On Tuesday, the company behind the Dow Jones Industrial Average said it would make the biggest change to the average in nearly a decade, dropping three companies (Hewlett-Packard, Alcoa, and Bank of America) and replacing them with three others (Nike, Goldman Sachs, and Visa). We think of the Dow as a way to track the stock market, but it also can serve as a barometer for how consumer culture has evolved during the Dow’s hundred-and-seventeen-year history.
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Intrapreneurship is responsible for a lot of product innovation around the world today. At Lockheed Martin, intrapreneurs developed a number of famous aircraft designs and at 3M, they came up with Post-It Notes and at Google, they came up with Google News, AdSense and Gmail. What these examples have in common is that companies embraced the idea of allowing their employees to become entrepreneurs and capitalize on new business ideas. These free flowing ideas come from in-house programs, which include Google’s famous “20% program”, contests, hackathons, skunk works and informal programs where employees pitch ideas directly to executives. Smart companies want you to become an intrapreneur because it fuels business growth and allows them to gain a competitive advantage in their industry.
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More than ten years ago, in 2002, Manoj Night Shyamalan appeared on the cover of Newsweek, his hands placed assertively on his hips, confidently staring into the distance, looking like more of a movie star than a director. ‘The Next Spielberg,’ proclaimed the cover (in large sized-text) along with ‘Hollywood’s Hottest New Story Teller.’
Today, those words come seem cruelly ironic. In a phantom twist, Newsweek doesn’t exist as a print magazine and neither does Shyamalan’s career, (at least according to Hollywood observers.) If it were at all possible that ex-wunderkind Shyamalan couldn’t hit a new low, he has somehow managed to helm, After Earth, which has been roundly panned.
The real ignominy for Shyamalan is that Columbia, the studio that produced the movie, was so petrified that moviegoers would be put off by Shyamalan’s association with the film that they tried to bury his name from any of the marketing and publicity paraphernalia. This was a director whose movies had famously announced themselves with “A film by M Night Shyamalan”. Evidently, a brand had become a liability.
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