Posted by Mikal Lewis on December 3, 2009 under Analysis | 
Second post in the ‘Is Nook a Kindle Killer?’ series by Mikal Lewis, coauthor of Notsocommoncents & CEO of nascent Technology Startup Qworky.
At the conclusion of the last post on Barnes & Noble’s strategy I wrote:
What I would do if I was Barnes and Noble:
- Discover what business you’re in. You’re not in the book selling business. You decided that long ago when you let Amazon run away with online book retailing. . .
While this follow on has been delayed- lets resume there.
Step 1
Barnes & Noble must discover the business they are in- they stopped being in the book selling business when they ‘let’ Amazon run away with online book retailing. Much as Yahoo has discovered they are not in the search business after Google similarly ran off with the search market- Barnes & Noble must come to grips that their business is not about selling books.
And of course its easy for me to say they let Amazon run off with the online book selling business but- if they didn’t let Amazon, who did? There is plenty of room for innovation in online book retailing (not just eBooks either)- but Barnes & Noble is still behaving ambivalently. For example compare the two homepages for books:
Amazon vs. Barnes & Noble (go ahead click through)
Notice something? One company behaves as if price matters, the other doesn’t (opting instead to showcase ambiguous numbers like 50% off – yeah, but you were 60% more expensive).
People buy online because of price. Don’t believe me- JPMorgan “Internet Team 2007 Consumer Survey” cited the number one reason people buy books online is price (86%+ of respondents across income ranges)- with selection being reason number two (73% of respondents) and it drops off starkly from there. Lets face it with gimmicky members clubs, buy this discount card to save more money on books, and with the limited selection of the store, we don’t have it but if you drive to this other store might have it, just wait 5 minutes here while I call them and have them locate it on the shelf if they can find it, Barnes & Noble gave away this market.
If Barnes & Noble were in the bookselling business they’d have bet the house in order to increase relevancy in the digital era “If we don’t have it in stock at our store- we’ll ship it to you for free”, pushed the envelope for giving Barnes & Noble customers a digital inventory of books they’ve purchased- commit advertising to its brand and highlighting the ‘essence’ of what Barnes & Noble’s stands for, I posit Barnes & Noble : Books :: Hallmark : Greeting Cards. I go to Barnes’ & Noble all the time but I can’t say what their brand is about vs. say a Borders- bigger stores? More sitting room?
Barnes & Noble’s true Business
In Pour Your Heart Into It, Howard Schultz defines Starbucks’ value as a 3rd place. It’s not home, it’s not work but it’s this third place where you can see people, meet and interact. With a lot of societal shifts that have occurred- Starbucks came along just as a time when our culture demanded a third place, to feel connected, the most. Starbucks grew based on the value and the promise of its brand as a third place, they monetized this through selling premium coffee. Of course I’m trivializing the value of the coffee intentionally, only to focus on the importance the social aspect of this accessible, and inviting third place was that filled a void- the local pub may have for blue collar males in a different era.
Barnes & Noble should take heed. Their business is not selling books, their business is selling knowledge, and experiences. To simplify today they sell knowledge & experiences through two means: selling knowledge- non-fiction books; selling experiences: fiction books.
Selling Knowledge
Selling knowledge doesn’t have to be in the form of books, in fact Barnes & Noble has an asset Amazon cannot match at least not in the next five years- the physical presence of their stores. If Barnes & Noble were to realize the value of their ‘selling knowledge’ – they would, for example, utilize sections of their floor space for ‘learning centers’.
Imagine for a moment. Today if you want to continue education or learn in a new field you enroll in university, a community college, or . . . buy a book. There has to be an opportunity to ‘right size’ lessons in the way the information is scaled down to fit into self directed texts. If I want to learn to cook, why simply sell me a recipe book, when you can sell me a recipe book + Wednesday Night at 6pm class? There has to be lots of categories ([Category Name] for dummies, anyone?) that are waiting to be explored. And as any great chef rotates their menu, Barnes & Noble in the area could rotate their course and classes to cover most subjects at a price point and a distribution point that would be otherwise unmatched.
If Rosetta Stone can get $600 for learning a new language- how much would one pay for a lifetime classes on speaking a language?
Selling Experiences
I personally think this area is a bit more tricky- but in short the books people know and love, in many respects could be translated into other forms of experiences. Why wouldn’t Barnes & Noble be the brand to help book authors translate their experiences into games, sound tracks (what music might be on the lead character’s playlist?), documentaries, or movies. Perhaps Barnes & Noble could custom generate the accompanying manual for the books they sell- is it a period Novel on life in Rome? Why not sell the accompanying guide on life in Rome during that era to help augment the book- with images of areas described within the novel etc.
With a little programming magic- accompanying guides and info books for most of the major best sellers could probably be generated on demand extracting information and excerpts from books Barnes & Noble already sells.
And Step 2
Get out of the eReader hardware business, even if you win and build a profitable business- you lose, are you really expecting to over take Amazon as a digital brand? How long do you think eBook Reader margins will hold? My bet is they mimic the PDA with everyone selling an eBook reader at relatively low margins within three years. Barnes & Noble should figure out how to sell white label solutions and infrastructure to the companies that want to pursue this model- to challenge Amazon. And keep in mind, Amazon is fighting on multiple fronts- they have decoupled selling eBooks from the selling eReaders; which means Amazon may be fighting to get their bookstore on potential partner devices as well.
Step 3
Good luck!
–
In many respects as industry shifts and competitive environments change- it is on us to to focus on the value we deliver to our customers. Doing so and framing our marketplace accordingly will often open the door to unique opportunities in open competitive space. Of course after we identify these opportunities the fear of being pioneers often paralyze us into inaction. But that’s for another post, perhaps best covered by innovation strategist, Qworky cofounder and friend Jon Pincus.
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Posted by Mikal Lewis on October 23, 2009 under Analysis |
In a word. No.
Barnes and Noble execs (hopefully) know it, Amazon knows it. Everyone except for PC magazine knows it. But I don’t blame David Coursey’s cursory commentary, after all someone had to write the obligatory five reasons why… list.
Silicon Alley one of my favorite blogs has a good list of reasons explaining why ‘Nook is toast’ if you need a good logical reason.
But of course I’ll tackle this from the notsocommoncents perspective.
The biggest threat to Barnes & Noble is its not a digital brand. Ebooks are inherently digital. And while Barnes and Noble likes to tout itself as the No. 1 Bookseller Brand, the true data doesn’t lie. Amazon is the number 43 global brand as ranked by Interbrand. Barnes & Noble, not on the list.
Amazon is sells more media (books, CDs, and DVDs) in the U.S. than Barnes & Noble + BN.com- book sales alone aren’t broken out.
More people primarily buy books online and at a far greater frequency:
(Percentages, Source: Zogby, The Reading and Book Buying Habits of Americans)
Ok, so it’s clear, online is the dominant retail channel, Amazon compares favorably with Barnes and Noble, despite retailing online only, and Amazon’s brand has global clout. There is still one more data point Barnes & Noble should pay attention to when deciding to go to war with Amazon digitally:
(Data is in the Thousands 000s; Source: The Nielsen Company as cited on company blog Jan 2009)
Amazon is the 800 lb gorilla in the digital realm. They are mimicking Apple’s iPod strategy beautifully and I think their expansion to PC applications and iPhone applications are genius. Amazon Kindle needs to expand to new retail partners soon though- while 77 percent of people buy books online, gadgets are purchased offline. Amazon has already proven the Kindle can sell well digitally:
“Kindle has become the #1 bestselling item by both unit sales and dollars – not just in our electronics store but across all product categories on Amazon.com. It’s also the most wished for and the most gifted. We are grateful for and energized by this customer response,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “Earlier this week we began shipping the latest generation Kindle. Its 3G wireless works in the U.S. and 100 countries, and we’ve just lowered its price to $259.”
Source: Amazon’s Huge 3rd Quarter
As a product planner/strategist, it continues to surprise me the lack of strategic rigor that goes into big corporate decisions like this. The capital invested in this defies logic.
What I would do if I was Barnes and Noble:
- Discover what business you’re in. You’re not in the book selling business. You decided that long ago when you let Amazon run away with online book retailing. . . [Intrigued? Stay tuned for part two ... suggested strategies for Barnes and Noble]
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Posted by Justin McDowell on September 5, 2009 under Analysis, In the news |
When I first heard the news Oracle – Sun merger, I had high hopes that given a quick transition there would be some interesting disruptive effects.
This immediately threatens IBM who for years have used less expensive, home-grown hardware to propel sales in higher margin enterprise software. Oracle not only acquires the hardware to implement an end to end solution, but it acquires a very extensive software platform with the crown jewels being Java and MySQL, a technology that has propelled many companies looking to expand online. Oracle also acquires Solaris/OpenSolaris and thus fulfills its needs to own its own flavor UNIX based operating system which will no doubt further antagonize Microsoft and more importantly leave Oracle less dependent on the excessive churn in the myriad distros of Linux. — Justin McDowell — Jabian Internal Blog
While the DOJ has approved the merger the European Union recently launched an antitrust investigation that will grind the close of this merger to a slow walk. IBM, HP, and Dell have been using a serious ground and pound game to lure customer scared that their platform/server of choice will not be supported by Oracle, and for good reason. Oracle has been known to raise licensing rates after a successful acquisition – and kill products not in it’s core strategy. Developers have been forking projects and exiting the building in droves.
I still think all is not lost. Oracle will still have Java, MySQL, Solaris/OpenSolaris, and Xen. I think the question we should be asking ourselves is what else in the “stack” does Oracle need to acquire before it could theoretically run your data center top to bottom, and have a significant desktop software footprint (i.e. OpenOffice). IBM, HP, and Dell might be winning in the short term sales but none have made the strategic investments to be a single source provider.
A notsocommon prediction: Oracle still wins, but not by as large of a margin if it could have closed this merger in July.
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Posted by Justin McDowell on September 4, 2009 under Uncategorized |
Wear Your Colors
Here at notsocommoncents, we love and support collegiate athletics. We also love Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University. I hope you take the time to wear your colors, whatever they may be.
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Posted by Justin McDowell on August 19, 2009 under Analysis, Notsocommon Ventures |
This is the second post of a two part blog series on some exciting news and future blog topics
Welcome to The Resume Lounge
After much delay, I am proud to announce the second piece of news. True to my word, you are going to get some inside access into The Resume Lounge as we start up and get our sea legs. So let’s start from the beginning:
We are Getting Real at The Resume Lounge, and that is already paying dividends operationally and philosophically.
We started on this journey realizing that even though our core team is located in the metro Atlanta area, our schedules would still lend towards working independently. Members of our core team all have full time jobs so we tend to burn the midnight oil, or rise early in the morning to work a couple of hours on the project. Therefore remote collaboration is essential to our success. Price is also a big deal. We are a non-profit and my default answer when it comes to spending my time or money is NO. I knew from the very beginning that we needed to be as laser focused on our mission and our tools needed little to no maintenance and needed to get out of our way. Lastly, none of us are using the same hardware and software. These requirements naturally lend itself to the notion that we needed a web office. We simply don’t have time to manage all of this ourselves, we have people to help. So without further ado here are some of the tools we are using to get things our work done:
Balsamiq Mockups – We use this extremely useful and flexible tool to mock up designs for our website and collaborate with our designers and developers. It makes my life at The Resume Lounge easier. I sent an email to Valerie Liberty at Balsamiq explaining what we are about. In 10 minutes Valerie sent us a free license. We can’t thank you enough Valerie (our thank you letter is in the mail)!!! Follow her on Twitter, she has interesting things to say.
Backpack – This serves as our company intranet and group scheduling calendar. We store all of our appointments, legal documents, our board of directors meetings minutes, our expense receipts, our staff meetings…. etc all. Anytime we need a quick webpage created or a quick to do list thrown up that isn’t worthy of a formal “project”, we put it in there.
Basecamp – We need a simple and flexible collaboration tool to help us with project management. It keeps us on the same page and soon we will roll this out to our partners and sponsors so we can keep track of what they have going on. It truly lives up to its motto “The Better Way To Get Projects Done.”
Highrise – is a dead simple customer relationship management tool. It helps James and I keep track of who we talked too and what was said. We need to keep track of our open deals (they might be pledged donors that we need to follow up with, a proposal for services that we will need to pay a third party vendor for, or corporate sponsorships) and if they were won or lost.
Gmail – We use gmail for our email platform, and Google Talk for our instant messaging capability. We occasionally use Google Docs.
MailChimp – We use MailChimp to create and track our email marketing efforts. There automagic integration with Highrise and attractive price point (including a discount for non profits:) made this an extremely easy decision. It saves me time and takes one problem completely off the table. The analytics and reporting really helps us slice and dice our target markets.
We are in the process of evaluating web accounting software, because for us Quickbooks isn’t an option. Right now Less Accounting is the front runner.
What other web office tools do you recommend?
– Justin McDowell
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Posted by Justin McDowell on July 30, 2009 under Notsocommon Ventures |
This will be a two part blog series on some exciting news and future blog topics
As you can see Mikal and I have been grappling with this notion of aligning our personal and professional goals to fundamentally engage and help people in a transformational way. Every day on the news we hear about the meltdown in our financial markets and the grim housing market reports. Many of my friends and business associates have lost their jobs and health insurance at a time when they can least afford it. I can no longer sit idle in good faith and conscience and watch as unemployment hovers near 10%. I feel compelled to take immediate action.
Today I would like to announce that I am boldly taking a first step.
I have partnered with a very good friend, James Augustus Jr, to form The Resume Lounge, and we have been running dark for some time…
The Resume Lounge is a grassroots 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization that offers donation based resume education to job seekers who wish to advance their careers. The organization was founded in 2009 to tackle the underlying cause of unemployment across the nation, deficient resumes. As the national unemployment rate nears double digits, this growing problem has given way to mass
confusion and frustration.
It is hard enough to look for a job in the best of situations, but many people and their families are hurting. Trying to search for a job without knowing the basic rules of crafting an accurate, value-based resume, can make an already tough situation seem impossible.
Our goal is to help people facing tough economic realities by educating them on how to create a competitive resume. This often neglected document holds the key to boosting a job seeker’s confidence, opening the door to more opportunities, and taking them from a once ‘impossible’ situation to a place of hope.
We only want to bite off what we can chew, and in this case it is helping people better compete with an effective resume. If you would like to help you can do so in many different ways.
- Donate! Your donation helps us help more and more people get professionally re-written resumes. Consider that for-profit services usually cost anywhere from $100 -$600 per resume. In these difficult economic times many people simply can’t afford this. As always, all donations are tax deductible.
- Volunteer! We need all sorts of help, we can’t do this alone. We can use resume writers, designers, copy writers, recruiters, corporate sponsorships, and social media help. Fill out the contact form and we will get back to you.
- Spread the Word! Follow us on Twitter, join our Facebook Group, attend our events, network, and be informed.
Now for the notsocommoncents perspective. I will be periodically blogging about our successes and our struggles as a small non-profit startup. I’ll be sure to highlight all aspects of our operation, and will probably pay special attention to the social media aspects of community building for a specific cause. Sprints and Marathons indeed.
- Justin F. McDowell
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Posted by Mikal Lewis on July 28, 2009 under Analysis |
Pepsi’s branding vs. Coca-Cola over the years.
Read more to see graphic.
Read more of this article »
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Posted by Mikal Lewis on July 22, 2009 under Analysis |
Building on Justin’s post: Who are you working for?
“No, that is not your problem,” he says.”Your problem is you don’t know what the goal is. And, by the way, there is only one goal, no matter what the company.”
That stumps me for a second. Jonah starts walking toward the gate again. It seems everyone else has now gone on board. Only the two of us are left in the waiting area. I keep after him.
“Wait a minute! What do you mean, I don’t know what the goal is? I know what the goal is,” I tell him.
By now, we’re at the door of the plane. Jonah turns to me. The stewardess inside the cabin is looking at us.
“Really? Then, tell me, what is the goal of your manufacturing organization?” he asks.
“The goal is to produce products as efficiently as we can,” I tell him.
“Wrong,” says Jonah. “That’s not it. What is the real goal?”
….
Wait a minute, I’m thinking. That’s it!
Technology: that’s really what it’s all about. We have to stay on the leading edge of technology. It’s essential to the company. If we don’t keep pace with technology, we’re finished. So that’s the goal.
Well, on second thought . . . that isn’t right.
The Goal, Eliyahu M. Goldratt p32
In life it’s easy to lose sight of the goal. Without acknowledgement of “The Goal” interesting things become important things – important things become critical things.
If you can imagine for a moment – the above conversation taking place but instead of proposing “technology” or “products efficiently” as the goal instead “Six Sigma” or “Brand” or better yet “Employee Morale” might be cited as “The Goal.”
Think about it though – why is it we do the things we do? In life my goal is to make the world better by having lived vs. how it would be had I not existed. The more I make the world “better” the better I’ve achieved “The Goal.”
The saying is raison d’etre it’s not raisons d’etre, and the reason is when it boils down to it there is only one target goal. I’m of the belief that while the goal may not necessarily be the only measure of success, it is most definitely the measure of failure.
How I go about my goal may be through learning, through impacting the business world, and by striving to be a good friend and family member. But in the event I no longer have friends or family (heaven forbid), I can no longer retain new things, or I no longer have the chops for the business world – my goal lives on. Therefore my goal is not to learn – learning is just a core element for how I go about my goal.
When I think about my goal and to continue along with Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, the process to attain the goal and the barriers/bottlenecks to that goal, I get clarity around the things I should be doing, when and why.
What is your goal?
What is your business goal?
And how do your actions of today drive yourself and business to those goals?
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Posted by Justin McDowell on July 17, 2009 under Analysis, Branding, In the news |
Attitude
It’s good to be back!!
Yesterday I had a very informative conversation with a client of mine with a deep marketing background. The topic centered around “Web 2.0″ companies and could small to midsized, non “Web 2.0″ companies, borrow some of the same concepts to grow market share and brand awareness, social networking, and focused marketing strategies leveraging social networks. What immediately came to mind was “Web 2.0″ companies have attitude, and tons of it.
These companies have bold refreshing websites, take a strong position, will call out the big dogs or have an enemy in mind, and have attitude for days. They usually make it incredibly easy to connect with customers, other companies, and recruits. These companies tend to make extremely good limited feature products that are incredibly easy to use. Personally when these characteristics are exhibited, I am attracted like a moth to a flame. In these recessionary times, I actually want to patronize these people.
Here are some examples taken from some of my favorite companies right now…
Web applications today are too limited. They’re hard to use and don’t play well together. They’re also incredibly difficult to build. We want to change that. — 280North
Balsamiq Studios LLC is a fresh little software company, focused on adding flavor to your Web Office suite.
Life’s too short for bad software. Most applications have too many buttons, are ugly and boring. We focus on small problems, so that we can solve them really well.
The entire About us page at MailChimp.
Here are three examples of attitude presented in a tasteful manner that instantly separates these companies from the umpteen millions of large and small companies and firms that all seem to want to provide value, and are focused on customer service. When is the last time you heard AT&T talk about how they were focused on providing a kickass telecom network and customer service to support their myriad of consulting services. Can you even find out what consulting and data center hosting services they offer in less than 1 minute? Thus it is no surprise that large companies and mid-sized companies that want to be large corporate titans are having a difficult time using social networks to spread the word about their brand. It’s kinda hard to get twitter followers if your boring and monolithic. Luckily there is help, but I wonder how dynamic can you really be when your’re so large and can’t shake the irresistible urge to be conservative.
Here is an example of a marketing services agency that got it right.
Social Media isn’t a gimmick. It isn’t a fad. It’s not going away.
Social Media presents new and exciting opportunities for brands to
better understand and connect with their customers online. At Spring
Creek Group, we help our clients monitor and analyze their brand equity
online, develop their social media marketing strategy, and build their
social media brand presence and customer engagement programs. — Spring Creek Group
Talk about a tightly focused, strong position, introductory statement that really draws you in. It really isn’t that hard to do.+10 points for this description of their team:
Our team at Spring Creek Group consists of a growing group of Project Leads, Analytics & Measurement Leads, and Engagement Leads. Our titles don’t map to traditional marketing and advertising agencies, because our services and business model are quite a bit different than typical agencies. We are organized from the ground up to focus on our clients’ needs and driving brand insights and awareness in the social media channel.
You know who else is showing tons of attitude in a very engaging ad campaign…. Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma Brewery, a subsidiary of FEMSA (NYSE: FMX) and better known right now for Dos Equis. “The Most Interesting Man in the World” advertising campaign is another great example of a larger organization showing some attitude using the social networks to their advantage, and getting results for their brand. At this point who isn’t a fan of Dos Equis on Facebook? Who (unless you’ve been living under a rock) hasn’t seen those commercials on TV or YouTube.
However, to be fair, there are some large entities showing plenty of attitude in the midst of a downright brawl. Apple and Microsoft have been slugging back and forth for awhile now and their ads are indeed entertaining. In fact Microsoft has been showing a bit too much attitude because apparently Apple wanted the Laptop hunter ads to be removed. I’ll save my comments for later about what I think of Apple’s course of action on this, but it is worth noting that these two companies are definitely taking a stand and their attitude and fight are showing in their ads. I literally joked with Mikal that the “I’m a Mac” ads were a sucker punch to the head by Apple, and I was curious to see what the retaliation would be. It took a while, but eventually Microsoft came back swinging. That’s attitude, that’s where the web and popular culture is going, and people need to get on board.
What other “traditional” aka non Web 2.0 companies are showing some attitude either on their websites, or as a part of their marketing strategy?
– Justin
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Posted by Mikal Lewis on July 11, 2009 under Analysis |
A few weeks ago I came across an article by 24/7 Wall St titled: Why Yahoo! (YHOO) WIll Never Recover.
I fell for the hyperbole and read through the article.
What I uncovered was more notsocommoncents.
The general premise is that since Social Networks are challenging Yahoo in page views, and Microsoft has the money advantage in search (BING!) – Yahoo is lost and stuck in its low margin business of only $121 million on $1.82B Q1 revenue. Some excerpts:
Yahoo! has not developed any effective strategy to have any presence in the fast-growing social network sector. The same can be said of Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG). Each company may regret its lack of success in entering the the online world created by MySpace (NWS), Facebook, and Twitter. Because of its size in relationship to Microsoft and Google, Yahoo! can least afford to let major opportunities pass. It is still questionable whether social networks will make money…
Yahoo!’s most important strategic blunder is likely to be the refusal of CEO Bartz to form a search partnership with Microsoft quickly after taking the top job. The industry has known for months that Microsoft was about to launch the next generation of its search product. Bartz and many experts believed that Microsoft did not have the product development and engineering expertise to build a highly competitive search engine. This turned out to be an underestimation of Microsoft’s resolve, its willingness to invest great sums of money on risky ventures, and the prowess of its developers.
The fundamental flaw with this analysis is the assumption that there are only two potential ways to generate profit online, social networks (though their profit potential is unknown) and search. The fact is when you apply unproven present day constraints to the future outlook of an opportunity- you severely limit the way you see opportunity.
Lets call this: the gold rush fallacy.
When the California gold rush wound down, everyone who went there searching for gold probably was thinking: now what am I going to do to get by? The gold rush is over, all the ways to make real money are lost.
Yet for Levi Strauss the gold rush had just begun. So while everyone else had given up in despair- “woe is me the gold rush is over”, Levi Strauss was just digging in building a gold rush on the back of what were then, present day needs.
The fact is that each wave of new products and services we introduce into our life introduces a new wave of needs, be it sociological or physiological. Therefore The Gold Rush never ends.
Let’s take a look back at the Gold Rush Fallacy. After the dot com crash there was a Gold Rush Fallacy with regard to online advertising. Gold rush is over the bubble has crashed, there was no way to generate enough advertising revenue to sustain a tech business.
Along came Overture (And Subsequently Google Ad Words) – Illustrating that there was in fact a highly profitable billion dollar business to be had with online advertising, even after the “Gold Rush.”
Looking at this from an asset based thinking point of view: Yahoo has the top homepage of the internet, a top photo community, No. 1 in email, and No. 2 in messaging – world wide. Couple this with a technology portfolio that is rivaled by few companies, and probably the number one Question and answer communities in Yahoo Answers, not to mention their well recognized brand. With these assets, how could one really believe the gold rush is over?
I wish Yahoo much luck in uncovering additional business models, I specifically hope they ignore the wise business minds which would only encourage them to believe their opportunity to strike gold is over.
“What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders,” Michael Dell speaking on Apple’s prospects in 1997
The Gold Rush is only over if you believe it so.
Conversely the business models, products, and services that are economic drivers, will one day sunset to give way to another gold rush. But don’t take my word, ask Levi Strauss:
“In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth.”
- Levi Strauss
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Posted by Justin McDowell on June 14, 2009 under Admin |
An American in Paris
My execution wedding date is today and as such I will be blogging even less over the next 2-3 weeks. Don’t worry, the shop won’t be closed though… just consider us on a work schedule similar to our friends in Paris….
While I am blogging, I’d like to note that USD -> EUR exchange rate sucks… it’s one thing to read about it in the WSJ, but it is an entirely different matter when you see it happen right before your eyes. However Bank of America made my life a whole lot easier with their Foreign Currency Service. I placed an order on Wednesday for Euros and they were overnighted to my local bank where I could pick them up Thursday afternoon. BOA’s rate was 0.08133575 more than the wholesale exchange rate. Talk about fast service and a very good price!!
Ok folks, Mikal will keep the lights on…. Au Revoir
- Justin McDowell
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Posted by Justin McDowell on June 9, 2009 under Self Realization |
While taking a mental break this morning to read my new favorite blog Coding Horror, I came across Jeff’s post about UNIX turning 40 years old. While I digested his points about the different closed source, open source and mixed source flavors of *NIX, I was pleasantly surprised when a quote from Joel Spolsky in Jeff’s post resonated with me so deeply in a completely different direction than it’s original intent. Let’s take a look:
What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers. This is, of course, a major simplification, but really, that’s the big difference: are we programming for programmers or end users? Everything else is commentary.
So when I read this quote my mind immediately went elsewhere… I began to grapple with a more fundamental question. Are we programming working for programmers work’s sake or end users to help someone else? I mean, not just making a product or a service that helps someone do something, but really helping people grow, transform, and enable them for success while getting the job done every day.
How does thinking about the people you’re helping – change how you work or what decisions you make? Think about it, if you’re a consultant hired by another company, your client isn’t just the company that hired you, but it’s the people impacted by your clients business and that interface with the client.
This train of thought was initially started by taking several managerial assessments and discovering among other things that my Social/Altruistic aspect of my natural style is almost off the charts when compared to the national average. Continuing on that train, I think one of my favorite quotes is in order.
“Every person must decide, at some point, whether they will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive
selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ’What are you doing for others?’” -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., August 11, 1957
I’d love to hear your comments on how this alternative view impacts your outlook on work, I’m still contemplating the impact on my own.
By the way, Happy Birthday UNIX.
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Posted by Mikal Lewis on May 27, 2009 under Friends of Notsocommoncents |
There is an inadvertent side-effect to going deep into subject areas that may or may not be current news, you have fewer opportunities to link to friends.* So this is the post where we let all our friends know that yes we do read your blogs.
Martin Gillard @ The Digital Corner – a quick and interesting post that says, ok with all the industry focus on display + search advertising, what’s beyond Display + Search, how do you take a more holistic look at advertising ROI and what’s the right metric to use?
Annie Lee @ Social Potato Chips – Own Your Online Identity. If you don’t someone else will.
Mikal’s note: Open question all, what do you think about ‘Google Profiles’? I am a fairly transparent person online – but I have to say Google Profiles scare me. Not sure why, I think its for the same reason I wouldn’t have an online profile at the IRS. I feel like Google is the defacto internet – so this move has a government database we’re watching you, feel to me.
Gayle Laakmann @ Technology Woman – Think Less, Experiment More 5 Lessons on Entrepreneurship. A great and insightful guest post by Gayle on Women Grow Business. All spot on truths – I especially like the point about knowing the value of your time- most important concept in finance, time value of money. Now if time = money, the most important concept is therefore the value of your time.
For entrepreneurs: I’d add to experiment more think less, is a commoncentism “never pay full price for a lesson you can get on discount” and everyone else should “avoid paying full price for a lesson you can get on discount”
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Jason Yormark @ Jasonyormark.com – Jason is a former colleague at Microsoft Advertising who worked as an adCenter Community Manager. He wrote a post mortem so to speak on his experience at Microsoft titled: 9 Things I Learned While Working at Microsoft. Honest, he provides an open perspective on his Microsoft experience.
Quick Note. I’ve gotten in on the Guest Post game at The Ideators Journey – discussing a collaborative journey through ideation. (ambiguous enough? check it out)
As always you can find out what’s going on with our friends under the Friends of Notsocommoncents section to the left.
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*possible next post: is Google PageRank and Twitter “followers” bad for the (social) internet?
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