Tipping Point Strategy

The success of a company depends on the strategies implemented, but sometimes seemed from the outside strategy from the small things. Even small things changes sometimes can make a big change accidentally. If this happens in the company, the company will be successful in sales. This incident occurred on the Wolverine, the manufacturer of shoes with the Hush Puppies brand. Classic suede shoes with the sole light of raw rubber is made in United States sales decreased sharply, to only 30,000 pairs per year and most of the shops or stalls, a simple outlet in a small town far from the crowd. Wolverine think even the company to stop production.

Suddenly, in late 1994 and early 1995 a miracle happened. In the event the opening of a branch of fashion houses, two executive Hush Puppies, Owen Baxter and Geoffrey Lewis met with a fashion designer from New York who relaxed in the discussion told them that the classic Hush Puppies sudden preferred the hipster in clubs and cafes in the center of the area Manhattan business. "Some shops of used goods in the Village and Soho sells our shoes. Many of those who invade the small stores that buy everything "said Owen Baxter. "Isaac Mizrahi also wear Hush Puppies" said the fashion designer. For some of the old story, the story of Lewis Baxter and the only joke. For those not reasonable if the shoes are so behind the days suddenly become famous.

Fashion designer John Barlett, that used Hush Puppies in the Spring collection. Then followed, Anna Sui, which is used for the presentation of clothing. Jooel Fitzgerald make balloon and install a seven and a half meters in the form of soft furry dog children, short-legged and long ears a symbol of the Hush Puppies brand. Fitzgerald even install symbols on the roof of the store at Hollywood and clear in its art gallery to be a special boutique Hush Puppies beside. When it is paint and arrange the shelves, actors Pee-Wee Herman to come and ask a few pairs are provided. "Promotion of mouth to mouth, really powerful" said Joel Fitzgerald.

In 1995, Hush Puppies sold 430,000 pairs and in next year can sell four times in 1997 and sold more of the Hush Puppies ultimately strengthen itself as the apparatus of youth clothing trend center in the United States. Hush Puppies also won the award best from the Council of Fashion Designers in a reception dinner at Lincoln Center and president of the company's board stage with Calvin Klein and Donna Karan to receive the award on the cut Hush Puppies.

Booming sale of Hush Puppies shoes, only because some fraudulent teenagers that use the shoes. Anyone they do not intend promote. They put on shoes is just want to appear different. However, somehow fraudulent contagious to other teenagers until finally there was the two-mode use commodities to offer them another. These shoes appear on the surface because the accident. Shoes reaches certain point because of the popularity of is said by Malcolm Gladwell called tipping point. Prayer can change something that is not possible, something that becomes extraordinary. Prayer is followed by a hard business that can make the tipping point.

source : msuyanto.com

Blue Ocean Strategy

Strategies to compete in the competition is very tight can cause "sea of blood" for companies that compete or are put-off. This strategy is known as Bloody or Red Ocean Strategy. W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne said that the Red Ocean Strategy is no longer effective to create growth and profits in the future. They are proposing a new strategy called the Blue Ocean Strategy. Differences between the Red Ocean Strategy and Blue Ocean Strategy, among others, on to the market, competition, demand, values and strategy.

W.Chan Kim and Renee Mouborgne
Red Ocean Strategy considers that to compete it is to compete in the market space that, while the Blue Ocean Strategy, considers that compete is to create market space that is not any opponent. The market is very broad as "blue ocean". Because the market is very broad, companies can choose the market as they want. Red Ocean Strategy to use the concept can grow and benefit with the defeat competitors in the competition. Blue Ocean Strategy by using the concept to create competition with none.Becausecompetition does not exist, then the only company to compete with himself without another company. The company will win the competition unopposed. Red Ocean Strategy exploit the demand that exists limitless. Blue Ocean Strategy to create and capture new demand. Red Ocean Strategy to achieve excellence create value, then the Blue Ocean Strategy to achieve excellence without the need to create value. Red Ocean Strategy unified system with the overall activities of the company by selecting a differentiation strategy or overall cost leadership strategy (the low-cost strategy), while the Blue Ocean Strategy unified system with the overall activities of the company in implementing the strategy and differentiation strategy of leadership in the overall cost of co - same. Blue Ocean Strategy concerning two aspects. First, how to find and develop the blue ocean. To find and develop the blue ocean, with the launch of new industries such as a complete eBay auction conducted on the Internet and do more with the general idustri expand the boundaries created by the red ocean. Second, how exploitated and protect the blue ocean.

Source : www.msuyanto.com

Global Threats

Globalization and free market are expected as the global effort to improve efficiency. Global trade to help many countries to develop more quickly. Globalization is also considered to make the developing countries gain access to knowledge that can not be obtained previously. Globalization is as if the progress that must be accepted developing countries, if they want to grow and fight poverty effectively. But for most people in developing countries, globalization does not bring the promised economic benefits (Stiglitz, 2002:6).

Globalization in practice, developing countries must pay for the welfare of the efficiency of the world's developed countries. South efficiency of the global fund for the benefit and progress of the North. Market failures or failure, market failure occurs everywhere, not only because of the conditional demands for the realization of the market that can be self-regulating is not met (because of the assumption realization of the competition-free for the formation of a pure free market is not proven empirical-realistic), but also because of the economic interests and nonekonomi that must be maintained and through efforts to distort the market significantly (Swasono, 2003:83).

Joseph E. Stiglitz
The increasingly wide gap between the rich and the poor has raised a lot more people in the Third World to become increasingly poor. In 1990, 2,718 billion population live with less money than $ 2 per day, whereas in 1998 the number of poor people who live with the money less than $ 2 per day is estimated to be 2,801 billion. This happened with the increase in total revenue in the current world average of 2.5% every year (World Bank, 2000:29).
World Bank Office, Wachington
Globalization has not succeeded in reducing poverty and ensuring stability has not been successful. The crisis in Asia and Latin America has been the economy and threaten the stability of developing countries, even the 1997 crisis and 1998 is a threat to the entire world economy.

Source : www.msuyanto.com

The beautiful business

Small companies that can win the competition with large companies more than 50 years is Belbin. Even now there are customers who have been widowed and living alone who call Belbin every week. Belbin family-owned company is similar to Caviston, namely customers to their children and grandchildren.

Belbin Shop
Belbin do business surely only continue in business from the grandfather, brother and cousin. They know Belbin because the quality of service and attention to the customer. Customers are treated with respect and given the best service without considering the money they spend. Belbin is a specialist shopping customers to send customers home. For customers who use the services of transmission of this can be done through telephone, fax, even through the website of Belbin. Nevertheless, there are also customers who still loves shopping at the store Belbin.


A personal relationship with these customers, which can cause Belbin growing rapidly. Belbin also has served customers who regularly need a delivery to the home during office hours because they work full-time and the delivery of services offered Belbin. Different strategies conducted with Belbin shops are some other potential customers to give them house key to Belbin. The keys are stored in secure boxes that are stored in the office Belbin

Personal Finance Expenditure
The personnel delivering the order until the home is often also the owner of the shop can open the lock box and use once they open their home and refrigerator. Often the goods are set in the refrigerator, even throwing rotten vegetables that have been stored in the refrigerator, because the owner was not clean the refrigerator when back home from office because it is too tired, so that customers feel that conducted by the personnel Belbin. Sometimes the sender when the facts of customers, invited drink some tea, chat and take a few minutes set the purchase to be included in the refrigerator. What is the benefit to send home shopping to customers? "Maybe I did not get the benefit. But we will not stop. We are indebted to him, "said Robert Belbin, the owner of the store. Mr. Belbin did not do the special, but that he usually do from the grandfather. Although not be financially profitable, but that is the value of Belbin That customer, so they remain loyal to the Belbin until their children and grandchildren. In addition, they also recommend to their children and grandchildren, too. By the way Belbin did not know the difficult economy and the competition is very tight, Belbin pitch in their own way


Level of trust from our customers to shop Belbin is because Belbin has been developed to treat customers with fair and responsive for many years. While some people said that the Fellowship is difficult, but Belbin was indeed provide the best example of a small store can compete with the big stores. Indeed, the situation that developed by Belbin is a situation such as the rural community between shop owners and buyers know each other and talk to each other and mutual trust and easy to hold in fresh bid.

Source : www.msuyanto.com

Life Insurance

Life insurance provides compensation to specified individuals or groups—such as to family members or charities—when the policyholder dies. Some policies also provide funds for people to use during periods of their life when they will no longer be able to earn income through work, such as in the final stages of a terminal illness.

In industrialized countries such as the United States and Canada, most people must earn a living to provide for themselves and their families. When a wage-earning family member dies, remaining family members may not be able to meet financial obligations and goals. Life insurance allows people to use some of their earnings to assure that money will be available in the case of death. Individuals can purchase life insurance coverage individually from insurance companies. Others purchase coverage as part of a group, such as through their place of employment.

Some life insurance policies, known as term life, cover policyholders for set periods of time, or terms. Other policies, known as permanent life, cover policyholders for their entire lives.

Term Life Insurance

Term life insurance pays out its face value (the value specified on the policy) if the policyholder dies during the period specified in the policy. People may purchase term life coverage for 1, 5, 10, or 20 years. It works best for covering defined costs in the case of death, such as to pay off short-term loans. Younger people also buy term life insurance because of its affordability, perhaps its biggest advantage. Young families, in particular, often need more coverage than they could afford through permanent insurance. Term life can provide fairly large amounts of coverage with relatively low premiums.

However, some people need longer-term coverage to provide for such expenses as a 30-year home mortgage loan or estate taxes imposed after the insured person’s death. Term insurance can play a part in covering certain long-term expenses, if the insurer can design policy options to match the need.

Using term insurance policies to deal with long-term risks poses two serious problems: (1) An insured person’s health may decline to the point that the insurance company will no longer wish to extend a policy for another term. To protect against this problem, a policyholder can consider adding an option to make a policy guaranteed renewable, an agreement in which an insurance company must continue to provide coverage if the policyholder wants it. (2) The premiums of guaranteed renewable term life policies, or any term policy, commonly increase with each renewal. Often the increasing premiums become so high that policyholders decide to drop their coverage, sometimes before the need for the coverage disappears.

Policyholders using term life insurance to protect against long-term risks should consider buying convertible term insurance, which can be changed to permanent coverage. Convertible term life policyholders can switch their coverage as soon as they can afford additional premium costs. Once this switch is made, costs usually remain stable.

Permanent Life Insurance

Permanent life insurance pays its face value whenever policyholders die, as long as they have complied with policy requirements. Most types of permanent life insurance policies also provide a cash surrender value, which returns some money to people who cancel their policies. This practice helps maintain fairness within large groups of policyholders.

If the risk that caused some people to buy their insurance, such as an outstanding debt, should disappear, those people would probably decide to discontinue their coverage, often called “surrendering the policy.” But they would also have overpaid for the amount of risk protection delivered by the time they ended coverage. Cash surrender rules allow individuals who surrender their policies to take some or most of their overpayments out of the group without hurting those who retain their policies.

Insurance companies commonly sell three different categories of permanent life insurance: (1) whole life, (2) universal life, and (3) variable life. Although some insurance companies may use different names to market their policies, most fall into one of these three categories.

Whole life insurance spreads the cost of insurance coverage over a person’s entire life through a payment plan of regular, equal installments. People’s early payments into a whole life plan actually exceed what they would have had to pay for similar amounts of term insurance coverage. But these overpayments accumulate in whole life policies to a cash-surrender-value fund. The fund returns money to those who end their coverage and also keeps premiums from going up for people who do not end their coverage. Whole life policyholders may take out loans using their insurance as collateral, which they can either repay with interest or deduct from their death benefit (face-value benefit at death).

Another type of policy, known as endowment life insurance, resembles whole life but runs for less than the full life of the policyholder. Endowment policies pay out their face value at the contract’s end, even if the insured is still living. Because endowments have short terms, they also have higher premiums than do whole life policies, which in turn force the policyholder to save more.

Universal life insurance policies are permanent plans that incorporate some features of term life plans. Although more flexible than whole life, universal life policies transfer less of policyholders’ total risk to the insurance company. Typically, a universal life policy has a flexible target premium, which the insurance company calculates will keep the plan in force for life for a particular group of policyholders. Policyholders may pay somewhat more or less than the target premium, depending on their current financial circumstances.

When an insurance company collects universal life premiums for a particular policy period, it allocates a portion of that premium to pay claims if policyholders die during the policy period. This is called the policy’s mortality charge, which is the equivalent of a term life insurance premium. The company then deposits the remainder of the universal premium in an investment account that earns interest. The amount that results is called the policy’s accumulation value. The accumulation value minus any charge for surrendering the policy equals its cash surrender value. The company repeats the same calculation each month, deducting the mortality charge from the accumulation value in months when no premium is paid.

Variable life insurance works much like whole life except that the insurance company invests overpayments from all policyholders in the stock market instead of in accounts that earn a regular rate of interest. The performance of stock investments varies. Therefore, the insurer and policyholders cannot know the exact cash surrender values of policies in advance. Instead, their value depends on the performance of the stocks bought with money from premiums.

Some variable life policies also allow the death benefit to vary with stock market performance. Variable universal life, a variety of policy introduced in the 1980s, combines the stock market investment feature of variable life insurance with the flexible premium feature of universal life.

Property and Casualty Insurance

Property and casualty insurance policies protect things. Property insurance protects people against losses of and damage to things they have acquired, including houses and valuable items such as appliances or jewelry. Casualty insurance protects people against having their property taken to compensate others in settlements of legal disputes. Property and casualty insurance commonly go together because many policies include provisions to cover both casualty and property damage or loss. Common types of property and casualty insurance include (1) homeowner’s, (2) tenant’s, (3) automobile, (4) marine, and (5) commercial.

Casualty insurance resembles a more restrictive but similar form of coverage known as liability insurance. In general, liability refers to the legal and financial responsibility someone has to another person. A person can be found to be liable for causing loss or harm to another person or for having an unpaid debt. Some types of liability are covered under property and casualty policies. Liability claims require determination of fault for loss or damage, whereas other types of casualty claims may not.

When someone sustains injuries in, on, or caused by another person’s property, the property owner may be found legally liable for those injuries. For example, if someone is injured as a passenger in another person’s car, the car’s owner and driver are held legally responsible. If a person sustains injuries by slipping on a patch of wet ground at a private golf club, the club may be liable for damages. If someone is injured directly by someone else’s property, such as when the occupants of a car are hurt by the impact of someone else’s speeding car in an accident, the owner of that property may often be found legally liable.

1. Homeowner’s Insurance

Homeowner’s insurance covers a wide range of losses or damages to people’s houses and home property, as well as many types of liabilities for which homeowners might be responsible. It protects homeowners against losses from such causes as theft, storms, and fires.

Also, homeowner’s insurance typically pays for additional expenses related to home damage, such as fees for temporary lodging while damage is fixed. It also protects against most lawsuits that could arise from ownership of the property. It usually includes a type of coverage called medical payments. Such coverage would pay, for instance, for damages to a guest who slipped on the steps to the door of a house and suffered an injury. Homeowners insurance normally does not cover the risks associated with operating a home-based business, such as if a customer is injured on the premises.


2. Tenant’s Insurance

Tenant’s insurance, also known as renter’s insurance, provides much the same coverage as does homeowner’s insurance, but it does not cover damage to houses or apartments themselves. A fairly inexpensive form of insurance, it protects against loss of or damage to personal property and most lawsuits that could arise from occupying rented property. For example, tenant’s insurance would pay for damages caused by a fire that started in a policyholder’s apartment and spread to the rest of the building.


3. Automobile Insurance

Automobile insurance protects against damage to a policyholder’s car and most liabilities that could arise from operating that car. Most U.S. states allow drivers to satisfy their financial responsibility for the costs of auto accidents by obtaining insurance in three categories of liability coverage: (1) for injury to any one person, (2) for injury to two or more people, and (3) for damage to another person’s property. An increasing number of states are requiring drivers to obtain auto insurance by law.

Most U.S. states require that drivers who purchase auto insurance buy no less than a specified minimum of coverage, such as $25,000 toward the injury of another individual, $50,000 toward the injury of multiple persons, and $10,000 toward the damage of another person’s property. This minimum requirement is generally listed on policies as 25/50/10. Most Canadian provinces require $200,000 of liability coverage for covering the combined costs of bodily injury and property damage claims. In some provinces, such as British Columbia and Saskatchewan, the government operates compulsory programs of auto insurance in which all drivers must participate.

Most drivers also purchase medical payments coverage, which pays for treatment of injuries they or their passengers may sustain in an accident, and collision protection, which pays for damages to their own cars. Another optional form of auto insurance, called comprehensive, covers a person’s car against theft or many types of nonaccident damage, such as windshield cracks caused by rocks.

In addition, drivers may purchase insurance against injuries to themselves or their passengers from accidents with drivers who have little or no insurance. With underinsured motorist and uninsured motorist coverage, a person’s own insurance policy provides damage and injury compensation that would normally come from another person’s auto liability insurance. Another type of coverage, called personal injury protection or no-fault, is required in some states in addition to or instead of liability insurance. This coverage compensates drivers from their own policies for damages from accidents without determining responsibility for the accident.


4. Marine and Other Forms of Transportation Insurance

Boats and their cargo and passengers face many risks on unpredictable and powerful waterways. Marine insurance, one of the oldest forms of insurance, covers damage to and losses of boats, ships, marine workers, cargo, and passengers. Both businesses and individuals may purchase various forms of marine insurance.

Insurance for commercial ships or boats at sea, docked in a port, or on some inland waterways—as well as their cargo or passengers—is known as ocean marine insurance. There are four main types of ocean marine insurance: (1) hull insurance, (2) cargo insurance, (3) freight insurance, and (4) marine liability.

Hull insurance covers damage to a ship itself. Cargo insurance covers losses to a ship’s physical cargo. Freight insurance covers shippers against a loss of freight (payment for the transportation of cargo). Marine liability covers damages to people and property from collisions and other incidents.

Businesses involved in transporting cargo or passengers by land or by air can purchase coverage similar to that of marine insurance. Insurance policies for commercial transport of cargo by land or air are commonly known as inland marine insurance. However, because of the increasing importance of the passenger airline industry, specialized property and casualty coverage, known as aviation insurance or aircraft insurance, has developed to cover aircraft and their cargo or passengers.


5. Commercial Property and Casualty Insurance

Commercial property and casualty insurance cover businesses against a wide variety of liabilities and property damages or losses. Commercial property policies cover the building occupied by a business; such items as the furniture, fixtures, machinery, and inventory (unsold, warehoused goods) of a business; income lost by a business due to fire, theft, or other damage; and most liabilities that may arise from owning property and operating a business. A special kind of casualty insurance, called workers’ compensation, pays for employee injuries or illnesses that occur on the job.