Business Blog

BusinessWeek, working with an advisory board of 14 academics, consultants, and industry leaders worldwide, has developed a list of the World’s Most Influential Companies. We selected 10 companies that played a major role in their industry over the past year and could shape the corporate landscape for years to come. Have a look at the names on our list, as well as two other categories we think are worth noting: companies that are masters of their domain because they dominate their market and those up-and-comers likely to emerge as the next generation of influence leaders.

via The World’s Most Influential Companies: The Influencers – BusinessWeek.

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Ever wonder who all those sponsors are for the Tour de France?  With each rider and their equipment (cars, jerseys, and more) made to be walking billboards, it might help to know who some of the sponsoring companies are.  Bike Noob did a little research into those bike team names.

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Need to find companies with subsidiaries in other countries?  Then LexisNexis may be the tool that you need.  This screencast walks you through how to search for companies wthat have subsidiaries in other countries.

For other screencasts, take a look at the Biz Wiki Screencasts page.

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From the Report Alert:

American Electric Power has published its second corporate sustainability report – “Working Together For A Brighter Future.” available from www.aep.com/cr. This year’s report highlights the progress the company has made since implementing its CSR strategy and addresses issues that affect AEP’s ongoing sustainability including climate change; environmental performance; public policy; energy security, reliability and growth; work force issues; stakeholder engagement and leadership, management and strategy. As part of the company’s focus on sustainability, AEP management met with more than 100 stakeholders during the last year to receive input about the company’s performance, reporting process and its business practices. Stakeholders participating included state and federal regulators, power plant neighbors, environmental and conservation advocates, customers, employees, investors, community leaders and representatives from academia. The report was prepared according to G3 Reporting Principles established by the Global Reporting Initiative, a voluntary reporting framework used by organizations around the world as the basis for sustainability reporting.

This report might be useful for cluster students working on the “greening of business”project.  You can get the report directly from AEP’s website.  To find other similar reports, go to the Corporate Register to search and browse reports.  You can find other resources on corporate responsibility, citizenship, and green business on the Biz Wiki.

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Fortune has published an interview with Steve Jobs.  I’d definitely recommend looking at it for understanding what makes the CEO of one of the world’s most admired companies tick.  Some excepts are below:

On market research:

“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products. “

On work:

We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the [executive team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.

On management:

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

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