“People do not seek news”- a worrying declaration indeed from innovative Times Web Development Editor, Joanna Geary.

This comment really struck a cord with me. For a few months I have glowered at the doom and gloom pervading newspaper journalism and resented the ever-growing ignorance and disinterest of the consumer (or non-consumer of news).

News=Product, Journalist=Salesman

But what right do I have to claim this privileged position over what are essentially customers. There is a fundamental lofty misconception that we are the gatekeepers of democracy when in reality we are no more important to the consumer than a sales assistant- we are there to serve.

The typewriter has evolved into an iMac, the copy writers have disappeared and yet we are still producing a similar product to what journalists have always churned out. Admittedly we have changed the content, but we are only just getting round to shifting away from what some consumers might see as an archaic medium.

“Business models are one of the biggest talking points in newspaper journalism.” The question is not: how can we make people pay for news? But: what product will people want to pay for?

Like any other salesman we are subject to consumer demands. Our attitudes and in turn our product must adapt if we are to succeed.

We have heard the problems, now we need some answers. Perhaps Rob Andrew, UK editor of paid content, and this Thursday’s lecturer will shed some light on the possible way forward.

Confederation of British Industry (CBI) have issued this paper. It is a short but useful discussion on what business ought to consider in the UK, but my reading suggests most western economies. It touches on the main categories of concern of business, people issues, environmental, partnerships, supply chain and technology

Here is an excerpt from the Table of Contents, followed by the conclusion.

Download: The shape of business – the next ten years (PDF 2MB) | CBI

The Changing Business Environment

1. Changing finance and capital conditions
2. The decline of trust in business and markets
3. A less benign macroeconomic environment
4. Social and demographic change
5. Sustainability and resource issues
6. Technology trends

The Business Response

1. Capital and investment
2. Workforce
3. Organisation and location
4. Governance and sustainability

Conclusion:
The next decade will be one of fundamental change for businesses in the UK and the actions business takes will begin to have a significant impact on the shape of the UK economy.

In ten years time, businesses will typically be involved in a range of collaborations, partnerships and joint ventures, supporting investment finance, R&D and innovation, training and new organisational structures. There will be much more rigour in identifying investment and innovation projects for funding and businesses will have outsourced the next level of activities, including many specialist tasks. The workforce will be more diverse, highly flexible and mobile, making the most of new ways of working and using more business-relevant professional skills. This will leave organisations focused on a smaller core of people and projects, supported by a much wider range of individuals and businesses around the periphery. Building and maintaining trust with business partners and the public will become critical to the smooth operation of these structures, and compliance with governance and sustainability standards will be a major objective. Effective management will be the key determinant of survival and success.

These changes will have a range of implications for the UK economy, which have been highlighted in the previous section. Taken together, we identify the following as the main areas of concern and opportunity:

• In the short term, the UK will see slower (but more sustainable) growth and a longer climb out of recession, with elevated unemployment for an extended period, and the socio-economic consequences this will bring
• An increased number of burdens coalescing on business at the same time will increase business costs, reducing profits and tax revenues
• Until new systems of governance, collaboration, risk management and SME financing come into place, and start to work effectively, businesses are likely to miss opportunities for more radical innovation and the UK may fall behind some of
• its competitors
• But, by the middle of our five to ten-year time frame, these same systems will make the UK more productive and competitive and our expertise in implementation will be valuable in its own right
• New business structures, new ways of working and new relationships with employees will make businesses even more flexible and this will enhance what is already our most important competitive advantage
• Towards the end of the decade, some key aspects of the UK economy may ultimately fall under the control of overseas governments, and as market opportunities shift, current prominent businesses in both services and manufacturing may move substantially overseas.

As I wrote about at the time, Ashoka was fortunate to have been placed on the Twitter  Suggested Users list in early October. The power of this list is amazing. We had about 9,000 followers when added, now we’re over 150,000. You can see the effect here.

However, most of these new followers are not choosing to follow Ashoka, they are simply accepting Twitter suggestions for 300 people to follow to kick off their twitter experience. And it’s a very diverse/random list, ranging from politicians both left and right (although there have been complaints about twitter favoring Democratic politicians), lots and lots of celebrities of the music, film and sport variety, twitter developers, business entrepreneurs and a bunch of tweeters chosen by company insiders as interesting.

Media outlets are now reporting that Twitter is planning to “kill” the Suggested Users list. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said at a conference recently that the list was “going away” and “in its stead will be something that is more programmatically chosen, something that actually delivers more relevant suggestions.” This, to me, doesn’t sound like “killing”, but rather a much-needed update to the Suggested Users model to something that will help people find users who are relevant to their interests, making their Twitter experience more relevant and enjoyable. Currently the list is too large, too broad and too celebrity-heavy to be a truly useful jumping-off point for most people.

What I’m hoping will happen is a simple change to add categories to the Suggested Users list. Instead of being show the entire list when you sign up you should be asked “What are you interested in?” and given the choice to tick categories such as “Celebrities”, “Sports”, “Non-profits”, “Technology”, “Businesses”, etc. You could choose all of them, and end up with the full list as it currently stands, but I suspect that most people would choose only a few of the categories and so get a much smaller, more focused list of people to start following.

In this way Twitter can still highlight some valuable users, and help new tweeters get over the hump when you join and have nothing in your stream, in a higher-value more contextual way. It could even be a revenue stream for Twitter (we all know they need one or two of those) if they charged businesses to appear on the “Business” list. Most lists, such as “non-profits” (or, better language, “citizen sector organizations“), should not be sold however if they are to retain any credibility.

If this change was implemented it would certainly slow down the growth rate of the Ashoka account, but those that did end of following us would be much more likely to be interested in our work, and thus more likely to participate in or support this work in some way. As importantly it would be better for the new Twitter user as it would help them to pick their filters and craft their twitter experience in a way that is meaningful and interesting to them. This, then, would hopefully reduce the significant burn rate of new accounts (people joining, updating once if at all and then abandoning the service).

It’s a new model, not death, that the Suggested Users list needs.

By Ryan Chapman, Internet Marketing Manager, Macmillan

A lot of the discussion about eBooks tends to frame the format in absolutist and misleading terms.

“It will destroy print.”

“It will devalue the book.”

We shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming a growing new format will upend the entire industry (remember the fear concerning audiobooks?). The format will dictate the content and this makes for one of the most exciting shifts in the industry since the rise of mass-market paperbacks.

I bring up mass-markets as an analogy and a precedent. Could you imagine pitching the concept to publishers? “It’s a smaller trim size, printed on cheap paper, and we’ll charge a third of the hardcover price. Yes, hardcovers are beautiful objects, but we think there’s a big opportunity here in treating our books as disposable commodities.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if industry pessimists back then expressed the same fears of cannibalized sales and devalued content that they do now regarding eBooks.

Mass-markets defined their own readership (at airports and supermarkets) and genres (commercial and genre fiction); you don’t see biographies or political nonfiction in this format. Of the current top 20 bestsellers on the New York Times’ Paperback Mass-Market Fiction list, 8 have never been published in hardcover (disregarding the large-print hardcovers for Snow Angels and Hot on Her Heels).

The eBook format is no different. After the digital transition, we’ll find that certain books fit an eBook audience, while others are meant for print. Personally, this year I purchased hardcovers that I would never buy as an eBook (Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice), and vice versa (Steve Knopper’s Appetite for Self-Destruction).

Of course there will be overlap. Of course there will be outliers. It’s foolish to think this will be cut and dry on either side.

Thankfully, the publishing industry will be able to weather this transition with greater ease than at previous inflection points. Returning to our analogy, a mass-market pilot program for a major publisher would have required a significant amount of capital for market research and R&D. Not anymore. A lot of traditional market research tools have become affordable (if not free) in their digital forms. Creating consumer surveys, testing book covers, sampling book fairs (for the YA market), etc. Publishers leveraging their direct-to-consumer channels will gain unprecedented reader data at much less cost than in the past.

In the digital transition, we’ll stumble and fall more than once. Harlequin felt this recently with the warm reception for their Carina Press announcement, and the cold shoulder Harlequin Horizons received a week later. But now we can “fail fast forward,” informed with real-time reader response to determine what readers want and in which formats.

The data will most certainly run counter to our guesswork and opinions.

Bowker’s Kelly Gallagher has noted eBook consumption favors fiction over nonfiction at a rate disproportionate to print. (We’ll learn more during his Digital Book World presentation, “Today’s eBook Consumer: A Look at First-Round Data from BISG’s On-Going Survey of Consumer Attitudes Toward eBook Reading.”) Is this significant of eBook habits overall, or merely the behavior of the early adopter community? How much of this is determined by the device?

Reading on a dedicated ereader is different than reading on the iPhone or PC; this too will determine purchasing behavior in the coming year. e.g.: I can embed links to YouTube videos and relevant URLs in my ePub, which, for the right title, makes it a more attractive media property on the iPhone than the Kindle.

Just as 40% of New York Times mass-market bestsellers have never seen the traditional hardcover format, I predict that by this time next year we’ll see a trade title flourish as an eBook, with little or no print support. I’m not talking about Stephenie Meyer selling 10K copies of the Twilight iPhone app, but a word-of-mouth hit operating solely within this new market. Maybe it’ll be a thriller encouraging readers to seek out YouTube content; or an extremely topical work of satire pushed to market at twice the speed a printed book can be crashed.

We know all change is disruptive, and in an industry with thin profit margins that can be scary as hell. It may get worse before it gets better.

Whatever happens, though, I find it’s a thrilling time to be in publishing.

Ryan Chapman works for Macmillan as an internet marketing manager. In January he’ll transition to working exclusively with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. You can follow him on Twitter at @chapmanchapman or on his blog.

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..of companies in the United States to figure out how to better the standard of living of American workers while at the same time reducing wages so that we retain the product manufacturing and service delivery instead of outsourcing it to foreign countries.

..rebuilding the American workforce. Rebuilding will require not only education, but also a paradigm shift in how we as business leaders provide a better standard of living to our workforce.

..be integrated into the business model to provide a competitive advantage over a company’s product/service competitors?

.. to the business model. We are trained in Business schools to believe that a company’s profitability relates only to the financially aspect, and so we make them profitable, but necessarily at the cost of American workforce, our own human resource. But what about social profit? This is not really part of our business model, yet. We need to give back and greatly if we are to keep this America, our America, alive.

..reduce the American worker’s wages while increasing their standard of living so that we retain the American worker instead of outsourcing to foreign countries the product manufacturing and service delivery that this viable human resource can perform?

.. of capable workers, and passing them by because of their demand for compensation that price them out of the competition for fewer jobs. Our American workforce is losing faith in our ability to lead because they see us making million-dollar salaries while we complain that as viable business we cannot afford to pay the wages that workforce demands.

..American workers can not compete with those of China and India because there is an expectation of a reduced standard of living in order to do so. The United States is sitting on a goldmine of capable workers, and passing them by because of their demand for wages that price them out of the competition for fewer jobs. Our American workforce is losing faith in our ability to lead because they see us making million-dollar salaries while we complain that as viable businesses we cannot afford to pay the wages that workforce demands.

..in that we raise the price of fuel, we raise the prices of electricity and water, we raise the price of day-care for children, we raise the price of health-care. We raise the prices of the goods and services that we expect Americans to pay for. We do all this in addition to providing lower quality. We want our American workforce to pay taxes to support our way of business, but what do we do to support their way of life.

What market boundaries are artificially set? Yes, artificially. Market boundaries are not concrete walls. It is just seen that way due to the way the industry lags behind what could be. Industry standards are just that…they are the common practices that all the participants have agreed to follow.

The first rule to effectively change your business strategy is to accept that boundaries are artificially set. It will not be easy. Exploring outside the accepted norm will bring the nay-sayers out in the open. “This is how we have always done it” is a red flag indicating how thick the perception of industry standard is in your company. Identify these individuals as you will need to address them (calm their fears) to be able to initiate the exploration of these boundaries. 

Artificial boundaries are implemented within the corporation by organizational structures and their associated IT systems. The tighter the systems are to the organizational structures and the more the data/information is tied to the detailed process will increase the pressure not to change.

Be prepared for these roadblocks. Acknowledge you are challenging the current boundaries. Acknowledge the risk. Acknowledge the challenges inherint in the current organizational structure and the supporting systems. Then, explain how where you want to explore can leverage what you already have in place. Address these risks in your research before you explain the opportunity to the masses.

Found at http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2009/11/the-rise-of-networks-the-end-of-process.html

Read more at http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2009/11/the-rise-of-networks-the-end-of-process.html

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• Supporting Graham Hill’s Manifesto for Social Business (fredzimny.wordpress.com)
• The Über-Connected Organization: A Mandate for 2010 (blogs.harvardbusiness.org)
• Read Bob Thompson’s Where is the Customer in Enterprise 2.0!! (fredzimny.wordpress.com)
• Jeff Jarvis about “The Future of (your) Business Is in Ecosystems” (fredzimny.wordpress.com)
• Six Social Media Trends for 2010 (blogs.harvardbusiness.org)
• Reading Tony Byrne’s “Trends: Enterprise 2.0 Conference (SF 11/2009) wrap up” (fredzimny.wordpress.com)
• Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2009 Closing Keynote by Dion Hinchcliffe (slideshare.net)

After being around different systems, process, models, process tools, etc, etc   I wanted to try and see if I could design a model that would illustrate how it all fits together.

I have done a draft in Powerpoint,  this gives a good starting point  but I would love to get some feedback or other input – I will probably need to change from Powerpoint to another, more appropriate media soon.   The model is based around retail/distribution with a small amount of production.

Regards
Mark

Click here to see PPT Slide – >   Business Modelling

Management in the 21st century

He died under a cloud but Agha Hasan Abedi said something sensible:

The conventional definition of management is getting work done through people, but real management is developing people through work.

Do you agree?

Real management is understanding how people will grow through our work so that our collective value grows and we all benefit.

Based on our assessment of Blippr and the services they provide we believe that Twitter is using an Affiliate and Advertising Business Models. Blippr applies the Affiliate Business Model by driving traffic and leads or sales to affiliated company’s websites such as Netflix and Amazon. They give the direct links for Blippr users to be able to purchase the items they are reviewing on Amazon.com. They also suggest for Blippr users to become Netflix subscribers and it will allow them to easily blip any movies that they watch through the Netflix service.

Blippr applies the Advertising Model by utilizing GoogleAds throughout each of the variety of topics that they allow their users to blip about. For example, all over the Movies section of the website you will find numerous GoogleAds for Netflix and giving Blippr users the opportunity to subscribe to the Netflix service. The ads are specific on each section that you can blip on so if you are in the books section you will find advertisements for Borders and other book related advertisements.

This information is based on our assessment of the Blippr website. We could not find direct information regarding Blippr’s business model but we believe that they in some way utilizing the above two business models to provide their service.

Lately, an old theme has been surfacing again – that insurmountable fear of grown men that computers ultimately are going to take over the world. Artificial intelligence was a high flying area in the 80s – many students and academics, yours truly included, had dreams of making machines think and act like humans. It seemed like such a natural course to take. The brain is like a computer and hence a computer can be designed to act like the brain. It is possible that we went wrong on both of these assumptions. Unfortunately, a worse outcome may be awaiting humanity – humans are now acting like computers and taking over work that computers can easily handle.

This momentary lapse of reason for the brain was due to the fact that computers are linear thinkers and the last 50 years, people have been training themselves to behave like computers. In manufacturing floors and the glass houses of financial services, humans have been slowly taking over the computers. They have trained to think logically and programmatically, they trained themselves to be most efficient and most importantly they have created specifications and rules for every thought and action.

Computers have underestimated the human’s ability to squeeze out any bit of creativity left in their brains and perpetuate efficient processes and supply chains across all industries, handled exclusively by them. Computers have underestimated the human’s ability to design organizations in prescriptive pyramidal structures led by human robots making decisions to hire, fire and retain. Computers have underestimated the rise of consultants, willing and able to cut and paste with incredible precision, as they help contemporary companies to the edge of precipice. Computers have underestimated the human’s ability to add risk linearly in spread sheets and crash when non-linear and unexpected events occur in the penthouses of high finance. Computers have underestimated the human’s ability to create policies assuming that linear forecasts will hold for decades as precisely as a Pentium chip, devoid of any uncertainty

Computers are unlikely to take over the world as humans have already taken over the computers..

The post title is a great quote from Blue Ocean Strategy (by W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne). The authors of this approach (which is already at least 5 years old) couldn’t be more on point. If you haven’t read this book, buy a copy immediately! I’m sure your competition already has and is acting on it.

During a recession, it is the right time to start thinking differently. It is the time to take a close look at your strategy and identify ways that your business can be changed. Standing still, usually because of fear, is the wrong approach to be able to come out of the recession ashes and soar to new profitable heights. In order for any company to soar they must evolve…continuously.

It begins with taking a close look at your strategy. How can you change your company direction and the marketplace to make the competition irrelevant? What can you investigate outside your industry that will stop the current process of becoming a commodity?

This is NOT the time to keep using vertical industry experts (those that specialize in your industry). His or her deep industry knowledge will help you in the next stage when changes need to be made. Now you need a more horiztonal view. A Business Architect with broader exposure to multiple industries will force you to look at other options from a wider field.

Right now you are at the strategic level of discussions. Your CIO or a representative will benefit by hearing the new direction and offer data to help identify new markets and products. Other than that, you are too early for most of the IT organization to be involved.

A business analyst from the IT organization may not have the experience or the exposure that is needed. Use him or her after you have a high-level roadmap and projects identified to document the details of what needs to be done. A Technical Architect will be needed at that time as well along with an Organizational Architect. Don’t worry about all these different people from within (or outside) the organization. A holistic Enterprise Architect will coordinate their efforts when the time comes.

The point now is to make sure you have a Business Architect with broad exposure to multiple industries. He or she will facilitate the process of making the competition irrelivant. He or she will understand that you are not looking at the competition but at alternatives…how to turn a new non-customer base into customers. (If you not understand the difference…now is the time to go and buy a copy of Blue Ocean Strategy.)

Biz Stone (left) and Evan Williams

A thought which was and is always surrounding my educated reasoning.

TechCrunch posted photos from the new Twitter HQ via Twitter’s Flickr account and employees tweets, and I had again this internal process of questioning and reasoning the moves of Twitter as product and company (Vision, Mission, Objectives). I may not be versed enough into internals of Twitter as product and company, and TechCrunch & others tend sometimes to make more up and want the re-tweet (clicks) at any cost than to inform and give insight. So I am sorry in advance when I make here a call and it turns out, in hindsight, that it wasn’t or isn’t or couldn’t be so. You shall forgive me reader.

Out of the occasional Fail Whale in the past grew the demand for a distributed service of Twitter from the userland. Like Yammer! does. A Twitter like service for companies to host in their environment for internal communication. A self hosted/maintained and safe internal economy. While I was working at IBM, they adopted Twitter as service quiet fast on their BlueGroups Community and Services platform. It didn’t grow beyond early adopters like Twitter itself and I left in September 2008, thus can’t report any progress on that.

It is interesting to observe where they (Twitter) are going, now that the Twitter team is beyond (a critical) product phase (scaling./stability) where they had the growth problem. They work hard under the hood of the product in the past, and the founders have stated that. Because it was ruining the experience…  Thus, the blog posts about Twitter should opening up its product and building a protocol out of it like e-mail (IMAP, POP3) are on the low tide, now that they can have a nice and smooth product experience. Especially that they are showing progress on the front-page; lists, re-tweet, geolocation, display of new tweets on front-page while logged in as user.

Question time: What would have been the (i) advantage or (ii) disadvantage of a Twitter protocol?

• (i) Distributed services & self hosted equals reliability
• (ii) Community around the development of the protocol equals lots of management because of the noise, would have slowed down the progress eventually
• (ii) Time consuming, maybe waste – switching from platform&service to protocol instead of working on the scalability and stability of the platform&service. And the scalability of the eventual protocol would not have been solved (maybe). And then there would have been the lack of features. Incoherent experience possibly because of different service providers. Changing the strategy because pundits scream for it would have cost Twitter lots of credit points.
• (i) They could have had revenue early by having a licensing model/fees of the protocol. But diminishing returns over time. Would be hard to justify to ask the license holder for $10k more each year after 4 years just because inflation and shareholder pressure to increase revenue. Being a public traded company or being venture backed have a bittersweet taste.
  • (ii) Innovation couldn’t then come from inside or from the outside though users, as a protocol has to be a standard, and updating a standard because of every new feature every 3-6 months – impossible. The innovation process would have had to be transported to the license holder building on to (like now API, experience would then again be different to each other), and growth just by growing the amount of licenses is a limited income source. Clearly they had to have to care about their investors interest too.
• (i) Being the sole and proprietary provider of a popular service with a diverse user base offers (almost) better revenue models and projections of revenue over time.
• (i) Being a monopolist is great and has many advantages than being a price taker.

It might be a bit harder to formulate a coherent B2B revenue stream without tapping into the traditional, automatic ads market. Sourced by meta data, context, user, following list, geolocation. And when they are on the same wave as I am, and know that advertising is a declining model for customer acquisition and a volatile model for revenue – they might not put ads at all into the product I love (and want) for its simplicity and non-intrusiveness.

Here is the take-away.

The ordinary user and the ordinary tech columnist aren’t business (or economists) people in flesh and blood. That is why they read the news or write the news but don’t make the news.

Tot nu toe heeft het businessmodel “gunnen” goed gefunctioneerd in de financiële dienstverlening. De vraag is echter waarom?

Over het algemeen wordt gunnen gezien als vriendendienst. Ik vraag mij af of het sluiten van een hypotheek en daarvoor een vergoeding ontvangen van meer dan € 2.500,- nog als vriendendienst gezien kan worden? Ik denk dat als de “vriend” erachter komt dat een dergelijke vergoeding is betaald voor de bemiddeling (zonder dit te melden) de vriendschap al snel over is.

Als geen ander heeft een financieel adviseur bestaansrecht door zijn vertrouwensband met zijn relatie. Zodra dit vertrouwen geschaad wordt is er geen band meer. Een advies kan niet meer worden gegeven en de toegevoegde waarde van de adviseur is niet meer aanwezig.

Het is dus zaak om vanaf het eerste moment te bouwen aan de toegevoegde waarde én het vertrouwen. Dat begint door te vertellen wat je doet, wat het kost en wat het de relatie oplevert.

Als je aan een van deze zaken niet voldoet zal je misschien nog wel zaken doen, maar geen vrienden overhouden.

The business model for lunch.com, as expressed in the video, has several pros and cons.  The fact that it is free is extremely helpful, as most users could be swayed not to join if there was a fee involved.  The connectivity between user reviews is also very useful, as users could potentially find new things to like through other users’ reviews.  If two users share similarities, they could use each other’s reviews to find new hobbies, new movies, new music, etc.  The business model also has several cons, however.  Because users rate and review anything they want, the reviews run the risk of being biased.  A reviewer could rate things negatively strictly because of a negative bias towards that product, and not because they actually know about the product.  The network of users would also have to be enormous in order to have useful reviews on everything.  At this point, the small population of users cannot effectively rate everything on the site.  For example, the NFL only had one review, which probably would not help somebody looking to learn about the NFL.