Real World MBA

Marketvania

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:02:53 -0400

There are just two things you just have to do to get the most out of a trip to a foreign land (be it a country or the world of social media).

Learn how to speak the language.
Always hire a good guide.

You might wonder why you need both. Wouldnʼt one or the other suﬃce? You can muddle through with one. But the experience is much better with both.

If you just learn to speak the language, you miss many of things that are oﬀ the beaten path and worth exploring that a guide can show you. If you just get the guide, itʼs hard to tell him exactly what your needs are, what parts you want to see, and the results youʼd like to get from the trip.

-Does Anyone Know How to Market? by Chris Houchens

"Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision."

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:01:26 -0400

“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous
decision.”

- Peter Drucker

Designing for Sign-Up (Presentation Slides)

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:01:14 -0400

Designing for Sign-Up (Presentation Slides)

Chartered Corporations

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:02:20 -0400

“Back in the good ol’ days—I mean as far back as the late middle ages—people just did business with each other. As traveling got easier and people got access to new resources and markets, a middle class of merchants and small businesspeople started to get wealthy. So wealthy that they threatened the power of the aristocracy. Monarchs needed to come up with a way to stabilize their own wealth before the free market unseated them.

They invented the corporate charter. By granting an exclusive charter, a king could give one of his friends in the merchant class monopoly control over a region or sector. In exchange, he’d get shares in the company. So the businessperson no longer had to worry about competition—his position at the top of the business hierarchy was locked in place, by law. And the monarch never had to worry about losing his authority; businesses with crown-guaranteed charters tend to support the crown.

But this changed the shape of business fundamentally. Instead of thriving on innovation and progress, corporate monopolies simply sought to extract wealth from the regions they controlled. They didn’t need to compete, anymore, so they just sucked resources from places and people. Meanwhile, people living and working in the real world lost the ability to generate value by or for themselves.”

Rushkoff On The Economy: Let it Die

Itamar Rosenn conveyed how Facebook used data to answer two...

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:58:54 -0400

Itamar Rosenn conveyed how Facebook used data to answer two questions about new users: (i) which data points predict whether a user will stay? and (ii) if they stay, which data points predict how active they’ll be after three months?

For the first question two data points are significantly predictive of whether a user remains on Facebook:

(i) having more than one session as a new user
(ii) entering basic profile information.

For the second question, they found that activity at three months was predicted by variables related to three classes of behavior:

(i) how often a user was reached out to by others
(ii) frequency of third party application use
(iii) what Itamar termed “receptiveness” — related to how forthcoming a user was on the site.

Source: Dataspora Blog: How Google and Facebook are Using r

Comment on What Drives Consumer Adoption

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 11:15:46 -0400

In my opinion it is:
- sexyness to get people to first use
- socialness to get them addicted
- usefulness to keep them

Flo Pötscher on Fred Wilson’s Blog Post

100 Most Mentioned Brands on Twitter

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:15:29 -0400

100 Most Mentioned Brands on Twitter

How Obama Used the Science of Change

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:14:14 -0400

“Barack Obama’s deputy field director Mike Moffo passed along guidelines and a sample script from the Consortium of Behavioral Scientists, a secret advisory group of 29 of the nation’s leading behaviorists.

The key guideline was a simple message: “A Record Turnout Is Expected.” That’s because studies by psychologist Robert Cialdini and other group members had found that the most powerful motivator for hotel guests to reuse towels, national-park visitors to stay on marked trails and citizens to vote is the suggestion that everyone is doing it. ‘People want to do what they think others will do,’ says Cialdini, author of the best seller Influence. ‘The Obama campaign really got that.’”

-Time: How Obama Is Using the Science of Change

"People still remember what it was like to discover something and be moved by it. Our role should be..."

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:11:10 -0400

“People still remember what it was like to discover something and be moved by it.
Our role should be letting that happen.”

- Ethan Kaplan, VP Technology at Warner Music

“Google’s ads were always plain blocks of text...

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:10:50 -0400

“Google’s ads were always plain blocks of text relevant to the search query. But at first, there were two kinds. Ads at the top of the page were sold the old-fashioned way, by a crew of human beings headquartered largely in New York City. Salespeople wooed big customers over dinner, explaining what keywords meant and what the prices were. Advertisers were then billed by the number of user views, or impressions, regardless of whether anyone clicked on the ad. Down the right side were other ads that smaller businesses could buy directly online. The first of these, forlive mail-order lobsters, was sold in 2000, just minutes after Google deployed a link reading SEE YOUR AD HERE.”

-Wired: Secret of Googlenomics

Rousseau on Happiness

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:10:50 -0400

“If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.”

(via NYTimes: Happy Like God)

(via @Charlieok)

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 11:10:45 -0400

(via @Charlieok)

In the summer of 2006, Gordon Gould didn’t spend much time...

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 11:10:45 -0400

In the summer of 2006, Gordon Gould didn’t spend much time worrying about how to split ThisNext’s winnings with volunteer workers. Far more pressing was the need to lure thousands of volunteer workers to his new site. Here, like most free-labor entrepreneurs, he faced a chicken-or-egg dilemma: how to entice people to perform for a crowd that doesn’t yet exist? His answer was to create one. He and his team went out and interviewed a few hundred people—fashion designers, athletes, and activists—and then seeded ThisNext with their thoughts and recommendations. “When the first visitors came, there was a there there,” Gould says. The content on the site, he adds, had to be good. “If people come and see it’s lowbrow and ghetto, it’s going to stay that way.”

-Business Week: Will Work for Praise

"My mother and father thought I had lost my mind, because I had this great job at Xerox, a nice big..."

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:10:54 -0400

““My mother and father thought I had lost my mind, because I had this great job at Xerox, a nice big office overlooking the whole Bay Area. They said, ‘What are you doing?!’””

- Charles Geschke, cofounder of Adobe Systems on quitting his job to start his own company.

HBR: The Definitive Guide to Recruiting

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:10:50 -0400

HBR: The Definitive Guide to Recruiting:

Seven steps of the full recruitment spectrum:

anticipating the need for new hires
specifying the job
developing a pool of candidates
assessing the candidates
closing the deal
integrating the newcomer
reviewing the effectiveness of the hiring process

Source: http://www.judegomila.com/ “Mapping Out Your Web...

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:10:49 -0400

Source: http://www.judegomila.com/ “Mapping Out Your Web Strategy”

Google CEO Eric Schmidt on the Long Tail

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:10:48 -0400

“I would like to tell you that the Internet has created such a level playing field that the long tail¹ is absolutely the place to be—that there’s so much differentiation, there’s so much diversity, so many new voices. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. What really happens is something called a power law, with the property that a small number of things are very highly concentrated and most other things have relatively little volume. Virtually all of the new network markets follow this law.

So, while the tail is very interesting, the vast majority of revenue remains in the head. And this is a lesson that businesses have to learn. While you can have a long tail strategy, you better have a head, because that’s where all the revenue is.

And, in fact, it’s probable that the Internet will lead to larger blockbusters and more concentration of brands. Which, again, doesn’t make sense to most people, because it’s a larger distribution medium. But when you get everybody together they still like to have one superstar. It’s no longer a US superstar, it’s a global superstar. So that means global brands, global businesses, global sports figures, global celebrities, global scandals, global politicians.

So, we love the long tail, but we make most of our revenue in the head, because of the math of the power law. And you need both, by the way. You need the head and the tail to make the model work.”

-The McKinsey Quarterly Interview

“Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that...

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:10:48 -0400

“Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year.

Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.”

-The New Yorker: Most Likely to Succeed, by Malcolm Gladwell

"I have plenty of opinions about business models, but to me, the best business model is one that..."

Sun, 31 May 2009 11:10:52 -0400

“I have plenty of opinions about business models, but to me, the best business model is one that makes your customer money. I didn’t say “saves” them money - big difference. Also, its better yet if that customer is a business. You need less businesses as customers to be successful than if you had individuals as customers. A common sweet-spot is BtoBtoC. Supply to businesses that supply to consumers (and of course, make them money).”

- Paul Tyma, The Young Man’s Business Model

“When the business-school professor Julie Logan surveyed a...

Sat, 30 May 2009 11:10:45 -0400

“When the business-school professor Julie Logan surveyed a group of American small-business owners recently, she found that thirty-five per cent of them self-identified as dyslexic!

Paul Orfalea, the founder of the Kinko’s chain, was a D student who failed two grades, was expelled from four schools, and graduated at the bottom of his high-school class. “In third grade, the only word I could read was ‘the,’ ” he says. “I used to keep track of where the group was reading by following from one ‘the’ to the next.””

-The Uses of Adversity, by Malcolm Gladwell