Quick diversion from marketing to shout with reckless enthusiasm that heroes still exist. Floyd Landis is my new hero, right up there with Fred Rogers. Some of you know I’m a fan of cycling, and every year I follow the Tour in truly geek fashion–by reading the live commentary from Cycling News–some of the most compelling writing you can find anywhere, especially if you follow it day-by-day in real time. What Floyd Landis accomplished today is nothing short of amazing, and genuinely inspiring.
"Floyd Landis turned himself around from a defeated, broken man to a probable Tour de France winner in the space of a six-hour stage," said Paul Sherwen, a former pro and play-by-play announcer for OLN’s live Tour coverage. "What he did today was ride himself back into contention. Theoretically, that was impossible."
If you want to read about it, you can find a good article here. I’m just excited to see a giant of an athlete appear out of nowhere after so many have fallen from grace. Go Floyd!
Chris, thank you for your kind words. It’s interesting that you selected as an example of my work the last in a series of three papers that contributed directly to the development of my book. It’s all the more interesting since I forgot to cite this paper! Now that you’ve brought it to my attention I read it again for the first time in many years.
The last time I read this paper was when I decided not to include it in Readings in Marketing Strategy (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0894261398/sr=1-2/qid=1154265888/ref=sr_1_2/104-8320449-9319153?ie=UTF8&s=books) because it summarized a controversy I thought was settled. However, I should have cited it because the paper answers questions that might be asked about one of the key constructs in my book Competing for Customers and Capital: the enterprise marketing cost function.
Since the publication of those papers I devoted a lot of research effort to applying the principles to the data found in Standard & Poor’s COMPUSTAT. My book is the culmination of these efforts. The data now are available online to academics and students at over 150 universities world-wide through the Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS). It’s also available to most corporations directly from S&P as “Research Insight.” All my applications (from Amazon to Toyota) are based on COMPUSTAT, so they all may be replicated
by anyone with access to this extraordinary data base.
What’s a one-line description of my book? It would be something like “Economics 101 applied to the financial accounting data of public companies to measure earnings quality and the riskiness of enterprising marketing opportunities.” One of my accounting students at Tulane last semester called it a real page turner … compared with his other textbooks! By the way, that course was cross-listed for majors in marketing, finance, and accounting in both our graduate and undergraduate programs. It’s was the only course so cross-listed in the history of the Freeman School at Tulane University. It may be the only one in the world.