High Street music retailer HMV to appoint administrator
"Music and DVD chain HMV, which employs about 4,350 staff, has confirmed it will appoint an administrator, making it the latest High Street casualty. Deloitte will run the 239-store chain while it assesses prospects for the business and seeks potential buyers. Trading in HMV shares on the London Stock Exchange are being suspended, the company said in a statement. ... [Neil Saunders, the managing director of retail analyst firm Conlumin] said that although the HMV brand 'certainly has some value' for potential buyers, the current business model was dead. "The bottom line is that there is no real future for physical retail in the music sector," he said."
(BBC News, 14 January 2013)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
High Street camera store Jessops to close with loss of 1,370 jobs
"High Street camera retailer Jessops has shut all of its stores, resulting in the loss of about 1,370 jobs. Administrator PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), appointed this week, said the doors had been closed for the last time on all 187 stores in the UK. More jobs would be lost at the head office in Leicester, it added. Jessops became the first High Street casualty of 2013, after a raft of firms fell into administration in 2012, including Comet and Clinton Cards."
(BBC News, 11 January 2013)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
High Street electricals retailer closes 41 stores
"The insolvent electrical chain Comet will close 41 stores by the end of November unless a buyer can be found. ...
Comet's demise was one of the biggest High Street casualties of recent years.
The electricals chain had been hit hard by the drop in consumer spending in the UK since 2008, which has been particularly acute in the case of the big items that Comet sells.
Many of Comet's customers are first-time home-buyers, according to Deloitte, meaning that business has been hurt by the much tighter conditions in the UK mortgage market."
(BBC News, 17 November 2012)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Cooperation and collaboration: problem solving and problem finding
"The economists Richard Lester and Michael Piore have studied the firms that sought to create the switching technology, finding that cooperation and collaboration within certain companies allowed them to make headway on the switching technology problem, whereas internal competition at other corporations diminished engineers’ efforts to improve the quality of the switches. Motorola, a success story, developed what it called a 'technology shelf,' created by a small group of engineers, on which were placed possible technical solutions that other teams might use in the future; rather than trying to solve the problem outright, it developed tools whose immediate value was not clear. Nokia grappled with the problem in another collaborative way, creating an open-ended conversation among its engineers in which salespeople and designers were often included. The boundaries among business units in Nokia were deliberately ambiguous, because more than technical information was needed to get a feeling for the problem; lateral thinking was required. Lester and Piore describe the process of communication this entailed as 'fluid, context-dependent, undetermined.'[20]
By contrast, companies like Ericsson proceeded with more seeming clarity and discipline, dividing the problem into its parts. The birth of the new switch was intended to occur through 'the exchange of information' among offices 'rather than the cultivation of an interpretative community.'[21] Rigidly organized, Ericsson fell away. It did eventually solve the switching technology problem, but with greater difficulty; different offices protected their turf. In any organization, individuals or teams that compete and are rewarded for doing better than others will hoard information. In technology firms, hoarding information particularly disables good work.
The corporations that succeeded through cooperation shared with the Linux community that experimental mark of technological craftsmanship, the intimate, fluid join between problem solving and problem finding. Within the framework of competition, by contrast, clear standards of achievement and closure are needed to measure performance and to dole out rewards.
[20] Richard K. Lester and Michael J. Piore, Innovation, the Missing Dimension (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 98.
[21] Ibid., 104."
(Richard Sennett, 2008, pp.32-33)
1). Sennett, R. (2008). "The Craftsman". New Haven & London, Yale University Press.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Gestalt Principles
"Gestalt is a psychology term which means 'unified whole'. It refers to theories of visual perception developed by German psychologists in the 1920s. These theories attempt to describe how people tend to organize visual elements into groups or unified wholes when certain principles are applied."
(Spokane Falls Community College)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
