Unlike Lego, Playmobil has quietly walked a different path over the past decade—one that is slower, less flashy, and with fewer licensing deals.
China's Gas Price Conundrum.
CHOKING ON GROWTH
Chinese Dam Projects Criticized for Their Human Costs
By JIM YARDLEY
A year after the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, water pollution, landslides and mass resettlement have led to questions about hydropower as a solution to China’s energy conundrum.
CHARLES HANDY: Now that I am sitting where the great Peter Drucker walked and talked, I wonder how he would have reacted to some of the things that bother me. For instance, how would he respond to what I call "Adam Smith's Great Conundrum?"
Adam Smith, the father of economics, 250 years ago, said: "An investment is by all right-minded people to be commended, because it brings comforts and necessities to the citizenry. But, if continued indefinitely, it will lead to the endless pursuit of unnecessary things."
Now that I am living for a while in California, I am staggered by the amount of "unnecessary things" that I see in the malls that dot the suburbs. America is no different from anywhere else, of course -- just more so.
The conundrum is this: All that stuff creates jobs -- making it, promoting it, selling it. It's literally the stuff of growth. What I'd love to ask Peter Drucker is: How do you grow an economy without the jobs and taxes that these unnecessary things produce?
Drucker saw business as the agent of progress. Its main responsibility, he said, was to come up with new ideas and take them to market. But not just any new ideas, please -- only those that bring genuine benefits to the customers, and do not muck up the environment.
The market, unfortunately, does not differentiate between good and bad. If the people want junk, the market will provide. So we have to fall back on the conscience of our business leaders.
Maybe they should all be required to sign the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath that doctors used to be required to swear, including the commitment, "Above all, do no harm." No, it couldn't be a legal requirement, just an indication of a cultivated responsibility.
To my question, then, I like to imagine Peter Drucker nodding assent and saying, "Yes, I have always insisted that business exists to serve society, not to muck it up."
NEW TED talk by Daniel Webster, Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. Webster examines some surprisingly hopeful possibilities that exist for a controversial public policy conundrum that seems to have no universally acceptable answer.
conundrum
(kə-nŭn'drəm) pronunciation
n.
A riddle in which a fanciful question is answered by a pun.
A paradoxical, insoluble, or difficult problem; a dilemma: “the conundrum, thus far unanswered, of achieving full employment without inflation” (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.).
[Origin unknown.]
conundrum Show phonetics
noun [C]1 a problem that is difficult to deal with:
Arranging childcare over the school holidays can be quite a conundrum for working parents.
2 a trick question, often involving an amusing use of words that have two meanings
2 a trick question, often involving an amusing use of words that have two meanings
━━ n. 地口(じぐち)なぞ; 難問.
to spoil something completely, or do something very badly:
I really prepared for the interview because I didn't want to muck it up.
I mucked up the whole exam!
muck-up Show phonetics
noun [C] INFORMAL
They made a muck-up of our order - it won't be ready till next week now.
nod Show phonetics
verb [I or T] -dd-
to move your head down and then up, sometimes repeatedly, especially to show agreement, approval or greeting or to show something by doing this:
Many people in the audience nodded in agreement.
When I suggested a walk, Elena nodded enthusiastically.
She looked up and nodded for me to come in.
Compare shake (MOVE).
nod Show phonetics
noun [C usually singular]
Chen gave her a nod of recognition across the crowded room.
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