blackberry to grow, their built a wonderful handset which offer secure emails to people, and in a world where privacy is still important, having secure emails is a great thing to offer. The supplier was BellSouth who was competing against the other telecoms. If they had the hot technology people would be sign up as subscribers and the company would operate similar to a utility. People tend to have few choices to their provider so switching is less an option particularly if the provider has the hot technology. This leads the suppliers in a tough position – every year companies more or less have to come up with something new and this new should be the hot item in the field. That is a huge challenge and for 15 years the engineers at Blackberry did that but since engineers are people; events and lives change sometimes for the better and sometimes to make them run on the same spot while others in the field are running in the distance.

Part of the success of Blackberry was for many years the two founders functioned great as partners – one looked after sales and finance; the other looked after the engineering. The sales person always promised the moon in new things and the engineered delivered. The abilities of the two to be co-Chairs with a President who could balance the two off and understand what directions the company needed to go was one of the companies secret to success. The engineer and his group did wonders in correctly anticipating where the market was going and meeting the needs of the telecoms. When the telecoms were interested in advanced technology for the time and the engineering group asked why? they started to look at other alternative companies who would provide the devices the company needed to compete in the marketplace. Loyalty was not forever but it would allow for time overruns.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, one of the reasons to read the book is to look at why the company can down as fast as it did. One year it was worth 100s of billions next year tens of billions, still a large successful company just not as large as it once was when it dominated the smart phone market. When you invest in companies such as Blackberry you need to know what triggers and what is hot and not and be ready to switch to alternatives in the market place when those triggers can be noticed. Otherwise one year your stocks are worth 100s of dollars the next year they are worth 10s of dollars.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

Losing the Signal with the subtitle of the book is the spectacular rise and fall of Blackberry by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff  published by HarperCollins, Toronto, 2015 is the terrific story of the smart phone. If you look around more and more people have smartphones as opposed to basic cell phones and there are many advantages to this. One of the first smartphones was the Blackberry and being the first on the technical side there were many hurdles to pass through. The combination of brilliant problem solving engineer and a hard-driving sales president  – Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie respectively, built a great company, however in the ever-changing world of smartphones the company is not the leader it once was. The story of Blackberry is the story of an engineer who figured out how to put wireless communications and computers together is to build something special. The something special proved to a Blackberry which allowed a person to read their emails away from their computer on a secure platform. This lead to sending more emails than telephone calls. Along this journey is the invention – trying to keep the device reasonably simple; the selling of it and all the infrastructure to ensure the system works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The sexy part of technology is the device or program; the non sexy part of business is selling the technology to receive income streams. After Blackberry was being used and sold, it than began to be concerned over receiving the income stream or money from people using their devices. The stock would go up on the greater sales, it would fall when those sales were not regularly captured by users paying for the system – or bad operations. Big companies do the operations side well; small companies do not because it is the non sexy part of the business. As a company grows it has to balance these elements of the company out or be sold to a bidder willing to pay for the technology. The sexy part of the smart phone business is the continual advancements – figuring out what a consumer is willing to pay for. For many years, Blackberry was the secure emails; however as time went by and telecom companies spent billions to upgrade their infrastructure, the advantage is no longer an advantage. Apple made the Mac portable in the iPhone; the iPhone came with applications or apps for people to use; there is now considerable advantages to having an iPhone. Blackberry is still in business just following a different path.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, while successful tech companies generate billions of dollars because of their age they often do not pay dividends. As the company gains years of service, then it is inclined to offer dividends which are secured by their large cash balances. As younger companies tech stocks are growth stocks and with growth stocks the manta is what have you done for me lately? or why is the latest technology the best and brightest, given the immense alternatives that are offered in the marketplace. Understanding the complexities of the how and where the companies compete is part of the investors homework. If you are interested you world is a bigger place, if not focus on other companies where the benchmarks of understanding are easier and the rewards can be as lucrative.

There are more question than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

This blog looks at books such as Switch – How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, published by Random House Canada, Toronto, 2010 because as Dividend buyers part of what we want is not to change.

To create and sustain change, you have to act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper. You have to embrace a growth mindset and instill it in your team, The reason is in the middle of the project everything can look like a failure, it is only at the beginning and the end do success occur. In the middle it is often 3 steps forward and 2 steps backward – think snakes and ladders. This means if failure is a necessary part of change, then understanding failure is a critical step. The important thing to learn is people will persevere only if they perceive falling down as learning rather than failing. What is the attitude towards failure in the company?

Many times we attribute behavior to the way they are rather than the situation they are in. The Path can be made easier to navigate and no matter what your role is there is an element of control. Tweaking the environment is about making the right behavior a little bit easier and the wrong behaviors a little harder. Remember the easiest path – most people will take.

How can you create a habit that supports the change you are trying to make? There are only two things to think about (1) the habit needs to advance the mission and (2) The habit needs to be relatively easy to embrace.

One of the best tools to do this is the Checklist. Why are they effective? They educate about what is best, showing them the ironclad right way to do something. You can ignore but you cannot dispute it.

How to keep the journey going? Reinforcement is the secret to getting past the first step on the next ones. The problem is most of us are not good at reinforcement we are quicker to complain than to praise. Learning to spot and celebrate approximations requires us to scan the environment and look for little rays of sunshine and it is not easy. Change is not an event it is a journey.

In the book there are more examples and downloadable on http://www.switchthebook.com/resources

Linking to dividend paying stocks, the good thing is these companies tend to have longevity which allows change to happen and many companies are not the same as they were founded, something has changed. Something good and consistent which customers keep paying for at a margin which the company can make a profit and pay dividends. The history is of some change, just because it is making a profit does not mean standing still. The key is making it easier for the people who continues to buy your goods and services.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

This blog looks at books such as Switch – How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, published by Random House Canada, Toronto, 2010 because as Dividend buyers part of what we want is not to change.

In the world of big oil companies, because they are big they are looking for big oil reserves. However, you really do not know until you have drilled to determine how big the oil reserve is or can be? Oil companies exploration budgets go up and down with the price of oil and during one downturn, the head of BP exploration lowered the budget and came up with the simple phrase “no dry holes”. This means a lot of things but one thing is to ensure the geologists to spent more time formulating data to weed out the possibility of dry holes, so when the drill was going down the best information possible was used to expect a hole with oil. No system is perfect but BP used its data better and hit rate was 2 out of every 3 holes struck oil which was better than the competition.

In all industries – various publications dominate for example with financial news the Wall Street Journal, for institution investors add the magazine Institutional Investor (II), the large pension funds managers look at II for articles and rankings to see where they allocate their funds. For a firm to be highly ranked, it will translate into more dollars going into that firm. It was this premise that in 1986 Shearson Lehman’s research ranked 15th with nobody ranked in the top 5 in II. The new boss made many formal changes clearing out deadwood, changing the compensation package and to get the company moving he decided analysts were expected to initiate at least 125 client conversations per month and post them on the internal network. In addition, at presentations the I think were changed to we think. The results were besides doing better research which II noticed, customers were noticing the extra attention. One example of the work was when a drug company called Epogen made by Amgen and distributed by J&J was introduced, Shearson identified more than one market for its drug and called it a blockbuster which made money for many clients. It is always possible to rise in the rankings.

How do most of us change something ? do we analyze-think and change or See-Feel and Change. Turns out it is the second one or we are touchy feelings and if you show us we can and do react. Two wonderful examples:

a man wanted to centralize the purchasing system – the company had many different divisions buying products. He took gloves from all over the company with various price ranges and laid them out on a table and said – if we centralized all the gloves would be in the similar price range. The board approved it.

Target department store is known for many things including clothes with bright colors but that was not always the case. The ready to wear trend department manager saw that the year’s fashion was neutral or gray, white, etc. She wanted color, so she bought M&Ms and displayed them in glass bowls and asked do you see the colors? She brought in Apples in different colors and photographs from different boutiques showing colors and how they pop. The interesting thing is she was one person with limited authority and resources but it can be done.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, the examples show change is possible within any company and the organization can benefit from it. What changes are going on in the companies which you own stock in?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

This blog looks at books such as Switch – How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, published by Random House Canada, Toronto, 2010 because as Dividend buyers part of what we want is not to change.

One of the problems with change is the assumption of behavior of change agents is the change desired is an obvious change. To most people it is not, they need to be guided and understand why the change is better. One example is a controller wanting the expense claims done on time. Why because they are small but important part of closing the monthly books and the results can reported upward. How should the person deal with the late filers? Step one look and learn from the ones who file on time. why do they get it done? what could be made easier? are the forms easy to fill out? If there are ambiguities make it more clear. In the emails to those who do not have it done – say we have a file rate of 80%, help make it 100%. If you learn from the ones that are doing it on time, you can ensure the late comers have fewer excuse not to because the process was made easier. Clarity dissolves resistance.

One great way to affect change is point to the destination. This means a buy in and work towards the destination. A great example is a teacher in kindergarten with all levels of reading ability – her goal was you will read like 3rd graders. To the kindergarten kids 3rd graders were bigger, smarter and cooler; however the next step was to call her kids scholars. A scholar is someone who lives to learn and is good at it. The days went by and one day a child was called out of the classroom for administrative reasons, the other kids let a groan because they were thinking that scholar is going to miss something. At the end of the year, 90% of the kids were at grade 3 level.

Another grade school principal used the grading system A, B, C and NY or Not Yet. This is combined with extra supports for those at the NY grade, which is meant to encourage them and figure out a solution to move to the higher levels.

Another wonderful example is Breast Cancer Care in University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) similar to most institutions they do the work, but the internal structure of the organization could be changed. The process was take a test and in one area, learn about it another area and come back in a different building, what if all the steps were in one location? Anyone that has been in a hospital and educational institution know that they move slowly with one area having money, another area having the “turf” and the people reporting to a variety of different people. How you move the organization is to start small to begin to have the departments working together on one process. It took practice, it took persistence with the end game the needs of the patient, not the department. The process started with one doctor who would see the patient, then the patient would come back in an hour or two by that time the doctor would have seen the test results and consulted with others. The patient would come back and the next steps would be mapped out. It took others to see how the process was going before others joined in. Eventually, the organization gave the Breast Cancer Care their own space with all the departments in the same area. The results were more patients were seen, UCSF became a recognized leader in breast cancer care and research and it is major source of revenue. They continue to do more to put the woman at the center of the experience.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, the above examples are health and education; two very important areas of our lives and two very complex organizations. However, through change or linking to a destination they were able to impact many lives for the better. For company when lives are impacted for the better greater revenues flow and it takes work and picking the correct destination to go to. Corporately you will see SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Timely) do not give emotion or the drive to accomplish it. The goals must be matched with why are they important? who are you doing them for? or the people will be cynical. Asking about the emotion of the company or the reason for its existence will help ensure the return of equity and dividend are maintained and grow.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

This blog looks at books such as Switch – How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, published by Random House Canada, Toronto, 2010 because as Dividend buyers part of what we want is not to change. The idea is to buy into companies that can consistently earn profits which can be distributed to shareholders. The combination of capital gain and dividend over the long-term will give you very rewards. The long-term means to potentially do nothing after you have bought; but you have to do some homework or have simple reasons to exit a stock and done your homework what is the better alternative? Thus dividend paying stocks have a dual nature – no change and looking at possible changes.

The biggest problem with change is to change means to change your personal situation.

How do you make changes – the easiest way is have a goal which everybody agrees with. Then find ways for people to buy in to the goal; and most important some easy ways for the participants to embrace the change. If you make it easy, then people can soon do, if they are doing, they will begin to think of more ways to do and change agents will be brought it to gain more acceptance and soon the change has happened for the better. Some resources are needed but there does not have to be great.

The biggest change can happen with the little resources because as people go through the process they begin to understand the solutions. Sometimes the solution is food – ensuring a well-balanced meal which includes vitamins and proteins. You may not know all the food content but if you eat some from each food group you should be healthier.

Sometimes the solution to the problem is to ask what is working right now. Rather than going into the past to find reasons for the failure, something must work right now and if you start with that, the good can be enhanced.

Dealing with finances – unblock revenue; minimize up-front cash; faster is better and use what you have got. These 4 rules plus being innovated about what you have means you can solve problems and work for a better future.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, one of the advantages of the companies is they are profitable and should have a good cash flow which enables them to pay dividends. This means some waste will be in the system, because of the knowledge the company makes money. In many instances the best planning is done with limited resources. if you can get management to think that way, those profits should be consistent.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

When you think of the world’s biggest economies , which countries do you think of? For thousands of years the answer was India and China.About  2000 years ago, India made up of 33% of the world’s economy, China had the 26% or combined 59% of the world’s economy was China and India. 2000 years was the time of Christ, yet most Europeans never thought of the world in that fashion – they likely thought the world revolved around Rome. Now 2000 years later those two countries are regaining their lost status, what should you do? In the book Growling Tiger Roaring Dragon by David Smith published by Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, 2007 the author offers ideas. Now the countries are back what do you do?

For many reasons, the countries of China and India with continue to grow, although the grow rates will slow, they will continue to dominate the world’s economy. Both countries have populations that are over one billion and given their growth there is a growing middle class which will change the countries to more service in jobs. In many countries resources or commodities will have great impact on the countries budgets, the growth of China and India has increased the price of commodities which is one of those good bad things. Good for companies in the industry, bad for the individual prices tend to go up, but we are talking about the overall country and good wins out. As the economy grows, China and India have a greater presence on diplomatic matters.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, if you shop at Wal-mart or one its subsidiaries and 80% of US citizens visit the store at least once a year – the biggest customer of China is Wal-mart. This means the North American economy is tied to China, just as it is tied to Europe. As both China and India develop their economies they will be and still are opportunities for making money from your investments. The same process which is used to pick stocks it means being selective, understanding how the economy works and start your homework there. In China there is a mixture of state and privately owned companies; in India there are a number of family owned companies which have the greatest influence.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

 

When you think of the world’s biggest economies , which countries do you think of? For thousands of years the answer was India and China.About  2000 years ago, India made up of 33% of the world’s economy, China had the 26% or combined 59% of the world’s economy was China and India. 2000 years was the time of Christ, yet most Europeans never thought of the world in that fashion – they likely thought the world revolved around Rome. Now 2000 years later those two countries are regaining their lost status, what should you do? In the book Growling Tiger Roaring Dragon by David Smith published by Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, 2007 the author offers ideas. First, the more important question is why did those two countries take so long to dominate the world’s economies.

The reasons are different by they have not changed and it is something dividend investors need to pay attention to. For India in the 17th and 18th century the biggest cotton industry in the world was located in India. It was not mechanized which is the reason the UK factories and the industrial revolution became number one. The India industry was very labour intensive and locked into that form of production. The spinners and weavers were essentially self-employed and had no interest in technological innovation and neither did the Indian middleman merchants. The ruling British and East India Company made money sending cotton to England and how it was produced was not the issue. For years the system worked for those involved, few people had a desire to change anything, so when changed happened, in another country, the industry could not adapt and stagnated the economy.

In China the country had the finest navy, innovative people a view to see what goes on beyond its borders.  The classic case is gunpowder. The Chinese invented it used in for fireworks, but Europeans found the method to use gunpowder  in arms or warfare which changed the world. The Chinese had all ingredient to be an empire willing to expand and then the leadership changed. The new Emperor turned the country inward and away from innovation, away from what others in the world were doing and stagnated his country. If he had been forward-looking likely this would be written in Chinese.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, the lesson to learn is how does your dividend paying company make money and are they tied to the process or is it adaptable? If it is adaptable how open is the company to actually adapting it? Those questions look at senior management and its openness to change, because it can soon be left behind or stagnate because its unwillingness to change.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.