When your company becomes successful, ( or even before), there will always be a pressure to diversify - introduce new models, products, and services.  No matter how good you are, you will succeed or fail.

How you respond, and work when the product is not as good, which also hits your other brands, will be as crucial to your company’s continued success.

Sometimes, it is good to persist ( improve and fine tune your offerings).  Sometimes, it is good to throw in the towel, and admit that maybe we don’t have the resources, or the ability to turn everything to gold.

Google Fails, Again

Google’s once-ambitious plan to sell and rent videos through Google Video, a cornerstone of the monetization plan when it launched Google Video last year, is coming to an end.

In a letter sent to previous Google Video shoppers, the world’s leading search engine announced that it would stop supporting its platform that gave indie and major studios a digital outlet to sell movies, documentaries, short films, and television shows.

Its probably a name you seldom hear, but he founded and heads HonHai Precision, which has 270,000 employees in Shenzhen and a combined total of 450,000 worldwide which churns most of the big name brands in technology.

One of his favorite quotations is: “The important thing in any organization is leadership, not management.
A leader must have the decisive courage to be a dictator for the common
good” which may show his being Asian where the concept of benevolent dictatorship is still much practiced.

This article is a good inside look on challenges on growing the company, and later on, the issue of scaleability and ultimately management training and succession.

The Forbidden City of Terry Gou - WSJ.com

Past a guarded gate on the outskirts of this city sits one of the world’s largest factories. In dozens of squat buildings, it churns out gadgets bearing technology’s household names — Apple Inc.’s iPods and iPhones, Hewlett-Packard Co.’s personal computers, Motorola Inc. mobile phones and Nintendo Co. Wii videogame consoles.