The Integrative Stream

We’re Hiring!

Want to work on Personally Controlled Health Records? We’re hiring at CHIP for the IndivoHealth team. The first open position is for a top-notch Java QA Engineer, who will be responsible for building an automated testing infrastructure for the Indivo API. We’ll be opening a few more positions over the next couple of months.

Indivo Jobs

Great working environment, close proximity to me, etc.

The Carnival of the Capitalists

As part of my return to full time blogging (after my stint in the Federal government), it is my distinct pleasure to host this week’s edition of The Carnival of the Capitalists. For those who aren’t familiar, the Carnival is a roaming weekly roundup of some of the week’s best blog entries on the subject of business. Good CoTC posts focus on the economy, business strategy, and the practice of management. The carnival generally does not focus on personal finance or job hunting, and posts must be substantial and original – not just a link and comment on someone else, or even on the latest New York Times story. In recent weeks, the organizers have tightened up the inclusion criteria, and I’ve done my best to maintain the high standards that the previous hosts have set.

This week ten entries made the cut, about a third of the total submissions. The last time I did this, I marked a few posts as Editor’s Choice. Under the new, stricter editing rules, I have a few favorites, but they’re all worth reading, and unlike last time you won’t need to spend all morning doing it. Without further ado:

Hiring and Firing

Wally Bock at Three Star Leadership explores how A “War for Talent” mindset can be hazardous to your company. Just because some consultants wrote a book about something doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea. Culture matters, a lot.

Communications & Branding

Aloys Hosman debunks “brand value” in Google most valuable brand. So what?. For what it’s worth, I think he’s right about Google’s brand – but I’m not ready to write off the idea of independent brand value just yet. But brand equity is way too easy to overstate. Almost as easy as it is to destroy.

I enjoyed Josh Dorkin’s description of his logo design process at Time For Blogging. Logos are not the most important part of a business, and we’d all prefer to be judged by the content of our offerings rather than the color of our web sites (with deep apologies to Dr. Martin Luther King). But customers, floating in a sea of options, need all the help they can get.

If I hadn’t been hosting this week, I’d have submitted Good Healthcare CEO Blogs, Bad Healthcare CEO Blogs, in which I compared the blogs of three healthcare industry executives, all of whom have recently adopted blogging. I liked two of the blogs; the third blogger left a comment which triggered Healthcare CEO Blogs, Revisited. So please enjoy my take on what makes a CEO blog, and also an example of a healthy, effective response to criticism.

Entrepreneurship

Silicon Valley Blogger presents 6 Ways We’re Managing Our Finances and Our Emotions While Starting A Business at The Digerati Life. Starting a company is stressful, risky and time consuming, and it’s important to make sure the whole family understands what it means, and is ready to sign on.

Wayne Hurlbert talks about The value of mistakes at Blog Business World. This isn’t new advice, but it’s worth repeating, and Wayne does a nice job presenting the message. If you aren’t willing to make mistakes, you’re unlikely to get everywhere. The plan never survives contact with the enemy, and the business plan (almost) never survives contact with the customers.

You have to love a blog about laundromats, and you have to respect somebody who spends his vacation time touring other people’s laundromats. And some pricing lessons are universal. The Laundry Capitalist contributes Price Wise – Is your Laundromat Keeping Up with the Times? Hint for readers: it doesn’t have to be a laundromat.

Politics and Economics

Jack Yoest sat down with the Administrator of the US Government’s General Services Administration, and the result is a great post entitled How To Cut The Federal Budget at a Government Agency by Lurita Alexis Doan at Reasoned Audacity. A warning: the preamble is a little political, and I include the post without endorsement either way. The meat of the post is insightful and – speaking as a former employee of the Federal Government – spot on. I’ll likely comment on this post further later this week.

For Earth Day, Sean Hackbarth presents The Environment’s Best Friend: Economic Growth at The American Mind.

And the rest…

Tongue firmly in cheek, Ironman presents The Coming Global Trade Superstorm at Political Calculations. Those pesky polynomial expansion models. Actually, you can read this one two ways.

David Aron submitted Gliese 581c and Interstellar Capitalism at The Capitalist League. I had to include this one because of the line “alien societies may be genetically predisposed to socialism.”

That’s it for this week; thanks for visiting, and remember to tip your server. Next week’s edition will be at Race in the Workplace, and you can sign up for email announcements at The CoTC Home Page.

Healthcare CEO Blogs, Revisited

A few days ago I wrote a post on Healthcare CEO Blogs, in which I expressed my disappointment in Steve Case’s Revolution Manifesto blog at Revolution Health. My main complaint was that it simply wasn’t all that interesting, particularly compared to two of the other (arguably) most prominent CEO blogs in the healthcare area.

In this case, disappointment was a function of expectations. I heard Hillary Clinton speak at Yale shortly after she was elected to the Senate. I know she has interesting things to say – on the dynamics of Washington, if nothing else – but she was playing things safe and her speech was boring. My reaction to Case’s blog was similar. Here’s a very smart guy, who built one of the iconic late 20th century companies and is now taking on a very complex healthcare industry. That’s a recipe for interesting discussions, provided one has the time and inclination to go ahead with actually producing the content.

I was up in Boston for meetings much of this week, and when I finally got back to Washington yesterday morning I was somewhat surprised to see a comment from Steve Case. Even more surprising was that he concurred that the blog had been a little dull of late. He also confirmed that he did, in fact, write it himself, and fair’s fair, so I apologize for the insinuation that he didn’t. Reading my RSS feed this morning, I saw not one but two new entries in the blog–and they’re increasingly interesting. I’m not so hubristic as to actually take any credit for this, since with the launch of the Revolution Health web site I suspect he has some more time on his hands.

So what’s the wrap-up here? I’m not entirely sure. The response to my post was spot on, if not necessarily economically efficient given that I’m the definition of micro market media. I’m looking forward to reading Case’s blog over the next few months, and hopefully learning something. And my advice is to follow Levy and Baker’s examples: write about whatever is interesting, wherever you have a unique insight, and without obvious spin – better to admit you can’t write about something than to write about it disingenuously (not that I’ve observed such in this case). The combination builds traffic, but it also builds trust, and trust is a vital corporate asset, especially in healthcare.

Business Networking

It’s a few months old, but I just came across a neat post from Businesspundit: How To Network: For Introverts.

I like Rob’s insights, particularly since we share a similar background. Some people reach out automatically. I think the magic trick, for them, is that they’re utterly unafraid that somebody will say no. I’d say it’s equally important to respect the other guy’s (or girl’s) judgment – if they don’t have time for lunch, they’ll tell you. Invitations are not impositions, or at least they shouldn’t be.

Here’s another thought – connections exist to be used, and there’s nothing wrong with using them on someone else’s behalf.

Control What Can Be Controlled

Case study of the day: sometimes it all works out. Airlines, hotels and travel web sites are not always known for stellar customer service, but sometimes a company just gets it right.

For example, hotels in London. I’ve had a checkered history with my London hotel reservations. I used PriceLine once for a two day stay, and ended up with a nice rate at a nice hotel in Kensington. The hotel seemed to have regretted giving me that rate, since they decided I was only there for one night and, while I was at dinner, cleaned out my room and rented it to somebody else. I discovered this at about 2:00 in the morning. If I hadn’t printed the receipt I might not have gotten into the one remaining room.

My cousin is getting married in London in May, so my entire extended family is converging on the city. My mother took on the task of coordinating hotel reservations, and booked a nice hotel through LondonTown, a London tourism web site that has a better selection of hotels available than Expedia and its ilk. However, through a (family) miscommunication, my reservation ended up a day short. I noticed this today, and emailed the hotel, who told me I had to go through the web site.

Here’s where it got interesting. I looked back at the confirmation email, and it had the name of a real person, rather than “reservations” or some other generic name. So I sent her a note, attaching the original confirmation and asking if they could extend it a day. They are in London, I am in Washington. Regardless, within five minutes my cell phone rang, showing a +44 country code in caller ID, and a very polite fellow named Paul, who had all of the information about my reservation available, was on the line from the web site. He gave me my options (including realizing that, due to rate changes, I could now add breakfast to my reservation for about two dollars), and even called the hotel back to see if they could extend my reservation at the original rate. It ended up being a few dollars more expensive, but I got the impression he’d tried to save me as much as possible, and since the original reservation was in January a rise of a few dollars is acceptable. Within a few minutes everything was resolved.

I found the whole interaction fascinating. They called me from England! That’s service, particularly compared with my prior experience of getting kicked out of my hotel room. I may not end up liking the hotel, but I like the booking process, and I’ll use them next time I need a London hotel room. As a bonus for LondonTown, I’m writing it up here.

There are a couple of generalizable thoughts here:

Control what you can. Booking web sites don’t have any control over the hotel. I haven’t used PriceLine since the Kensington Incident, and not because of anything they did – the hotel miskeyed the fax. This has happened to me before, with an Expedia booking, but since it was detected at checkin and the hotel made good on it, I wasn’t put to any trouble and it didn’t stop me from using Expedia in the future. In that case, the Holiday Inn saved Expedia’s reputation. In the PriceLine case, I never did get my razor back.

Even if they can’t control the hotel, the web sites can control the reservation experience, and that’s what LondonTown did well. They were proactive; I’ve never, in my life, gotten a call from an Internet based company to resolve an issue. The closest was a call to confirm my credit card number. I’ve been told to call (and to wait on hold), but I have never been called until now.

Personalize the experience. LondonTown gave me a name to connect with. It wasn’t the person who actually called me back, but if made me feel like I was interacting with a person who could help me, rather than a faceless call center. Given how quickly the callback occurred, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if everything that goes to that address is automatically parsed out, and there isnt’ anybody with that name at the company at all. It doesn’t matter; mission accomplished anyway.

Use technology to change the offering. I’m old enough (barely) that I remember when calling internationally was a pretty big deal. That’s not true anymore, and it’s just as inexpensive for the call center in the UK to call me in the US as it is to call a fellow Briton, give or take a few pence. Most of it is probably routed over the Internet. The low costs mean that the authority to pick up and call someone in the US can sit at the lowest level of the organization. And getting that call, for an American trying to book a room in London, is a real time saver.

Think about the whole package. If I hadn’t needed to rebook, I wouldn’t have any particular memory of this company. I didn’t even make the original reservation myself. The “high touch” rebooking was a chance to make a sale (after all, I was adding an additional night, and London hotels aren’t cheap), but it was also a chance to cement future sales. I’ll use them again. This kind of thing is even pretty easy to measure – just look at the repeat customer rates among people who have interacted with the call center and those who haven’t. If they’re not collecting these metrics, they should be.

Drop out, Start Up, or Live Your Life

Just spotted a great post analyzing an important question for young entrepreneurs: Should you quit school because you’re brilliant?

The post resonated with me because it was a decision that I had to face when I was (not so much) younger. I joined the team for my first startup, Invantage, when I was still in high school, just as the “Internet Economy” was starting to heat up. The temptation to take a year off, or just start working full time, was pretty strong, but I never seriously considered it–and I still appreciate that our CEO never pushed me to, although it certainly would have been in his best interest if I had. So I balanced work with school, and sometimes both came out behind, but I managed to have a pretty great college experience and the company worked ok in the end.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t occasionally wish that I’d been able to floor it, entrepreneurially, back in ‘99. But I don’t think my failure to do so (or, rather, my success in sticking with formal education) closed any doors. That may be the other crucial insight: there are rarely any unique moments in history. The bubble was a chance for a small number of people, with the right skills and in the right places at the right times, to make a lot of money. But it wasn’t a unique opportunity.

Update, 1:10 EST: When this post showed up in my feed-reader I noticed how pompous the first line sounds. “Because you’re brilliant” is the title of the original post. I didn’t face the decision because I was brilliant, but because the opportunity was there. Hopefully whatever intrinsic capabilities I may possess had something to do with that, of course.

Quick Updates and Brief Thoughts

Three unrelated items:

Our Personal Health Records Conference at Harvard Medical School was a big success. More soon – we’ll be posting proceedings and video from the keynotes.

Utility companies should not charge extra for online bill payment. Pepco (the DC electric utility) apparently does this. You pay more – and more than the cost of a stamp – for the privilege of saving them money. Obviously, I’m paying my DC electric bill with a good old fashioned paper stamp.

All web sites for chain stores should be able to identify mobile web browsers. When a mobile user connects, the interface should optimize for the one thing that you’re likely to be doing when accessing, say, Staples.com, from a mobile phone – finding the nearest store! Needless to say, Staples.com does not do this (and when I did find the store finder, it didn’t work). Google does a pretty good job of this, although it’s hard to get at file attachments from mobile GMail.

And that’s the wrapup for this Saturday morning, October 28th.

Stanford Revamps MBA

Stanford has cut back on core courses, aiming for a more “personalized” MBA curriculum. It sounds like a good idea; it’s also one of the things that attracted me to MIT. After finishing the required first-semester core curriculum you’re free to take whatever you want, although there isn’t much (if any) advising in place to help students craft their curriculum. More flexibility will draw better students to MBA programs.

Carnival of the Capitalists is Up (Downunder)

Leah at Working Solo has done a bang-up job with this week’s Carnival of the Capitalists. Head over for your weekly dose of the best in business blogging.

Dell India Ops Head Interview

Roi Malhotra, Dell India’s head of operations, interviewed in The McKinsey Quarterly on Running a customer service center in India. Registration required. Interesting if you’re interested in how outsourcing works, when it works.

Of course, in this case whether it works (or doesn’t work) is determined by the company. Customers are not always going to be happy, but they’re not always going to be happy with on-shore phone support either.

Online Claims Up

The New York Times reports that as of this year, three-quarters of insurance claims are made online (NYT link, registration required). That’s up from 44% in 2002.

And now, data I can’t source properly: an electronic claim costs $8 to process. That sounds like a lot, until you realize that a paper claim costs $16 (this is from an IBM presentation I recently attended). Surprisingly, twenty minutes of web surfing didn’t produce a good number for total health insurance claims on an annual basis. On the other hand, WellPoint alone processes 2.4 billion claim line items a year, according to this article on payer performance. WellPoint is just one insurance company. Assume 10 line items a claim; that’s 240 million claims a year for a player with relatively small market share (Medicare alone covers 50 million seniors).

Even without making the math fuzzier, there’s still a tremendous amount of money left on the table.

A Lost Customer Service Opportunity

I didn’t want to knock the Carnival of the Capitalists off the top of the site so quickly, but needs must when the devil drives. T-Mobile, my mobile phone provider, just lost an excellent opportunity to make a customer very happy. What follows may start to sound like a rant, but it gets back to business at the end.

A few weeks ago, I was down in Washington, DC for some meetings. The meetings went very well, and I flew back to Cambridge a happy man. I remained happy until the following morning, when I determined that my cell phone was still in DC. Best bet is that it ended up in the taxi. Within 15 minutes I was down at the T-Mobile store in Harvard Square, having the phone canceled and a new SIM card inserted into my old Nokia. A few days after that I went back and upgraded to a new service plan and a T-Mobile MDA Smartphone. This was about three weeks back.

About an hour ago I was sitting on the couch paying bills, and took a look at my just-arrived T-Mobile statement. $412. Apparently, at some point before I realized the phone was missing, somebody made a dozen calls to Pakistan, totalling about $350. This was all before I realized the phone was even missing.

I called up T-Mobile support, and was told, basically, to buzz off. They weren’t rude, per se, but the attitude was that I didn’t report it, so it wasn’t their problem, and there was nothing they could do. I spoke to a supervisor who gave me the same line. At the end of the call, nothing, although I did learn that they don’t have any screening programs in place to identify odd calling patterns (something the credit card companies have been doing for years, probably because they’re actually liable).

The truly annoying thing is that I expected this to be an easy thing to resolve. The phone was stolen, I reported it as soon as I noticed (although at the store, not on the phone), and this is the sort of thing they must deal with all the time. Fifteen minutes on the phone and we’re done, right? All of my previous T-Mobile customer support experiences have been excellent; I would have rated them var better than Verizon was. I was not just a good customer, I was an evangelistic customer.

So T-Mobile gets an extra $350 from me. What have they lost? Well, for one thing, I’m very unlikely to renew with them, and if I hadn’t just bought an expensive new phone (now past the 14 day return period, of course) I’d drop them right now, particularly as I’m doing less international travel and don’t need the world phone capabilities as much. Once my contract is up, I’m gone. And I spend about $600 a year on mobile phone and data services.

And they’ve lost me as a satisfied customer. In the past, I’ve encouraged people to use T-Mobile and spoken highly of their data services and hotspots. I know for a fact that at least two people went with T-Mobile on my recommendation. I don’t know what plans they went with, but call that $400 a year in revenues for each. I won’t be doing that anymore. And, of course, I’m currently writing an angry blog post about it; can’t imagine that helps any, although I should be honest and admit that I don’t think it’s going to hurt them much either.

But from a pure cash flow perspective, they’re out $600 a year from me, a cash flow they otherwise might have had in perpetuity. Having a process in place to credit me back for $350 in obviously fraudulent charges would not have been too high a price to pay for that, particularly since the real cost is probably a lot lower: the margins on international calls are reasonably high, particularly for cell phone carriers.

T-Mobile probably doesn’t want to make credits too easy; otherwise support will be deluged and the impact on the bottom line will be substantial. Adverse seletion issues abound. But by not giving their staff any lattitude at all the customers with legitimate grievances (albeit initially with the taxi driver, airplane cleaner or whoever found my phone) don’t get helped, and then they aren’t customers any more.

There are some generalizable lessons here. First, give your customer support people the ability to help customers in situations where the psychic impact is high. It pays off. In this case, I had a phone stolen, which was bad enough, and then got hit with hundreds of dollars in charges. Customers in that kind of situation represent an opportunity, and not just to bill for calls to Pakistan! Help me out, and I’m going to be willing to overlook all sorts of things, including the lousy T-Mobile coverage around MIT.

Second, one bad experience can cancel out any number of good experiences. Loyal customers are sometimes used to being smacked around – look at Apple through much of the 1990s – but that tolerance ends quickly when confronted with a multi-hundred dollar invoice.

The Carnival of the Capitalists

Welcome to the May 22nd Edition of the The Carnival of the Capitalists! For those visitors to the site who aren’t familiar, the the CoTC is a weekly roving roundup of the best business, investing and career management posts in the blogosphere, as nominated by the authors. Anyone blogging on business topics is eligible to participate. See the web site for more information.

For those who know the carnival but don’t know this blog, The Integrative Stream is a collection of short articles, links and general pondering from the perspective someone who’s been an independent consultant, CTO of a small software company and writer on technology issues, and is now in the middle of an MBA at MIT Sloan, on the principle of better late than never.

It’s been a lot of fun editing this week’s submissions. As per usual, most of the submitted posts have made the carnival. However, I did drop some posts which I felt lacked substantial original. A few blogs submitted every post for the week, and those got ignored too. For blogs which submitted too posts, I went with the one I found more interesting. The themes for the week seem to be international business ethics and network neutrality.

An Editor’s Choice doesn’t necessarily mean that I agree with the argument; but it does indicate that I respect the research and thought that went into the post and had some fun thinking about the issues. You might too.

Thanks for visiting, and don’t forget to check out next week’s host, Working Solo.

The Philosophy of Business

• Isaac Schrödinger defends Exploiting the Poor. Of course, it’s not that simple. Having grown up in Pakistan the author adds some first hand observations, and reminds the reader of some fundamental (classical and behavioural) economics.
• Starling David Hunter continues Email Conversation with an MBA Student at The Business of America is Business. Professor Hunter moved on from MIT Sloan right before I arrived at MIT Sloan. I wish he hadn’t.
• Wayne Hurlburt just thinks that good business ethics Change the World.

Managing

• Professor Steve Bainbridge takes an anthropological approach to Meetings and Dominance Rituals: Implications for Corporate Governance at ProfessorBainbridge.com. I was motivated to try to apply his analysis at my next meeting, so this one warrants an Editor’s Choice.
• In Predictably Unpredictable, Carmine Coyote of Slow Leadership takes a crack at the difficult issue of models. Computers make it easier than ever to gather vast quantities of information, but how much data is too much data?
• Michael Wade of ExecuPundit makes a case for why organizations need mavericks. A nice reality check if you get too worried about the occasional prima donna in the cubical farm.
• David Maister brings us Why Should I Help You? at Passion, People and Principles. It’s hard to be a supplicant, but most people can do a better job of it than they currently manage. Editor’s Choice.
• K T Cat at The Scratching Post suggests thinking about Process Improvement As a Current Liability. He (apparently, the author is a black and white tabby cat) is focusing on large-scale, corporate projects. It’s important to differentiate process improvement activities from process overhead, which can also be thought of as a current liability. What looks like overhead today can save your bacon tomorrow.
• A century ago, Frank Woolworth resorted to selling hammers disassembled — the head and handle separate — to maintain his promise that everything in the store was five or ten cents. From 1903 to 1970 Hershey shrank its chocolate bars 12 times to avoid crossing its own nickel price barriers as costs increased. What did they have in common? Constant values. Bob Pritchett suggests avoiding them, whether in software of strategy.

Public Policy

• On the Libertarian front, Brian Gongol has A Public Decision-Maker’s Checklist.
• Leon Gettler of Sox First writes about The SEC and the Jargon Maze. Plain english disclosures? It’s so crazy that it just might work. This is an issue close to my heart–and not just in regulated industries. Editor’s Choice.
• Jack Cluth at The People’s Republic of Seabrook raises important issues involving alligators.
• Tom Rants reviews reasons to mess with markets?.

Career and Employment

• Jacob Cazzell at SuccessMinders.com reminds you to Give value first. Paychecks will follow.
• Jack Yoest has 3 Questions for Your Prospective Boss.
• Mark at SportsBiz looks at the Psychic Income Appeal of playing for the WNBA.
• Brandon Peele at GT reflects on his time with a recent employer in SunTechnics & Me. There are some job search-and-selection lessons to be learned here.
• More ideas for personal growth from Adrian Savage.
• David Lorenzo suggests that you Be the Best.

Business of Technology

• Jon Kay at Centrist Coalition has Everything You Wanted to Know About Network Neutrality. Excellent analysis and an Editor’s Choice.
• cehwiedel at Kicking Over My Traces comments on Net Neutrality, in the context of providing access to telecom services.
• Barry Welford says that [ I’m Feeling Lucky ] Out | [ Search Blogs ] In. He means the buttons on the Google Home Page.
• Scott Milener at The Browster Blog laments the end of the New Economy in Supernova Party – Not Quite Like Its 1999. The other day I was in a meeting and CommerceNet came up. The operative quote from the conversation was “Wow, the last time I read about them it was in The Industry Standard.” The parties were just better back then.

Personal Finance & Personal Business

• Brian at Financial Reference looks at The Role of Financial Advisors. That’s the role they play now, not the role that they should play in the future.
• Need to get motivated? Todd suggests you Learn to make money by emulating people who make money.
• Josh Cohen at Multiple Mentality has Gas Price Tips
• David A. Porter advises that you Beware of Mortgage “Rescue” Firms.
• Dan Melson at Searchlight Crusade presents Real Estate Boycotts and the current state of the SF housing market.
• Steve Mertz writes about how good record keeping helped claim a pension from a previous employer. In this case, $29,871.63 worth. His story does nothing for my own packrat tendencies.
• Free Money Finance has a theory of How the Middle Class Can Get Back on Solid Financial Ground.
• Bob Vineyard reminds us that we have insurance Because Things Happen. A very good health economics point, as well. Insurance doesn’t just
  improve health outcomes after disease strikes – it can engender habits that make disease, or at least acute disease, less likely.
• A Samuel at New Homes Blog has
  5 rules to follow for buying an off-plan property.
• Paul at Paul’s Tips presents Ten good rules-of-thumb for investing.
• Nina Smith at Queercents talks about Team Effort. It’s not a good idea to leave financial leadership to just half the couple.

Impersonal Finance

• RJH Adams at Capital Chronicle presents Equity Markets: Crunched by Deteriorating Liquidity?
• nickel at fivecentnickel.com notes that Bankruptcy Filings are on the Rise
• Dominic Basulto at Business Innovation Insider tells us why My 500 is better than your 500
• Ed at Daily Dose of Optimism saw that Bill Miller is Down on Commodities and decided to take a closer look.
• Inflation may be on the rise, according to Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture. And apparently folks are catching on..
• Econbrowser notes the dilemma posed for the Federal Reserve by this week’s data suggesting both an increase in inflation and a slowdown of real economic activity. Stagflation wasn’t much fun the last time. Editor’s Choice
• Chris Welch examines Cramer’s “Cyclical Investing and Trading” Chart at InvestorGeeks.
• frugal has some Ramblings on Illegal Immigrants, Globalization, and Inflationary Pictures at My 1st Million At 33.
• Joe Kristan looks at backdating stock options at TaxUpdateBlog.com/a>.
• Japanese Stocks Nose Dive, Japan ADRs & ETFs Next? from Steve Towns at ETF Investor.

Entrepreneurship

• Yaro Starak at Entrepreneur’s Journey provides a Paypal Review from the merchant’s perspective. The same author writes at Small Business Branding about How To Throw Away $500. Australian money, though.
• Dave Navarro has some coaching on 10 sepcific actions for a healthy, growing small business. Keeping normal business hours is something that I can heartily endorse from my own startup and consulting experiences.

Sales and Advertising

• Kevin Hillstrom at MineThatData describes the ‘Multi Channel’ Myth in direct marketing. He starts by positing that the direct marketing industry is in the middle of a strategic collapse, and builds from there. I read this one with great interest, as I’ve recently had the good fortune to hang around with some of the marketing models theorists and practioners here at MIT. Editor’s Choice, and bonus points if you can come up with a new business model for direct sales.
• Steve Mertz at Sales Presentation Training gives a Sales Presentation Tip-Don’t Waffle. Good advice.
• Jim Logan tells us why Your Full Service Real Estate Professional has wasted an opportunity.
• Steven Silvers of Scatterbox presents a PR conundrum: Army chief backs off of war documentary because it has all that pesky war stuff in it.
• Le Centre at Centrerion Canadian Politics explores an Ethical Dilemme[sic] Facing Google Adsense Publishers.
• Abnu presents Naming Restaurants Down There at Wordlab.

Office Life

• The oft-amusing Big Picture Guy at Big Picture, Small Office asks why financial summaries have to boring in The Long and Short of It. I’ve sat through a few of these. It’s also worth noting that BPG got this submission in right at the 3:00 cutoff for Blog posts. Why bother with leftover time before the deadline?

Niches and Riches

BusinessPundit suggests avoiding Chinese Math. “Chinese Math” is the common practice of beginning a business pitch with “the market is huge, and all we need is 10%”. And common it is: even I’ve heard it enough to be tired, and I’m not a VC, Angel, or other reads-business-plans-for-a-living type. Landing those first couple of customers is key, regardless of market size. Savvy investors will want to know how you plan to do that.

All of which is amply summed up in Rob’s post. Here’s my two cents: this kind of thinking doesn’t just stop funding; it stops entrepreneurs cold. I wonder how many good ideas have been left on the table because the potential founders can’t tell themselves a good story about how big the market is going to be? So maybe, after ten years, you end up with a hundred million dollar a year company rather than a five hundred million dollar a year company. That might be just fine. And you might be surprised. Why sit around waiting for the big score that may never come?

As my marketing professor used to say, “in niches there are riches.” Actually, that was just last fall, so I’m sure he’s still saying it. Niches don’t need Chinese Math (or huge populations). They need execution. Ok, maybe that’s just harder.

TV Online

Fox Network just announced a contract renegotiation with their affiliates. The new deal will allow them to offer 60% of their prime time schedule online the day after the show first airs. ABC, of course, has just announced that they will be airing shows for free on the web, funded by unskippable advertising. ABC and NBC shows are available on iTunes.

There’s been a lot of talk about this trend, so I won’t waste time recap. However, it’s a great idea. The general consensus is that the networks are “under assault” by digital video recorders. People skip ads, and the whole television broadcast model will fall apart. This is broadly true. I wrote about the future of digital television back in 2002, arguing that DVRs would, all else equal, encourage a drive towards subscription channels like HBO. At that point I didn’t expect video on demand to come to market so quickly. My current Comcast cable system gives me a surprisingly large menu of programming options, and the selection is only going to grow. Without Comcast On Demand I would never have seen Marlon Brando in “The Appaloosa.” So the jury’s still out.

It’s worth looking at ABC’s move from a product development perspective. Why do consumers purchase DVRs? To time shift programs, and to skip commercials. These are not equal imperatives. It’s easy to determine which is more imporant – how much would you pay for a machine that let you do one, but not the other? I’m not sure I’d pay very much for a machine that only skipped commercials (or for scheduled programs that didn’t have them in the first place). But I know it’s much less than what I would be willing to pay for a service that would let me time shift programs but wouldn’t let me skip commercials. The fact that I’d pay even more for both is somewhat irrelevant.

ABC is solving the problem that affects the consumer the most, and doing it in a way that seems sustainable. That’s smart business. The iTunes project is complementary – viewers who are willing to pay a little more to skip commercials can do that. We’ll see what things look like in a few years, when bandwidth and video quality are higher and more PCs have the connectors that link them to TVs (Apple’s iMac is a step in this direction).

Micropresentations

The best presentation may not be much of one at all. Seth Godin points out most presentations are given to large groups of people who aren’t very good at presentations. Maybe we’d all benefit if the people giving those presentations had access to an alternate methodology. Specifically, walk up on stage and ask “Any Questions?”

It’s an interesting idea, although I’m not sure that I buy it. I tried an experiment in my MIT Communications for Managers class, which backfired rather dramatically. Since PowerPoint feels artificial and enforces a linear view of events without a whole lot of nuance, I gave a presentation backed with only a few PowerPoint slides that I pulled out at various points. My theory was that narrative, punctuated by a few visual aids, would be more effective.

I got marked down because I didn’t include a slide with an agenda.

Wal-Mart Bloggers

I barely have time to keep up with prolific business blogger Starling Hunter. Since I’ve been thinking about online promotions lately, this post on Wal*Mart’s blog strategy is a good read.

The Business of America is Business: The NY Times Takes on Wal-Mart

McKinsey on in-house software development

McKinsey & Company has an interesting article on in-house software development. Some good points on the challenges of productizing in-house innovation.

Registration required, but it’s free for their web exclusive articles.

The McKinsey Quarterly: The next generation of in-house software development

Effective Delegation

As I continue to weather out the blizzard by catching up on the blogosphere, I’ve come across Thinking Faster’s guide to Delegating for Fun and Profit. Simple and easy to absorb, as is all the business advice that people actually manage to remember.

Update 2/13: For a two sentence post, this one had a surprising number of typographical errors.

Biomedical Enterprise Program in FT

My graduate program, the MIT Biomedical Enterprise Program, is the focus of an article in the Financial Times today. My friend Rupa (who is also here in New Zealand this month, although working with another firm) gets the lead mention. I haven’t done my autopsy yet. Next year.

The BEP is a young program, so it’s nice to see the profile rising.