Step right up! Step right up and behold the wonder of the Carnival of the Capitalists, a traveling weekly roadshow that celebrates the many, many ways in which we earn, manage and spend money to educate and entertain you. Depending on your politics and your mood, they may make you cheer, boo, laugh, cry or scream, but above all, they will make you do one thing… think!

Posts are self-selected, i.e., bloggers submit their best posts of the week, and all those that meet the guidelines are accepted. I have marked my "editor’s choice" in each category with a simple asterisk (*) for those who may want to filter their reading a bit. If your post didn’t get run, it’s most likely because either a) it wasn’t "substantially original" (links and re-posts of others’ articles and posts don’t cut it), or b) you submitted more than one post (you’re supposed to pick your best, not make the host do it).

So without further ado, on with the show!

The Economy

• * Jewelers Dangling takes a look at how the 37% increase in the price of gold since January is impacting jewelry businesses. I love stories like this that take the impersonal numbers we read on the market pages and make them personal.
• Is SOX Dragging Down the US Economy? Yes, says Professor Bainbridge, and new legislation is intended to ease Section 404 requirements for entrepreneurs.
• The Fed’s New Conundrum: Slowing Housing explains the thinking behind last week’s 1/4 point interest rate hike.
• Corporate Debt Financing Is on the Rise, which might be a good thing if it were being used to fund revenue-generating projects, but the fact that it’s being used to fund acquisitions has blogger David Foster concerned.
• An Interview of Abundance argues that we need to have more free-market privatization of health care, not less, and that one of the keys is to have patients make more adult choices about their care. It’s thought-provoking, but I think the interviewee misses the mark on why so many people are uninsured. I’ll be leaving a comment there.
• Getting Transparent continues in the same vein as the previous post, saying that pricing has to become transparent in order for consumers to make informed, rational healthcare decisions.
• Bad Loans in China reports that more than $900 billion is invested through the Chinese economy in non-performing loans, mostly to state-owned enterprises. What does this mean for those who are so eager to get a piece of the action in China? Read and find out.
• Wage Increases for State Workers says that urban workers are reaping the benefits of Chinese economic growth and leaving migrant workers out in the cold.
• Zimbabwe Inflation Hits 1,000% - Imagine using a wheelbarrow to haul enough cash for a simple shopping trip. Yikes! That’s what tyranny tends to do to a country.
• Iranians Blaming Ahmadinejad , Nukes For Sluggish Economy - The Khaleej Times reports that Iranian businessmen aren’t happy about the current extremist president’s recent isolationist moves.

Economics and Capitalism

• * The Friendly Version argues that capitalist theories of justice are more substantial than leftists, or even most right-wingers, give them credit for. In particular, he explains how they can give rise to a duty to implement a Friedman-style "negative income tax", or some other equivalent of an unconditional basic income
  guarantee.
• Social Justice - Who’s In the Right? Are $10-million-dollar salaries justified or not? This blogger says that the only true social justice is "where you receive resources and popularity proportionally to the perceived value of your contributions, and give proportionally to how you perceive other people’s work."

The Market / Investing

• * Return on Capital & Equity Growth explains two of Warren Buffett’s favorite indicators that demonstrate how fast a company can grow the money it has to invest in itself.
• Keep an Eye on the Fundies gives an overview and offers a template for keeping track of a company’s fundamentals.
• Vanguard STAR Fund Performance Analysis shows how just managing the allocations in this balanced fund has produced an 11% higher return over 10 years than an individual investor would have realized putting money in the same secondary funds at current allocations. It never ceases to amaze me how much money can be made just by shuffling it around.
• Ultimate 2006 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting Guide provides links to all the best meeting notes, press coverage and photos from Warren Buffett’s annual confab. The next best thing to being there.
• The Week Ahead is Tom Hanna’s weekly guide to the announcements and events that impact our economy.

Entrepreneurship

• * Please Stop with Your Chinese Math explains that small numbers aren’t necessarily related to easy success and urges entrepreneurs to stop presenting low percentages of a huge market potential to investors as if that means it’s a sure thing.
• Entrepreneurship Gap says that Gen X’ers are not starting businesses at as high a rate as those before or after them, but that it may be a part of where they are in their life at the moment more than anything. Jeff goes on to summarize five ways to start a company without quitting your day job.

Energy

• * High Gas Prices Are Overrated makes a compelling argument that gas prices are not really having a substantive impact on either personal spending or the cost of doing business.
• What’s the Big Deal About Gas Prices? This blogger has a slightly different take, saying that gas prices cut into the disposable income of the bottom 60% of wage-earners, who don’t have much disposable income to begin with.
• Congressionally Mandated Shortages looks at the Energy Price Protection Act of 2006 that is supposed to prevent "price gouging". Of course, it doesn’t actually define price gouging - they have six months to figure that out. I buy Hamilton’s argument to a point - the thing he’s missing here is that neither consumers nor business owners always act completely rationally, fully considering the long-term consequences.
• My Crystal Ball Knows All reports that one year after price caps on gasoline were implemented in Hawaii, legislators are eliminating the caps under public pressure. This is what happens when politicians try to control the market.
• Bursting Into Flames: The World’s Battle for Oil says that for all we may rail against it, the fact is simple: we as individuals have to decide to consume less oil and spend more money on alternative fuels.
• Climate Change vs. CO2 Capture Technology makes the case for CO2 capture technology in order to prevent CO2 emissions from reaching critical levels in about 35 years.

Career / Personal Development

• * Six Steps for Learning Difficult Subjects Quickly offers a strategy for cramming dry and difficult material. This is a great way to expand your knowledge base, or at least not feel completely lost at the next dinner party with all your intellectual friends.
• Goal Setting: Why So Many Fail challenges conventional wisdom about goal-setting. Goal-setting should be simple and private, says Adrian Savage.
• Basic Training for Everyone draws a lesson from the military about the importance of basic skills.

Human Resources

• * 10 Reasons Why Organizations Are Not Able to Retain Employees - A great list, but Ghautam Ghosh leaves off the most obvious one: a better offer.
• Good Will Hunting tells the story of a job reference that perhaps shouldn’t have been used. Lessons here for job seekers, recruiters and former bosses.

Management

• * Gresham’s Law and Leadership makes a compelling case that "the only way to produce a working environment worthy of a civilized nation is to value some things more highly than financial results."
• * Meet the Nick Carr of Organizational Change Management - Cambridge Professor Chris Grey’s new paper, "The Fetish of Change", challenges the idea that constant change is a given and says that the practice of change management has been largely a failure.
• Six Sigma and Employee Satisfaction reports on a recent study showing that focusing purely on customer satisfaction and financial results is short-sighted, and that employee satisfaction must be a consideration for long-term success.

Intellectual Property

• * When Is "Fair Use" of News Media Not? Does the end justify the means? Can a watchdog group use copyrighted material in its entirety under the terms of fair use? Steven Silvers says no, and I agree, as I’ve written about before.
• Wal-Mart Faces Smiley Trademark Dispute demonstrates the complexities of intellectual property law. Before you decide this is one more reason to hate Wal-Mart, read the whole story.

Marketing

• * What Do the Simple Folk Do? According to this corporate marketer, folks at the local florist and fish store have a lot to teach corporate types about marketing. Highly educational for businesses both small and large.
• Starbucks = Coffee claims that Starbucks may be positioning themselves to become a generic word for coffee, a la Kleenex, Band-Aid or Xerox.
• Make Your Baby Stupid Even Earlier With BabyFirstTv deconstructs the marketese of this atrocity.
• Cultivate Loyalty Through Great Customer Service & Support - It’s cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one, and great customer service is the key. Here are four simple steps to better customer service.
• Yvonne Discovers The Power of We looks at female bloggers and sets up Yvonne’s interview on Synergy Weblog (follow the link at the bottom).
• Advertising And Customer Service Are Just Like Family says that advertisers and customer service people don’t tell us the truth — they tell us what we want to hear.
• On Pricing explains value-based pricing and why software developers have such a hard time with it.
• Using Gasoline And Other Creative Ideas To Add Fire To Your Business shows how tying in to current events can add spark to your promotional campaigns.
• Novell: Branding Open Source reports that Novell is following in the footsteps of IBM and others in jumping on the open-source bandwagon.
• Another Green Bus? Green marketing rings hollow if what you actually do is visibly out-of-sync with your marketing message.

Personal Finance

• * Home Improvement Investment lists ten home improvements that should increase the value of your home by more than they cost. The ROI varies greatly depending on the type of improvement and where you live, so if you’re doing this to improvie your home’s value, and not just for your personal taste, invest wisely.
• Another Advantage of Education: It Saves You Money on Your Car Insurance - In states where rating factors can legally include education and occupation, insurers are now charging drivers in certain jobs lower insurance rates. Politically incorrect? Maybe, but the facts are the facts.
• Dance Dance Revolution shows that many of the same strategies for a healthy diet are parallels of healthy money management.
• Time for Medical Checkups says that freelancers need regular checkups, just like employees do, and offers some tips on how to find the time and money for them.

Real Estate

• * 11 Secrets to Buy-to-Let Property Rental Success Abroad offers a checklist of points to consider if you’re considering owning rental property in another country.
• Making Prepayment Penalties Illegal explains why, distasteful though they may be, making them illegal would not be in the best interest of consumers.
• Welcome to 1884 East Locust Place! Ordinarily I wouldn’t include something that is purely promotional, but this intrigued me. This owner/broker is using a blog format to provide more in-depth information about the home than the MLS listings provide. Could this be the start of a trend?
• Home Improvement Investment gets another mention here because it really needs to be in both places.

Business Blogging

• * Business Ideas: Bloggers As Partners shows how to use blogs to identify and connect with potential business partners. I love seeing stuff like this that helps expand the view of new media tools beyond just journalism and marketing.
• When Blogging Meets the Law asks if the 500-word legal disclaimers found on the comment submission forms of many Fortune 500 blogs detract from the blogging experience. I suppose it might if I actually read them.

Miscellaneous

• * Massively Multiplayer Innovation says there are organizational lessons to be learned from massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft and Anarchy Online (my personal preference).
• How to Win Friends & Influence People is, in my mind, still the best book ever written on the topic of "networking". This 19-year-old entrepreneur offers a brief summary and a fresh perspective on it.
• Figure and Ground looks at the growing field of ergonomics. Particularly funny is the study which showed that people apparently make subconscious attempts to ingratiate themselves to their computer.
• Karl Rove at the Salem Communcations Annual Meeting is Jack Yoest’s humorous account of how he spent his wedding anniversary, including an intriguing quote from a Chinese academic about Western culture. If that doesn’t pique your curiosity, nothing will.
• For a Psychic, He Doesn’t Seem to Think Very Far Ahead shows why clairvoyance may be over-rated. Very funny.
• Series 7 is Joshua Sharf’s personal account of the cram course he’s taking to prepare for the Series 7 license. Also very funny ("I’m sure there must be films noir where the husband and the femme fatale can only raise the money to get to Brazil by getting the bearer bonds out of the unsuspecting wife’s safe deposit box."), but practical probably only if you happen to be cramming for the Series 7 yourself.
• The Hypocrisy of Anita Roddick comes down hard on the Body Shop founder who’s calling for a consumer boycott of Nestle, who is a major shareholder in L’Oreal, which now owns the Body Shop. This "guilty by association" chain stretches just a little too far for me - ’tis the nature of the networked world in which we live - but decide for yourself.
• We’re Losing in Iraq, Just Like We Lost in Vietnam - Chuck says that there is good news coming out of Iraq every day, but the mainstream media chooses not to cover it in favor of personnel changes on "The View" and who got kicked off "American Idol". I think what frustrates me is the lack of balance - we have individual shows and commentators that all demonstrated obvious strong biases, but virtually no one in the mainstream media presenting a balanced view.
• Nobel Prize Economics Game “Trade Ruler” shows that Wendy Boswell apparently has a penchant for unfair trade practices. I want to play!

That wraps up this week’s Carnival of the Capitalists - I hope you enjoyed the show! Next week’s carnival will be hosted at The Integrative Stream. To learn more about the Carnival of the Capitalists, including how to subscribe, how to submit a post, or how to host a future edition, visit TheCotC.com.

And if you like the carnival format, I also invite you to add the Carnival of Entrepreneurship, Carnival of Marketing and the new Carnival of Business to your weekly reading.

Personal note: Sorry it’s late - in retrospect, hosting a carnival at the end of a three-day weekend during which I didn’t touch the computer probably wasn’t such a great idea. Future hosts take note.

Via Marc, I was led to a blog post by David Manaster on recruiter efficiency. He reports that “It would seem that (on average) the optimal workload for a recruiter is between 11 and 20 open positions. ”

I’d argue that the main reason for this phenomenon is that most recruiters are using only the traditional toolkit: Excel, Word, email, phone, to keep track of their applicants. Nitron couldn’t function effectively if we were this inefficient. John Younger, CEO of recruiting process outsourcer Accolo, observed:

I actually find this research to be right in line with our surveys for the typical recruiter today. We have found the optimal workload to be between 4 and 18 unique full-time jobs simultaneously. At 18 or more, the applicant screening, follow-up and tracking take a severe dive. The astounding part is that this is the same recruiter workload of 1963! Think about it. What else in our lives has not budged a bit in productivity in over 40 years! This is the time before e-mail, job boards, the internet and Starbucks. The core reason is that the recruiter today operates in exactly the same model as the early 1960’s. All we have done is pave the cowpath. It gets worse… the hiring manager service and applicant experience have actually diminished with all the technology noise in the middle. There are new models emerging, but there is an army of people invested in keeping things the same.

According to a staffing.org survey of 2,294 companies, during 2005, the national average Recruiting Efficiency Index was 12.3%. REI is calculated by dividing total recruiting costs, including recruiter salaries & overhead, applicant tracking, advertising fees, etc. and dividing it by total compensation recruited. Accolo reports an REI of under 7% for clients using Accolo’s system. Among the drivers for that efficiency:
- much higher per-recruiter workload
- use of online networks for recruiting (more on that topic)

Knowledge @ Wharton reports on: MySpace, Facebook and Other Social Networking Sites: Hot Today, Gone Tomorrow?:

Popular social network sites, including MySpace and Facebook, are changing the human fabric of the Internet and have the potential to pay off big for investors, but — given their youthful user base — they are unusually vulnerable to the next new fad. As quickly as users flock to one trendy Internet site, they can just as quickly move on to another with no advance warning, according to Wharton faculty and Internet analysts, who offer some ideas on how these new sites can both increase user loyalty and generate revenues.

From our latest FastCompany column:

Your dream employee is lurking out there. How do you find him or her? To track down those stars, recruiters are aggressively using online tools such as blogs, virtual communities, social-networking sites, and biography-analysis software. Here are some best practices in those areas, drawn from Accolo, Nitron Advisors (my firm), and Microsoft.

(Disclosure: I’m on Accolo’s Advisory Board).

full column

Fellow Ryze member Walter Paul Bebirian and I were having an interesting discussion about the concept of “leverage” and how it applies to networking.

“Leverage” is a term we all have a pretty good concept of physically, but perhaps a more vague concept in business. Perhaps the most common use of it in business/finance is, as Walter pointed out in our conversation, in financial investments where we can use margin to have control over more shares than we could otherwise work with.

Simply put, “leverage” is the ability to accomplish more by use of a tool than we could through our own direct effort. I have an idea of three ways that this can apply to networking:

1. When you have strong enough relationships that people take action on your behalf proactively, rather than just responding reactively, that’s leverage. Your relationship with them leverages their entire network. But it takes a certain strength of relationship for them to act PRO-actively — that’s when it’s leverage. Just having a lot of contacts who only respond to requests doesn’t count. That’s why I tend to favor “quality” (of relationship, not of people) over quantity. As one networking expert put it, “It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you.” If your relationships aren’t above that “action threshhold”, they’re not really serving you.
2. Any time you interact in a public forum rather than one-on-one, that’s leverage. The same conversation exposes you to and connects you with dozens of other people, all for the same amount of effort. When my readers write in at About.com, I reply with a blog post, not a private e-mail. That’s leverage.
3. You can also leverage your writing by repurposing it for other venues. What you write in a discussion forum, use as as a discussion starter in another one, then post it to your blog, include it in your newsletter, and expand it into an article. Walter made the excellent suggestion to take our private conversation and post it. It takes me two minutes, and I leverage the effort I’ve already put into creating the content.

So there are three ideas for applying the concept of leverage to networking. What’s your idea of how to apply the concept of leverage to networking?

Apparently, Gmail’s built-in ‘View as HTML’ functionality, which allows you to view the content of PDF files (and other types of documents) as if they were classic webpages, works regardless of the files’ usage restrictions (i.e., the functionality doesn’t respect Digital Rights Management).

More…

Via Boingboing

Via Mark Hurst of GoodExperience and GEL:

Part of learning to type means learning how to position the arms and wrists. (See more on “learn to type!” here:) http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/000576.php

For years, to cut down on wrist pain, I’ve rested my forearms on a dictionary and a thesaurus, each 5 cm thick. That elevates my forearms above the mouse and keyboard and reduces stress on my wrists.

Last week I spotted in Yahoo News, “Forearm Support May Cut Computer Injuries” :

“An “ergonomic board” that provides forearm support may relieve upper body pain and disorders that can develop from spending extended hours on a computer, a new study suggests. The device, a board that attaches to a desk and supports the forearm, lowered the risk of developing shoulder and neck problems by nearly half and significantly reduced neck, shoulder and right arm pain associated with computer work.”

My favorite, though, was this quote:

“The average cost per board is around $100, said Rempel. The study found that employers would recover these costs within about 10 months of purchasing the boards.”

A hundred bucks? Buy a dictionary (from Gel 2006 speaker Erin McKean, please) and a thesaurus for much less than that!

Andrew Shaindlin (who contributed a sub-chapter of The Virtual Handshake) just co-wrote a good piece on Online Networks: A New Tool for Alumni Relations : How third party social and business networking sites can benefit alumni online communities. His coauthor is Elizabeth Allen, Communications Coordinator at the Caltech Alumni Association.

One of the great ironies (and brilliant aspects) of TheFacebook is that it has monetized the networks of Harvard, Yale, and virtually every other university in the US—without paying them a dime! Andrew wrote this piece to explore how university alumni communities should respond to these new services.

From Jason Dowdell (via Claire Delong of Accolo): Konstantin Guericke of LinkedIn writes:

There are two types of acceptance rates…

1.) Those from invitations
2.) Those from introductions.

Invitations to connect are generally from people you know and trust already, like former co-workers, classmates, etc.. By accepting an invitation, you agree to make introductions for the person when he/she wants to meet people you or your contacts know. Of the people who send over 10 invitiations, 7% have an acceptance rate of 90% or higher. These kinds of conversion rates are unthinkable in traditional marketing, but only possible via word-of-mouth marketing where there are well-established relationships and bonds of trust.

Introductions are contact requests from people you generally don’t know and who are contacting you about doing business via an introduction from someone you know. When accepting a contact request, you are providing your contact information, so you can start a dialog about the opportunity via phone or email. When people receive an introduction, they accept it (meaning they provide their contact info to the sender) 84% of the time. This is quite amazing given that they generally don’t know the sender, and it’s a testament to the fact that business users realy heavily on social filters — they are much more willing to give their attention and respond favorably to someone who comes introduced (even if the sender is just a friend of a friend of their connection) than if they get contacted directly via phone or email where nobody is vouching for the sender and where they can’t easily look up the profile of the sender. It also shows that most users are careful which people they let into their LinkedIn network and that they give signficant weight to the fact that one of their LinkedIn connections is recommending the sender, based on their direct knowledge of the sender or based on the recommendation provided about the sender by someone they know and trust.

What comparable data can other services provide? Any ideas?

I love to read blogs, but increasingly, I find it harder and harder to keep up with all the blogs I’d like to read because there is just so much good stuff out of there. And, of course, it’s all mixed up with a lot more stuff ranging from merely mediocre to just plain pointless.

Recently, I’ve particularly become a fan of the “blog carnival” format, a weekly traveling roadshow of the best of the blogosphere on a particular topic. I got overwhelmed trying to keep up with the dozens and dozens of good blogs out there, and just setting up search feeds on keywords wasn’t giving me a good variety.

Blog carnivals, though, give you a very concise view of some of the best of the blogosphere on various topics. Here are some that you may find particularly relevant:

• Carnival of the Capitalists - 50+ weekly posts about economics, entrepreneurship, personal finance - basically anything having to do with money. I hosted this week’s edition.
• Carnival of Marketing - Seven editor-selected posts on all things marketing.
• Carnival of Entrepreneurship - Inspired by both of the above, I started this back in February and it’s going great guns. If you have a blog, I’m always looking for submissions and hosts.
• Carnival of Business - Newly launched this week.

To learn more about blog carnivals, including what they are, submitting articles, and a list of all known blog carnivals (here’s another), visit BlogCarnival.com. This site is a one-stop resource where you can subscribe to RSS feeds for individual carnivals, submit posts to multiple carnivals, and have some great tools for managing a carnival if you already run one or want to start one.