Former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner was interviewed by the WSJ. The interview included an excerpt about the auto industry. I thought his comments on turnarounds was pretty interesting. He mentioned that when you're trying to turnaround a company you have to move quickly. You can't take a decade to slowly turn an organization around - you have to move with speed. He also comments on how important it is to deal with the culture change necessary to make that turnaround strategy really work (which is probably the most difficult thing to change in a company). The easy part is coming up with the strategy and knowing what to do. Getting it done and changing behavior is the hard part.
Read an interesting article a couple weeks back in the WSJ on how biofuels may actually increase carbon emissions in the medium to long-term. Apprently the shifts in land-use necessary to support the production of bio-materials like soybeans, corn, or palm could in fact release more carbon emissions. The time it takes to get carbon-neutral on some of these projects is pretty crazy - 319 years for soybean biodiesel from Brazil (assuming you're clearing rainforest), 93 years for corn ethanol from the U.S. (assuming you're clearing grasslands), 86 years for palm biodiesel from Indonesia (assuming you're clearing rainforest). I suppose biofuels really aren't meant to reduce carbon emissions, but just crazy that they potentially exacerbate the problem so much.
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