Letters Remain

Tag: business

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Perceived Freedom Threats and Our Reactions

    Perceived threats to our behavioural freedom or autonomy–even inconsequential and trivial threats–provoke instinctive and often unusual reactions. This reactance, as it is known, must be considered in a business context (and is often completely ignored), argues Andrew O’Connell in Harvard Business Review, noting the many unexpected ways we react to perceived freedom and autonomy threats. What’s amazing…

  • 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…

  • MacLeod on Entrepreneurship

    Hugh MacLeod shares a list of random thoughts on being an entrepreneur–a simple list of twenty-six inspirational titbits on business, positioning and success. My favourite five: In a world of over-supply and commodification, you are no longer paid to supply. You’re being paid to deliver something else. What that is exactly, is not always obvious.…

  • 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…

  • Summarising Joel on Software

    Now that Joel Spolsky has ‘retired’ from blogging at Joel on Software (in the format the site has been known for, at least), Jan Willem Boer is reading the entire back-catalogue of entries and condensing the knowledge within each essay into a single sentence (or two). The result is a stunning list of tips on…

  • The Benefits of Side Projects

    The creation of 3M’s Scotch Tape, the Declaration of Independence and Metallica: just three of the stories Ben Casnocha retells to show the importance of innovation through side projects. Is giving away a day a week of your employees’ time worth it? Google executives seem to think so. They cite first the enormous goodwill generated internally:…