skyhawk04kilo said...





I'll be graduating in December with a degree in Accountancy and I have yet to take a class called "figuring loopholes" or "covering your ass". I have, however, had a class about "calculating the odds", it was called statistics. But you're right, statistics is all just fancy mumbo-jumbo made up by bigwigs to rob America. We don't need to know how to calculate odds when making a business decision, we should just do whatever seems right in our gut. That whole concept of risk is totally inconsequential. If only people had paid less attention to risk, we wouldn't be dealing with the sub-prime-mortgage-induced economic crisis right now...

It's weird that you wrote this post today, I just walked in the door from my management class. We learned about Pan-Am, and the reason it went out of business. It had a bunch of business segments, the airline, a hotel chain, and a building in NY that apparently made money somehow. The airline was crapping out, so Pan-Am sold off the building in NY and the hotel to try to revitalize the dying airline, instead of selling the airline to invest more in the successful hotel chain. Look what happened! Pan-Am is no more, but Inter-Continental Hotels lives on. This is just one example (there are thousands of others) of a huge company going bankrupt because it didn't know when to cut its losses on a business segment. When a company recognizes a segment of its business is dying, it's a really horrible idea to keep funneling money into it. Harley absolutely made the right decision here. If they didn't, the losses could keep growing and eventually take down all of Harley. Imagine how pissed you'd be then!

If you really believed what you said about Buell being a winner, you would have gone out and bought a Buell. But you didn't, because you're not about to spend $10 grand on a bike just to prove a point about how much you support a company that represents America. No one else bought Buells either, so now it goes away. That's how companies and economies work on the most basic level. If you think Buell should stick around and continue to operate at a loss, why don't you buy it?

Buell represents the exact opposite of America being a winner. It represents Americans' failure to compete with Japanese and European competition. The demise of Buell will hopefully lead to another American sport bike manufacturer that will make a better bike, one that will actually compete with the other manufacturers' bikes both on the track and at the dealerships.


Seems to me that your example of Pan-Am & the hotel chain just reinforces what Cadd said. To an accountant, selling the profitable hotel chain was dead wrong - but to the person with a passion for the AIRLINE, selling off anything & everything else would have been the only possible choice if it funded one more roll-of-the-dice to get the airline going again. From an accounting point of view, it was the wrong thing to do, and in that case it really was - BUT WHAT IF THE DICE ROLL HAD WORKED???
In the case of Buell, it sounds like Hardley has confiscated the dice before the last few rolls were tossed, which means they've adopted the "bean-counter" outlook. Seems to me they'd have been better served to change the marketing approach & go for exposure somewhere OTHER than HD dealers.