By his own reckoning, his greatest strength is choosing the right people to run his business.
He is determined that the group will not go public, because short-term shareholder demands conflict with long-term planning. ‘I hate short-termist decisions. If you want to take long-lasting decisions, it’s very difficult to be on the stock exchange. When entering the Russian market, we had to decide to lose money for 10 years.’
Mr Kamprad has been slowly withdrawing from the business since 1986, when he stepped down as group president. He maintains that he is still ‘too much involved and in too many details’, although he admits to a distinct reluctance to withdraw altogether.
The question is: can there be an eternal Ikea without Mr. Kamprad? Does the group depend too much on its founder? Will the empire continue, as control of Ikea gradually moves to Mr. Kamprad’s three sons?
From the Financial Times
ТЕКСТ 6
COMPUTER VIRUSES AND CRIME
Computer virus is a portion of a program code that has been designed to copy itself into other such codes or computer files. It is usually created by vandals to effect a result or to destroy data and program code.
A virus consists of a set of instructions that attaches itself to other computer programs, usually in the computer's operating system, and becomes part of them. In most cases, the corrupted programs continue to perform their intended functions but surreptitiously execute the virus's instructions as well. A virus is usually designed to execute when it is loaded into a computer's memory. Upon execution, the virus instructs its host program to copy the viral code into any number of other programs and files stored in the computer. The infection can then transfer itself to files and code on other computers through magnetic disks or other memory – storage devices, computer networks, or online systems. The replicating viruses often multiply until they destroy data or make other program codes meaningless. A virus may simply cause a harmless joke or cryptic message to appear on a computer monitor each time the computer is turned on. A more damaging virus can break an extremely large computer system within a matter of minutes or hours, causing it to crash and thereby destroy valuable data.
Computer viruses are simply small programs that insert themselves into program files and boot sectors. Most are activated when you run the infected program or boot from an infected disk, and they immediately start replicating themselves by looking for new files and boot sectors to infect. Like real germs, the most successful and prevalent computer viruses do little except hide, reproduce, and wait for the opportunity to spread to other PCs.
The computer viruses we fear most – those that destroy files, format hard disks or make them unbootable or corrupt BIOS settings – are relatively rare. They usually
31
don't spread as rapidly as lethal bugs because they do such a dandy job of disrupting their host – your hard disk, which you may have to format, wiping out the viruses in the process.
It is useful to set the write-protect tab on floppies when you're not actively writing to them, and don't leave floppies in the drive. Viruses that spread by infecting the system area of a floppy disk are the most common, and some even periodically check the floppy drive for an easy victim.
Now we can assume: computer viruses are everywhere. Here's how to keep your computer from "catching a cold," and what to do if it does.
There's no question that every computer user should have some sort of virus scanning software – programs that can help prevent your computer from contracting a virus and wipe one out if necessary.
Contracting a virus can be simple, it’s all a matter of introducing an infected file onto your computer system. And today, more types of files can be infected than ever before.
Since the first reported case of computer abuse in 1958, computers have been involved in most types of crimes, including theft, burglary, sabotage, espionage, kidnapping, and murder. Computer systems themselves can be the targets of attack, as when a computer virus is surreptitiously introduced into a system to alter or destroy data. Breaking into private computer systems to destroy, steal, or alter information became easier once modems were introduced in the 1960s. Most serious computer crimes, however, are committed in the banking and financial-service industries, where money, credit, and other financial assets are recorded in electronic databases and are transmitted as signals over telephone lines. Persons with access to such systems may falsify or manipulate these records for their own purposes by, for example, illegally transferring money balances to their own accounts.
So, in order to be protected from computer viruses and crime, a person should have modern antiviral software and some knowledge in protecting PC from internal and external invasion.
ТЕКСТ 7
POWERFUL STORAGE
Researchers have discovered a new material that could improve digital storage in the future.
Thanks to advancements in technology, people can now do more and more with their gadgets. Mobile phones, for example, are no longer just for talking - they can be used to listen to music, take photos and soon even to watch movies. But this also means that new sources of power will be required to accommodate the technology - and at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a team of researchers led by Prof. Prashant Kumta has recently synthesized a new material that can store more energy than the super capacitors used today.
Unlike a battery where energy is stored in a chemical form, a super capacitor is an electrical device that stores energy in an electric field. This field is generated by
32
negative and positive plates in the capacitor - and their "super" status comes from their ability to hold four times as much charge as a normal capacitor.
Currently, supercapacitors are made from ruthenium oxide but the high price of this compound limits their use in a wide range of technologies. They are most useful in applications like hybrid cars and robotics where a large, fast pulse of energy is required. Compared to a normal battery, a supercapacitor can also last much longer.
The new material - called nanocrystalline vanadium nitride - could be a viable alternative to ruthenium oxide. It has a capacitance that is almost two times greater and can also store energy for longer. The structure of the material has two layers: it has an outer shell of vanadium oxide and an inner core of vanadium nitride. This setup enables energy storage because of electrochemical reactions that occur on the vanadium oxide surface - which generate an electric charge. The vanadium nitride interior stores the charge generated.
To create this new material, nanocrystals were made by a method described by Kumta as "simple and novel", where vanadium chloride is reacted with ammonia, at 400 degrees C, in an environment without water. The final product is a material made up of tiny nanocrystals six nanometers wide, and is particularly interesting because it combines the good electric conductivity of vanadium nitride with vanadium's many oxidation states in vanadium oxide.
But the main advantage of vanadium nitride is its price. According to Prof. Ian Boyd, Executive Director at the London Center for Nanotechnology, although ruthenium oxide exhibits some of the most desirable properties for supercapacitors, such as constant capacitance, reversibility, and cycle times running into the hundreds and thousands cycles, the main problem is that it is very expensive. Ruthenium oxide costs $100 per gram whereas vanadium nitride is priced at $50 per gram.
The researchers are confident that this new material will be cheaper, more stable and a higher quality material for energy storage in the future. Prof. Kumta says that this nanomaterial is key to creating the next generation of super capacitors, and will be used in everything from cars, camcorders and lawn mowers to industrial backup power systems at hospitals and airports.
ТЕКСТ 8
THE INTERNET ECOLOGY
Foraging for food seems to be a straightforward proposition: if you’re a hunter, you hunt; if you're a gatherer, you gather: then you eat. What could be simpler? Well, plenty of things, because, as it turns out, foraging is a complex business. In fact, a whole foraging theory was developed in the 1970s to explain animal foraging patterns and strategies. At its core is the idea of a cost-benefit analysis in which an animal examines the available food {the benefit) and weighs the amount of energy required to obtain it (the cost).
The theory also tells us that animals will move to a new area as soon as the costs of foraging in the current one become too high relative to the remaining
33
benefits. Selected by evolution over millennia, the techniques are hard-wired into animal brains.
We humans have these foraging mechanisms installed in our own brains. That fact was the inspiration for the theory of information foraging, a concept that has generated a number of interesting new words. In the early 1990s, Peter Pirelli and Stuart Card of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California observed that tracking down information was analogous to foraging for food, so they tried applying foraging theory to information hunting and gathering. Their results showed that information seekers do use the same strategies as food foragers. In their cost-benefit analysis, the benefit is the information they seek and the cost is the time it takes to find it. And once the costs of the current information patch outweigh whatever benefits are left, they move on to a different Web site or database.
Also, like food foragers, information foragers rely on "cues" that tell them whether a particular patch contains the data they seek. When animals are foraging for food, they often use scent to determine whether a particular area is worth investigating. Hunters, for example, will sniff around for evidence that prey has been in the area. Web searchers do something similar by examining a site's information scent: the visual and linguistic cues – researchers call this the residue – that enable a searcher to determine whether a source has the information they seek, as well as to navigate to the desired data.
On arriving at a site, for example, someone looking for device drivers will hunt for a supportive link labeled "Downloads" or, even better, "Device Drivers." Labels such as "Products" and" Purchase" aren’t as promising – that is, they don't give off a good information scent. Another foraging cue is the existence of footprints, which are traces left by other foragers who have traversed die same virtual path. In the Amazon.com niche, for instance, footprints occur all over the place: reader reviews, ratings, and even lists of other books purchased by people who bought the current book.
Pirolli, Card, and others at Xerox PARC are continuing this research, which is now part of a larger idea: called the Internet ecology, the relationship and interactions between people and the online environment, in particular the Web. New words and phrases abound in the Internet ecology, where people aren't users, but informators, consumers of information, who have highly specific information diets. The satisfied {satisfy and suffice] their info, mat) on needs by foraging within the information food chain.
ТЕКСТ 9
AN AMERICAN LEADER IN EUROPE
Since Nancy McKinstry moved from New York to Europe a year ago to run Wolters Kluwer, the specialist publishing group, she has had plenty of experience of national and cultural differences in business. She has rarity value as an American woman at the head of a Dutch company, an issue she feels strongly about. 'In
34
Holland, there aren't a lot of women in senior management That is a legitimate criticism, of the business community,' says Ms McKinstry.
'It's changing but very slowly. Often the schools don't have any lunchtime programme so the children are expected to go home for lunch. If you're a working parent, whether you're male of female, that's pretty tough to accommodate as well as work. In the US, you have more day care and more opportunities for women to balance working with having a family'.
Although an outsider by nationality, she is a corporate insider, having spent 13 years with the publisher, which produces journals and electronic information services for professional in medicine, the law, tax, accountancy and education, and reported sales of (eur)3.4bn ($4.2bn) last year.
'The benefits of being an outsider are that I'm able to do things in Europe from a restructuring perspective that would be much more difficult in the chairman was a European.' This includes cutting 1,600 jobs, or 8 percent of workforce, as part of the three-year recovery strategy she announced last October. 'People expect that Americans 'come in and have more of a bottom-line approach.'
But she admits it can be heavy going, even when the is American. 'In certain geographies in Europe it can take you a year or two to reduce 100 positions. That was described to me as a board member. I understand now how these things work in a very different way. One of the things I've learned in my time here is that in Europe there isn't one approach,' she says. 'If you have a product or a customer problem in France, there might be an approach that works extremely well. But if you took the same approach and tried to solve the exact same problem in Holland, you might fail.'
She points to differences in communication style. 'The Americans tend to be pretty direct, but optimistic. In other geographies, the communication is more subtle. You have to really listen not only to what people are saying but what they're not saying. In southern Europe, there's far more nuance to what people are saying. You often find they don't want to say 'No' to you, especially as the chairman, but in fact they may not be able to achieve what you've asked them. I try to listen really hard, and to say: 'How are you going to meet this goal?'
ТЕКСТ 10
BEING ETHICAL
Being ethical can be a clever marketing strategy. Increasingly, consumers are influenced by 'non-commercial' factors such as whether a product harms the environment. Firms such as Ben & Jerrys's, an ice cream maker, and Body Shop International, a cosmetics retailer, have strengthened their brands by publicising their ethical standards. Cummins Engine, a maker of diesel engines, made its products greener while lobbying for stricter pollution laws.
But such ethical self-promotion can be dangerous. Body Shop was publicly forced to change a claim that its products were not tested on animals (some of the ingredients in its cosmetics had been tested on animals by other firms in the past). The error led many consumers to question Body Shop's ethical standards.
35