John Quelch, the Harvard Business School marketing professor, has an interesting post on his blog about companies that defy conventional wisdom by dominating the mid-market, instead of focusing solely on the high or low ends.

Professor Quelch cites the examples of Tesco, Toyota and Charles Schwab as companies that have adopted this strategy. As he notes, Tesco and Toyota have gone into premium segments after securing the mid-market first.

Many companies now avoid the mid-market:

In business, it’s not fashionable to concentrate on midfield. Focus, we are told, is essential. You either have to be a specialist niche provider of premium-priced products tailored to a particular customer segment, or you have to shoot for scale, using low prices and volume purchasing to attract a mass market and drive down your cost structure.

Yet these companies have thrived by providing goods and services that are perceived as solid value, without having to venture into discounting. The whole post, which is worth reading, can be found here.

Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway is, of course, always worth reading. This year’s does not contain too many surprises but there are plenty of valuable insights and good jokes.

I particularly like his comparison (at the top of page 9) of corporate acquisitions that go wrong to the line in a song by Bobby Bare (politically incorrect though it is):

I’ve never been to bed with an ugly woman but I’ve sure woke up with a few.

A friend once told me a story about a friend of his who was facing some tough decisions in his life. He was seeing an analyst and, at one of their sessions, he explained that he felt under pressure.

The analyst listened to the various choices he was facing and how hard it was to make up his mind. Then he paused and asked: “Well, have you considered doing nothing?”

I thought of that story, which always seemed to me to have relevance for a lot of us - including corporate executives - when I read in the New York Times on Saturday about a study of goalkeepers and how they react to penalty kicks.

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It has been obvious for some time that Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination is badly run compared with that of Barack Obama.

Leaving politics aside, it simply seems like a poor managerial effort. The fact that she has had fund-raising problems, did not grasp that the campaign would continue beyond Super Tuesday, and has not been able to organise effectively on the ground are all signs of a fundamental lack of competence.

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There are lots of theories about why Hillary Clinton unexpectedly won the New Hampshire primary. I don’t know which is right, since I am not a political expert (and even if I were, I wouldn’t). But there is clearly significance to the fact that many women voters turned out to support her.

Maybe it was because they resented John Edwards and Barack Obama attacking her in the televised debate. Mrs Clinton seems to think so since she has since pounded away at the point that the male "buddies" teamed up against her.

Anyway, there is an fascinating demographic point here that has as much relevance for business as for politics. It is the rise in influence - and sheer numbers - of American college-educated women.

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My Financial Times column this week is on Barack Obama and what chief executives can learn from him about leadership. You can read it here and comment below.

For my weekly column in the FT, I have written about the decision by Tim Mason, the head of US operations for Tesco, to rule himself out of the race to succeed Terry Leahy as chief executive on the grounds that he is too old. Mr Mason is 50.

I conclude that companies are acting rationally in looking for chief executives in their mid to late-forties but that does not mean everyone over the age of 50 is doomed.

You can read the whole column here and post comments below.

Via Marginal Revolution, via Kottke, from LinuxWorld, (isn’t the internet a wonderful thing?) comes this sentiment:

Google is one of the few large companies that gets one fundamental rule of the Internet: Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it . . . Don’t over-plan something. Just do it half-assed to start with, then throw more people at it to fix it if it works.

I think this is quite an important insight into the evolving nature of product development. Traditionally, companies hem and haw for a long time about launching products, partly because they are hard to come up with, partly because they do not want to waste money on something that does not pan out, and partly because they do not want to damage their reputations if the products fail.

But Google has, from the start, adopted a far more relaxed and improvisatory approach to new products. Many of them, as a Business Week article on cloud computing illustrated, emerge from the "20 per cent time" that Google engineers are supposedly allowed to spend on special projects of their own choosing. Others start off small, remain in beta for some time, and eventually gather steam.

This venture capital-style approach to new products has its risks. Some Google products publicly flop and others do not go anywhere much. But it allows the company to throw things up quickly. And it does cost less than having big layers of bureaucracy deciding what should be approved and what killed.

I have heard management consultants suggest that this "portfolio" approach to product development - essentially to try out a lot of things and see what works - is the future for all kinds of companies. The LinuxWorld post expresses its benefits neatly.

Last week, I attended an interesting event hosted by Time Warner at its headquarters in New York. It involved John Edwards, the Democrat candidate for the presidency, being interviewed by Dick Parsons, Time Warner’s chairman and chief executive, in front of an small-ish invited audience. It was one of a series of events called "Conversations in the Circle".

I cannot recount what Mr Parsons or Mr Edwards said (although neither said anything controversial) because the meeting was held under what Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s president, described as Chatham House rules. Mr Bewkes explained half-jokingly that this meant: "What’s said in the circle stays in the circle".

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Book review on Financial Times Business Life page

How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves – From the Board to the Boardroom
By Garry Kasparov

Amazon US; Amazon UK

The notion that business is like war is not new. Sun Tzu’s Art of War pops up on many a corporate leader’s bookshelf, with its gnomic lessons on how to defeat an enemy.

Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion, has a similar rationale in this book. His point is that a game of battle, strategy and tactics aimed at defeating a single opponent can teach us about business and politics.

Continue reading here. Please post comments below.