The insights of cultural/media theorist Douglas Rushkoff are always contemporary and often prescient. He was deciphering the social codes of the virtual psyche, lifestyle, and marketplace before such concepts were formally identified by the so-called “machine.”
TheMerchants Of Cool is a brilliant analysis of the incorporation of youth pop-culture that Ruskhoff created while working as a correspondent for PBS Frontline. This is a very entertaining documentary. You’ll learn a lot too. Let me know what you think in the comments section.
Thanks to Chris Metcalf for permission to use this Photo.
In the hyper-competitive business environment of today, there are millions of dollars invested and mistakenly often wasted by companies looking for the “next big thing,” the elusive innovation that will electrify the marketplace. When most people think of innovation, they automatically consider it in the technological sense, but innovation means much more than producing a faster computer or a telephone that doubles as a home entertainment system; innovation is ultimately about ideas. In the following video, innovation expert Charles Leadbeater discusses how innovation isn’t just reserved for the corporate giants with infinite capital, but rather how independent thinking entities, people like you and me with a vision, are now empowered like never before to compete in the marketplace on our own terms. I found this presentation both informative and inspiring. I hope you feel the same way after viewing it and approach your next lesson with a sense of enthusiasm. Click on the image above to watch this video.
Any organization in which you find employment will have a variety of managers who have a variety of responsibilities. A typical business will have sales, operations, financial, and other types of managers, each with a different viewpoint on what it takes for the company to succeed. In smaller enterprises a manager may wear several of these hats. In a large corporation managers tend to be more specialized, either as to their duties or their geographic area or product line.
These managers speak different “languages” and sometimes the result can be a virtual Tower of Babel. For an example of this, you might try sometime asking an accountant, a plant supervisor, and an engineer what it costs the company to make a particular product. Having completed this course you should now be able to communicate effectively with a financial manager, and you should also know how to read and interpret financial statements, determining what they’re telling you and what they aren’t. Armed with these skills you now have the ability to ask the right questions to make better decisions both as a manager and as an investor. And you can appreciate why the accountant, the plant supervisor, and the engineer would look at “cost” differently. You needn’t expect them to all agree, so long as you recognize how you need to view the cost of a product.
Whatever profession you choose, if you’re not already tied to one, you’ll need to master its language and those of professions tied to individual departments, as well. These could include production, purchasing, materials management, human resources, sales and marketing, and even corporate legal disciplines. This is the purpose of a general business education such as the one you are pursuing at Ashworth University. (more…)
With Apple continuing to dominate the headlines and industry buzz with one acclaimed release after another, it’s easy to forget that the so-called ”Evil Empire” has been rather quietly refining their Surface computing technology. We’re talking about more than multi-touch features for your mobile phone; Surface is perhaps most intriguing for its’ “surface” adaptability and potential virtual applications. Check out this video demonstration of Microsoft’s Sphere prototype. I’m an Apple guy myself, but I must admit that Sphere could be interesting…
Ryan Rode
Interactive Services Manager
Ashworth University
Sometimes technology is driven not out of necessity or productivity, but simply in the name of technology. I will let you decide on this one. Earlier this year, Papa John’s Pizza initiated a partnership with a private firm called trackmypizza.com. Drivers carry GPS-enabled handsets that feed location data to a TrackMyPizza server. There, the data is coupled with the customer’s phone number, providing location updates every 15 seconds. Customers simply go to www.trackmypizza.com, order their pizza and can then watch their delivery in real time.
Not all franchises have adapted it as of yet, but an eleven store chain in Alabama that did the initial test roll out experienced a 100% increase in online orders, which provides substantial savings to the chain versus the traditional order taking. Not to be outdone, Dominoes is supposed to unveil its own on-line pizza tracking system which will even track the pizza through the kitchen as it is made. One can only imagine what is coming next.
Consumer confidence (the term used by the Conference Board) and consumer sentiment (the label used by the University of Michigan) are not quite at their all-time lows, but they are very close to them.
This seems a little odd because two of the biggest elements of consumer attitudes, unemployment and inflation, are quite benign.
Unemployment, at 5.5 percent, is a hair below its long-run average (5.6 percent). Inflation (all items) is 4.1 percent, only a little above its long-run average of 3.7 percent.
There’s that store over on the corner. It is one of your favorite stores or you just go there once in a while. But the next time you go by, it’s closed. Not just closed for the day, but closed for good. You feel bad as you liked going in there, but you may not have gone in there that often. You think to yourself if you only knew that they were near that point you could have done something – blogged on them, told your friends or simply went in there more.
For me there were 2 such places, an awesome Vietnamese/fusion restaurant and a coffee shop. Now a jeweler and a check-cashing store stand in each respectively. But what if each owner reached out to its customer base for help, would I have responded? I asked myself as I read about Toscanini’s, an ice cream shop I have visited in Cambridge, MA in a recent issue of Inc. magazine. In this case, getting behind on paying their taxes resulted in the store closing, and after an Internet appeal they were able to raise enough money to reopen.
As I said before, you can’t mess with the numbers. However, they did and paid the price for it, literally. Had they reached out earlier to their customers, how would they have reacted? How would I have reacted? (more…)
Thanks to Orin Zebest for permission to use this Photo.
When I was a small girl, my family would gather to watch The Art Linkletter Show, a television variety show which aired once a week.
Although I have watched countless shows since that time, there is one particular segment which comes to mind when considering the many facets of starting and operating a small business. During the segment, Art Linkletter introduced a juggler who proceeded to explain how we all are jugglers. There are those who juggle as a profession; however, the analogy was applied to the rest of the population. No matter your profession, age, or socio-economic status, we can all learn from the juggler’s lesson of “The Spinning Plates.”
To offer a brief synopsis of the lesson, the juggler first began the process by placing a dowel rod on the floor and balancing a plate on top of the rod. He gave the plate a spin with this hand and stood back to watch as the plate, balanced atop the dowel rod, would spin around and around. As the first plate was spinning, the juggler would set up a second dowel rod and plate. This process continued until the juggler had twelve sets of dowel rods and plates spinning. In order to keep the plates from crashing to the ground, the juggler had to run from one to the next to keep the motion going. Inevitably, he would be too slow to attend to all of the plates and one would crash to the ground with the plates shattering into pieces. Quickly, he would set up a replacement and run from one plate to the next spinning, spinning, running, spinning, running, spinning, and running again! I was exhausted just watching the process.
The morale of the lesson is that no matter how wonderful you might be at spinning plates, you can only manage a certain number of plates effectively. Add just one too many plates and they may all come crashing to the ground. The same lesson is especially true for those of us who are business owners.
There are many aspects of your new business which will spin at the same time: financial, marketing, sales, service, employer/employee relationships, customer relationships, deadlines, industry regulations, ordering supplies, overseeing production, submitting bids, and the list goes on! With all of these responsibilities, it is no wonder that we find ourselves spinning and running just to keep all of our “plates” operating as they should. New entrepreneurs are often overwhelmed with the magnitude of responsibilities created when they decided to start and operate a new business. Realizing that all of the different areas must be effectively operating at the same time can create quite a bit of stress for the new business owner. To be successful, it is imperative that we understand our value to the new business. The primary responsibility for the new business owner is to focus time and effort on actions which contribute the greatest value to a new business. So what happens to the rest of the plates left spinning? Ah, that is the portion which must be delegated to others. In other words, the business owner should “spin” the value plates and delegate all activities that others can do. To capitalize on entrepreneurial strengths, new business owners must learn to delegate in order to spend valuable time strategizing and leading rather than doing.
Art Linkletter has been quoted as saying, “I’ve learned it is always better to have a small percentage of a big success, than a hundred percent of nothing.” An entrepreneur himself, Linkletter learned early in his career that the quality of employees he hired was in direct correlation with the success of a venture. Linkletter hired the most creative people he could find to assist with the production of his television shows, “House Party” and “The Art Linkletter Show.” Then, he shared his success with the employees realizing that without creative employees, his ventures would not have yielded the same results. If you were to ask the 96-year old entrepreneur his secret for success, he would tell you that he has learned not to spin more plates than he could comfortably handle. Of the many books Linkletter wrote, it was the title of a book released in 1980 that states the fact entrepreneurs must remember, “I Didn’t Do it Alone!”
As this article comes to a close, I hope that you also learn from the juggler’s lesson and realize that you can not possibly “spin all of the plates” found in your new small business. Instead, learn to delegate responsibilities to others within your organization so that you can concentrate on that which brings your enterprise most value. I’ll leave you with another bit of advice from Art Linkletter: “Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out!”
Good question! It’s a tough one, really. I revisited this question last night when I told a fellow entrepreneur of mine to “bury your idea.”Geezzz, Dave! why would you tell her such a thing? Well, because the idea simply went sour, and it wasn’t something that she was super passionate about doing, so when I see that happening — when I see an idea sucking the blood out of someone — I try to relieve them of that burden. If I were to name the top poison pill for young entrepreneurs, it would be “ideas.” Seriously, I’ve seen ideas kill the entrepreneur.
We are like machines when it comes to ideas, and many of us never know when to just start focusing on one. We want to do it all. So what happens when we want to do it all? What happens is that we sometimes fall into a trend of focusing on “so-so” ideas that we may not really be extremely passionate about, but we push forward with them anyway. As time passes we grow more and more unenthused with the idea. It begins to become a burden. It haunts us. It keeps us awake at night. It brings tons of stress and worry. But we push on, knowing that the idea really isn’t in our hearts. We push on because we think — as entrepreneurs — that we should never quit or give up on something.
Thanks to Rob West for permission to use this Photo.
Our new Ashworth University Discussion Forum has been sparking some lively debate. If you haven’t checked out the forum yet, what are you waiting for?—get engaged with your student community!
Ashworth University Business Student, Frederick F, states:
I recently completed the Macroeconomics course, and all the negative things about Keynes were wrong!
I do agree with government intervention to get the economy out of recession and depression as a better solution by lowering interest rates and major government projects to get people employed and spending money.
However… I wrote projects, not programs. Programs that are started to help people don’t usually work, just enough to keep people employed and create more red tape.
As for supply and demand side economics, I side with Jean-Baptiste Say whom said “Demand creates it’s own supply”
Keynes basically said that excessive saving can lead to recession or depression, True, but today we are experiencing excessive greed which is causing our current recession. (High gas prices and the mortgage crisis.)
Ashworth University Technical Services Supervisor And Resident Economist, John Ash, responds:
Well, Keynes’ ideas look dynamite on paper, but they suffer from the minute flaw of not actually holding up in the real world. I know, I know, we should ignore that and just let the beauty of his carefully constructed theories suffer no detractors, but those of us who are actually studying economics to understand the world better and use that knowledge to improve our own lives (i.e., make more money) can’t allow such intricate economic fallacies to remain unmolested.
Keynes’ theories were gospel for the economic advisors of the 60s and 70s, and it is generally believed (among economists anyway) that strict adherence to his policy recommendations led to the stagflation of those decades (stagflation is when the economy is in a recession but inflation is increasing, two things which are supposed to be mutually exclusive by Keynesian standards). Keynes is a good starting point for understanding economics, but modern post-industrial economies are far too complex to be modeled with it. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to find one unifying principle which will explain everything; it’s never going to happen. There are a lot of variables, and usually no single one is going to accurately predict the movement of the economy. (more…)
Subscribe to Feed
