Category: business
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Life Advice Through Management Theory and Business Strategy
When Harvard Business School’s class of 2010 invited professor Clayton Christensen (expert on disruptive technology and innovation, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma) to address them, they requested he talk on how to apply management theory principles to one’s personal life. Christensen responded by answering three questions: How can I be sure that I’ll be happy…
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Selling Software on a Shoestring
From the early days of development through to the release and refinement of the final product (and further), Patrick McKenzie has been chronicling his journey as a one-man Micro ISV (Micro Independent Software Vendor). McKenzie has recently compiled a fantastic list of his best posts and this acts as a list of practical advice for…
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The Business of Invention
By separating invention from manufacture we can create a strong “capital market for inventions”, says former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold*, and this will bring about greater creativity and rewards for all concerned. Myhrvold is currently the CEO and cofounder of Intellectual Ventures (a company he freely admits as being “reviled as a patent troll”) and…
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Scaling Success and Bright-Spot Analysis
When there is a large-scale and wide-ranging problem that needs a solution, we shouldn’t attempt to solve it with an equally large solution but instead attempt to break the issue down and find outlying successes to replicate. That’s the wisdom of Dan and Chip Heath–authors of Made to Stick and Switch–saying that to solve complex…
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The Keynote MBA
Truth is, the great value in most MBA and JD programs can be boiled down to 5 to 10 talks, presentations, classes and conversations that changed the way you experienced the world. Following up on this comment, Jonathan Fields presents The Seven Keynote MBA: seven keynote speeches, from a diverse group of people, that together…
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Complexity and Autonomy Key to Workplace Satisfaction
Work complexity and autonomy are the two largest factors in deciding workplace satisfaction, suggested findings reported in a 1985 article in The New York Times. The findings came from research by Dr. Jeylan T. Mortimer and Dr. Melvin L. Kohn and seems to agree with a more recent discussion on the three keys to programmer…
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Journalism Online and Internet Entrepreneurship
In profiling a number of ‘online journalism entrepreneurs’, The New York Times does a good job of providing a relatively cliché-free, high-level overview of the current state of online news publishing. The article looks at the “new breed” of blog-based journalists, a few business models, and the problems associated with advertising online. There’s nothing new…
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Prevention of Attainment Increases Desire, Decreases Attractiveness
Being prevented from obtaining something we desire simultaneously increases our desire for the item and decreases its eventual attractiveness. That’s the counterintuitive result from a study that shows the various surprising effects of “being jilted”. We show how being “jilted”–that is, being thwarted from obtaining a desired outcome–can concurrently increase desire to obtain the outcome,…
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The Landscapes of Gadgets
Stating that modern gizmos (in this example, the iPhone) are no longer just dependent on highly integrated and developed systems for their production, but now also depend upon “a vast array of infrastructures, data ecologies, and device networks” for their operation, Rob Holmes’ “mind-boggling update to I, Pencil“* looks at the landscapes of extraction, assembly…
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Succeeding With Freemium (Case Studies)
A look at how to succeed with freemium, through a number of case studies: Experiment with different freemium models: When Pandora offered 10 hours of free radio before requiring users to pay an annual subscription, the vast majority of their users left once their allocation of free time expired. The company then experimented with a…