PART Ⅳ READING COMPREHENSION
We wouldn't have imagined it? After years on top,
Nike suddenly looks like a world-class marathoner who, in mid-race, questions
whether he's got what it takes to keep on running. Nike's symptoms of distress:
a global glut of shoes, flat sales in key market, and declining profits.
Moreover, the global brand champ that captured its own winning corporate mindset
with the "Just do it" ad slogan has a new pitch. "I can"— to which investors
seem to be restoring. "No, you can't." Losing faith, they have knocked Nike
stock from its all time high of $76 about a year ago to a recent $46.
What happened? While Nike has tripped on fickle fashion trends and
heightened competition before, its main obstacle today appears to be its own
success. Here's why:
Big-brand backlash. When he founded Nike
in 1972, CEO Phil Knight contended that "if five cool guys—the best and most
popular athletes—wore his shoes, other people would want to as well. The
strategy worked wonderfully, of course, and now Nike controls an astounding 47%
of the U.S. athletic shoe market. But the brand has become too common to be
cool. "I call it the Izod syndrome." says John Horan., publisher of Sporting
Goods Intelligence, referring to the once-hip golf shirt. "Nike is everywhere."
Brand expert Watts Wacker, chairman of the consulting firm First Matter,
believes that the ubiquity of the Nike logo —the over—Swooshing of America—turns
off important core consumers, the 12-24-year-olds.
"When I was
growing up: we used to say to that rooting for Yankees is like rooting for U.S.
Steel," Wacker says. "Today, rooting for Nike is like rooting for
Microsoft."
The Marlboro mistake. Indeed, many cool-conscious
youngsters have gravitated to other brands such as Adidas (which sells sneakers
at lower prices) and Timberland (a leader in the outdoorsy "brown shoes" trend).
Instead of responding with hotter products or lower prices, Nike did what many
overconfident giants do (think Marlboro, pre-Marlboro Friday): It raises its
price ahead of inflation. "Retailers loaded up, but the products weren't
necessarily reaching consumers' closets," says Josie Esquivel, who follows Nike
for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. Now, Nike is paying with price cuts—in the 50%
range—last tear's models (except the irrepressible Air Jordan line).
The (Asian) economy, stupid. Nike's inventory glut is messiest in Asia,
largely because the company operates few outlet stores there. (In the U.S. Nike
sells almost half of its leftover shoes through its 41 factory stores and the
rest through discounters like T. J. Max) Also, Nike was particularly ill
prepared for Asia's economic collapse because Knight has long believed his
company's sales are recession-resistant. Management expected revenues in Asia to
almost double this year, from $1.2 billion, but retailers canceled orders at
alarming rates. It looks as though sales will rise marginally at best.
Waffling on Wall Street. Nike worsened its woes by failing to acknowledge
them soon enough. "Early last year, there was a major crack I the day," says
analyst Esquivel. "It took them over two months to say, 'Oops, we have
problems." She lowered her rating on the stock from buy to hold last May just
before Nike warned that profits would fall short of expectations. As more
negative news followed, Some analysts complained that management was hard to
reach for information. One executive, CFO Robert Falcone, antagonized major
shareholders and left in January.
Will Nike get back up to
speed? Probably it's one of the world's most powerful brands, and Knight is
resilient as well as smart. But the recovery will be long and painful. Knight
and his senior managers are currently working on a plan to close facilities and
reduce Nike's work force worldwide. A big restructuring charge will hit profits
hard this year, and growth will likely be slow during the few years.
In order to recover, Nike will certainly need flesh products to excite
bored consumers. "The lineup for the coming year looks OKEY," says Ralph Parks,
president of Foot Action, the second—largest athletic—shoe specialty retailer.
"It looks better than 1997's, but I'm not sure that core consumer is quite ready
to jump back in."
Most important, Nike needs a new vision of
itself and its brand. This task belongs to Knight, who turned 60 a few weeks ago
and says he plans to work until he dies. That's a good thing, because the boss's
favorite motto "There is no finish line" seems more appropriate now than
ever.
To produce the upheaval in the United States that
changed and modernized the domain of higher education from the mid-1860's to the
mid-1880's, three primary causes interacted. The emergence of a half-dozen
leaders in education provided the personal force that was needed. Moreover, an
outcry for a fresher, more practical, and more advanced kind of instruction
arose among the alumni and friends of nearly all of the old colleges and grew
into a movement that overrode all conservative opposition. The aggressive "Young
Yale" movement appeared, demanding partial alumni control, a more liberal
spirit, and a broader course of study. The graduates of Harvard College
simultaneously rallied to relieve the college's poverty and demand new
enterprise. Education was pushing toward higher standards in the East by
throwing off church leadership everywhere, and in the West by finding a wider
range of studies and a new sense of public duty.
The old-style
classical education received its most crushing blow in the citadel of Harvard
College, where Dr. Charles Eliot, a young captain thirty-five, son of a former
treasurer of Harvard, led the progressive forces. Five revolutionary advances
were made during the first years of Dr. Eliot's administration. They were the
elevation and amplification of entrance requirements, the enlargement of the
curriculum and the development of the elective system, the recognition of
graduate study in the liberal arts, the raising of professional training in law,
medicine, and engineering to a postgraduate level, and the fostering of greater
maturity in student life. Standards of admission were sharply advanced in
1872-1873 and 1876-1877. By the appointment of a dean to take charge of student
affairs, and a wise handling of discipline, the undergraduates were led to
regard themselves more as young gentlemen and less as young animals. One new
course of study after another was opened up science, music, the history of the
fine arts, advanced Spanish, political economy, physic, classical philology, and
international law.
Good news is bad news and bad news is good news,
newsmen often say to one another. And when you look at the media it's only too
easy to see what they mean. A dictionary definition of the media is mass
communications, e.g. the press, television, radio. The media sees its main
purpose as giving the public news. Naturally to provide the public with news it
has first to gather it. The whole function and purpose of the media, then seem
to depend on the word "news", but more important, on how the word is
interpreted.
The media, like any big business venture today, is
an extremely competitive world of its own. In providing material for its public
it has constantly to make sure it serves the right diet. No public will waste
time on your paper or your TV channel otherwise. The sad truth is that there
seems only one way to catch an audience—hit them right between the eyes. What
started as a mild tap has now become a sledgehammer blow that goes by the name
of sensationalism.
A reporter chooses—has to choose—a news
story because of its sensation value. The young inexperienced cub reporter rings
his news editor about a car crash. He starts to explain the details to him but
the experienced editor asks the cub one question: "Anyone killed?" and to
himself he thinks, why do we offer jobs to children?
One may
accuse newsman of cynicism but they will quickly remind you of the hard facts of
survival in the world of the media. The favorite words the newspaper place cards
in the streets bombard the public with are, "Surprise, Sensation, Drama, Shock".
You wonder, put an end to sensation long ago. As a regular newspaper reader you
also thank Heavens for the light relief of the comic strips. Turn finally from
them to what is referred to laughingly as "steam radio", in order to show its
relative antiquity. This for many millions of people is the only live contact
they have with the outside world that rightly or wrongly they have been led to
believe they should have contact with. It's extremely hard of course to see why,
when for the most part its news services bring them tragedy, disaster,
heartbreak, other people's misfortunes—in a word, trouble. What again becomes
quickly apparent is that a man's job depends on sensationalism, and we are asked
to excuse him for this.
Perhaps the media hasn't quite grown up
and we should congratulate it on getting this far. The year 2000 may see great
changes in the way news is presented to us. Again, who knows, it might even get
worse—if such a thing is possible. Perish the thought!
Initial voyages into space introduced questions
scientists had never before considered. Could an astronaut swallow food in zero
gravity? To keep things simple, astronauts on the Project Mercury ate foods
squeezed out of tubes. It was like serving them baby food in a toothpaste
container.
But these early tube meals were flavorless, and
astronauts dropped too many pounds. "We know that astronauts have lost weight in
every American and Russian manned flight," wrote NASA scientists Malcolm Smith
in 1969. "We don't know why." Feeding people in space was not as easy as it
looked.
Floating around in space isn't as relaxing as it might
sound. Astronauts expend a lot of energy and endure extreme stresses on their
bodies. Their dietary requirements are therefore different from those of their
gravity-bound counterparts on Earth. For example, they need extra calcium to
compensate for bone loss. 'A low-salt diet helps slow the process, but there are
no refrigerators in space, and salt is often used to help preserve foods," says
Vickie Kloeris of NASA. "We have to be very careful of that."
By the Apollo missions, NASA had developed a nutritionally balanced menu with a
wide variety of options. Of course, all the items were freeze-dried or heat-
treated to kill bacteria, and they didn't look like regular food.
Today, the most elaborate outer-space meals are consumed in the
International Space Station (ISS), where astronauts enjoy everything from steak
to chocolate cake. The ISS is a joint venture between the U.S. and Russia, and
diplomatic guidelines dictate the percentage of food an astronaut must eat from
each country. NASA's food laboratory has 185 different menu items, Russia offers
around 100, and when Japan sent up its first crew member in 2008, about 30
dishes came with him. Due to dietary restrictions and storage issues, astronauts
still can't eat whatever they want whenever they feel like it.
In 2008, NASA astronaut and ISS crew member Sandra Magnus became the first
person to try to cook a meal in space. It took her over an hour to cook onions
and garlic in the space station's food warmer, but she managed to create a truly
delicious dish: grilled tuna (金枪鱼) in a lemon-garlic-ginger sauce---eaten from a
bag, of course.