So Groupon is a real company. But it seems unlikely that it’s going to become a revolutionary company, along the lines of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Most of the companies that have transformed the Web have certain things in common. They have distinctive technologies. They benefit from what are usually called network effects: the more people who use the service, the more valuable the service becomes. (You’re more likely to use Facebook or Twitter when lots of your friends have signed up, and the more people there are who use Google the more accurate its searches become.) Most important, they scale easily, meaning that they can grow very big without much additional effort. To be sure, the more users Twitter and Facebook have, the more servers they have to buy, and so on. But the genius of these companies is that their users do most of the work and create most of the value; once the ball is rolling, it’s the users who keep pushing it along.
“Groupon, Google, and value on the internet”, James Surowiecki in The New Yorker
Why didn’t Blockbuster evolve more quickly? In part, it was because of what you could call the “internal constituency” problem: the company was full of people who had been there when bricks-and-mortar stores were hugely profitable, and who couldn’t believe that those days were gone for good. Blockbuster treated its thousands of stores as if they were a protective moat, when in fact they were the business equivalent of the Maginot Line. The familiar sunk-cost fallacy made things worse. Myriad studies have shown that, once decision-makers invest in a project, they’re likely to keep doing so, because of the money already at stake. Rather than dramatically shrinking both the size and the number of its stores, Blockbuster just kept throwing good money after bad.
James Surowiecki in The New Yorker: ’Blockbuster, Netflix, and the future of rentals’
(Source: newyorker.com)
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
Steve Jobs (via scfk)
(Source: tobia)
reblogged from constantwanderlust
Von Clausewitz summed up what it had all been about in his classic On War. Men could not reduce strategy to a formula. Detailed planning necessarily failed, due to the inevitable frictions encountered: chance events, imperfections in execution, and the independent will of the opposition. Instead, the human elements were paramount: leadership, morale, and the almost instinctive savvy of the best generals. The Prussian general staff, under the elder von Moltke, perfected these concepts in practice. They did not expect a plan of operations to survive beyond the first contact with the enemy. They set only the broadest of objectives and emphasised seizing unforeseen opportunities as they arose. Strategy was not a lengthy action plan. It was the evolution of a central idea through continually changing circumstances.
Definitely the best passage from Jack Welch’s mediocre autobiography, Straight from the gut, p.448.
NEW VIDEO: Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks with James Surowiecki about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis and the future of the economy.
Read James Surowiecki’s piece from this week’s issue on the regulation crisis.
reblogged from newyorker
Another brilliant TED talk by Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland.
We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly – or not at all – because of a stifling bureaucracy.
Warren Buffett’s 2009 letter to shareholders (this should be plastered on the wall of every corporate manager)
She was in the conference room, pouring a cup of coffee, when the other company’s executives and lawyers walked in. They proceeded to discuss the lowest bid they would accept, as if she wasn’t there. ‘They assumed I was the admin,’ or secretary, she says. When the group sat down to negotiate, she adds, ‘Their faces went white as ghosts.’
Why So Few Women in Silicon Valley? - NYT (via nickdouglas, fred-wilson, mikehudack)
reblogged from mikehudack
What I could not get my head around was having to force-fit analysis to a conclusion. In one case, the question I was tasked with solving had a clear and unambiguous answer: By my estimate, the client’s plan of action had a net present discounted value of negative one billion dollars. Even after accounting for some degree of error in my reckoning, I could still be sure that theirs was a losing proposition. But the client did not want analysis that contradicted their own, and my manager told me plainly that it was not our place to question what the client wanted.
From this funny story written by a former BCG consultant about his time at the esteemed firm.
A new frugality, characterized by a strong value consciousness that dictates trade-offs in price, brand, and convenience, has become the dominant mind-set among consumers in the United States — and probably in other wealthy countries as well. Two-thirds of American shoppers are cutting coupons more frequently, buying low price over convenience, and emphasizing saving over spending. Per capita consumption expenditure has declined across demographic groups. Consumer sentiment remains weak. These trends are not going to change, no matter the pace of economic change.
‘The New Consumer Frugality’, Booz & Co
Many of the really interesting business models in the new economy use radically different ways of working. Smart businesses increasingly enjoy the flexibility of using the growing number of skilled, talented, experienced individuals who consult, freelance, design, build, develop, project-manage. A model that puts them in the middle of a talent network, without the overhead. Other businesses are turning traditional models on their head by putting themselves at the centre of communities of skilled contributors and advocates formerly known as customers, enabling development cycles that are many times quicker and processes that are many times less capital intensive than industry norms.
‘Agile Planning’ - Neil Perkin
Maybe the hardest part of leadership—be it leading a company, a family, a relationship or simply your own life—is that often times you don’t know and you still have to act.
The Monster In Your Head (via fred-wilson, wearethedigitalkids)
reblogged from wearethedigitalkids
Buffett always likes a sweetener, and Burlington gives him one in the form of information. He learns about wallboard demand from USG and consumer-credit trends from American Express, but Rose has called the railroad a kaleidoscope of the economy. Rail traffic patterns are a window on commodity, wholesale, consumer, and international trade flows. Buffett is adding this kaleidoscope to what his other CEOs tell him about the “reset of the consumer” to a lower level of spending. They feed him data from Berkshire’s portfolio of companies—sales of building materials, jewelry, furniture, real estate, credit, fractional jets, vacuum cleaners, fabricated steel, newspaper ad lineage, and other products and services. He may now command as much information about the state of the U.S. economy as anyone, including the Federal Reserve—and probably gets his faster.
When CEOs Have Warren Buffett in Their Boardroom - BusinessWeek (via rickwebb)
reblogged from rickwebb
Andy sent me a link to Flattr last week. It’s a service that is setting out to revolutionise how people get paid for online content. I’m always pretty suspicious of any startup that claims they are going to ‘revolutionise’ something, but it’s an interesting idea. These were my initial thoughts:
I love the (generally) uncommercial nature of blogs at the moment, and I wonder how this would change people’s behaviour for the worse. I know that I’d get way more donations for posting “10 steps to becoming a power blogger” or uploading a photo with a stupid caption on it in Helvetica, rather than writing something interesting about how people use the internet or what I’m thinking about life. I’d probably rather not have this in the back of my mind when I’m thinking about what to write on, and I’d definitely rather not read blogs for people who are motivated this way.
When I see that bloggers are doing ‘sponsored’ posts or taking money from people like Nuffnang, they immediately lose all credibility in my mind. If we can find time to blog for free just because we enjoy doing it then everyone else can too.
Not sure about the writing and art direction in the explanation video though!
← Older Posts
Page 2 of 4
Newer Posts →
