links for 2008-10-31
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"We've found out that having a price is really cool for making profits," Hansson pointed out last spring in an entertaining presentation called "The Secret to Making Money Online." "You have customers, they pay you money for the product or service, and you get profits! It's almost too simple to work." Of course, 37signals didn't come up with this idea on its own, either: "I've heard that over time—hundreds of years actually—this has been how most businesses have made their money."
It's a lot easier to start a nice neighborhood restaurant than it is to start the best Italian restaurant in the world (the Google of restaurants). But just like their bigger brothers, neighborhood Italian restaurants make money. Sure, they don't make as much as the best restaurants in the world, but they do well enough—and it's not nearly as much of a headache to run a neighborhood restaurant as it is to run a place where investors, critics, and the world's press are breathing down your neck.
Popularity: 1% [?]
links for 2008-10-30
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I still believe the chief hindrance to China's long term international competitiveness is not its resources or processes but its values and the impact those values has on its net productivity. If China is unwilling (not unable) to become more productive and let unemployment potentially float higher, they simply have no compelling competitive incentive to become more productive internationally with a well protected home market.
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… killing bad ideas isn’t that hard — lots of companies, even bad companies, are good at that…. What is really hard – and a hallmark of great companies – is that they kill at lot of good ideas…. for any single good idea to succeed, it needs a lot of resources, time, and attention, and so only a few ideas can be developed fully. Successful companies are tough enough to kill a lot of good ideas so those few that survive have a chance of reaching their full potential and being implemented properly.
Popularity: 1% [?]
LinkedIn Adds Outside Apps
Popularity: unranked [?]
links for 2008-10-30
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Large organisations are often incapable of changing course promptly, even in the hands of a capable consultant. So it sometimes makes sense to pursue innovation outside the main business. “You need to remove that risk aversion – one of the key barriers to fostering innovation”, states Attari. He describes a client that realises it has such a large mass moving in one direction that steering from that direction is a near impossibility. “How do they do logical experimentation in developing innovative capabilities that allow them to both test and assimilate while creating this new platform?” The solution is often a Skunk Works where a company can develop a new capability in a logical way, addressing the needs of the marketplace and internally growing and driving profitability growth without having a real impact on the traditional organisation.
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McCain aides now say Palin is “going rogue” and straying from their script. Wow. What a condemnation. McCain sticks to the script. How well is he doing?
In truth, Palin’s real problem is not her personality or whether she takes orders well. Her real problem is that neither she nor McCain can make a credible case that Palin is ready to assume the presidency should she need to.
And that undercuts McCain’s entire campaign.
This was the deal McCain made with the devil. In exchange for energizing his base by picking Palin, he surrendered his chief selling point: that he was better prepared to run the nation in time of crisis, whether it be economic, an attack by terrorists or, as he has been talking about in recent days, fending off a nuclear war.
“The next president won’t have time to get used to the office,” McCain told a crowd in Miami on Wednesday. “I’ve been tested, my friends, I’ve been tested.”
But has Sarah Palin?
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How do McCain aides get around this dire picture without the aid of strong drink? Let's just say that McCain's campaign now relies on hope more than Obama's does. They hope that the Obama organization isn't as impressive as signs suggest it is. They hope that the greater enthusiasm apparent among Democrats turns out to be less than advertised on Election Day. They hope that the public polls that show a big Obama lead are poorly designed, overstating participation by young voters and African-Americans. They hope undecided voters will all break to McCain in the end.
Popularity: unranked [?]
links for 2008-10-28
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"The infield was tough. The ball would do funny things," Phillies second baseman Chase Utley said. "It was in bad shape. It was not playable."
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Capital is the reward the market gives to good designs. Interestingly, though, the nature of capital changes over the course of a company’s lifecycle. Early on, a company’s capital is tied up in cash and the visions of its founders—but later, capital can be equated with what some economists have termed “know-how.” In classical economics, the necessary economic inputs for production are land, labor, and capital, but know-how—the sum total of an organization’s ideas, plans, and production capabilities—eventually replaces all of them as the economic driver in a modern company. A big part of know-how is derived from customers. Having bought and used a product or service, the customer develops not just an understanding of that offering but, more important, the know-how for what its next iteration ought to be. To capture and leverage know-how, companies must find better ways to understand what their customers know.
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Think of it in evolutionary terms. Innovation is really a form of competition. Why do companies innovate? They innovate for only one reason: to outperform their peers, to create something that their peers don’t have from which they can gain economic benefits. And because innovation is a form of competition, it’s subject to the laws of evolution. If you look at the CPG sector from the macro perspective, what you’ll see is lots of companies introducing lots of new innovations, and it will look like many random events. Those that really meet consumer expectations or change consumer expectations survive — those that don’t, die. Ultimately, the environment chooses which products work and which don’t.
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Management fashion is full of stark choices: Centralize or decentralize? Global or local? Cost or growth? There’s a long-standing proverb in the system dynamics field: “You can have everything you want, but not all at once.” In the 1990s, many consumer products companies decided that they would give up growth in order to have the security of lower expenses. Now they are riding the pendulum back to growth. But in the end, those who succeed in growing their company will do so with all their frugality intact. With an organization design in place that balances the roles of the core, the business units, and the functional infrastructure, they should be able to have it all.
Popularity: unranked [?]
slide:ology by Nancy Duarte
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links for 2008-10-27
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Don't think I'm not a little worried about voting for Obama mind you… just less worried that I am about voting for McCain – here's an excerpt (the WSJ's Murdoch is starting to show):
… growth in government spending outstrips revenues. Fiscal and trade deficits soar. Public debt, excessive taxation and unemployment follow. The central bank tries to solve the problem by printing money. International competitiveness is lost and the currency depreciates. The system stagnates. And then a frightened electorate returns conservatives to power.
The economic tides will not stand still while Washington experiments with European-type social democracy, even though the dollar's role as the global reserve currency will buy some time. Our trademark competitive advantage will be lost, and once lost, it will be hard to regain. There are too many emerging economies focused on prosperity and not redistribution for the U.S. to easily recapture its role of global economic leader.
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A paradox of human life is that the evolutionary forces that have made us cooperative and empathetic are the same ones that have made us prickly and explosive. Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, is a leading theorist in the field of moral psychology. He says the paired emotions of gratitude and vengeance helped us become the ultrasocial, ultrasuccessful species that we are. Gratitude allows us to expand our social network and recruit new allies; vengeance makes sure our new friends don't take advantage of us.
You could say our lives as social beings are ruled by the three R's: respect—the sense that proper deference has been paid to our status, reputation—the carefully maintained perception of our qualities, and reciprocity—the belief that our actions are responded to fairly. In other words, high school may be the most perfect recapitulation of the evolutionary pressures that shaped us as a species.
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Last night came final and irrevocable proof that the country is entering tough economic times, unseen since the 80s: AC/DC have returned to the top of the album charts for the first time in 28 years.
Even by the standards of a band whose commercial success is a given – the venerable Australian rockers have shifted more than 80m records since forming 35 years ago (in the midst of the 1973 oil crisis) – the circumstances of their 16th studio album's British success seem striking.
At one point last week, AC/DC's Black Ice was outselling its nearest competitor, Kaiser Chiefs' Off With Their Heads, by two to one, despite the fact that they declined to release it as a digital download, preferring vinyl and CD.
Popularity: 1% [?]
iPhone Bill
Popularity: unranked [?]
Getting Out the Vote for Barack Obama in Wisconsin
Popularity: 1% [?]
links for 2008-10-22
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