Less sugar...reads great

My weekly post on s+'s blog is about an unusual book by the founders of Honest Tea:

Comic Books, Iced Tea, and the Secret to Winning in Business

Once in a while I receive a business book that, like a box of Cracker Jack, comes with a prize inside. I enjoy these promotional gewgaws; often they engage me more than the books that they accompany. Mission in a Bottle: The Honest Guide to Doing Business Differently—and Succeeding (Crown Business, 2013), which arrived with a bottle of Honest Tea’s Honey Green Tea, is an exception: In this case, I was engaged equally by both.

Mission in a Bottle succeeds for a couple of reasons.The biggest is that its authors, Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff, offer a combination of practical experience and theoretical insight that’s atypical of business-book authors. They founded Honest Tea in 1998 in one of the most competitive CPG categories. They grew it to the point that Coca-Cola invested US$43 million for a 40 percent stake in 2008—and eventually bought the company lock, stock, and barrel in 2011...read the rest here

Customers are storytellers; companies are storydoers

My weekly book post on s+b's blogs offers a interesting twist on corporate storytelling:

What’s Your Metastory?

The first book I remember seeing on corporate storytelling was Managing by Storying Around: A New Method of Leadership (Doubleday Currency, 1992) by the late David Armstrong, a CEO who practiced what he preached. Armstrong took a time-honored idea—telling stories to communicate, disseminate, and reinforce information—and applied it to promulgating the mission, values, and strategy of a company.

Since then, many authors have written business books about how to use storytelling to galvanize employees and build brands, and more than a few of them have covered the topic in more practical detail than Armstrong—Annette Simmons immediately comes to mind. There are so many business books on storytelling, however, that I tend to give new ones a perfunctory browse and move on (been there, read that).

True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to Transform Your Business (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), by Ty Montague, the cofounder of co:collective, a strategy and brand story consultancy, is an exception to my rule. Montague gets right to the chink in the armor of storytelling: Unless the story you tell about your company is true, it is just empty words. And the way you make a story true, he says, is by “storydoing.” Storydoing is telling a story through your actions...read the rest here

Don't forget the white space

My weekly book post on s+b's blogs is on the need for "white space" in idea generation:

Why I Get My Best Ideas in the Shower

I get a lot of good ideas in the shower, but I never thought too much about why until I read a new book by Ori Brafman and Judah Pollack, The Chaos Imperative: How Chance and Disruption Increase Innovation, Effectiveness, and Success (Crown Business, 2013). It turns out that it’s not the water pelting my noggin or the shampoo that promotes healthy, silky smooth hair triggering my creativity. It’s the default mode network in my brain...read the rest here

Rita McGrath's career assessment

My book post on s+b blogs this week offers an assessment for business people who are seeking to bolster career security:

Can Your Career Survive Transient Competitive Advantage?

Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School, has devoted her 20-year-long academic career to sussing out how companies can successfully respond to a global economy characterized by uncertainty, fast-paced change, and increasing competitive pressure. She wrote three books, with Wharton’s Ian MacMillan, which explored how to wring out growth in such an environment. In June, her latest book, The End of Competitive Advantage: How To Keep Your Strategy Moving As Fast As Your Business (Harvard Business Review Press), was released.

In it, McGrath steps squarely into the ring of strategy. “Strategy is stuck” is her first jab, and then she steps in with the body blows—arguing that sustainable competitive advantage, the holy grail of strategic concepts and frameworks put forth by such luminaries as Michael Porter and by Gary Hamel and the late C.K. Prahalad is no longer a realistic goal. Her knockout punch: Increasingly, across many markets, competitive advantage is transient and conventional business strategy isn’t prepared to handle it.

The End of Competitive Advantage explores the ramifications of this transience on corporate strategy, and how companies can manage it. At the risk of oversimplification, her core recommendation is to discover new businesses, milk them, and when the time is right, get out of them faster than everyone else. But toward the end, McGrath slipped in something that you rarely see in business strategy books—a chapter on the effect of transient competitive advantage on us, the toilers in the corporate fields, and our careers.

If our employers begin rejiggering their businesses’ portfolios at a faster pace, our jobs are going to get rejiggered more often too. And if that starts to happen, are you ready? McGrath offers the following 10 yes-or-no scenarios to help you figure that out...read the rest here

Elmore Leonard said...

Elmore Leonard passed away today at age 87. I haven't read any of his westerns, but I read many of his crime novels and always got a lot of pleasure from them. He was a crisp, clear, no-BS writer. He also published a short how-to book on writing back in 2007 that was based on the following 10 rules:

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" …he admonished gravely
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Robert Monks takes on the corporate drones

My weekly post on the s+b blog is about a new book from a guy I've long admired, Robert A.G. Monks:

In “Drone Corporations,” Self-Interest Prevails

In Citizens DisUnited: Passive Investors, Drone CEOs, and the Corporate Capture of the American Dream (Miniver Press, 2013), Robert A.G. Monks sets the tone right off the bat by recalling the time he stood up at an ExxonMobil annual meeting and addressed CEO Lee Raymond as “emperor.” Indeed, Monks has long been a highly vocal gadfly and leading activist when it comes to corporate governance. 

Here, he argues that corporate governance is more important than ever because of two relatively recent developments. First, corporations have ascended to levels of unprecedented power in the United States, thanks in large part to legal rulings. The Supreme Court’s decision in the 2010 case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, for example, removed virtually all limitations on corporate political spending—a “grotesque decision,” rightly judges Monks. Second, the leaders of the largest and most powerful corporations in the U.S. (ExxonMobil, IBM, and General Electric top the list) have never been less accountable to shareholders. This is because of weak boards and the movement of large ownership positions to passive institutional investors, among other things. The result is “drone corporations,” in which “manager kings” have free rein to pursue their own self-interest. Monks puts more than half of the Fortune 500 among their numbers...read the rest here

Quick tips for better mentorship

This week, my book post on s+b's blog offers quick tips on better mentoring from Chip Bell and Marshall Goldsmith:

How You Can Be a Great Mentor, and a Great Protégé 

Revised editions of books don’t often pique my interest, even when they are best-selling business books, such as Chip Bell’s Managers as Mentors: Building Partnerships for Learning, which Berrett-Koehler originally published in 1996. But there is something unusual about the newly published third edition: Bell has taken on Marshall Goldsmith as a coauthor. When I asked Bell why he decided to share the author credit on such a well-regarded book, he said, “No one on the planet has more expertise and is better known in the coaching field than Marshall.” No argument here. 

Accordingly, there’s lots of new content in the book, such as interviews with a number of notable corporate leaders and a mentoring toolbox. The latter features, among other things, the following “quick tips” list for mentors and their protégés (reprinted with the authors’ permission)...read the rest here

Stephen King on opening lines

There's a very cool one-question interview with Stephen King in The Atlantic. Joe Fassler asked him about his favorite passages in a couple of his books and King mentioned two opening lines. That lead to King talking about the art and craft of a great opening line. Where are you gonna get better advice than that?

Stephen King: There are all sorts of theories and ideas about what constitutes a good opening line. It's tricky thing, and tough to talk about because I don't think conceptually while I work on a first draft -- I just write. To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar.

But there's one thing I'm sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.

How can a writer extend an appealing invitation -- one that's difficult, even, to refuse?... read the rest here

Finding common ground

My post on s+b's blog this week is about a quietly fascinating book that examines a mediator's career for insights into conflict resolution and change management:

What Managers Can Learn from Mediators

When it comes to challenging careers, mediation can make management look like a cakewalk. Take the contentious and long-running disputes over water rights, grazing land, nuclear waste dumps, and Native American treaties that arise on environmental mediator Lucy Moore’s home turf in the Southwestern United States. These are the kinds of conflicts that can lead to real-life shoot-’em-ups. 

Moore has written an engaging and thoughtful new book, Common Ground on Hostile Turf: Stories from an Environmental Mediator (Island Press, 2013), in which she describes her work and, better yet, teases out some of the lessons she has learned about getting people with sometimes radically different backgrounds and perspectives to come together and undertake change...read the rest here

Daniel Pink’s new pitch

A few months ago, I got the opportunity to interview Dan Pink for strategy+business. Smart guy, great writer, fun to talk with. The results were published yesterday. Here's the opening:

Daniel Pink didn’t plan a career exploring the world of work as much as he gravitated toward it. After studying linguistics at Northwestern University and law at Yale, he became an aide to U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, and then served as chief speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore. “When I had the opportunity to dole out assignments, I kept the ones about work, labor, business, economics, and technology,” he recalls.  

In 1997, disillusioned by the realities of politics and burned out by the workload, Pink quit to write under his own byline. An article published in Fast Company later that year became the kernel for his acclaimed first book, Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself (Warner Books, 2002). It plumbed the transition from employee to self-employment by millions of people much like Pink himself, and established a format that Pink has been following ever since: presenting a highly articulate, accessible synthesis of a topic or trend and a practical tool kit for putting it to work at work.

Several more books followed, bringing Pink into the ranks of the world’s leading management thinkers and speakers. His most recent book, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others (Riverhead Books, 2012), explores a topic ripe, perhaps even overripe, for Pinkian synthesis. The very nature of selling has been fundamentally altered by digitization, which continues to render long-accepted sales conventions irrelevant, yet, paradoxically, makes salespeople more important to companies and customers than ever before...read the rest here

China's real industrial advantage

My post on the s+b blog this week is about a book that seeks to illuminate one of the less understood sources of China's industrial might:

Government Subsidies Pave the Way in China

In the 2000s, China transformed itself from a net importer to one of the largest producers and exporters in the world in four mature, capital-intensive industries: steel, glass, paper, and auto parts. What accounted for this success, which in each case was achieved in a short five-year span? 

Industry research reveals that each of the four has relatively low labor requirements, so it wasn't China’s seemingly endless supply of inexpensive workers. The Chinese companies didn't enjoy economies of scale or scope. Nor did the undervaluation of the renminbi explain their growth.

According to Usha Haley, director of West Virginia University’s Robbins Center for Global Business and Strategy, and George Haley, a professor of marketing and international business at the University of New Haven, it was government subsidies that drove this industrial transformation. In Subsidies to Chinese Industry: State Capitalism, Business Strategy, and Trade Policy (Oxford University Press, 2013), they calculate that subsidies from China’s governmental bodies—in the form of free or low-cost loans, energy, materials, land, and technology—provided the dollar equivalent of as much as 30 percent of the output of these four industries...read the rest here.

A practical take on creativity

This week's book post on the s+b blog is a one-question interview with the authors of a new book proposing that we rein in our creativity efforts: 

Thinking Inside the Box
Books about business innovation seem to arrive as quickly as ideas on a whiteboard in a brainstorming session. But Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results  (Simon & Schuster, 2013), by Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg, jumps out for its counterintuitive take on creativity.

In the book, Boyd, assistant professor of marketing and innovation at the University of Cincinnati and former director of Johnson & Johnson’s Marketing Mastery program, and Goldenberg, professor of marketing at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s School of Business Administration, assert that thinking inside the box enhances idea generation. Thus, they argue, innovation initiatives should be limited to resources close at hand...read the rest here

John J. Raskob: A CFO for the Roaring '20s

My book post on s+b's blog this week covers the first biography of the most influential CFO in the U.S. a century ago.

Resurrecting a Forgotten Capitalist 

In June 2013, echoes of the Roaring 20s were everywhere in Manhattan. The Great Gatsby was in movie theaters, and the film’s marketing partners—the Plaza Hotel, Brooks Brothers, and Tiffany among them—were playing up their Gatsby connections and collections. Oxford University Press got into the act, too, with the timely release of Temple University history professor David Farber’s seminal biography, Everybody Ought to Be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist. 

Raskob is relatively unremembered today, but he shouldn’t be: He is as much an icon of that high-flying decade as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s glamorous and doomed protagonist, Jay Gatsby. Raskob was America’s leading CFO (“treasurer” in those days). Reportedly able to size up complex financials at a glance, Raskob was instrumental in the growth of two industrial giants: DuPont and General Motors...read the rest here

How to get filthy rich in rising Asia

This week, my book post on the s+b blogs calls out a novel that offers lessons about the pursuit of wealth.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia  

It’s always enlightening—and enjoyable—to read business literature that actually qualifies as literature. And Mohsin Hamid’s new novel fits the bill perfectly.

Hamid, whose previous novels, The Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, were shortlisted for several major literary awards, including the Booker Prize, creatively appropriates the self-help format in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. It’s the life story of an unnamed man, an amoral Horatio Alger who is born to a poor family in a rural village in a country that sounds a lot like India (but could be any developing nation with an emerging economy)...read the rest here.

Decisive

My weekly book post on the s+b blogs is about the Heath brothers' new book, Decisive:

Smarter Executive Decision Making Is Within Reach 

Chip and Dan Heath are back with another book that applies cognitive science to management. In 2007, the brothers—Chip is a business professor at Stanford and Dan  is a senior fellow at Duke’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship—had a hit with Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Random House), which David Hurst reviewed  in s+b’s Summer issue that year. And in 2010, they published Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Broadway), which Judith Glaser called out as one of the year’s best business books in s+b. Their new book, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work (Crown Business), looks just as promising. 

So when the publisher offered me a bit of Dan’s time, I used it to ask him a question: “In writing the new book, what did you guys discover about improving a company’s executive decision making?” Read Dan's answer here...

American Turnaround

My strategy+business blog post this week is on Ed Whitacre's management memoir:

AT&T from Apples to iPhones

My grandfather repaired switchboards in Manhattan for the Bell system. When he retired in the 1960s, he and my grandmother lit out for the wilds of western New Jersey, where they bought a couple of acres of apple trees and lived quite comfortably on his pension. My great-grandparents, a waiter and an embroiderer, lived on the dividends from the AT&T shares they had purchased through my grandfather’s employee stock plan. Those were the days.

My mother inherited that stock in 2000. A few months later, AT&T announced an 83 percent dividend cut. By 2005, the former blue chip had been written off. “AT&T was a stripped-down long distance company with twenty straight quarters of declining revenue,” recalls Ed Whitacre in his memoir cum management guide, American Turnaround: Reinventing AT&T and GM and the Way We Do Business in the USA(with Leslie Cauley, Business Plus, 2013). “It was bleeding customers by the thousands, with no way to bring them back…a shell of a company with no future, a crummy balance sheet, and a tarnished brand name.”...read the rest here

Story of My People

I've been neglecting my blogging responsibilities lately. Too much work, too little time. But starting last week, part of that work includes a weekly post on business books for the newly launched strategy+business blogs. I'm excited about it: I've been serving as s+b's senior editor for books since 2007, but mostly behind the scenes - managing book reviews and features, and editing a really terrific group of expert freelance reviewers. Now, I get to call out books that catch my eye but might not make it into s+b otherwise, and stick in my own two-cents (one of the great joys of life...just ask any Kinni).

Going forward, I'll keep this blog going in the usual sporadic fashion. I'll also post a teaser of my weekly book post with a link back to the s+b blog. Here's last week's:

Another Facet of Globalization

“Who can say whether there was ever a moment, an hour, a day when we reached the apex of our economic lives, and from that day forth, our dreams became chimeras, our successes privileges, our future an imaginary quantity?”

So begins the climactic chapter of Edoardo Nesi’s Story of My People (Other Press, 2012), an eloquent, emotion-laden, and, I think, essential addition to the globalization bookshelf. Just released last month in the U.S., this slim memoir won the 2011 Strega Prize—the first time a work of nonfiction has received Italy’s most prestigious literary award since it was established in 1947...read the rest here

Chandler on the detective story

Since I have a longstanding reading jones for mysteries of every kind, I really enjoyed Raymond Chandler's take on the genre, "The Simple Art of Murder," which he wrote in 1950. Chandler is, of course, one of the great masters of the detective novel - the author of classics, such as The Long Goodbye and Farewell, My Lovely.

Being a fan of hard-boiled crime novels, I got particular kick out of Chandler's criticism of Dorothy Sayers and what he saw as the flaws in the mystery "formula."

Taking issue with Sayers' assertion that mysteries could not "attain the highest level of literary achievement, he says:

I think what was really gnawing at her mind was the slow realization that her kind of detective story was an arid formula which could not even satisfy its own implications. It was second-grade literature because it was not about the things that could make first-grade literature. If it started out to be about real people (and she could write about them–her minor characters show that), they must very soon do unreal things in order to form the artificial pattern required by the plot. When they did unreal things, they ceased to be real themselves. They became puppets and cardboard lovers and papier mâché villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility. The only kind of writer who could be happy with these properties was the one who did not know what reality was. Dorothy Sayers’ own stories show that she was annoyed by this triteness; the weakest element in them is the part that makes them detective stories, the strongest the part which could be removed without touching the "problem of logic and deduction." Yet she could not or would not give her characters their heads and let them make their own mystery. It took a much simpler and more direct mind than hers to do that.

He also complains about American writers who picked up the English style, skewering both with this classic back-handed compliment:

Personally I like the English style better. It is not quite so brittle, and the people as a rule, just wear clothes and drink drinks. There is more sense of background, as if Cheesecake Manor really existed all around and not just the part the camera sees; there are more long walks over the Downs and the characters don’t all try to behave as if they had just been tested by MGM. The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

You can read the entire essay here...
 

Vonnegut on writing well

Who says ads are a waste of time? Well, I usually do, but then I came across an International Paper Company ad from the early '80s. The company asked Kurt Vonnegut to write an ad titled "How to write with style." Here's what he wrote:

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful - ? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you're writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead - or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don't you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

1. Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way - although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

2. Do not ramble, though

I won't ramble on about that.

3. Keep it simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. "To be or not to be?" asks Shakespeare's Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story "Eveline" is this one: "She was tired." At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

4. Have guts to cut

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

5. Sound like yourself

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad's third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.
All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens not to be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

6. Say what you mean

I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable - and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.

7. Pity the readers

They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don't really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school - twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify - whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.

8. For really detailed advice

For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White (Macmillan, 1979). E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.

How to alienate a country

Have you seen the letter that Titan International CEO Morry Taylor - who so delights in his nickname "The Grizz" that he features it in his bio on the Titan corporate website - wrote to the French minister of industry on Feb. 8? It's quite an addition to annals of corporate communiques:

Dear Mr. Montebourg: 

I have just returned to the United States from Australia where I have been for the past few weeks on business; therefore, my apologies for not answering your letter dated 31 January 2013. 

I appreciate your thinking that your Ministry is protecting industrial activities and jobs in France.  I and Titan have a 40-year history of buying closed factories and companies, losing millions of dollars and turning them around to create a good business, paying good wages. Goodyear tried for over four years to save part of the Amiens jobs that are some of the highest paid, but the French unions and French government did nothing but talk. 

I have visited the factory a couple of times. The French workforce gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that’s the French way! 

You are a politician so you don’t want to rock the boat. The Chinese are shipping tires into France - really all over Europe - and yet you do nothing. The Chinese government subsidizes all the tire companies. In five years, Michelin won’t be able to produce tires in France. France will lose its industrial business because its government is more government. 

Sir, your letter states you want Titan to start a discussion. How stupid do you think we are? Titan is the one with money and talent to produce tires. What does the crazy union have? It has the French government. The French farmer wants cheap tires. He does not care if the tires are from China or India and these governments are subsidizing them. Your government doesn’t care either: “We’re French!” 

The US government is not much better than the French. Titan had to pay millions to Washington lawyers to sue the Chinese tire companies because of their subsidizing. Titan won. The government collects the duties. We don’t get the duties, the government does. 

Titan is going to buy a Chinese tire company or an Indian one, pay less than one Euro per hour and ship all the tires France needs. You can keep the so-called workers. Titan has no interest in the Amien North factory. 

Best regards, 

Maurice M. Taylor, Jr.

Chairman and CEO

The downside of this missive for Titan is pretty obvious: It alienates the French government, which can make it difficult to do business in the country; it insults the French, who buy Titan products; and it suggests that the company has an arrogant leader who can't curb his tongue, with all the problems that implies for investors, business partners, etc.

I assume The Grizz saw some benefit to sending such an incoherent rant, but I can't imagine why he just didn't write: "Thanks so much for thinking of us for this opportunity, but it isn't something we can pursue at the moment."