In this video, we want to talk about something called the box score, which is a way that we will use to analyze some of the companies and industries that we talked about during the course. And actually, a lot of this exercise is going to be left up to you the student. So this is a phenomenon from baseball. And I find it really difficult to explain sports that are unique to one or few countries to people who have never seen that particular sport played. I had a college from Austria, who was here a few years ago, and we went to a Yale-Princeton football game and I tied to explain to him what was going on the field, without a whole lot of success. And eventually, he was satisfied just watching the cheerleaders. So, for those of you who have never seen a baseball game let me just say that a baseball game is divided into units called innings, and in an innings, each team is up at bat once and tries to score runs. The team, when it receives three outs, okay. So, a batter strikes out or a fielder catches a fly ball, that's considered an out. It has to stop and the next team comes up to bat. And they do this nine times and if there's no tie at the end of the ninth inning, that's the end of the game. And what happens is, it's sportscasters for each inning keep track of what's happened. So, they might have the number of hits, the time that the person at bat hit the ball and it was not caught successfully or picked up successfully, and he was able to get to base. And it might have the number of runs that were scored and the number of errors. So, there are judges who try to decide if a person fielding a ball, actually couldn't have reached it or should have been able to get the ball, but missed it for some reason. So, the box score then, describes what's going on for individuals in teams throughout a game. And what we see here is a box score from an old baseball game in 1876, courtesy of Wikipedia. So, for the survival model, I have added in this idea of a box score for companies and industries. And the example that I'm using here, to illustrate it, is from a company called Earth Color, which is a commercial printing firm in New York City. And several years ago, we spent some time studying Earth Color to try to understand how it had adapted to disruptive technologies. And the story began when the head of Earth Color, the chairman and his second in command were at a trade show. And they saw Macintosh computers, Apple, Macs, being used for something called Page Makeup. So, in the commercial printing process, there is this stage in which all of the material is placed on a plate. The old way of doing this, the manual way, was to use film and the Page Makeup technicians would cut the film and fit it onto the page. And that would be used then, for making proofs. What the chairman and his colleagues saw at this trade show was a Macintosh computer doing all of this graphically on the screen. And they looked at each other and said, you know, this isn't going to affect us, we don't have to worry about it. And they went onto the rest of the show. After they got back to New York and thought about it for a while, they said, you know, maybe this is going to have some impact on us. And so, they ordered a Mac and they started using a Page Makeup Software and they realized the tremendous savings if you come from this in terms of labor and responsiveness to customers. So, they brought in Max and gradually replaced their old film operation. So, we had the film makeup here. So, we had the, the, or the Page Makeup here here. We'll call that Page Makeup. And soon the people who actually produced the printing plates, so this is the plate, adapted their machines to take input from the Mac. So, you just press the button and you made this plate. And then, these machines were adapted to send things like the ink colors to the printing press itself. So, it automated this whole value chain. And Earth Color used this advantage to go by other printing companies, so we're having troubles, very competitive environment, printers were having a hard time making a profit. Earth Color bought up some of these printers, removed their old processes and put in their, their pre-press computers to rejuvenate the companies they had bought. And so, if we look at the characteristics of our model that, for survival, that said these things inhibit or facilitate a company over here on the box score that we have. Okay, we're going to look at the Nile as being a 5, a very low score. These are going to go from one to ten. A very low score because at first, Earth Color, denied this would have an impact, but then, they rapidly adapted it. their history was one of many years of using the old film markup for procedures. they, they were not necessarily ready to move into this world of, of Macs and Page Makeup Software. But resistance to change here was very low, this is a good thing, okay? They were very quickly ready to adapt new technology. Their mindset was one of being open to it. So, they got a low score on a mindset of, of inhibiting their response. They had a brand that was well-known in the area, but they were willing to go out and, and risk what they've been doing with this new approach. Sent cost it didn't impact them at all. they weren't worried about the film. First of all, the film rooms. A pre-press room was, was not an expensive operation in terms of capital resources. They had been very profitable and they certainly wanted to continue that profitability. And it kind of threatened them to think about adapting something new, because it could have affected their profitability. But they had a lot of imagination. So, they get a very low score on the lack of imagination. And what Earth Color did was successfully morph its business model. They gradually, over time, replaced what they had been doing with these new processes. Okay. And so, we will be using the box score. primarily, I'm going to be asking you to use the box score as you think about the examples. And to summarize each of the companies and the industries that we analyze, and if you decide to take some of the essays the pure graded exercises that we do. And you might think about the box scores, the way they help analyze those as well.
