Category: business
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Free: Interview with Chris Anderson
Whether you’ve read it or not, you’re undoubtedly aware that Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, has written a new book: Free. I haven’t read the book but can likely guess the premiseāand given thatĀ the unabridged audiobook can be downloaded online I’ll no doubt be giving it a…
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Apple’s Strategy: The Good and Bad
The four major issues with Apple’s current product line and strategy that are “stifling the industry, consumer choice and pricing”, according to Jason Calacanis: Destroying MP3 player innovation through anti-competitive practices. Monopolistic practices in telecommunications. Draconian App Store policies. Wanting to own almost every extension of the iPhone platform. It’s tough to disagree with these…
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The Five Whys
Five Whys is “a question-asking method used to explore the cause/effect relationships underlying a particular problem. Ultimately, the goal of applying the 5 Whys method is to determine a root cause of a defect or problem”. Developed by Taiichi Ohno–one of the inventors of the Toyota Production System–the oft-cited example is as follows: My car…
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Emails Predicting Organisational Collapse
Regardless of content, the email patterns inside organisations may be able to predict approaching crises. This is the conclusion of a study looking at how the communication between Enron employees changed as the company approached its 2001 bankrupcy. [Researchers] expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest…
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The Advantage of Female Executives
Of the top 500 public US companies, firms with women in senior management performed 18 to 69 percent better in terms of profitability than the median companies in their industries. Not only this, but these firms, with around three women in top jobs,Ā scored higher on top measures of organisational excellence by at least 40 percent.…
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Exporting Poor Work Environments
After a long time of successfully managing to avoid the blog, I eventually clicked this past week when I was sent Fake Steve Jobs’ reaction to the news that an employee of Foxconn, one of Apple’s Chinese ‘manufacturing partners’, committed suicide shortly after reporting a missing iPhone v4 prototype. We can’t make these products in…
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The Ideal Creative Workspace
Jonah Lehrer suggests that the ideal creative workplace is “a room with blue walls that feels very far away and is filled with references to foreign countries”. Why would these three conditions be conducive to creativity? Colours can influence how we think (in one experiment, red backgrounds were found to make participants more accurate, while…
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The Benefits of a Classical Education
Asked by Forbes about his Classical education,Ā Tim O’Reilly discusses at length lessons learnt from the classics that have influenced both his personal and business life. A great post looking at how the classics not only influence culture, but the adoption and adaptation of technology. The unconscious often knows more than the conscious mind. I believe…
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Reporting Company Results
I don’t know if this is common knowledge or not (which in my case usually means it is), but Rowan Simpson gives a concise lesson detailing the three ways companies report their results, and how misleading each can be. Size “We made a net profit of $15 million.” Growth “Revenues increased by 9%.” Acceleration “We…
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The Declining and Thriving News Magazines
While Time and Newsweek saw double digit falls in revenue last year, The Economist saw similar sized gainsādespite increasing subscription rates (previously). The Atlantic discusses this phenomenon, looking in detail at why The Economist is thriving in a market seemingly in decline. The Economist prides itself on cleverly distilling the world into a reasonably compact…