online small and micro business management platform & crm

Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to build rituals — specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

cf horowitz's "mbas are underpriced"
Indeed, the vibe, in the words of a former employee, is of an Apple that is becoming "far more traditional," meaning more MBAs, more process, and more structure. (In point of fact, 2,153 Apple employees reference the term "MBA" in their LinkedIn profiles out of a nonretail workforce of nearly 28,000. More than half the employees who reference "MBA" have been at Apple less than two years.)

Don’t like that answer? Try focusing on earnings rather than sales, and you get only a marginally different result. Assuming its profit margin stays constant (instead of falling as it could very well do as it grows), assuming its P/E ratio in five years will be just as high as Google’s is today, and assuming that its stock will produce a five-year return of 11% annualized, Facebook’s stock today should be just $16.66.

How can Facebook investors wriggle out from underneath the awful picture these calculations paint? By assuming that its revenue and profitability will grow faster than the average IPO between 1996 and 2010 — and not just by a little bit, either, but a whole lot faster.

Of course, it’s always possible that Facebook will be able to pull that off.

But, as Professor Ritter pointed out to me earlier this week, “the bigger a company gets, the harder it is to maintain percentage growth.” And Facebook is already huge — larger, in fact, than all but 47 other publicly traded companies in the U.S., by market capitalization.

So my back-of-the-envelope calculations for this column could very well be too optimistic rather than too pessimistic.

Given all this, Ritter said that a market cap “of $63 billion … five years from now seems like a very reasonable scenario.”

I’m not sure whether I’d dub this the perfect storm, but Facebook is currently on track to be the biggest IPO flop in recent memory, with all three CEOs taking the blame.

If the Facebook IPO has taught us anything, it’s that not all social-media companies are automatic buys. Zynga (Nasdaq: ZNGA ) shareholders, for instance, have learned that the hard way. With more than 90% of its revenue tied to Facebook, Zynga shares are now well below their IPO price.

Facebook, we really do need a “dislike” button for last week’s fiasco.