David Landes

Strategic Concepts & Mechanics

Signature MoveThirteen-Hour Meeting as Onboarding Ritual

Relationship LeverageFoxconn's Loss-Leader-to-Lock-In Playbook

Risk DoctrineTacit Knowledge as Accidental Export

Competitive AdvantageApple Squeeze: Invaluable Experience Over Margin

Identity & CultureVerbal Jujitsu Procurement Culture

Signature MoveDesign the Impossible Then Manufacture the Impossible

Signature MoveFifty Business Class Seats Daily to Shenzhen

Operating PrincipleZero Inventory as Theological Doctrine

Strategic PatternUnconstrained Design Not Cost Arbitrage

Cornerstone MoveSecret $275 Billion Kowtow to Keep the Machine Running

Signature MoveSilk Tie Competitions to Train Negotiators

Cornerstone MoveScrew It, iTunes for Windows

Cornerstone MoveBuy the Machines, Own the Factory Floor Without Owning a Factory

Signature MoveDrive Off the Cliff to Prove the Brakes Don't Work

Cornerstone MoveTrain Everyone Then Pit Them Against Each Other

Risk DoctrineRule By Law as Corporate Leash

Decision FrameworkBig Potato Small Potato: Positional Power Over Fairness

Primary Evidence

"Building on a long-forgotten or neglected legacy of technique from classical antiquity, with additions imported by the so-called barbarians, or acquired from more advanced cultures to the east, they succeeded in developing by the fourteenth century—certainly by the fifteenth—a corpus of knowledge and skills that not only put them far ahead of their teachers, but conferred on them a decisive superiority of power. It is on this basis that Europe changed from a hapless victim to global aggressor, from a poor backwater, obliged to make its balance of payments in slaves for want of marketable exports, to the affluent workshop of the world. —David Landes (1924–2013), Harvard economic historian"

Source:Apple in China

"David Landes: “If the gains from trade in commodities are substantial, they are small compared to trade in ideas.”"

Source:Apple in China

Appears In Volumes

Apple in China