Real Case Stories

Over 100 years after Theodore Roosevelt warned against the growing control of a handful of corporate giants, a small group of "superstar" companies—some old, some new—are once again dominating the global economy. As per a 2015 Mckinsey Global Institute report , 10% of the world’s public companies generate 80% of all profits. What's most intriguing is that the gap between these few “superstar” firms and the rest is growing .  But what makes these "superstars" thrive? These firms are known to invest in their core skills so as to relentlessly pursue their long-term goals. And thus it turns out, that a remarkable number of superstar companies are family owned or run by dominant owners who can resist the pressure for short-term results. The last single-arch McDonald's sign in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, modified to mention the drive-thru, dismantled in 2016 For an example, we can turn to McDonald’s. In 1948, the fast-food joint was already a succes...

The industry average in the clothing industry to take a design to distribution is around 9 months. Zara, through efficient use of technology, has developed a distribution model that takes new models from design to the store in just 3 weeks . As a result, the company produces approximately 20,000 designs a year! To make this work, Zara uses  technology to make sure departments and outlets the world over constantly know what is needed when and where.  Designers keep in daily contact with store managers, discussing which items are most in demand and which aren't.  This, supported by real-time sales data, allows the designers to action repeat orders and create fresh designs, and from La Coruna they are shipped directly to the stores, eliminating the need for expensive warehouses. Some of the unique features Zara's business model is: It employs 100s of designers at its HQ in Spain Half its production facilities are close to its HQ in Spain, Portugal and Morocco - ...

Teenagers, ages 12–17, report using phones to text message in their daily lives more than any other form of communication, including face-to-face socializing. The extensive time that children and teenagers engage with media and communicate using screens may be taking time away from face-to-face communication and some in-person activities. A field experiment examined whether increasing opportunities for face-to-face interaction while eliminating the use of screen-based media and communication tools improved nonverbal emotion–cue recognition in preteens. Fifty-one preteens spent five days at an overnight nature camp where television, computers and mobile phones were not allowed; this group was compared with school-based matched controls (n = 54) that retained usual media practices. Both groups took pre- and post-tests that required participants to infer emotional states from photographs of facial expressions and videotaped scenes with verbal cues removed. Change scores for the t...

In his book " Reclaiming conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age ", author Sherry Turkle writes about how communication between youngsters is changing dramatically because of Technology. She cites an example of a short film where a girl does not have her phone for a day and she observes the behavior of people around her. Her boyfriend is busy texting in bed Her boyfriend chats about laughter at a comedy show without actually laughing. At a bowling alley her friends do not hi five her when she makes a strike

How Music Got Free is a riveting story of obsession, music, crime, and money, featuring visionaries and criminals, moguls and tech-savvy teenagers. It’s about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful executive in the music business, a revolutionary invention and an illegal website four times the size of the iTunes Music Store. Journalist Stephen Witt traces the secret history of digital music piracy, from the German audio engineers who invented the mp3, to a North Carolina compact-disc manufacturing plant where factory worker Dell Glover leaked nearly two thousand albums over the course of a decade, to the high-rises of midtown Manhattan where music executive Doug Morris cornered the global market on rap, and, finally, into the darkest recesses of the Internet. Through these interwoven narratives, Witt has written a thrilling book that depicts the moment in history when ordinary life became forever entwined with the world online—when, suddenly, all the music ever re...

When Nobel laureate Economist Milton Friedman was consulting with an Asian nation government in the 1960s he visited a site of a large scale public works project and found workers shoveling but not using any heavy equipment like bull dozers, tractors or heavy equipment. On enquiring he was told that the purpose of the project was to provide jobs. To which he drly remarked "Why don't you give worker's spoons instead of shovels?" In the book " Rise of the Robots: Technology and the threat of a jobless future " the author cites this story and also speaks about the looming threat of a jobless future with advancement of technology creating a jobless future.  In Rise of the Robots, Ford details what machine intelligence and robotics can accomplish, and implores employers, scholars, and policy makers alike to face the implications. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren't going to work, and we must deci...