Category: business
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What a Non-Programmer Should Do In a Startup
Twenty things a non-programmer should do in a startup; a list compiled by Spencer Fry in response to a question asked on Hacker News: Writing the copy for the website. Mainly keeping the support documents up-to-date. Doing all the business related tasks. Doing all the customer service. Handling all incoming e-mail. Doing all of the…
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Environmental Assumptions
Big business is environmentally destructive: a widespread and almost unquestioned assumption. A false assumption, according to Jared Diamond, noting that profits often arise from green initiatives and environmental concern is of inherent importance to many large corporations. The story is told through the lens of Wal-Mart’s transport and packaging initiatives, Coca-Cola’s concern “with problems of…
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Marketing and Spreading Online
Bud Caddell, strategist at Undercurrent, talks with the author of Chief Culture Officer,Ā Grant McCracken, onĀ Bud’s experience of marketing online and how it really should be done–by the small and large companies. This on making something ‘spreadable’: Trying to design a program that reaches mass first, isn’t going to spread at all. It’s not remarkable, there’s…
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On Hiring Talent (Not Just Programmers)
You could hire through open source like GitHub (“we hire ‘The Girl or Guy Who Wrote X,’ where X is an awesome project we all use or admire”) or use a check-list to recognise competency (passion, self-teaching, a love of learning, intelligence, hidden experience and knowledge of a variety of technologies) and no doubt find…
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Apple, Disney and Pixar: It’s the Products
Written in early 2006 shortly after Disney’s acquisition of Pixar in a $7.4 billion all-stock deal, BusinessWeek looks at the relationship between the Disney and Apple CEOs and where their relationship may lead. Prescient in that it accurately predicted the Apple TV and the iPhone, the article also briefly looks at Jobs and his product-first…
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Business Schools Failing American Manufacturing
America’s deterioration as a leader in the engineering and manufacturing fields can be attributed largely to the failings of the elite business schools, suggests Noam Scheiber, Rhodes Scholar and senior editor at The New Republic. Business school graduates are now educated toward high paid financial services jobs, leading gradually to an “era of management by…
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The Societal Value of Various Jobs
The New Economics Foundation has released a report comparing various jobs in terms of the societal value they destroy or generate (pdf). The report was produced to start “a fundamental rethink of how the value of work is recognised and rewarded”āspecifically by creating a relationship between jobs that create a benefit for society and the…
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Anatomy of a Price War
With the recent AmazonāWalmart price war on books and the 1992 airline industry price war as the backdrop, James Surowiecki takes a look at how price wars start, how they can be avoided, and how to (possibly) win at them. The best way to win a price war, then, is not to play in the…
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Cultural Differences in Career Change Perceptions
We all have career transitions throughout our livesāsome by choice, some not. By interviewing workers from Austria, Serbia, Spain, China and the U.S., researchers have determined someĀ cultural differences in how people perceive career transitions, and why they occur. Workers in the United States didn’t ever attribute a career transition to an external cause, such as…
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(Preventing) Manipulation Through Irrationality
Through the theories discussed in Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational (and largely based on the excerpts in Chris Yeh’s outline of the book), two articles have emerged on different sides of one topic: our irrational decision-making in terms of products and purchases. One on how to take advantage of our irrationality when marketing products, and another…