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October 31, 2005
An e-Circular Argument
Good news. Online newspaper readers will no longer miss out on local grocery store circulars. They can thank Gannett - along with a renewed appetite from traditional media for Internet firms.
In June, Gannett bought media marketer PointRoll for about $100 million, itself a coupon-cutter special (the New York Times paid $440 million for About.com; Scripps paid $525 million for Shopzilla. In all, offline media has quietly shelled out over $1 billion this year for online advertisers and marketers). By late August, Gannett, Knight Ridder and the Tribune Company had created ShopLocal, a searchable national database of neighborhood store specials, sales and discounts. The goal was to keep big chain businesses running ads for local outlets in the online editions of local papers. Today, Gannet announced it would soon roll out banner ads on its newspaper websites that work just like old-world circulars: by entering a ZIP code, readers can view discount prices at the nearest store.
Now instead of falling in your lap, it's your laptop.
Posted by Angus Loten at 4:45 PM
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33 Comments
Food Service, Social Service
Imagine a restaurant at which you aren't allowed to pay your bill but can agree to pay the bill of a party seated in the future. And your bill was paid for by someone who ate there before you arrived. Such is the idea behind the Seva Cafe in a high-end shopping district in Ahmedabad, India.
The "pay-it-forward" restaurant also posts its receipts on a wall, donates tips to charity, and encourages patrons to volunteer at the cafe -- as well as eat there. Volunteers examine some of the ideas behind the project, as well as the evolution of the experience.
A worthy idea!
Posted by Heath Row at 12:36 PM
| 6 Comments
Rest in Peace
An executive who led the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency in the mid-'70s, succeeding founder David Ogilvy, died Saturday. John Elliott Jr. started work in advertising in 1945 and retired in 1981.
Notable quote: "Big ideas are so hard to recognize, so fragile, so easy to kill. Don't forget that, all of you who don't have them."
Posted by Heath Row at 9:57 AM
| 5 Comments
Report from the Futurists
Futurists who have tired of being relegated to the second string are organizing to advocate for the value of futures studies. Today, for one day only, futurists are reclaiming Wikipedia's "future studies" topic in what they're calling a "one-day raid."
Starting at 9.00 am Australian time on 31 October and working around the world to midnight, Hawaii time, on 31 October: we will expand, explain, augment, and illustrate both academic and applied activities in futures studies all around the world.
Should be interesting.
[Thanks, Wendy!]
Posted by Heath Row at 9:46 AM
| 6 Comments
October 26, 2005
Break It Up!
Cendant Corporation will become four companies this summer. As the article states on the bottom, this is part of a recent trend of large corporations splitting up into smaller parts. With a possible AOL Time Warner break up to come, the trend is only getting started.
I believe this trend points to companies' need to truly perform and reach consumers, something that seems only possible when a company is focused on a specific product line or market. It seems as this trend continues synergistic and diversification strategies will be forced to the fringes. Of course, some would say many of the fragmenting companies shouldn't have come together in the first place--AOL Time Warner never succeeded like common sense dictated, Time Warner's content reaching AOL's huge membership.
In our reality of information at our finger tips and an infinite number of products and services vying for our attention online, a company's output really has to truly shine and connect with the public. Perhaps that which is the product of small teams in specialized companies will be the only ones do succeed in doing that. Then again, Google keeps expanding.
Which do you think is better: diversification or specialization?
Posted by Kevin Ohannessian at 3:05 PM
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Fast Company... on the Air!
Fast Company Associate Editor Jena McGregor will appear on CNBC Squawk Box at 8:20 a.m. tomorrow to discuss the November issue's list of Fast Cities. Tune in if you can!
Posted by Heath Row at 2:09 PM
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Leading Ideas: The Value of Rough Seas
"A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner." -- English Proverb
Last week I had the pleasure of meeting a man who, despite a severe speech impediment, had become the top salesman at his company. It was such an unlikely story that I asked him how he'd done it. He joked, "with a lot of bruises and scars." He went on to say, "Not surprisingly, the road was terribly tough for me. I was awful in the beginning -- and it lit a fire under me. It made me work harder than everyone else. I resented it then, but I've come to realize it was a blessing in disguise."
Posted by Doug Sundheim at 9:45 AM
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October 25, 2005
Guest Host: Faces of Innovation
I'd like to thank FC Now guest host Tom Kelley for his contributions to the blog last week. I've collected all of his entries in a dedicated category so you can quickly and easily access his posts, and FC Now readers are continuing the conversation in the comments. Feel free to catch up of you missed his entries!
Posted by Heath Row at 7:09 PM
| 27 Comments
October 24, 2005
Two All Beef Patties...
McDonald's has had enough of bad press. The company is pushing a new campaign that promotes the quality of the ingredients it uses in its food. It will reportedly add listings to its Website citing the sources of all ingredients.
If you go to the site now the "food quality" section is still mostly fluff -- without those hard facts about suppliers. Where are the names? The inspection records of those factories and farms? If McDonald's really adds these things it would be a considerable step toward transparency. Posting the nutrition information on the Website was a good start. Now if only they made their nutrition charts easier to find in the restaurants.
Will such transparency help McDonald's undo some of the damage to its brand -- or reclaim some of the business it lost -- because of all the negative attention it received over the last few years? Will seeing that information get you to buy more Big Macs?
Posted by Kevin Ohannessian at 2:55 PM
| 12 Comments
October 22, 2005
Remarkability and the Ten Faces of Innovation
During my week as guest host here at FC Now, I've tried to amplify, explain, or improvise on the Ten Faces of Innovation from my new book that appears in the current issue of Fast Company. Those posts were mixed in with the prolific blogging of other Fast Company editorial contributors, so in case you missed the narrative thread, here's a link to posts about the Anthropologist, the Experimenter, the Cross-Pollinator, the Hurdler, the Collaborator, the Director, the Experience Architect, and the Set Designer.
Collectively, these innovation roles are intended to offer a chance for people feeling stuck in an ordinary work life to have the rewarding experience of being just a little bit more extraordinary. To break up patterns of routine or boredom with the chance to capture fresh insights or master new skills. In fact, maybe The Ten Faces of Innovation is ultimately about the chance to be remarkable, which is also the theme of The Big Moo a new book by Seth Godin and the Group of 33. You can hear the story of The Big Moo at Remarkabalize.com or at Seth Godin's blog.
Continue reading "Remarkability and the Ten Faces of Innovation"
Posted by Tom Kelley at 5:49 PM
| 12 Comments
October 21, 2005
The Secret Power of Space
If you're a Set Designer at heart, you probably have people tell you that office space doesn't really matter. "People can work anywhere," they'll tell you. "Just give them a desk and a comfortable chair." Those skeptics a haven't discovered the secret power of space.
One of my favorite metaphors for the power of space comes from the world of baseball. Growing up in northeastern Ohio, my “hometown” team was—for better or worse—the Cleveland Indians. Throughout my childhood, all the way through my twenties and thirties, the Indians were one of the sorriest teams in American baseball. The Chicago Cubs admittedly had a worse win-loss record some years, but at least the Cubs were lovable. And when Hollywood was looking for a sad-sack team to lampoon in the comedy “Major League,” the Cleveland Indians were the team they chose.
Posted by Tom Kelley at 7:25 PM
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Better Science Through Video Games
Want to make your kid smarter? Tell him to put down that book and pick up a joystick. Playing video games is actually more of an intellectual challenge than reading, says Steve Johnson, author of “Everything Bad is Good for You” at Friday afternoon’s session of PopTech!
“Decision making doesn’t happen the same way in books as in games,” he says. “Video games teach the scientific method: Build a working hypothesis, test it, and if it doesn’t work, try again.
“The ability to make the right decisions at the right time based on the information in front of you is the very definition of being smart,” he says.
Posted by Linda Tischler at 6:50 PM
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URL Hell
It seems GoDaddy.com has a new service, appraising the value of domain names. There are two price points, one with two-hour turnaround and one with a more comprehensive report that takes two business days. While this is a logical extension of GoDaddy's business, I wonder if it's a good thing for the Web.
While the frenzy for domain names has heated up again, I would hate to see domain names becoming even more of a commodity, with companies and speculators once again buying and selling names at absurd prices. That kind of land grab could have disappointing consequences for individuals and even small businesses. Users who want premium URLs for genuine purposes may be burned. And for what? When a corporation finally gets the URL it's likely to simply redirect surfers to its main site.
Of course, that's only if this appraisal service speeds the renewed rush to snatch up domains. Do you think such frantic buying will occur? Do you think the common user will be left out?
Posted by Kevin Ohannessian at 4:42 PM
| 4 Comments
Architecting Experiences
Inspired by Pine and Gilmore's ground-breaking book, The Experience Economy, great companies have gotten into the experience business in a big way. Ask loyal cutomers about the "Starbucks experience," the "Lexus experience" or the "Nordstrom experience," and they can tell you stories to support their strong feelings about those brands. At IDEO, we encourage even product-oriented companies to focus on the "verbs" not the "nouns" in thinking about the actions, the behaviors, the experiences that customers associate with their brands.
If you are an Experience Architect who help crafts such offerings, look for ways you can provide more behind-the-scenes opportunities for your customers. Done right, they not only help build a bond with you customer but also help them understand your business better.
Continue reading "Architecting Experiences"
Posted by Tom Kelley at 4:19 PM
| 8 Comments
China and Us: Are We Toast?
Discussions about China’s encroachment on U.S. competitiveness often end
with the comforting idea that we’ll be OK because China is several
economic transformations behind us. They’re moving from agriculture to
industry, the argument goes, while we’re moving up the economic ladder
from industry to services.
Don’t get too cozy with that notion says Oded Shenkar, Ford Motor
Company Chair of Global Business Management at Ohio State University at a PopTech! Session called “The Chinese Century: Are We Toast?” “We’re in uncharted territory,” he says. “There is no precedent for any major economy based solely on services.”
Posted by Linda Tischler at 12:43 PM
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Must-Have TV
Congress, according to the New York Times today, has now mandated that all TV sets must be digital-capable by April 7, 2009 (which, for you sports fans, is one day after that year's NCAA basketball championship game). What the heck does this mean?
A couple things. First, if you own one of the 20 million TV sets that still uses rabbit ears, you'll lose out. You'll get no reception at all. (Hey, at least you caught that last game.) Not to worry, though. Congress has earmarked $2 billion for you and your Luddite friends to buy you a set-top box so you can adapt your old set to receive the digitized signals.
Second, we'll all be getting a bunch more channels. Think CBS1, CBS 2, CBS3, ABC4, ABC5, ABC6, etc. Kinda like BBC3, or HBO Family. This is because when the signal space now occupied by those networks is converted from analog to digital, they can slice it a lot thinner, thus fitting more channels into it. And you thought there were too many cable channels already.
Continue reading "Must-Have TV"
Posted by at 11:58 AM
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Frog Soup at PopTech!
Day Two on PopTech! Earned the distinction as the Conference Most Likely to Induce Whiplash. The morning sessions were devoted to dire predictions of the incipient meltdown of the planet, the afternoon to the potential of video games to save them –- or at least the hope that kids smart enough to play “World of War” will also be smart enough to figure out a strategy to save our sorry butts.
Mark Lynas, author of “High Tide,” showed truly alarming pictures of glaciers taken 10 years apart. If anybody doubted that global warming was for real, these images would put that speculation to rest in a terrifyingly vivid way.
Lynas, who’s British, made no bones about his contempt for the current American administration, but politics aside, his data should strike fear in the hearts of the most recalcitrant nay-sayer.
Temperatures are higher than they have been for 5,000 years according to glaciologists from the Andes to the Alps, he says. Stuff that’s been buried for this long is suddenly bubbling to the surface. The World Glacier Monitoring Service (run out of Switzerland) –- says 90% of world’s glaciers are retreating.
Lynas ran through a range of scenarios that are likely to occur with one degree of warming, up to six. Even small increases, he says, are likely to trigger dramatic triggers. With two degrees of warming, for example, one third of all species will be extinct. That means the end of polar bears, walruses, and empire penguins. At five degrees, you can say good bye to coastal cities from New York to Bombay.
Why aren’t more folks more alarmed? “We’re like the frogs being boiled in a pot,” he says. With Wilma bearing down, we seem to have passed beyond simmer.
Posted by Linda Tischler at 8:08 AM
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October 20, 2005
Directing is 90% Casting
Hollywood film industry veterans will sometimes tell you that “directing is 90% casting.” The secret of being a great Director is fielding a team of talented people who don't really need much coaching to deliver a solid performance.
In the movie world, Steven Spielberg is the epitome of someone who directs his cast and crew to capture the audience’s imagination, while in business that role falls to people like Steve Jobs, who has proved himself brilliant at motivating his teams to create something “insanely great.” Both Directors have the ability to bring out the best in their teams, often with a contagious enthusiasm that spurs individuals and project groups to extraordinary achievements.
Sure, Directors have the mantle of authority, but the best ones don't have to rely on the power of the hierarchy. I dedicated a whole chapter to Directors in The Ten Faces of Innovation, but the role is more about coaching and mentoring than about being "the boss."
And great Directors--in busines and in film--are content to let others take center-stage, confident in the knowledge that their behind-the-scenes work will make the whole production come together. You never see Steven Spielberg onscreen—-except at the Oscars.
Posted by Tom Kelley at 6:09 PM
| 9 Comments
PopTech! Kicks Off
Given the events of 2005 –- killer hurricanes, radical insurgencies, melting ice caps, threats of pandemics –- the theme of this year’s PopTech!, “Grand Challenges,” has a “ripped from the headlines” urgency.
Stepping to the stage before a sold-out crowd at Camden, Maine’s opera house this morning, curator Andrew Zolli promised the next three days would explore not only a range of catastrophes currently besetting the earth and its people, but also the enormous opportunities for exploration, creativity, and sustainability on the horizon, driven by human ingenuity and invention.
Promising beginning! Unfortunately, the first speaker, Graham Flint, a physicist who is working on a portrait of the world as seen thru gigapixel digital cameras quickly got bogged down in the minutae of the technology instead of demonstrating its cool applications.
Continue reading "PopTech! Kicks Off"
Posted by Linda Tischler at 6:02 PM
| 1 Comment
I Think ICANN
Does the internet belong to America, or to the world? That is the essential question being asked by the UN. They are seeking to have the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that governs internet addresses, absorbed into the UN's International Telecommunications Union. Why? Because UN countries do not like the fact they can't influence the internet (such as President Bush stopping .xxx domains from being established). They also dislike not being able to tax commerce on the internet.
Senator Norm Coleman (Republican, Minnesota) has introduced a new resolution to give the ICANN political protections for the coming World Summit on the Information Society. There is a fear that international governance could result in both taxes that may stifle internet commerce and censorship of websites by governments.
While the internet belongs to everyone, someone needs to watch over. The internet has developed into a network that is infused with freedom and choice, with success of individual sites mostly dictated by the world's users. If control is given to other countries, sites may disappear due to political reasons. Or even worse, disputes will arise between multiple countries and certain issues could stagnate, resulting in a pressing matter not being addressed and UN time being taken up by something as petty as domain names.
I think ICANN has managed things fine. The UN should be moving to insure that ICANN in not interfered with, and that the internet stays as free as it is now -- a global network without borders. It shouldn't be moving to confine it.
Posted by Kevin Ohannessian at 2:50 PM
| 17 Comments
Radical Collaboration: Triathlons Are the New Golf
Golf has always been considered the ultimate business-oriented game, with plenty of opportunity to talk shop on the course and afterwards at the 19th hole. If you're a Collaborator and want to form a real bond, however, maybe it's time to think beyond the golf course. There’s a broad palette of options to choose from. One of my colleagues at IDEO believes preparing gourmet meals together (and then eating them, of course) is a great way to strengthen team bonds. Another friend likes to take clients scuba diving, because it build both mutual trust and shared experience.
But some of the fit young designers in the building next door to me may have carved out the ultimate niche in the world of radical collaboration: they do triathlons with their favorite clients. The trend started when one of them discovered a team member at Daimler Chrysler that was also a serious runner. The next thing we knew, Mercedes was sponsoring them both (complete with team t-shirts and other gear) in a triathlon in Germany.
Now the idea has a life of its own, and the number of triathlons seems to be multiplying. So for example, IDEO-ers Neil Grimmer and Chris Waugh compete every year in the Life Time Fitness Triathlon in Minneapolis—-sponsored by our client, Cargill-—and work on Cargill projects in between. Over a hundred Cargill employees turned out for last year’s event, and the joint effort has built a lot of good will between our firms.
So even if—-like me—-you’re not quite prepared to go scuba diving or run a triathlon with the team, look for new creative options for building camaraderie that go beyond the ordinary.
Posted by Tom Kelley at 2:04 PM
| 3 Comments
Google Those Books. Stat.
As expected, Google's plan to digitize every book ever written is coming under fire. Yesterday, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), the Association of American Publishers filed a court complaint against Google, arguing that its plan violates book publishers' copyrights.
Note to publishers: Hello! Wake up. Quit your whining. You're actually going to make a killing on this deal -- and lord knows you need the help.
Posted by at 11:50 AM
| 4 Comments
PopTech! Kicks Off
Given the events of 2005 – killer hurricanes, radical insurgencies, melting ice caps, threats of pandemics – the theme of this year’s PopTech!, “Grand Challenges,” has a “ripped from the headlines” urgency.
Stepping to the stage before a sold-out crowd at Camden, Maine’s opera house this morning, curator Andrew Zolli promised the next three days would explore not only a range of catastrophes currently besetting the earth and its people, but also the enormous opportunities for exploration, creativity, and sustainability on the horizon, driven by human ingenuity and invention.
Promising beginning! Unfortunately, the first speaker, Graham Flint, a physicist who is working on a portrait of the world as seen thru gigapixel digital cameras quickly got bogged down in the minutae of the technology instead of demonstrating its cool applications.
In conjunction with Google Earth, Flint and his team are currently building a portrait of America, but will soon move to preserve images of the world’s endangered sites in high rez. “Had we photographed the Buddhas before the Taliban blew them up we’d have that forever, but now it’s forever lost,” he says. The images, on display in the opera house, had an HDTV-like clarity. I worried about those rusty bolts on the side of the space shuttle Discovery in one picture.
Meanwhile Rome is “dissolving like an Alka Seltzer because of acid rain. If future generations want to see what the Coliseum looked like, they’re going to have to see it via virtual reality since reality reality will be gone,” Flint says.
Flint ended with an image showing what the camera can do in a useful way – projecting an image of a nude beach in California, with pre-blurred faces to protect the perps. Stay tuned for the debate over the privacy implications of this technology. Check out the project at www.gigapxl.org.
Folks who can’t make it to Camden can watch the conference on ITConversations.com and ask questions via live@poptech.org.
Posted by Linda Tischler at 10:48 AM
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October 19, 2005
The Art of Hurdling
I had the fun-but-scary experience recently of being on a live radio show at KQED, the local NPR affiliate, taking random calls from listeners in San Francisco. One call-in question essentially asked "Isn't some of this innovation stuff hard to do?" The answer of course is that innovation can take work, but can also be REALLY rewarding in the long run. And putting a little extra energy into an innovation role is not nearly as hard or painful as slogging it out year after year in business-as-usual mode, pigeonholed into a narrow workstyle.
The most remarkable Hurdler's achievement I witnessed in my childhood was the post-sputnik race to put a human on the moon. In May of 1961, JFK threw down the gauntlet, challenging the best minds in America to do what seemed truly impossible at the time. And he didn't pretend for a minute that it would be simple.
"We choose to the moon in this decade and do the other things," said JFK, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win."
And they did it, of course, with a focused effort from industry, academia, and government, combining lots of hard work with some luck thrown in. So what is today's equivalent for great Hurdlers, either inside your organization or on a national scale? If we had a charismatic leader and a dedicated constituency, what "impossible" goal could we acheive? Energy self-sufficiency within a decade? Cure the healthcare system? Conquer a disease? What extraordinary hurdles could your group jump, if you set your minds to it?
Posted by Tom Kelley at 7:45 PM
| 3 Comments
Say Nothing
Business advice no longer comes from just conventional sources these days. Though they have neither an MBA or corporate experience on their CVs, Jesus and Ghenghis Khan (among other notable mavens of commerce) are being offered by gimmick-seeking publishers as posessors of sage business counsel.
But I would urge those really anxious for input from the anti-spreadsheet crowd to turn their attention to last week's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter. His advice can be summed up in one word: Silence.
Continue reading "Say Nothing"
Posted by Adam Hanft at 5:59 PM
| 7 Comments
The Graphic Art of Goals
OK, one final tool along the lines of the project storyboards and to-do list and then I'll get off my planning and time management kick. (Interesting how certain things hit your radar more readily than they might otherwise when you're in a certain mindset!)
Lift International's goal map templates come across as somewhat new agey given their goal-setting speak, but the worksheet itself looks eminently productive. By dividing goals into subgoals and identifying what steps need to be taken, as well as what tools you need and who you need to work with, it'll be easier to map your path to a completed project. The worksheet could also aid the development of project proposals because it identifies all the moving pieces and necessary parts.
[via Occupational Adventure]
Posted by Heath Row at 12:40 PM
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Cross-Pollinators in your Greenhouse
Want more innovation inside your organization? I think the secret is to start searching more OUTSIDE. Because no matter how big or successful your company is, there are always more ideas outside than in. For that matter, with 193 sovereign nations in the world, there are also more ideas outside your COUNTRY than in. (Sorry to disappoint nationalists and isolationists everywhere.)
So let others around you read all the same trade magazines, attend all the same industry conferences and talk among themselves about the same variations on a theme. If you have the heart of a Cross-Pollinator, look far afield for ideas that you can translate and adapt for use in your business. That's how metal pie tins thrown by a college student became the classic Frisbee flying disc. It's also how an Inuit technique for preserving fish in the Canadian wilderness became the catalyst for Birdseye's frozen food empire. And how punched cards for creating patterns in silk Jacquard looms became the 80-column Hollerith cards that drove computers for decades. (Younger members of the team may not have even SEEN a Hollerith card, but all of them will have heard of the resulting company: IBM.)
While those three examples of profiting from cross-pollination are all historical ones, the value of the Cross-Pollinator continues today. In the last few years, for example, Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley has urged his entire staff to get at least 50% of their ideas from the outside. And their lineup of successful products may herald the beginning of the end for the not-invented-here syndrome in the business world, since billion-dollar platform products like Swiffer and Spinbrush reflect the work of great Cross-Pollinators at P&G.;
Posted by Tom Kelley at 11:31 AM
| 3 Comments
From to Do, to Done
In line with the downloadable storyboard tools I pointed to last week, I just came across another PDF tool that may be of use. A colleague of mine says that at the beginning of every day, you should identify the One Thing you need to get done. Not started, not in process, but done -- closed, finished.
American Digest expands that somewhat with their Not Insane To-Do List. The downloadable 3-by-5 card-sized tool is simple: You get three to-do's a day. That's it. Three. If there are more, they roll over into the next day's three slots.
While this might seem lazy, I don't think it is. How many things on your to-do list are actually Things to Do? And how many are steps you need to take to get there? (A la, "Call Laura" is not a valid to-do list item... Surely there's something bigger that calling her leads toward.)
[via Focused Performance]
Posted by Heath Row at 11:28 AM
| 2 Comments
The Long, Fat Tail of Content
So USA Today technology columnist Kevin Maney opines today that Barry Diller is no idiot. Duh. He's talking about Diller's recent speech at a technology conference, when he remarked that real talent is rare, which makes the proliferation of user-generated media such as blogging and podcasting much ado about nothing. The real game, says Diller, is to match high-quality content (and the A-list talent that creates it) to new-media delivery systems.
Well, sure. It's not as if no one thought of this. But Maney defends Diller in his piece as if this was news. He says Diller's been proved right by two recent events: Apple's deal with ABC and Google's courtship of AOL.
Continue reading "The Long, Fat Tail of Content"
Posted by at 11:27 AM
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Cover Storied
Congratulations to the Fast Company team for ranking among the American Society of Magazine Editors' recently announced list of the top 40 magazine covers of the last four decades. Clocking in at No. 37, our August 1997 cover for the Brand Called You issue.
Posted by Heath Row at 10:54 AM
| 1 Comment
October 18, 2005
Crack Cocaine for Authors
Regular amazon.com customers may have visited that site hundreds of times without ever noticing one small statistic buried among esoteric data like a book's dimensions or its ISBN. The magic number I'm refering to is called the amazon sales rank, a numeric value recalculated every hour to reflect how a book's sales compare to the millions of others currently listed on amazon. And while READERS may not be aware of the amazon ranking, ask any author about it, and they will know exactly what you mean. Because as an author, when your book is on the rise, that number can become hypnotic, almost addictive. So much so that a senior executive at one of America's largest publishers once called it "crack cocaine for authors," since it is tempting to get a little obsessive, checking in every couple of hours to see if your stats are rising or falling.
To understand why the amazon ranking has such allure, you have to understand how starved authors are for information about how their book is doing. Typically, they get sales data quarterly, with about a 60-day lag, so if you want to know how your book is selling on, say, October 18th, you have to wait until sometime next February to find out. But amazon will actually tell you today. Right NOW, in fact.
And although I am not completely seduced by the amazon sales ranking for my new book, I confess that I have been hearing its siren song for the past few days.
Posted by Tom Kelley at 6:48 PM
| 5 Comments
Hello, I Must Be Blogging
Hi everybody. I'm John Bitzer, a new editor here at fastcompany.com. I suspect I'll be blogging quite a bit in the coming days and weeks, so you might as well know who I am. That way you can put my opinions in context -- and I do have opinions.
I spent most of my career in the music business: first as a musician, then as a magazine editor, and more recently as a web editor. In 1996, I co-founded Allstar, one of the first-ever music web sites. We covered music industry news on a regular basis, launched one of the first email newsletters, and generally had a good time figuring out what worked on the web in those days and what didn't. Later, I performed a similar role as the editor of CDNOW, a big music retailer of the dot com era. It was particularly challenging establishing a strong editorial voice -- with all of the journalistic ethics that entails -- in an e-commerce environment.
In that job, I dealt mostly with the blurring line between content and commerce. That convergence has only deepened in the years since, and I'll be writing about the issues that have sprung from it.
Continue reading "Hello, I Must Be Blogging"
Posted by at 4:37 PM
| 11 Comments
Failure as a Success Strategy
Look beneath the surface of many great business successes, and you're likely to find a trail of failures that preceded them. Describing the painstaking trial-and-error process that led eventually to the creation of the incandescent light bulb--and General Electric--prolific inventor Thomas Edison said "I have not failed. I have merely found 10,000 ways that won't work." Many people would have given up, but Edison had the heart of The Experimenter. Henry Petroski, in his classic book To Engineer is Human, says that in his field, failure is almost a prerequisite for success, because only by reaching a point of failure can you define the limits of possibility. I am not sure I would interpret that idea literally for business vetntures, but I do know that lots of stellar successes are built directly on a series of small failures. British entrepreneur James Dyson reports that he built 5,127 prototypes of his cyclonic vacuum before getting to one that was commercially successful. That dedication to the Experimenter role is truly extraordinary, but so was the reward the now-billionaire Dyson eventually received. At IDEO where I work, we try to maintain a sense of "joyful failure" about quick early prototypes, knowing that learning from those first rough versions will point us in the direction of future successes.
Posted by Tom Kelley at 12:00 PM
| 9 Comments
The Papadam Chase
Ask an American lawyer how secure her career is and she'll probably give you the standard flip response: In a litigation-loving society like this one, there will always be a need for our kind. And at first blush, she'd be right: According to a July 2005 study from the NASSCOM Research Group, the U.S. market for legal services in 2003 was $166.8 billion, which was more than five times the second largest country, the U.K., which spent just $34.2 billion. Japan, by contrast, had a market size of just over $1 billion. We love, hate and most of all, are obsessed with the law and the lawyers.
But that doesn't mean it takes an American to practice American law. The report, on legal-services offshoring, says that U.S. companies are increasingly turning to India, which graduates some 298,000 new lawyers every year, for a cheaper alternative to the high-priced hotshots here at home. The advantages are the same we've seen in other industries, such as expertise in English, a familiarity with British legal traditions and, of course, the salaries, which are 20-30% of their American counterparts. The report is further proof that intellectual capital is no longer safe from the global pressures that we've seen elsewhere in the economy. According to a Forrester study cited in the report, 12,000 legal jobs have been offshored so far, and the number is likely to reach 79,000 by 2015. Could a Bollywood version of Law and Order be far behind?
Posted by Jennifer Reingold at 10:30 AM
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