Tag Archives: big picture

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Social Action, Entrepreneurship, Marketing & a Big Idea

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Social Action: Here is an intriguing idea.  If a complete stranger offered to donate money to charity if they could have dinner with you, would you accept?  I love the way that Franke James tells this story.  Why wouldn’t it work elsewhere?

Entrepreneurship: Paul Graham has another winner – Startups in 13 Sentences. Another look at ways to win with a new venture.

Fun: I have talked before about the TED conference. Check out what David Merrill from MIT can do with Siftables, a computerized tile, that he and his team have built.

Marketing: Over at the Startup Blog, there were some good ideas and resources about improving your results from using PR, by focusing your copy on terms that are search engine optimized.

Big Ideas: Yesterday I wrote about Matt Miller’s book, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas.  One of his other assertions in the book hit me pretty hard.  He talks about the Lower Upper class in America.  The Lower Uppers are those at the lower end of the Upper class.  Those professionals, doctors, architects, lawyers, senior corporate executives and the like have been told all their life that the world is a meritocracy – you will earn in accordance with your merit. The financial meltdown has dealt these folks a different reality.  When they see hedge fund managers making billions personally while losing their client’s funds, when they see corporate executives like Bob Nardelli take home hundreds of millions of dollars from Home Depot while not moving the stock price at all, when they see Stan O’Neal rewarded with a severance package worth over a hundred million while leaving Merrill Lynch in a position where it had to be sold — these Lower Uppers, to use a line from the movie Network, are” mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.”  Matt wrote a column in the Daily Beast where he talks about the positive things that might come out of this.

Essay

The Tyranny of Dead Ideas

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I am currently reading The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity. The author, Matt Miller is a former White House aide during the Clinton administration and a contributing editor at Fortune. The premise of the book is that there are a number of dead ideas that we as citizens and elected officials deal with every day. The six that he discusses in detail are:

  • Our kids will earn more than we do
  • Free trade is always good, no matter who gets hurt
  • Employers should be responsible for health coverage
  • Taxes hurt the economy
  • Schools are a local matter
  • Money follows merit

In a remarkably non-partisan way, Miller describes the historical basis of these ideas and how world events have overtaken them.  He then prescribes some ways to change our national discussion on each of these ideas.

Dealing with dead ideas is not only on the national agenda.  Imagine yourself in a room with colleagues and a moderator.  You are trying to solve a vexing business problem.  The moderator urges each attendee to “think outside the box”.  Even with all of the brainstorming techniques available, it is exceedingly difficult to break through our ingrained thought processes.

Essentially, humans use shortcuts in critical thinking.  These shortcuts are called experience.  If we have burned our fingers on a hot stove, we learn that we shouldn’t touch the stove.  But what happens when the environment changes?  If we use an induction cooker, since the range does not generate heat, you can safely touch the stove.

It’s the same in our businesses.  Think about how often we say “Oh, we can’t do a fixed bid” or “We have to offer this product in 30 different sizes”.  What old baggage is holding us up from even thinking about potential solutions?

What dead idea can you challenge today?

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Finance and Google

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Only two topics today, although there is a lot of meat on the first one…

Finance: There has been a lot of talk recently about the future of publishing, especially newspapers.  The financial subscription and advertising models that used to work are not working now; actually they haven’t been working for years, but it has finally caught up with the publishers. 

Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time Magazine, wrote a Time cover story that advocated the utilization of micropayments.  In this model, the reader would pay some small amount to access the articles they wish to view.  The income generated in this manner would fund the operations of a complete news organization, advocates believe.

I am not so sure. There are a lot of problems with this idea, including the transaction costs and the nuisance of nickle and diming customers. Michael Kinsley, writing an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, agreed with me.

Jack Shafer believes that we already have a model for paying for discrete units of information.  We just need to think outside of the box, the browser box, that is.

The debate continues. On the Freakonomics blog, they asked 4 experts their thoughts on micropayments. Ian Ayres believes the solution to be creation of national endowments for investigative journalism by all world democracies.

Another interesting discussion is going on at Harvard’s Law School Blog, where Doc Searles and others are debating the micropayments issue.  A compelling side point in the comments talks about users willingly paying papers for coverage of certain topics.  In other words, changing the entire newspaper business model on its head.

Google: Google has made a couple of announcements this week that add some neat features to some of their products:

Google Docs has added the ability to have validation for cells in Spreadsheets.  This will allow you to check for valid email addresses or dates and not allow bad data to be saved to your spreadsheet. (via Blogoscoped)

GMail has added the ability to define custom colors to its screens.  Now, I am not a designer, so I will continue to use the themes that they announced in November, but if you have the color sense, you can now craft GMail into your style.

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Philanthropy, Brand Execution, Security and Distributed Systems

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Philanthropy: Trendwatching.com writes about Generation G, the generation not of Greed (see Gordon Gekko of Wall Street fame), but of Giving.  In these troubled economic times, it is interesting to see that the generation coming of age now seems to be more interested in the G for giving.
Just this week, a group I am affiliated with held a fundraising breakfast.  This year’s total amount pledged was 40% more than last year and the official I spoke with said that she is seeing this trend at many of the breakfasts she hosts.
Lastly, my favorite Generation G story relates to Adam Carter. Adam is the son of a good friend of mine.  Adam spends about 7 months each year providing funds and manual labor on humanitarian missions in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia as a part of a group called 100 Friends.  The other 5 months of the year, Adam earns his traveling money as a beer vendor at Wrigley Field and US Cellular Field.  He maintains a blog with his current exploits (including a video about his visit to Senegal).

Marketing: Brand Execution. I have a friend who likes to say “It’s all about me.” In her case, it usually is :). But when it comes to your business, it can’t be all about you.  It has to be about the business.  Jeff Leitner has brought this point together with a short riff on American Idol.

I don’t know if you watch American Idol, but every now and then the judges ask the kids why they chose to sing a particular song.
And the kids ALWAYS say it’s because the song means a lot to them.
And, of course, that’s the wrong move.
Sing a song that best shows off your vocals – whether you’ve got a big voice, small voice, high range, low range, big range, whether you can do runs or are particularly good or bad at expressing the lyrics.
I see the same dynamic in business all the time.
Business owners choose locations, hire people, design logos and launch products because they like those locations, people, logos and products. That’s fine that they have taste, but they should leave the taste at home. Choose locations, people, logos and products that will make you successful in your business.

If you have thought through your business and made the vision tight, you can’t afford to bring in extraneous items just because you like them.  If your concept is a classic French bistro, you can’t hang Chicago Cubs paraphernalia from the walls, just because you are a die-hard Cubs fan. You can bleed Cubbie blue in the comfort of your home.  But unless you are opening a sports bar in Wrigleyville, the Cubs stuff needs to stay at home.   Utrillo prints, maybe. In a dark corner.

Entrepreneurship: On Tuesday, I posted about the Open Source Challenge that Mark Cuban had started. Today, Seth Godin talked about it and helps provide future entrepreneurs with some ideas to get started.

Security: Bruce Schneier pointed me to this article on Facebook security. Note than on that page, there is a link to a free Facebook security e-book to pass along to others.

Big Picture: In a post earlier this week, I pointed to a discussion with Amory Lovins where he posited that electric generators will soon be microsized and distributed into a giant web. Kevin Kelly has also broached the same general topic in his article “The Surest Way to Smartness is through Massive Dumbness”.
The future of business is distributed systems. Look at Google. Google could not serve its customers with mainframe systems; they use an extraordinary number of cheap, custom processors. Kevin Kelly’s article highlighted a most basic industry – cement delivery – and how distributed systems (computers, GPS, authority) created a competitive advantage for one company. How can you take advantage of this trend in your business?