Questions for Starbucks’ chief bean counter; Troy Alstead: Bringing the Starbucks “experience” to groceries and more

Questions for Starbucks’ chief bean counter

By Interview by Geoff Colvin, senior editor-at-large   @FortuneMagazine November 21, 2013: 7:42 AM ET

Troy Alstead: Bringing the Starbucks “experience” to groceries and more

Starbucks stock has been highly caffeinated since the recession, up almost 10-fold from its 2008 low. The explanation includes many factors — products, operations, strategy, the return of Howard Schultz as CEO — and CFO Troy Alstead, 50, has been involved in almost all of them. The company had slightly more than 100 stores when he joined in 1992; today it has almost 20,000. Along the way the Seattle native has held operating jobs around the world; the company named him chief financial officer in 2008. He talked recently with Geoff Colvin about getting value from customer data, using social media skillfully, the magic of the customer experience, and much else. Edited excerpts:

About 70 million people go to Starbucks every week. What are they telling you now about the state of the U.S. consumer? Read more of this post

Inside the mind of Jonah Peretti: The visionary media entrepreneur explains the mechanics of how information spreads, his personal reading habits, and why it’s dangerous to be a slave to the numbers

Inside the mind of Jonah Peretti

December 5, 2013: 4:49 PM ET

The visionary media entrepreneur, diviner of virality and one-time enfant terrible (he turns 40 on New Year’s Day) explains the mechanics of how information spreads, his personal reading habits, and why it’s dangerous to be a slave to the numbers.

By Andy Serwer, managing editor

FORTUNE—People in the media industry are buzzing about entrepreneur Jonah Peretti, and it’s not just his latest venture, BuzzFeed, that has them talking. The Huffington Post co-founder has made a name for himself exploring the ways information spreads online, turning an academic interest into a highly lucrative series of businesses that are prompting people in the media industry to rethink the way they distribute content—especially online. Read more of this post

How to Burst the “Filter Bubble” that Protects Us from Opposing Views

November 29, 2013

How to Burst the “Filter Bubble” that Protects Us from Opposing Views

Computer scientists have discovered a way to number-crunch an individual’s own preferences to recommend content from others with opposing views. The goal? To burst the “filter bubble” that surrounds us with people we like and content that we agree with. The term “filter bubble” entered the public domain back in 2011when the internet activist Eli Pariser coined it to refer to the way recommendation engines shield people from certain aspects of the real world. Read more of this post

Charlie Rose Talks to Stanley Druckenmiller

Charlie Rose Talks to Stanley Druckenmiller

By Charlie Rose December 05, 2013

Describe how it happened that you made a billion dollars in one day shorting the pound with George Soros. 
Germany was unifying with East Germany. Their economies were simultaneously under a boom. At the same time their currency was linked to that of Great Britain. My European analyst called me in August of ’92 and said the U.K. couldn’t handle the interest rates to keep the pound aligned with the deutsche mark and that they were going into a housing recession. I put a billion-and-a-half-dollar short in on the pound … to see how this played out. Read more of this post

Chu Shijian: from Tobacco King to Orange King, at 85

Chu Shijian: from Tobacco King to Orange King, at 85

Staff Reporter

2013-12-04

Chu Shijian. (Internet photo)

Chu Shijian, China’s 85-year-old “Tobacco King” and former owner of the Yunnan Hongta Group, decided in 2011 to ease his way into retirement by starting a fruit company. Chu Oranges has since become an in-demand option for Chinese buyers worried about food security and taste, according to the Guangzhou-based 21st Century Business Herald. Read more of this post

Family Businesses Shouldn’t Hunt for Superstar CEOs

Family Businesses Shouldn’t Hunt for Superstar CEOs

by Josh Baron and Rob Lachenauer  |   9:00 AM December 6, 2013

It’s a dilemma that faces family businesses all too frequently.

We saw it recently when we worked with a $4 billion global manufacturing business in Hong Kong. The company was managed by the founder, who turned it over to his son when he retired. The two men had created distribution channels, built a supply chain, entered profitable new markets–and, just as importantly, held the family together, ensuring that family members were well taken care of and that family disagreements didn’t harm the business. Read more of this post

Who’s Managing Your Company’s Network Effects?

Who’s Managing Your Company’s Network Effects?

by Michael Schrage  |   9:00 AM December 4, 2013

Much as war is too important to be left to the generals, the business of network effects is too valuable to be entrusted to the CMOs and CIOs. Network effects make Google Google, Facebook Facebook, Twitter Twitter, Netflix Netflix and  Pinterest Pinterest. Network effects are the not-so-secret sauce profitably flavoring Amazon’s recommendation engines and Apple’s App Store. They’re destined to transform the “Internet of Things” from a post-industrial aspiration to a trillion-dollar sector. Read more of this post

Simplify your investing to avoid ‘opportunities for failure’

Simplify your investing to avoid ‘opportunities for failure’

abnormalreturns

December 5th, 2013

Retail investors are back. Josh Brown at The Reformed Broker in a recent post highlights the rush of investors back into the stock market, five years and nearly a 100% return up from the bottom. Unfortunately this is not altogether surprising. Investors are prone to sell amidst panic conditions and buy amidst euphoria. The point isn’t that the stock market will sell-off tomorrow just that our natural tendencies work against us investors. Read more of this post

The power of cockroach excreta may explain an entomological mystery

The power of cockroach excreta may explain an entomological mystery

Dec 7th 2013 | From the print edition

SMEARING the place you inhabit with faeces is, among people, an act of desperation rarely seen outside the confines of a prison. Some cockroaches, though, do it all the time. Rebeca Rosengaus of Northeastern University, in Boston, thinks she knows why. As she and her colleagues discovered in a study just published in Naturwissenschaften, wood-cockroach faeces protect the insects from a parasitic fungus. This finding, she thinks, may also explain the existence of one of the world’s most successful groups of animals: termites. Read more of this post

‘Everyone’s fighting over the skeletons of the Industrial Revolution’

‘Everyone’s fighting over the skeletons of the Industrial Revolution’

By Brian Fung, Updated: December 6 at 11:08 am

The factory in Lawrence, Mass., was supposed to be an ordinary harvest. They’d heard of the shuttered plant through a woman at a cocktail party whose late father had worked there. Once upon a time, it had been inhabited by the Dillon Machine Co., a firm founded in 1890 to produce paper-milling equipment. Now its owners were liquidating everything inside, and for $5,000, Carter Anderson and Glen Stone could take whatever they wanted. Read more of this post

Trio That Keeps Cool of Calvin Klein Alive: Meet the team of fashion designers—Kevin Carrigan, Francisco Costa and Italo Zucchelli—who together have kept the cool of Calvin Klein alive and built the brand into a global juggernaut

The Threesome Behind Calvin Klein

Meet the team of fashion designers—Kevin Carrigan, Francisco Costa and Italo Zucchelli—who together have kept the cool of Calvin Klein alive and built the brand into a global juggernaut

ELISA LIPSKY-KARASZ

Dec. 5, 2013 11:39 a.m. ET

HOUSE PROUD | From left: Francisco Costa, Italo Zucchelli and Kevin Carrigan, the creative directors of Calvin Klein’s fashion lines, with longtime house muse Christy Turlington in a Calvin Klein Collection top and skirt. Calvin Klein Collection top, $2,995, and skirt, $1,495, 212-292-9000 Photography by Dan Jackson, Styling by Tina Laakkonen for WSJ. Magazine

ELEVEN YEARS AGO, when Calvin Klein, along with his longtime business partner, Barry Schwartz, sold his company to Phillips-Van Heusen PVH -1.02% (PVH), the designer had just turned 60. In 36 years at the helm of his fashion line, he had gone from selling coats in the now-defunct New York store Bonwit Teller to having his name recognized around the world. In a way, it was time. Klein had endured a bitter lawsuit with his largest licensee, the Warnaco Group, and unbeknownst to the public, his company’s earnings had begun to slip. In the next year, he would give an interview describing his battles with addiction. PVH’s $700 million offer must have seemed like a lucrative reason to lay down his sword. “He’s at the top of his game. He’s a living logotype, and now he wants to rest a bit,” said his spokesman, Paul Wilmot, at the time. But the question everyone outside the company asked was could Calvin Klein Inc., survive without its charismatic founder?   Read more of this post