Learning space

I was going through a few searches for Strategy tools and hit upon the website of Bain. I learned that every year, Bain conducts a survey of the top strategy tools that corporations use to make their lives simpler. In the 2009 edition of the "Management Tools", Bain listed out 25 or so different management tools. 1. Balanced Scorecard 2. Benchmarking 3. Business Process Reengineering 4. Collaborative Innovation 5. Core Competencies 6. Customer Relationship Management 7. Customer Segmentation 8. Decision Rights Tools 9. Downsizing 10. Growth Strategy Tools 11. Knowledge Management 12. Lean Six Sigma 13. Loyalty Management Tools 14. Mergers and Acquisitions 15. Mission and Vision Statements 16. Online Communities 17. Outsourcing 18. Price Optimization Models 19. Scenario and Contingency Planning 20. Shared Service Centers 21. Strategic Alliances 22. Strategic Planning 23. Supply Chain Management 24. Total Quality Management 25. Voice of the Customer Innovation

Google plans to experiment with an Ultra hi-speed ISP service in cities across US. This it plans to do by building its own infrastructure of fiber network to deliver speeds 100 times faster than conventional networks - a 1-gigabit-per-second fiber-to-the-home connection at a competitive price to potentially 500,000 people. An interesting discussion happened today around the diversification of Google and we ended up realizing that Google is into more things than we thought it was, as a layman user. Here is what came out: 1) Search Engine, 2) Online Advertising Real Estate, 3) Mobile O/s, 4) Cloud apps (edocs), 5) Ultra hi-speed ISP (with Fiber network). Now if you put all of these in a melting pot, what do you get. A technology company which provides free search facility, which provides a mobile O/s, which provides you internet connectivity (ISP), helps you use applications on the future and the best part...it still makes major chunk of its money from advertisement dollars. Now here

There is a theory of an economic co-operation among all countries in North America. That there is a possibility of "amero" in North America like "Euro" in Europe. NAFTA might already be in place but a common currency like amero could change the dynamics of all countries in NorthAm. After normalizing all currencies for the first time, how would subsequent exchange rate fulctuations be taken care for amero?. Subsequently, the value of canadian amero and US amero will remain fixed after currency normalization. The catch is, there is every possibility of change in value of each currency in real time. Which means amero normalization needs to be done in real time. However this need not be done if other countries still maintain their currenies and have amero as an additional currency. In that case, why is there the need for amero. Economics seems complicated.