Global Goliath Terrorizes A Small Business

"It would appear that any tiny threat to LVMH's $13 billion in global sales in the first three quarters of 2006 and their 60,000 employees worldwide is more important to defeat than dealing with sweatshop labor it probably employs from factory workers around the globe."

WOW. Powerful statement. Read more about how a Global Goliath attempts to terrorize a small business ... here.

And here at Startup Journal: A Tiny Firm Wins 'Chewy Vuiton' Suit.

Liquid Borders?

Shipping goods from one country to another has always been a paper-intensive process. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, every container that crosses international borders generates 30 different documents. That adds up to roughly five billion documents a year.

But the EU, in partnership with IBM and the Free University of Amsterdam, plans to do away with all that paper, and instead have imported goods counted, monitored and evaluated for tax automatically, without producing a single sheet.

Sound unbelievable? Read more here: A pilot between the EU and IBM could introduce paperless shipping.

Hard Questions...12/16

Last year, Merrimack Valley Hospital lost $87,205. They have been an Essent hospital for how long? Since 2001.

In retrospect, the first hospital (Crossroads) that Essent bought lost money for all but one year (out of five.) From the beginning, they put serious money into the hospital, but like the Titanic, it just kept going down.

Nashoba Valley made $537,676 last year, approximately the same percentage of return on their gross as PRMC. But, their Return On Investment (ROI) is far better, as the price was only $11M. They still have a little over a year to commit an additional $16M in improvements or a new structure. While ground-breaking for a physician's office building has occurred, we'll see how an actual replacement hospital shapes up in the next year. Kind of waiting until the last minute...maybe hoping for an exception to be granted? Or was the timeline on the new hospital completion left open--sort of like the lawsuit by the gay couple....

Sharon Hospital seems to be the cash cow of the organization: Approximately $3.7M from a gross of $98.5. And they got it at a price lower than that of NVMC ($16M outright and $8M more for improvements)! Guess it was worth waiting for--despite assuming liability for a toxic waste dumping problem in NY.

Paris had a total revenue of $363,370,383...yet only made $1.6M over costs. Maybe it's all those locums?

Southwest wasn't in the mix, but lost almost $2M. I imagine that there were some changes.

It should be interesting this year, since the cost reporting period is over and the figures should be posted soon. For those interested, AHD.com is the website.

My questions are many, but here is the predominate one: Do they really expect to turn around a hospital with some paint and TVs? That isn't the problem, but let's see what happens....

Flags of the World

And comments about them. Wake up world. Thanks Seth for the tip.

Going Global

When Ogilvy Interactive set out to take IBM Corp.'s e-mail marketing strategy international, it knew it would need to make some adjustments to both messaging and design. It also would need to check in with local ISPs, which can impede delivery rates.

"Deliverability [as a concept] is fairly new to Europe and Asia-Pacific," said Eric Wheeler, CEO-North America of NEO@Ogilvy Interactive, the digital media unit of agency Ogilvy Interactive. "Marketers going into these places need to understand where they are, how to integrate into that region and what kind of technology they need."

Read the balance of the article here.

Your Comments are Welcome...12/15

It's hard not to hear the comments when you mention that you work at PRMC. I've heard of more incidents involving patients in the last year than in the previous six. Some have been relatives, some have been the actual individuals. E-mail them or if you want it as a comment, just comment. This is one forum in which complaints are asked for, and not swept under the rug.

Additionally, if you have a complaint in general, this is seen by Essent corporate at least once a day, most days six or seven times. Some execs even check it after hours. Trust me on this one. They are very aware of this blog.

If you mention that you don't want any identifiable information included, but in order to make the point to me, there are certain 'tells', that's fine. I'll use what I can, and if it can't be told without identifying you, then I just add it to my understanding of what we are facing.

I was asked why radiology was a hot-button issue here? You go with the gold. The topics with radiology were producing more comments than anything else. One post got 77 comments (and the comments are the best part!) If nursing was commenting more, we'd probably have a broader mix. But with RRVR even making the Paris Snooze, you go with success. There has only been one other that has been better (104), and that was a physician lambasting the medical community for sitting on its hands. Got to admit, there aren't too many that draw that kind of attention.

I will have some financial data a bit later, dealing with Essent's balance sheets. We will see how those go over. Just a few of the basics. All public domain, or subscription, but immediately available to the public for verification.

Is Your Firm Setup Like An Import-Export Business?

It should be.

An excerpt from the article:

According to Polk, it is critical for companies today to develop a world-class "tri-lingual organization" fluent in the "languages" of the consumer, the customer and the company. "What you are doing is translating your agenda into the language of the person who has to execute it," namely the retailer who sells the product. He likes to think of Unilever as an "import-export business," with some good product ideas hatched in Europe or elsewhere and then exported to the United States, or vice-versa. Axe body wash, for one, was a hit in Europe well before Unilever brought it to the U.S. market.

Read the article here: It's All About Dislocating Ideas