Jimmy Choo founder Tamara Mellon puts the boot into private equity; They come in and raid – raid your bank account and take your accomplishments. It’s all about fattening the pig for the slaughter, with no care about the people or the product. They came in, their only focus was their exit strategy, [and] on exit, you are thrown to the wolves.”

Jimmy Choo founder Tamara Mellon puts the boot into private equity

The Jimmy Choo co-founder wants to boot private equity out of fashion.

Tamara Mellon co-founded Jimmy Choo in 1996, after a stint as Vogue’s accessories editor Photo: Rex Features

By Katherine Rushton

9:00PM BST 28 Sep 2013

The first fashion collection Tamara Mellon will produce under her own name includes an extraordinary garment called “Sweet Revenge” – a pair of tight-fitting leather leggings that end with high-heeled boots. The Jimmy Choo co-founder is counting on this item to put her new venture on the map. The name is deliberate. It is, she says with a wry laugh, an example of the kind of innovation that was all but bled out of the luxury shoe label before her departure in 2011. Mellon, 46, takes a dim view of the private equity industry’s compatibility with the fashion business, or any creative endeavour for that matter, after a bruising decade at Jimmy Choo while it was being passed between different private equity owners. “They’re the sociopaths of investment banking,” she says. “They come in and raid – raid your bank account and take your accomplishments. It’s all about fattening the pig for the slaughter, with no care about the people or the product. “I’ve been through three private equity deals, and it was the same thing, every time. They came in, their only focus was their exit strategy, [and] on exit, you are thrown to the wolves.” Read more of this post

How Value Patterns Shape Priorities for Value Creation

How Value Patterns Shape Priorities for Value Creation

by Gerry Hansell, Jeff Kotzen, Eric Olsen, Frank Plaschke, and Hady Farag

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

How do successful companies make the right choices in order to create attractive shareholder value? There is no one simple or universal formula. Companies as different as the North American retailer of high-end yoga and exercise clothes Lululemon Athletica, the Korean automaker Hyundai Motor Company, and the U.S. industrial supplier W.W. Grainger all delivered shareholder returns over the past five years that were strong enough to earn them a spot in our top-ten rankings in their respective industries. But they illustrate the diversity of company starting positions, and each achieved superior performance following quite different paths.

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Unlocking New Sources of Value Creation

Unlocking New Sources of Value Creation

by Gerry Hansell, Jeff Kotzen, Eric Olsen, Frank Plaschke, and Hady Farag

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

Unlocking New Sources of Value Creation is the fifteenth annual report in the Value Creators series published by The Boston Consulting Group. Each year, we offer commentary on trends in the global economy and world capital markets, share BCG’s latest research and thinking on value creation, describe our experiences working with clients to materially improve their value-creation performance, and publish detailed empirical rankings of the performance of the world’s top value creators. This year’s report offers four different perspectives on successful value creation. We begin by analyzing the recent disconnect between uneven global economic growth and buoyant global equity markets. Next, we describe how senior executives can use value patterns, a concept we introduced in last year’s report, to identify the most appropriate “unlocks” to create new value. We follow with a detailed case study of how one BCG client, the branded apparel company VF, has used a focus on total shareholder return to transform the company’s business, accelerate its growth to the point that today it is the world’s largest apparel company, and deliver shareholder value at the top end of its peer group. Finally, we conclude with our annual rankings of the top ten value creators worldwide and in 25 industries for the five-year period from 2008 through 2012.

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The 2013 Value Creators Rankings (BCG)

The 2013 Value Creators Rankings

by Gerry Hansell, Jeff Kotzen, Eric Olsen, Frank Plaschke, and Hady Farag

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

The 2013 Value Creators rankings are based on an analysis of total shareholder return at 1,616 global companies for the five-year period from 2008 through 2012. To arrive at this sample, we began with TSR data for more than 9,000 companies provided by Thomson Reuters. We eliminated all companies that were not listed on a world stock exchange for the full five years of our study or that did not have at least 25 percent of their shares available on public capital markets. We further refined the sample by organizing the remaining companies into 25 industry groups and establishing an appropriate market-valuation hurdle to eliminate the smallest companies in each industry. (The size of the market valuation hurdle for each industry can be found in the tables in “Industry Rankings(https://www.bcgperspectives.com/Images/BCG_Value_Creators_2013_Rankings.pdf).”) In addition to analyzing our 1,616-company comprehensive sample, we separately evaluated those companies with market valuations of more than $50 billion. We have included rankings for these large-cap companies in “Global Rankings (https://www.bcgperspectives.com/Images/BCG_Value_Creators_2013_Rankings.pdf).”

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Cracking the Code of Practical Creativity

Cracking the Code of Practical Creativity

SEPTEMBER 23, 2013

Nearly all organizations and their leaders feel the imperative to grow and to innovate and thereby to generate value for shareholders and society. Responding to this imperative demands creativity and discipline in equal measure—and most executives would say that, of the two, creativity is the harder to come by. BCG creativity experts Luc de Brabandere and Alan Iny, who have helped innumerable clients generate their next big breakthrough ideas, have detailed their approach in their new book, Thinking in New Boxes: A New Paradigm for Business Creativity. They recently shared their thoughts on how to drive practical creativity. Read more of this post

How Popeyes went upscale: Here’s how you turn around a fast-food brand, according to the Popeyes playbook.

How Popeyes went upscale

By Lydia DePillis, Updated: September 27, 2013

Over the past few years, on the once-dingy midtown strip of 14th Street in Washington D.C., corner stores and carry-outs have yielded to upscale bars and boutiques. You can walk for blocks and blocks without finding so much as a sandwich for less than the price of a movie ticket. Until, that is, you hit Popeyes — the greasy chicken ‘n biscuits fast food joint that’s been around for three decades, and feels increasingly out of place as vintage clothing stores, glistening condos, and farm-to-table restaurants spring up on all sides. Inside, however, the franchise is undergoing a transformation of its own. Read more of this post

How Many ‘Greater Fools’ Does It Take to Make a Bubble?

Sep 27, 2013

THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR

How Many ‘Greater Fools’ Does It Take to Make a Bubble?

JASON ZWEIG

Where do market “bubbles” come from? A team of neuroscientists and economists has produced the first scientific evidence for what prudent investors have long believed: Paying attention to what others are doing is the easiest way for traders to get carried away. This new research can’t prevent the mass contagions that lead to bubbles. But it might help you step back before you get swept up in the next one. Economists have struggled and failed to explain why markets turn into manias. Some have denied bubbles exist; others have argued bubbles must somehow be “rational.” Often, the argument is that bubbles are caused by “uninformed” traders, or “dumb money,” while the “smart money” sits on the sidelines. The latest findings suggest, however, that bubbles might be caused not by traders who lack information but by those who have too much.

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2,564 Birthday anniversary of Confucius celebrated around China

Birthday anniversary of Confucius celebrated around China

(Xinhua)    16:44, September 28, 2013

A performer takes part in a memorial ceremony to mark the 2,564th birthday anniversary of Confucius at the Confucius Temple in Qufu, east China’s Shandong Province, Sept. 28, 2013. Qufu is known as the hometown of the great Chinese philosopher and educator Confucius. (Xinhua/Guo Xulei)

Book Review: ‘David and Goliath’ by Malcolm Gladwell

September 27, 2013, 6:07 p.m. ET

Book Review: ‘David and Goliath’ by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell too often presents as proven laws what are just intriguing possibilities and musings about human behavior.

CHRISTOPHER F. CHABRIS

David Boies is the super-lawyer who represented IBM against the U.S. government, the U.S. government against Microsoft, Al Gore against George W. Bush and gay marriage against California’s Proposition 8. A man at the top of his profession, presiding over a firm of 200 lawyers, he would seem to be a metaphorical Goliath. But Malcolm Gladwell sees this literal David as a figurative David too, because Mr. Boies came from humble origins and faced mighty obstacles to success. Read more of this post

The “Breaking Bad” school: The best show on television is also a first-rate primer on business

The “Breaking Bad” school: The best show on television is also a first-rate primer on business

Sep 28th 2013 |From the print edition

THERE are obvious reasons for watching “Breaking Bad”: for once the Hollywood hype surrounding the television series is justified. But there is also a less obvious reason: it is one of the best studies available of the dynamics of modern business. A Harvard MBA will set you back $90,000 (plus two years’ lost income). You can buy a deluxe edition of all five seasons of “Breaking Bad”, complete with a plastic money barrel, for $209.99, or a regular edition for less than $80. Read more of this post

Howard Schultz: What Next, Starbucks? The coffee CEO on the future of the company, from modern drive-thrus to wine and kale

September 27, 2013, 8:24 p.m. ET

Howard Schultz: What Next, Starbucks?

The coffee CEO on the future of the company, from modern drive-thrus to wine and kale

ALEXANDRA WOLFE

Starbucks SBUX +0.19% CEO Howard Schultz says he’s never been a “coffee person.” Sitting in his sprawling Seattle office overlooking Puget Sound, he says that what he’s always been is a merchant. It’s a title he is particularly comfortable with one morning earlier this month. A few hours before, his company’s stock price reached $76.24 a share, the highest it had been in its 42-year history. Read more of this post