I have been a big fan of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
by Chip and Dan Heath. It is engaging and practical and a worthwhile read. I have found myself recommending it lately. Great resources on their website as well.
I am looking forward to digging into their new book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
. As part of the inevitable book launch, they have been producing articles and blog posts fast and furious. I came across this one on Van Halen from Heather Hamilton and her excellent One Louder blog. Turns out that the brown M&M’s were used as a signal to make sure their contracts were read and understood.
I never did get to see Van Halen in their prime (pre-Hagar). Since I grew up in Chicago, we will always have that summer of 1984, Jump and the Chicago Cubs. I did get a chance to catch DLR at the House of Blues in Hollywood for a New Year’s Eve bash a few years ago. No doubt DLR is a party. Great time and great show. I still truly think that “Panama” should be the national anthem of Panama.
Fast Company: Business Advice From Van Halen
Heather Hamilton: As suspected, David Lee Roth is a business genius.
Interesting color profile personality test. Check it out.
USA Today: Favorite colors test shows CEOs are different; take the test
Great read on customer service over @ Inc. Great way to improve product and process simultaneously. Would your organization obsess like this? Maybe you should.
They say, “Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?” If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.
Inc. The Way I Work: Paul English of Kayak
Lots of chatter about iPad as the Kindle killer. The chatter is bunk. Kindle has a specific target audience, a niche. That niche loves the Kindle. Niche is the new critical mass.
Look at some of the advantages Kindle has:
- Battery Life. Kindle can last up to 7 days without a charge. Seriously.
- Content delivery. Kindle has it included. No extra charges or higher price tag.
- Readability. Do you want to read a backlit screen all day?
- Opening an App Store that people will care about.
The iPad is a very slick device, but it will not be the only one to change the tablet game. Apple App Store developers will start to run into some of the issues that cross-platform mobile developers are dealing with. Namely screen size and incompatible devices. Apple has been very smart with their device hardware and software release cycles. This will become more difficult as different devices begin to proliferate. The iPad will face way more competition than the iPod. Repeating success is, in fact, harder than initial success. Other players and other platforms (HP, Asus, Dell, Everyone on Microsoft or Android) are ready this time. My take is that the biggest losers will be the publishers. Their pricing models will now be more fully exposed to the buying public. That new knowledge will suppress their margins.
On of the better reads on the “Kindle killer” iPad at TechFlash: 5 reasons why the iPad is not a Kindle killer
Disclosure: The wife is employed by Amazon, does not work on Kindle, and does not read my blog.
With all the talk of an Apple tablet, it is worth taking the time to understand that this is far from a new idea. Jerry Kaplan’s
is not only a great read on the Silicon Valley start up life but on the origins and game of tablet computing. Notable characters in this tale include Jobs and Gates. Worth picking up a copy – to read on your Kindle!
For many years I have found the notion of price controls interesting mainly because there is vast amounts of historical evidence that state they do not work. Time after time, price controls are put forward as a solution, most recently in Venezuela. Interesting read at Forbes that tracts price controls back to Diocletian, which came as a surprise to this Catholic school boy who only knew about his Christian persecutions.
Forbes: The Futility Of Price Controls
All the incredible and horrible stories from the Haiti earthquake made me think of an article I awhile back in Forbes. Digicel CEO Denis O’Brien has brought mobile telecommunications to the world’s poorest countries. Digicel has been a large part of the surviving communications infrastructure in Haiti and has offered €3.5m in charitable funding. It would be frightening to think what Haiti would look like right now without Digicel.
In time, Haiti will begin the rebuilding process, it will need more people with vision and guts like Denis O’Brien.
Forbes: Denis O’Brien Cover Story, July 2008
What it’s not willing to compromise is the security of the cloud, on which its entire business rests.
~ Nicholas Carr
Carr is spot on, again.
Check the full article here: Nicholas Carr: Rough Type
UPDATE 1/17
Another fine read on the topic from Forbes. Different take. Google has been beat by Baidu. This incident put the issue over the top.
Article here Forbes: Why Google Is Quitting China