Category: business
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How To Be Happy in Business
‘What we do well’, ‘What we can be paid to do’ and ‘What we want to do’ are the sets in Bud Caddell’s ‘How To Be Happy in Business’ Venn diagram. Reminding me of the love–growth–cash triangle (previously posted), this Venn diagram is an infographic worth looking at on an annual or semi-annual basis to quickly…
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The Innovation Deficit
Disregarding software and much hyperbole (not necessarily mutually exclusive), one might think that recent times have been an innovation desert. This is the opinion of Newsweek’s Michael Mandel who believes that the lack of innovation over the past decade may be responsible for America’s economic situation. There’s no government-constructed “innovation index” that would allow us to…
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In Defence of Branding
By comparing and contrasting the “two worlds” of direct marketing and brand marketing, Andrew Chen discusses why metrics-driven marketing shouldn’t usurp that of ‘branding’. The nature of internet marketing makes it easy to have a highly accountable, metrics-driven view – but companies that are highly metrics driven easily overlook hard-to-measure issues like brand and user…
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Frugality and Entrepreneurship
Inc. Magazine has a (possibly too lengthy) profile, complete with the expected insights, of Paul Graham—author of Hackers and Painters, co-founder of Y Combinator, and all-round entrepreneurship guru. Cheap meals are, in a strange way, part of Y Combinator’s formula for start-up success. Graham wants founders to spend as little money as possible. Live cheaply…
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The Experience Response
Mark Hurst, author of Bit Literacy and host of the Gel conference, takes a look at Microsoft’s Bing and discusses the problem with Microsoft’s current strategy and ways they can improve. Customers online don’t respond to a brand marketed to them, they respond to the experience they have. If they can accomplish their goal quickly…
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Crowdsourcing and Creative Deflation
Monday Note uses the case study of LG eliciting designs for future mobile phones to show how crowdsourcing is changing how design is done… and how it’s starting to change advertising, too. Altogether, LG is going to spend $75,000, to be distributed among 43 awards. […] Let’s face it: for a company such as LG, seventy-five grand for…
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Advice for Design and Life, from Milton Glaser
Milton Glaser, the designer best known for creating the ‘I ♥ NY’ logo, offers ten pieces of advice from a life in design: You can only work for people that you like: “all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client”. If you have…
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Online-Only Newspapers: Counterintuitive Trends
Studying the progress of the Finnish financial daily Taloussanomat as it became Europe’s first online-only newspaper, researchers from City University London discovered a number of seemingly counterintuitive trends from the newspaper’s retiring of its print business. Six and a half months after going online-only Unique Users were 22 percent lower and Page Impressions 11 percent down. […]…
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How Reviews Influence Sales (Positive and Negative)
Unsurprisingly, this brief analysis of how reviews influence sales on Amazon equates quite well with my purchasing behaviour; I wouldn’t feel comfortable buying a product with 100% positive reviews unless I knew personally that it was awesome. And a product with less than 15 reviews or so? Forget about it. [A] handful of bad reviews, it…
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Setting Goals: A Good Idea?
Could setting goals be detrimental to achieving our targets? Yes, say a number of “management scholars” researching the issue, but only because they may lead to “bursts of intense effort in the short term” or be too narrow and poorly defined. The comprehensive article looking at their work has some interesting anecdotes and some good…