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By ANDREW MALONE
Created 11:42 PM on 24th June 2011

China Frets: Innovators Stymied Here

An article on The Wall Street Journal by Li Yuan.
Let hope more countries are abled to 'breed' such talent and creativity of Steve Jobs (I'm still short changing Steve by saying using these words).

Millions of Chinese flooded the popular micro blogging site Sina Weibo to tweet their condolences on the death of Steve Jobs over the past two days. They also raised the question: Why isn't there a Steve Jobs in China?

The tone of the resulting discussion was almost unanimously pessimistic. As is always the case on the Chinese Internet, the discussion quickly moved to talk about the problems in China's political, economic and legal systems. Wang Wei, chairman of the Chinese Museum of Finance, tweeted, "In a society with an authoritarian political system, monopolistic business environment, backward-looking culture and prevalent technology theft, talking about a master of innovation? Not a chance! Don't even think about it."

China may be the manufacturer of the world, but many are frustrated that Chinese companies are better at knocking off others' original work than coming up with innovative ideas. The commemoration of Mr. Jobs' genius highlighted the dilemma.

Chinese companies themselves will perform as well as Apple Inc., but their products won't match up, Kai-Fu Lee told his eight million followers on Weibo. "Chinese companies can be expected to have the market valuation and business model like Apple's within a decade, but it will be difficult to expect any type of Apple-like innovation," he tweeted.

The former head of Google China and founder of a start-up incubator Innovation Works said by phone that Chinese schools focus too much on memorization and don't encourage critical thinking. "It's not that Chinese are not smart or don't have the potential. Look at Jerry Yang of Yahoo Inc. and Steve Chen of YouTube," he said, referring to the two Internet entrepreneurs who were both born in Taiwan and migrated to the U.S. at young ages.

Chen Zhiwu, a finance professor at Yale University, tweeted that in Chinese schools, "The first thing the teachers do is to rub down the edges of those students who are different from the crowd."

One of the most popular postings on Mr. Jobs' legacy came from scholar Wu Jiaxiang. "If Apple is a fruit on a tree, its branches are the freedom to think and create, and its root is constitutional democracy," he wrote. "An authoritarian nation may be able to build huge projects collectively but will never be able to produce science and technology giants." On that, Wang Ran, founder of a boutique investment bank China eCapital Corp., added, "And its trunk is a society whose legal system acknowledges the value of intellectual property."

—Li Yuan

A Look Back at the Life of Steve Jobs

This is a link from MarketWatch which describe the life of Steve Job

12 lessons for us all from the life of Steve Jobs

This article from Brett nicely summarized keys points for us to learn from Steve Jobs (Steven Paul Jobs)

The death of the Apple co-founder has dominated the news from Cupertino, Calif., to Kuala Lumpur. Many are focusing on the way his products and services changed our world. Others are talking about Jobs, the man.

But this was the most successful business leader of his era, and one of the greats. Few have achieved so much, so quickly, and so publicly. It got me thinking: What are the lessons we can all take away? What do his extraordinary achievements tell the rest of us?

Here are 12 lessons from the life of Jobs:

1. Yes, you can make a difference
Anyone trying to achieve real change — in life, in a company or in any organization — probably feels the urge to give up half a dozen times a day. The naysayers and seat polishers will do everything to slow you down. No one is suggesting that what Apple achieved was the result of Jobs alone, but his career is proof of just how much one individual can change things.

2. You need a vision               

It’s not enough to conduct opinion polls and customer surveys, and rely on consultants’ projections. Those are all based on the conventional wisdom and the world as it is today. Jobs imagined things — most obviously the iPod, and the iTunes services — that didn’t yet exist and for which the market was uncertain. While his competitors were still building the products of yesterday, he was imagining, and building, those of tomorrow.

3. It’s not about you
It’s horrifying how many business decisions are still made on the assumption that “well, we have to do something with the XYZ division, so let’s give them this project” or “Buggins has seniority, so he’s in charge.” Do you think the customer cares about Buggins or XYZ? Jobs built Apple into a streamlined operation, focused on the output, nothing else.

4. Focus, focus, focus
Hard to believe, but mediocre managers everywhere like to keep their staff “busy” because they think that’s “productive.” It isn’t. (Ask them what their top priority is, and they’ll name two things. Or four. Or 16.) Apple sure was “busy, busy, busy” when Jobs arrived. And it was going bust. One of the first things he did was ax about 90% of the company’s activities and focus — first on the iMac, then on the iPod.

5. ‘OK’ is not OK
Look at the way Apple’s competitors keep putting out mediocre or unfinished products and thinking they’ll get away with it. Are they for real? The days when you could get by with second best are so over. Jobs was famous for a fanatical perfectionism. It was a core element of Apple’s success.

6. It’s not about the money

Steve Jobs’s life was a thumping rebuttal to all those who are obsessed with cash. The guy had billions: far more than he could ever spend, even if he had lived to 100. Yet he kept working, and striving to achieve greater things. Money? Bah. Something to think about the next time a CEO demands another $20 million a year as an incentive to show up.

7. It ain’t over till it’s over
Fifteen years ago Steve Jobs appeared to be a has-been in Silicon Valley. And Apple was circling the drain: plagued with losses, executive turnover, reorganizations, desperate asset sales and research cuts. Apple’s stock hit a low of $3.23 in 1996, and hardly anyone wanted it even at that price.

8. Give people what they really want
Sounds obvious, right? But most companies don’t do it. They simply produce what they’ve always produced, or what’s comfortable, or what Buggins thinks people want. For years the computer industry churned out ugly, clunky beige products with complicated operating systems. They all did it, and they all assumed that’s what people wanted. Turns out it wasn’t at all.

9. Destroy your own products — before someone else does

Jobs made sure that Apple kept innovating, and rendering its own products obsolete. Creative destruction came from within! That’s why Apple is a $354 billion company, and, say, Palm has vanished from Earth, even though a 2004 iPod is just as out of date as a 2004 Treo. How rare is this? Jobs knew full well that his $500 iPad threatens to cannibalize sales of $1,000 laptops. But he moved forward nonetheless. Most companies wouldn’t.

10. We are all spin doctors now
Critics point out that a lot of what Jobs achieved at Apple was put down to hype and hustle. But that was the point. And Jobs was a master at it — the product teasers, the showmanship on stage, even the black turtlenecks. Truth be told, we live in a superficial age of infinite media. We are all in the spin business. Deal with it.

11. Most people don’t know what they’re doing
It takes nothing away from Steve Jobs to point out that he couldn’t have done it without his competitors. Microsoft, Palm, Nokia, Dell, H-P — the list goes on. They missed opportunities, stayed complacent, failed to innovate and generally mishandled the ways their industries changed. It’s normal to assume that the people around us — and in power — know what they are doing. As Jobs proved, they often don’t.

12. Your time is precious — don’t waste it
Steve Jobs was just 56 when he died — a comparatively young man — and yet during his short spell on Earth he revolutionized the way we live, several times over. What are we doing with our time? It is the resource we waste the most — and it’s the one we cannot buy. Make the most of your short spell on this planet. Make each day and hour count.


Brett Arends is a senior columnist for MarketWatch and a personal-finance columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

Photo from Apple website - Steve Jobs (Steven Paul Jobs) 1955 - 2011

Market undergoing huge change

MARK HULBERT Sept. 30, 2011, 12:03 a.m. EDT
Commentary: Market’s dividend yield now higher than T-Note’s
Believe it or not, the stock and bond markets are behaving in a way that, with only one exception at the depths of the 2008-2009 credit crisis, they have not since 1958—53 years ago: The stock market’s dividend yield is now above the interest rate on the 10-year Treasury note.

For example, the dividend yield on the Dow Jones Industrial Average is 2.8%, and on the S&P 500 index,  it is 2.2%. The 10-year T-Note yield, in contrast, is just 2.0%. This might not initially strike you as that big of a deal, but it is. Most investors who are active today cut their eye teeth during the go-go years of the 1980s and 1990s, when dividends were considered to be little more than an afterthought. Price appreciation was the name of the game. In fact, many of the most widely-held stocks paid no dividends at all. 


But what we’re seeing today could very well be heralding the return of the pre-1958 era in which the market’s dividend yield was consistently higher than that of 10-year Treasuries. In that long-ago era, the bulk of stocks’ total returns came from dividends. Price appreciation contributed relatively little to that total return, if anything at all.


What might account for such a shift to the previous pattern? The best analysis I have seen was published over a decade ago, in the March/April 2000 issue of the Financial Analysts Journal. It was written by Cliff Asness, who is managing and founding principal at AQR Capital Management.


Upon carefully analyzing the yield histories since 1927 for both the stock market and U.S. Treasuries, Asness concluded that the key factor in understanding them was investor expectations of the markets’ relative volatilities.


Prior to 1958, according to Asness, investors expected the stock market’s volatility to be much greater than bond market volatility. To entice investors to incur that greater volatility, the stock market had to provide a higher yield than bonds.


Then those expectations began to change, according to Asness, and with it investors needed a smaller dividend yield to entice them to hold equities. And that is why the stock market’s yield dropped below that of bonds, and stayed there for decades.


Asness’ theory also helps to explain recent developments. The stock market’s extraordinary volatility has so traumatized investors that they now need a much higher dividend yield to make holding equities an attractive proposition.


Will the current situation persist? According to Asness, it depends in no small part on investor expectations of relative volatilities, which is impossible to predict.


But Asness points out that investors’ memories live for a very long time. The memory of the Great Depression lingered for years after it ended, for example, which is one reason why stocks’ dividend yields remained so high for so long.


The bottom line? If investor memories of recent market volatility persist, then prepare yourself for an extended period in which dividends become one of the central preoccupations of the investment community.


Click here to learn more about the Hulbert Financial Digest.