abt. quotedIn Charge
… So charge. Or at least act like you could if you wanted to.
(abt. solut godin)
Gebranded
these big companies are asking precisely the wrong question. They are asking, “how can we use these new tools to leverage our existing businesses?” They want to use the thing they have (money) to get the thing they need (attention) and are basically trying to force ads onto a medium that just doesn’t want them.
Teil 3 der Mini-Godin-Trilogie: Brands, social, clutter and the sundae
Gefüllt
… We’re running out of disk space, so if you have something left to say, better hurry. Once it’s full, it’s full.
…
… Today, it’s impossible. Today, you can’t even read every article on a thin slice of a thin topic.
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You can’t keep up with the status of your friends on the social networks. No way. You can’t read every important blog… you can’t even read all the blogs that tell you what the important blogs are saying.
Godin: Warning: The internet is almost full
Pulitzer
Godin mal wieder spot on: You’re not going to win a Pulitzer Prize
As newspapers melt all around us, faster and faster, the people in the newspaper business persist in believing that the important element of a news-paper is the paper part.
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What an opportunity (for someone) to start taking advantage of the huge pool of talent and passion that is moving online, and to work to raise the bar.
(zur pulitzer prize gibt’s auch für online kommentare, aber nur, wenn es auf dem ableger eines msm abgegeben wurde, policy)
Newspapers that invested for the long haul, that stood for something, that spoke up. When you can launch a blog for nothing and disappear quite easily if it doesn’t work, the gravitas is a lot more difficult to find.
…
The opportunity, then, is to organize and network and identify and reward that activity when it happens online. Not because the site is owned by a paper or because the founder has connections to the old media. No, because they’re doing work that matters.
Brot und Startups
Paul Grahams Dezember Predigt: Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?
The reason startups no longer depend so much on VCs is one that everyone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much cheaper to start a startup. There are four main reasons: Moore’s law has made hardware cheap; open source has made software free; the web has made marketing and distribution free; and more powerful programming languages mean development teams can be smaller. These changes have pushed the cost of starting a startup down into the noise. In a lot of startups – probaby most startups funded by Y Combinator – the biggest expense is simply the founders’ living expenses.
…
$3000 is insignificant as revenues go. Why should anyone care about a startup making $3000 a month? Because, although insignificant as revenue, this amount of money can change a startup’s funding situation completely.
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Once you’re profitable you don’t need investors’ money. And because Internet startups have become so cheap to run, the threshold of profitability can be trivially low.
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And while founders may not have needed VC money the way they used to, they were willing to take it if offered—partly because there was a tradition of startups taking VC money, and partly because startups, like dogs, tend to eat when given the opportunity.
Aber founders sind auch wie Affen:
Imagine what it would do to the VC business if the next hot company didn’t take VC at all.
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VCs think they’re playing a zero sum game. In fact, it’s not even that. If you lose a deal to Benchmark, you lose that deal, but VC as an industry still wins. If you lose a deal to None, all VCs lose.
Im Umkehrschluss kann man deutschen VCs weiterhin gute bis rosige Zeiten prophezeien. Die Gründerszene ist weitestgehend top down, ein CEO und sein Marketing-Freund haben eine Idee (oft die, die Idee von einem anderen hier auch zu haben, cheap shot), das VC wird immer gebraucht, um dann die Realisierung und die Koordination der Realisierung einzukaufen.
Capitalism now
Umair Haque über How To Be a 21st Century Capitalist
It’s more accurate to say that what’s being destroyed never really existed in the first place. If my car’s a Ford – but I call it a Ferrari – capital hasn’t been formed, and value hasn’t been created. I’ve simply created a fiction – like those we belatedly discovered Wall St was peddling.
(kleiner denkfehler (auch wenn klar ist, was er meint): der wert des ferrari ist natürlich auch nur eine fiktion, siehe etwa)
ReQuoting pt. 32 (The Crowd Goes Wild Edition)
‘I read a great insight about Google – while they set out to passively observe the internet, they are in fact a giant TV camera pointed at the crowd. Wherever it points, the crowd goes wild, flashing their tits and putting up “hi mom” signs.
Damien Morton via langreiter
ReQuoting pt. 31 (Parsimonious Error Messages Edition)
Ken Thompson is known for parsimonious error messages. (The ubiquitous “?” from ed is [in]famous.) He mentioned a (FORTRAN?) compiler once (mercifully never released) that produced only two syntax error messages: JIM and JOE, for “Junk In Middle” and “Junk Off End”.
Tom Duff via langreiter
Brave New World
Umair Haque’s Checkliste für neue Weltordnung:
| (Old) | (New) |
| Choose evil. Industrial era business is unrepentantly and almost sociopathically evil: shifting costs onto others, while striving to internalize benefits. |
Choose good. … The opportunity cost of defending evil for Detroit was never learning how to choose good – and that’s a crucial mistake. |
| Selfishness is self-interest. What’s strategic is supposed to be what’s in the firm’s self-interest. |
Purpose is self-interest. |
| Maximize destructiveness. The goal of orthodox strategy is to destroy the ability of others’ to imitate or commoditize you. And Detroit was a master of the art of destructive strategy: patenting, trademarking, and litigating |
Get constructive. … Can they let demand spark and fuel co-creation, can they co-produce from a pool of shared resources, are they capable of letting value activities be co-managed, are they tuned to cooperate? |
| Seek differentiation. … industrial era differentiation is too often just skin-deep: the same lemons with slightly different marketing, distribution, and branding. |
Seek difference. Ultimately, the problem is simple: differentiation is about perception. Difference is about reality. People in the 21st century aren’t the zombified, braindead consumers of the 20th century. |
| Seek agility. Strategy is in many ways simply the avoidance of crisis – the evasion of threat, weakness, and vulnerability. The goal of strategy as the avoidance of crisis is simple: agility. |
Seek crisis. By insulating themselves from real-world economic pressures, boardrooms also dilute and sap incentives for innovation and renewal. |
| Advantage happens against. Orthodox econ holds that it is through the pursuit of competitive advantage that corporations create the most value most quickly and reliably. … It sought a nakedly competitive advantage – against suppliers, dealers, consumers, and society alike. The result is an industry crippled by structurally antagonistic relationships with labour, buyers, suppliers, consumers, and society alike. |
Advantage happens for. |
ReQuoting pt. 30 (Game Over Edition)
Gegen übertriebene Medienhysterie
anonymer Sticker via gleiche höhe
Wealth
Wealth is not created by financial manipulation, the trading of equities or the financing of banks.
…
The media lemmings, the same ones that encouraged you to get a second mortgage, buy a McMansion and spend, spend, spend are now falling all over themselves to out-mourn the others. They are telling everyone to batten down, to cut back, to freeze and panic. They’re looking for stories about this, advice about this, hooks about this.
Seth Godin in The economy, the press and the paradox
(abt. godin und haque bei geburt getrennt)
ReQuoting pt. 29 (Free Rider Edition)
Not only does Wikipedia have no difficulties overcoming a ‘free rider’ problem, but the site actually has so many contributors that it can afford to squander vast amounts of human time and attention debating whether to toss out work that has already been done but may not meet the community’s standards.
T.B. Lee via langreiter
Got Superorganism?
Kevin Kelly auf alle Fälle got Schreiblust, sein Output nimmt in letzter Zeit zu:
Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism
I define the One Machine as the emerging superorganism of computers. It is a megasupercomputer composed of billions of sub computers. The sub computers can compute individually on their own, and from most perspectives these units are distinct complete pieces of gear. But there is an emerging smartness in their collective that is smarter than any individual computer. We could say learning (or smartness) occurs at the level of the superorganism.
Tactics of Recession
Umair Haque mit einem Text zur macro crisis und was die strategischen Superhirne daraus machen sollten usw.
The first and simplest level is a change in global patterns of savings, investment, and consumption. For too long, the poor have financed the rich. China and other emerging markets have lent to the US so Americans could buy Hummers, McMansions, and Frappuccinos. But this never made sense — it was deeply unsustainable; the macroeconomic equivalent of a giant planetary fossil fuel engine. The days of export-led growth — and it’s flipside, force-fed consumption — are numbered.
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On a second, and deeper level, strategists must rediscover the lost art of authentic value creation. Authentic, long-run value isn’t created through arbitrage or gamesmanship — what we too often confuse strategy for. Games of off-balance sheet accounting, currency hedging, capital structuring, so-called labour arbitrage — where corporations simply shift to the lowest-cost, or most poorly regulated, sources of manpower — don’t create value.
Cockroach Hotel
For years I’ve been telling founders that the surest route to success is to be the cockroaches of the corporate world.
Paul Graham über Why to start a startup in a bad economy
ReQuoting pt. 28 (Collision Edition)
For eBay and Amazon, the twin giants of e-commerce, the financial meltdown has arrived at a particularly crucial time. After years of claiming that their businesses were complementary, not competitive, the companies are now on a collision course.
Amazon has accelerated its courtship of small online vendors, allowing them to sell on its site — becoming more like eBay. And eBay, desperate to revive itself, has decided to emphasize traditional, fixed-price sales of both new and old merchandise — becoming more like Amazon.
Die NYT über den Kollisionskurs von eBay und Amazon via Exciting Commerce
stuff that matters
Um O’Reilly nicht unrecht zu tun, neben dem – eigentlich mit Luhmann vergleichbaren, wobei es bei Luhmann doch theorieinhärent war – Shift der Herausfaktorierung jeglicher Kultur aus der Betrachtungsweise, folgt er seit einiger Zeit – mehr oder weniger als einziger im Valley – Umair Haque in Richtung ‘wir lösen zu kleine Probleme, sind zu kurzsichtig auf die immergleichen Themen fixiert, wo bleibt die Addressierung der wirklich wichtigen Themen, Energie, Hunger, rotten financial und political system, usw.’.
Die Finanzkrise versetzt ihn dann schon fast in eine poetische Laune:
Watchful. Listening. Learning. Not rushing about fighting the small things of the moment but letting the storm wash in. It will change us.
That can be good. And as the storm washes through, it will become clear what we have to do.
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I’ve been quoting that poem in my talks since Why I Love Hackers at ETech in March. It ends with a ringing invocation to work on challenging problems, problems that stretch us, as the wrestlers of the Old Testament were challenged by wrestling with the angel. That seems to me to be the heart of what we need to do now.
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But I also want to point out that rough times are often the best times for creativity, opportunity and change.
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And if you look at history, you see that this has always and everywhere been true. It’s not an accident that economist Joseph Schumpeter talked about the “creative destruction” inherent in capitalism. Great problems are also great opportunities for those who know how to solve them. And looking ahead, I can see great opportunities.
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These are all things we should be doing every day anyway. Sometimes, though, a crisis can provide an unexpected gift, a reminder that nobody promised us tomorrow, so we need to make what we do today count.
The live web
Doc Searls über The Live Web
The Web isn’t just real estate. It’s a habitat, an environment, an ever-increasingly-connected place where fecundity rules, vivifying business, culture and everything else that thrives there. It is alive.
usw.
(via)
Boardrooms
Umair Haque’s five-step construction kit für next-generation businesses.
(1) the central challenge 21st century boardrooms must face is not reinventing strategies, or business models, but reinventing businesses as institutions.
(2) understand how the global economy, beyond all the chatter about bailouts, bankruptcies, and bubbles, is really changing.
(3) understanding that next-generation businesses are built on new DNA, or new ways to organize and manage economic activities.
(4) We need no less than better corporate governance, a working shareholder democracy, a recognition of what capital really is (and isn’t), radically more enduring incentives – aligned with outcomes that actually matter to people
(5) we have to put the meaning back into business.
Al Bundle
Focus and unbundling do not equal shrinking or fragmentation. At least two of the three business types outlined above – infrastructure management businesses and customer relationship businesses – are driven by powerful economies of scale and scope. These economics will lead to increasing concentration and consolidation on a global scale. As an example, look at the process of consolidation that has been playing out for years in the global contract manufacturing industry or global logistics markets.
In fact, unbundling will increasingly become a pre-requisite for creating scalable growth platforms. Focused growth will be much more profitable and sustainable. This is the paradox: companies may need to shed in order to grow more rapidly and more robustly.
John Hagel über Bundles, Unbundling, Dell und die Frage: was macht man eigentlich?