Curating the Internet: Business, leadership, and management micro-summaries for September 22, 2019

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Authored by @remlaps

The current knowledge on corporate growth; National parks in the US have free admission on September 28; Satire as a barometer for freedom; Airbus' rise to control half of the large commercial airliner market; and a Steem essay marking the 82nd anniversary of The Hobbit's publication

Note: I will be on the road on Sunday, so it is likely that there will be no posts in this series on Monday.

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  1. Solving the Riddle of How Companies Grow Over Time - This article summarizes a new paper by Harvard's Gary Pisano. In the paper, Pisano and colleagues summarize the knowledge about how companies grow from the seminal work in 1959 through today. Defining growth as, "a process by which organizations pursue market opportunities and the acquisition and accumulation of the resources required to exploit those opportunities.", the researchers looked at 2,500 companies during the last 60 years. Insights include: Most companies don't actually grow at all; Small, medium, and large companies all tend to grow at the same rates; Older firms grow more slowly than newer ones; Most growth happens as a sort of random-walk, although some few companies grow consistently; Industries with the most innovation showed the most growth, but the growth was concentrated in just a few firms; and industries with a few established players grow slowly without much change in leadership. As lessons for leaders, the article suggests that leaders should understand industry variations when projecting their own growth targets, and controlled growth rates may be healthier in the long run.

  2. Visit Any National Park for Free on September 28—or Volunteer to Help Maintain Them - In the US, apparently September 28 is "National Public Lands Day". This means that all national parks are open to the public with no admission fees. The national park service says that this has been a tradition for the fourth Saturday in September ever since 1994. There are 419 sites that are operated by the service, and some - such as Alcatraz Island and the Statue of Liberty - may not seem very "park-like" at first blush. Unfortunately, it seems that we just missed National Museum Day, so save the date for next year, I guess...

  3. A free world needs satire - In this TED talk, Patrick Chappatte opens with some examples of satire of the American presidency and other international figures, then goes on to describe his perception of the current problem, saying, "We now live in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm. The most outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows in. These social media mobs, sometimes fueled by interest groups, fall upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. They send publishers and editors scrambling for countermeasures. This leaves no room for meaningful discussions. Twitter is a place for fury, not for debate." Finally, he discuss the reasons why he thinks satire is so important for democracy, noting that "freedom of expression" is incompatible with intolerance.

  4. How Airbus became Boeing's greatest rival - Boeing and Airbus has become a great rivalry where each controls about half of the large commercial market place, but Boeing had a 53 year head start. Boeing was established in 1916, whereas Airbus came together in 1969. When Airbus was created, the commercial aviation market was dominated by firms like Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, BAe, and others. At first, Airbus ran into obstacles with its Rolls Royce engines and withdrawal of support from the British government, but the company whittled away at the competition with its A300 and A320 models during the 1970s and 80s, then in 1985, the company hired John Leahy away from Piper. By 1994, Leahy was the company's top sales executive, and by 2018 he had led the company to more than $1 trillion worth of sales, driven largely by the newer A330 and A340 and A380 models, the last of which was designed to compete with Boeing's 747. In 2017, in order to avoid a looming tariff war, the company also moved some of its production to Alabama, in the United States.

  5. STEEM Today in History : The Hobbit published - By the time this post is published, September 21 will be "yesterday", but here's a shout out to @gooddream for marking an important date. The article recounts the tale of the book's launch, saying that Tolkien had some low-impact short stories published, but was content with life as an academic, when he happened to pen the words, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." It took him about two years to finish the book, at which time he loaned it to C.S. Lewis, and he - in turn - loaned it to a graduate student. By chance, a publisher's staff member than happened to see it, and it was published in 1937 by George Allen & Unwin. All 1,500 copies were quickly sold out. After repeated new editions, it is now estimated that up to 100 million copies of the book have been published. (A beneficiary setting of 10% has been applied to this post for @gooddream)

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