Category Archives: Business & Marketing

The End of Management

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My favorite nuggets from a piece by WSJ Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray:

“Corporations are bureaucracies and managers are bureaucrats. Their fundamental tendency is toward self-perpetuation. They are, almost by definition, resistant to change. They were designed and tasked, not with reinforcing market forces, but with supplanting and even resisting the market.”

“The big companies failed, not necessarily because they didn’t see the coming innovations, but because they failed to adequately invest in those innovations. To avoid this problem, the people who control large pools of capital need to act more like venture capitalists, and less like corporate finance departments. They need to make lots of bets, not just a few big ones, and they need to be willing to cut their losses.”

“The new model will have to instill in workers the kind of drive and creativity and innovative spirit more commonly found among entrepreneurs. It will have to push power and decision-making down the organization as much as possible, rather than leave it concentrated at the top. Traditional bureaucratic structures will have to be replaced with something more like ad-hoc teams of peers, who come together to tackle individual projects, and then disband.”

Mr. Murry’s new book is “The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management.”

Gas Station TV

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My first look at GSTV (Gas Station TV) was at a Phillips 66 station on I-55. It probably took me no longer than 3 or 4 minutes to fill up and I guess there really isn’t much to do with that time, so why not. There were these really short sports/weather/news segments with commercial messages between each. Really can’t imagine someone paying for these but they obviously do. I foresee a time when we pay a premium to AVOID being hammered by ads. Ransom Ads.

“You will not be retiring at 65”

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Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, takes a –for some– scary look at the “extra” five years that most folks will work in their professional careers.

Everyone reading this should take 15 hard minutes to ruthlessly reassess the reality of the “new” final years of their future career. The finish line has become elusive; the goal posts have been pushed back. Based on your current skill set and competences, what do you think your workday will look like when you’re 70? Are you comfortable with the probability that you will be managing employees younger than your grandchildren? Temperamentally, do you think you’ll add more value as a mentor, a partner, or part-timer? More important, what will your (much) younger boss think? Do you honestly believe that, when you have to work five more years than anticipated, you can get away with not being more facile, adept, and productive with emerging technologies? The inevitable aging of the (for now) wealthier Western economies guarantees a surge of innovative device interfaces more compatible with slower fingers and tired eyes. You will, of course, be taking web-enabled professional/technical development courses at 58 or 62 or you will be fired for cause. Whatever your 70-year-old workday scenarios may be, what new or novel skills or experiences do they demand? Do they demand more travel or less? More time immersed in digital environments or less? More interactions with people within a decade of your age or fewer? Are there personal or professional development initiatives you should be undertaking now precisely because those five years present opportunities that the earlier deadlines don’t? The most important slice of those 15-minutes-for-five-more-years should focus on role models. Who are the 70+ year olds whose presence, energy, and effectiveness might profitably serve as the benchmarks for your own? Who are the two 75-year-olds who you would professionally emulate? Write them down. I know my two and why I picked them. But why have you chosen yours? What do your choices say about the kind of person you want to be at the end of your professional life?

I expect this to be less of a problem for me than some. I’m a little more technically savvy than the average 62 year old. I love my job and would love to be doing it when I’m 80. Or 90. But for people who still utter “I just don’t get this Internet thing,” those extra 60 months could be tough.

“A business model in decay”

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“…the creation of content that will be supported by ads is a business model in decay. Abundance isn’t the problem; it’s that the advertisers are now in the content business themselves, and this is a rapidly-growing sector of the advertising world. Advertising is in a full-blown revolution, as company after company discovers they don’t need media the way they used to, because they’ve become media companies themselves.”

Terry Heaton says there is no “content business” anymore and that’s not the business we (his clients) were in anyway.

“We’ve always been in the advertising business, although it sure looked and felt like we were in the content business. Our bottom lines were/are determined by advertising, and that’s the real business we’re in. Media companies need to accept that and move on to finding creative ways to enable commerce in our markets.”

Since posting the excerpts above, I’ve been remembering my days in small-market radio during the ’70s and early ’80s. I was an announcer and program director, but never in sales. We thought of ourselves as “talent.”

It was clearly understood by us that the advertising was the means to the end of creating the information and entertainment (mostly recorded music). We had to pay for all this wonderful stuff we were doing.

What the sales people believed –an management knew– was the news and music and all the rest was merely a way to attract ears for the commercials we sold to advertisers. We were not in the music business or news business… we were in the advertising business.

If you doubt that, go back and listen to this interview with Congressman Paul C. Jones to built the radio station. Or read the recollections of Joe Bankhead, who was one of the stations first salesmen. It was clearly about serving the businesses in the area. They were more than willing to put on any kind of programming that would attact enough listeners to satisfy a sponsor.

Used head stone. Make offer.

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I think the creepy trumps the amusing on this classified ad. First question: What about the immortal remains of Bertrand Goforth? Does he have a new head stone? Why?

If my name is also Bertrand Goforth, won’t the dates be a little off?

Are they hoping someone named Bertran Goforth was buried without a marker, in hopes the family would find a deal like this down the road?

I’d really like to know if someone buys this… and why.

[Thanks to Joel for spotting this gem]

Search “cancel xm radio”

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I cancelled my subscription to XM Radio a couple of years ago and it was such a hassle I shared my experience here. That post continues to generate comments and Google juice. First, the latest comment:

“Even though my credit card expired, they continue to send me bills. I have called numerous times to cancel but they refuse to do it. Instead, they continue to bill me through the mail and call relentlessly for the money. I am on hold now for at least 45 min. This is a problem that every XM subscriber should be aware of.”
How do these lost souls find there way to my obscure little post? Google search “cancel xm radio”

More than 10 million search results and the 2nd one (right after the company FAQ page) is a bunch of folks with horror stories about the company.

Beyond the iPad

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Doc Searls’ fantasy for the iPad involves interactivity with the everyday world:

“Take retailing for example. Let’s say you syndicate your shopping list, but only to trusted retailers, perhaps through a fourth party (one that works to carry out your intentions, rather than sellers’ — though it can help you engage with them). You go into Target and it gives you a map of the store, where the goods you want are, and what’s in stock, what’s not, and how to get what’s mising, if they’re in a position to help you with that. You can turn their promotions on or off, and you can choose, using your own personal terms of service, what data to share with them, what data not to, and conditions of that data’s use. Then you can go to Costco, the tire store, and the university library and do the same. I know it’s hard to imagine a world in which customers don’t have to belong to loyalty programs and submit to coercive and opaque terms of data use, but it will happen, and it has a much better chance of happening faster if customers are independent and have their own tools for engagement. Which are being built. Check out what Phil Windley says here about one approach.”