Big Picture: Imagine that your financial records were being held by your financial planner (and if you had more than one, each in a separate system) that you were not allowed to view. You trusted your financial planners, but if you asked questions of them, they would reply “Now, who is the financial planner here?”. If you ever did get to see your records and noticed an error, you could not find anyone who was responsible for fixing it. Doesn’t sound like my financial planner, thank god. But change the subject to your relationship with your physician and you aren’t so surprised anymore. Well, you may be surprised about how your medical records are actually kept. In his excellent blog, e-Patient Dave talks about his adventures in Electronic Medical Records and what we can do to make things better. Attention, open source software folks, we may need your help soon.
Networks:Kevin Kelly wrote a book called New Rules for a New Economy in 1998. He has reprinted them as a series of blog posts and they are more relevant today than when they were first published. A recent post talks about the mathematics of networks. Don’t be scared. The math is not difficult but the results are critical to our understanding of social networking.
Video: If you ever get the chance to see Seth Godin in person, do so. If you can’t find the opportunity or want to see what I mean, check out this video from 3 years ago.
Entrepreneurship: Raman Chadha, from DePaul’s Coleman Center for Entrepreneurship writes a great article on venture funding. I have long had the same kind of thoughts on entrepreneurship and whether angel or venture funding is right for even a small percentage of start-up ventures.
Peaks and valleys. Reminds one of a bucolic Colorado vista, perhaps Pike’s Peak and the San Luis Valley. But our lives are driven by patterns that look like peaks and valleys. For example, this is a graph of the stock market for the last 25 years.
S&P 500 1984-2009
Notice the number of times that the chart has significant ups and downs. This is a way that we as humans tend to operate in our domains. We push the level of an activity until it goes beyond a breaking point (or some external event, like 9/11, causes a breaking point) and then instead of slowly returning to an equilibrium level, the system quickly regresses back to a point well beyond a median and we start the cycle all over again. While it is painful to go through these cycles, our historical precedents do tell us that we will come out of the valley and start to rise again within a reasonable time. Over time, these boom-bust-boom cycles have been getting shorter but steeper.
A current example of the boom-bust-boom cycles have to do with credit. The credit markets have acted like a pendulum, swinging from high availability, low rates to low availability, high rates. Some of these changes were due to changed economic policy by our government and the Federal Reserve. A large part of our current credit problem is related to the reticence of banks to take on additional risk, so they have tightened down the requirements for getting credit, to consumers as well as to businesses. I wrote about the changes that Chase has made in their lending to small businesses here. Will this get sorted out? Yes. How soon? Much bigger question.
But not all peaks and valleys correspond to economic events. It has always been instructive to me to watch the technology curves.
My technology journey started with the mainframe. Everything you could want was on the mainframe. It had to be since you interacted with the mainframe via punched cards (yes, I am that old). All by one manufacturer, all guaranteed to work the same way, the only way. Kind of like Ford’s Model T, in any color as long as you wanted black. But soon, we got PC’s and things got colorful fast. Lots of different programs, different interfaces, different data storage, little interaction. Businesses had a hard time utilizing these PC’s; actually IT (or Data Processing as it was called in those days) had the problems. Everybody did things differently. So, they decided to purchase integrated ERP solutions that allowed the entire company to work together cooperatively on planning and executing, counting and selling, paying bills and receiving cash. These also included the support software to ensure it would all work together, the databases, the communications manager, the security systems and the scheduler. Back to the mainframe mentality – easier to manage, but limited in flexibility.
But of course, people wanted their own solutions. So, along came Unix and other open systems. Now it was possible to pick the best of breed solutions for each system need. Flexibility to pick and choose, difficult to integrate and make sure that Program A fed Program B the right data in the right format. It was costly for the software companies to support – they had to have every possible combination of systems to test with and provide their tech support staff with. I likened it to going to a race track and having to make the right choice to win for 10 races. Difficult for anyone and not efficient for the IT staff.
Yesterday’s announcement that Oracle is going to buy Sun is bringing this whole technology cycle full circle. Now one company can sell you the database, CRM Software, ERP Solution, security and hardware to be able to guarantee that all things will work together. IBM and HP are also looking to provide a full course solution. What could happen to companies like Dell, Cisco and Fujitsu? Where does Microsoft play in this arena?
All I can say is that given our history with peaks and valleys, you can expect that this phase of single company providing a full suite will have a reasonable lifespan and another model will come into play. It will be fun to watch this change over time.
Graphics: I recently pointed to the Seth Godin graphics lens which talked about getting better at graphic design. To go one better, Kristin pointed me to this site with 50 totally free lessons on graphics.
Big Idea: Ever wondered what it would take to become a blog writer? I am living that life, but was intrigued by the manifesto posted by Chris Guillebeau.
Economy: Mike Rowe, of Dirty Jobs fame, talks about work in general in this entertaining TED Talk.
Entrepreneurship: As an entrepreneur one thing that we all need to do is to network. Now, I have gone on record as saying that I hate the kind of networking that seems like speed dating. But some helpful tips on how to introduce people well is always helpful. Marci Alboher writes about the Seven Deadly Sins.
Behind the Scenes: Another behind the scenes article caught my eye. If you have ever received the familiar red envelope from Netflix, here is a photo montage that shows you how they do it.
The Big Picture: The germophobes among us who continually use Purell and Lysol have helped to create Antibiotic Resistant Microbes. These microbes have become much more prevalent in our world and will continue to be a significant infectious disease problem. Bonnie Bassler presented a talk at the TED conference this year on how microorganisms communicate which might prove to be useful as we look for therapies for these diseases.
Fun: A quick time waster for those of us who like word games is DeepLeap. A whole game is 2 minutes and is reminiscent of Scrabble.
Marketing: Marketing is an exceedingly hard thing to do well. I love to find examples of people who try, but really “just don’t get it”. This one was pointed out by my friend Kristin. Check out this Twitter from Jason’s Deli:
Happy Passover folks! For the first ever, we are offering Matzo to customers. But I don’t recommend ordering a Reuben on matzo. Oy!
Nice try that they are offering matzo for customers who are celebrating Passover. But, is there any reason that someone who would request matzo would go to a sandwich place for lunch? Perhaps for their ham and cheese on matzo?
Big Picture: Dubai is the new shining city in the desert. How did it get that way and what is coming next? This article explains the dark side of the developing city.
Fun: As father of two umpires, this article by George Will made my day.
Behavior: Last year, I read and thoroughly enjoyed Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist from Duke. He gave a presentation at TED this year on cheating that discussed, among other things, a fake MIT Honor Code, sweatshirts, the Personal Fudge Factor, atheists swearing on Bibles and The Ten Commandments.
Entrepreneurship:Seth Godin wrote today about how to apportion equity in a start-up. His ideas are well thought out and I especially like the idea of appointing an arbitrator right at the start. This advice is all the more important if your partner is also your spouse, best friend or both.
Economy: I posted recently on some ideas regarding the AIG bonus issue. Adam Davidson, writes on the NPR Blog today to tell us to look at the bigger picture and as mad as I was when I wrote about the bonuses, I think he makes some sense.
Technology: I have been a big online mapping fan from the early days of MapQuest. Now, I normally choose Google Maps, for the richness of the experience as well as the ease of use. Today, I found out about www.openstreetmap.org. This is an open source world street mapping program. It is designed to be crowdsourced, meaning that like Wikipedia, everyone can be an editor. It looks a lot like Google Maps but includes user generated features like detailed bike paths near my home that were included by a user with a GPS unit.
Marketing: The folks in the UK have found solace in a bit of WWII history. They have resurrected a poster created in time of war that is eerily appropriate for our current economic conditions. However, the entrepreneur in me, likes this version even better.
Quotable: Justin Wolfers in talking about economics partnerships: “The best way to keep learning economics is to find opportunities to be the dumbest guy in a very smart room.”. I think this is true for all endeavors.
Big Picture:Clay Shirky writes a nice long blog post about the history of the newspaper business and what comes next, by looking at history.
The Big Picture: For some reason, it seems that stories come in pairs; two totally different points of view on the same topic within 24 hours. It just happened to me. I had read a lengthy blog post and comments on MetaFilter about a woman who is confined to a wheelchair who is looking for love. Then along comes a New York Times article written by the husband of a woman with a spinal cord injury. The juxtaposition of these articles certainly makes you think.
By the way, if you ever have a half hour and want to learn something new, check out AskMeFi. There is always something interesting there. But beware, that half hour could turn into much more.
Economy:Richard Florida, an urban studies expert, wrote a very interesting article in The Atlantic about the future of the American urban centers as a result of the economic crisis. My favorite tidbit — Mesa, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, is now larger in population than Pittsburgh, Cleveland or Miami.
Now a question for you (Not in the article). How many state capitals have a smaller population than Naperville, IL? Answer below.
Entrepreneurship: Daniel Tenner writes about the rules about starting a business with a friend. I ran my first business with my wife, so these ideas were near and dear to me. We’re still together, so that says something about how we navigated these waters.
Ever Wonder Why?: Ever wonder why the Nissan.com website doesn’t belong to the Nissan Motor Company? Well, it is a long and convoluted story. It is a bit scary for a small business proponent.
Answers to above: Naperville had a population of 128,358 as of the 2000 census. There are 24 state capitals with a population below Naperville’s: Juneau, Dover, Hartford, Springfield, Topeka, Frankfort, Augusta, Annapolis, Lansing, Jefferson City, Helena, Carson City, Concord, Trenton, Santa Fe, Albany, Bismark, Harrisburg, Columbia, Pierre, Montpelier, Olympia, Charleston and Cheyenne.
Talent:Stephen Dubner of the Freakonomics blog pointed to a poster that he found in his neighborhood in New York. He looked at it as an interesting example of the Talent discussion that has been discussed by Colvin in Talent is Overrated and Gladwell in Outliers. I look at it as an example of entrepreneurship starting early.
Wordplay: I love a pun more than the next guy, so I was tickled by this picture. On so many levels.
Entrepreneurship:Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo.com, wrote a deeply personal and enlightening article in Business Week on What to do if Your Startup is Failing. No sugar coating here, but required reading for any entrepreneur in this economy. If you are still looking for that perfect business idea, check into this post on fear.
Strategy: The chatter around the The Cult of Done Manifesto is increasing. I agree with a lot of this, but what I really love are the posters.
by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist from Duke. He gave a