'A cult is perhaps the paradigmatic version of a culture that doesn’t work. Cults are crazy and idealistic in a bad way. Cult members all tend to be fanatically wrong about something big. And then there is what might be called anti-culture, where you really don’t even have a culture at all. Consulting firms are the classic example here. Unfortunately, this is probably the dominant paradigm for companies. Most of the time, they don’t even get to the point of having culture. People are mercenaries. People are nihilistic. A robust company culture is one in which people have something in common that distinguishes them quite sharply from rest of the world. If everybody likes ice cream, that probably doesn’t matter. If the core people share a relevant and unique philosophy about something important, you’re onto something. Similarly, differences qua differences don’t matter much. -- In thinking about building good company culture, it may be helpful to dichotomize two extreme personality types: nerds and athletes. Engineers and STEM people tend to be highly intelligent, good at problem solving, and naturally non zero-sum. Athletes tend to be highly motivated fighters; you only win if the other guy loses. Sports can be seen as classically competitive, antagonistic, zero-sum training. Sometimes, with martial arts and such, the sport is literally fighting. Even assuming everyone is technically competent, the problem with company made up of nothing but athletes is that it will be biased towards competing. Athletes like competition because, historically, they’ve been good at it. So they’ll identify areas where there is tons of competition and jump into the fray. The problem with company made up of nothing but nerds is that it will ignore the fact that there may be situations where you have to fight. So when those situations arise, the nerds will be crushed by their own naiveté. So you have to strike the right balance between nerds and athletes. -- Most startups are run by non-zero sum people. They believe world is cornucopian. That’s good. But even these people tend to pick competitive, warring fields because they don’t know any better. So they get slaughtered. The nerds just don’t realize that they’ve decided to fight a war until it’s all over. -- The optimal spot on the matrix is monopoly capitalism with some tailored combination of zero-sum and non zero-sum oriented people. You want to pick an environment where you don’t have to fight. But you should bring along some good fighters to protect your non zero-sum people and mission, just in case. -- Stephen Cohen: We tend to massively underestimate the compounding returns of intelligence. As humans, we need to solve big problems. If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in terms of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that intelligence is compounding, the cost of that missing long-term compounding is enormous. They’re not giving you the best opportunity of your life. Then a scary thing can happen: You might realize one day that you’ve lost your competitive edge. You won’t be the best anymore. You won’t be able to fall in love with new stuff. Things are cushy where you are. You get complacent and stall. So, run your prospective engineering hires through that narrative. Then show them the alternative: working at your startup.'

'It may upset people to hear that competition may not be unqualifiedly good. We should be clear what we mean here. Some sense of competition seems appropriate. Competition can make for better learning and education. Sometimes credentials do reflect significant degrees of accomplishment. But the worry is that people make a habit of chasing them. Too often, we seem to forget that it’s genuine accomplishment we’re after, and we just train people to compete forever. But that does everyone a great disservice if what’s theoretically optimal is to manage to stop competing, i.e. to become a monopoly and enjoy success. -- One problem with fierce competition is that it’s demoralizing. The perfect illustration of competition writ large is war. Everyone just kills everyone. There are always rationalizations for war. Often it’s been romanticized, though perhaps not so much anymore. But it makes sense: if life really is war, you should spend all your time either getting ready for it or doing it. But what if life isn’t just war? Perhaps there’s more to it than that. Maybe you should sometimes run away. Maybe you should sheath the sword and figure out something else to do. Maybe “life is war” is just a strange lie we’re told, and competition isn’t actually as good as we assume it is. -- One truth about that world is that, as always, companies want investors. But another truth about the world of perfect competition is that investors should not invest in any companies, because no company can or will make a profit. When two truths so clash, the incentive is to distort one of them. ...monopolies pretend they’re not monopolies while non-monopolies pretend they are. Non-monopolies always narrow their market. Monopolies insist they’re in a huge market. One important data point is how much cash a company has on its balance sheets. Apple has about $98b (and is growing by about $30b each year). Microsoft has $52b. Google has $45b. Amazon has $10b. In a perfectly competitive world, you would have to take all that cash and reinvest it in order to stay where you are. If you’re able to grow at $30b/year, you have to question whether things are really that competitive. Consider gross margins for a moment. Gross margins are the amount of profit you get for every incremental unit in marginal revenues. Apple’s gross margins are around 40%. Google’s are about 65%. Microsoft’s are around 75%. Amazon’s are 14%. But even $0.14 profit on a marginal dollar of revenue is huge, particularly for a retailer; grocery stores are probably at something like 2% gross margins. But in perfect competition, marginal revenues equal marginal costs. -- For a company to own its market, it must have some combination of brand, scale cost advantages, network effects, or proprietary technology. Of these elements, brand is probably the hardest to pin down. One way to think about brand is as a classic code word for monopoly. -- The Goldilocks principle is key in choosing the initial market; that market should not be too small or too large. It should be just right. Too small a market means no customers, which is a problem. Markets that are too big are bad ... it’s hard to get a handle on them and they are usually too competitive to make money. If there is no compelling narrative of what the market is and how it can scale, you haven’t yet found or created the right market. A plan to scale is crucial. The best kind of business is thus one where you can tell a compelling story about the future. The stories will all be different, but they take the same form: find a small target market, become the best in the world at serving it, take over immediately adjacent markets, widen the aperture of what you’re doing, and capture more and more. Once the operation is quite large, some combination of network effects, technology, scale advantages, or even brand should make it very hard for others to follow. That is the recipe for building valuable businesses. -- There is always some room to operate in existing markets. Instead of creating a new market, you could “disrupt” existing industries. But the disruptive tech story is possibly overdone. Disruptive companies tend not to succeed. Disruptive kids get sent to principal’s office. Much better than to disrupt is to find a frontier and go for it. -- Zynga is another interesting case. Mark Pincus has wisely said that, "Not having clear goal at outset leads to death by a thousand compromises." Zynga executed very well from the beginning. They started doing social games like Farmville. They aggressively copied what worked, scaled, figured out how to monetize these games—how to get enough users to pay for in-game perks—better than anyone else did. Their success with monetization drove the viral loop and allowed them to get more customers quickly. The question about Zynga is how durable it is. Is it a creative or non-creative business? Zynga wants the narrative to be that it’s not a creative or a design company. If it is, the problem is that coming up with new great games is hard. Zynga would basically just be game version of a Hollywood studio whose fortunes can rise or fall with the seasons. Instead, Zynga wants the narrative to be about hardcore psychometric sauce. It’s a better company if it’s figured out how psychological and mathematical laws give it permanent monopoly advantages. Zynga wants, perhaps needs, to be able to truthfully say, “we know how to make people buy more sheep, and therefore we are a permanent monopoly."'

'People often talk about “first mover advantage.” But focusing on that may be problematic; you might move first and then fade away. The danger there is that you simply aren’t around to succeed, even if you do end up creating value. More important than being the first mover is being the last mover. You have to be durable. -- The really valuable businesses are monopoly businesses. They are the last movers who create value that can be sustained over time instead of being eroded away by competitive forces. -- An interesting question is why most people seem biased in favor of perfect competition. To start, perfect competition may be attractive because it’s easy to model. That probably explains a lot right there, since economics is all about modeling the world to make it easier to deal with. Perfect competition might also seem to make sense because it’s economically efficient in a static world. Moreover, it’s politically salable, which certainly doesn’t hurt. But the bias favoring perfect competition is a costly one. Perfect competition is arguably psychologically unhealthy. Every benefit social, not individual. But people who are actually involved in a given business or market may have a different view—it turns out that many people actually want to be able to make a profit. The deeper criticism of perfect competition, though, is that it is irrelevant in a dynamic world. If there is no equilibrium – if things are constantly moving around—you can capture some of the value you create. Under perfect competition, you can’t. Perfect competition thus preempts the question of value; you get to compete hard, but you can never gain anything for all your struggle. Perversely, the more intense the competition, the less likely you’ll be able to capture any value at all. Thinking through this suggests that competition is overrated. -- If globalization had to have a tagline, it might be that “the world is flat.” We hear that from time to time, and indeed, globalization starts from that idea. Technology, by contrast, starts from the idea that the world is Mount Everest. If the world is truly flat, it’s just crazed competition. The connotations are negative and you can frame it as a race to the bottom; you should take a pay cut because people in China are getting paid less than you. But what if the world isn’t just crazed competition? What if much of the world is unique? In high school, we tend to have high hopes and ambitions. Too often, college beats them out of us. People are told that they’re small fish in a big ocean. Refusal to recognize that is a sign of immaturity. Accepting the truth about your world – that it is big and you are just a speck in it – is seen as wise. That can’t be psychologically healthy. It’s certainly not motivating. Maybe making the world a smaller place is exactly what you want to do. Maybe you don’t want to work in big markets. Maybe it’s much better to find or make a small market, excel, and own it. And yet, the single business idea that you hear most often is: the bigger the market, the better. That is utterly, totally wrong. -- Well-defined, well-understood markets are simply harder to master. Hence the importance of the second clause in the question that we should keep revisiting: what valuable company are other people not building?'

'...the PayPal team reached an important conclusion: BD didn’t work. They needed organic, viral growth. They needed to give people money. So that’s what they did. New customers got $10 for signing up, and existing ones got $10 for referrals. Growth went exponential, and PayPal wound up paying $20 for each new customer. It felt like things were working and not working at the same time; 7 to 10% daily growth and 100 million users was good. No revenues and an exponentially growing cost structure were not. Things felt a little unstable. PayPal needed buzz so it could raise more capital and continue on. (Ultimately, this worked out. That does not mean it’s the best way to run a company. Indeed, it probably isn’t.) Feb 16, 2000 was a good day for PayPal; the Wall Street Journal ran a flattering piece that covered the company’s exponential growth and gave it a very back of the envelope valuation of $500M. The next month, when PayPal raised another round of funding, the lead investor accepted the WSJ’s Feb. 16 valuation as authoritative. That March was thoroughly crazy. PayPal closed its $100M round on March 31st. The timing was fortunate, since after that everything sort of crashed. PayPal was left with the challenge of building a real business. -- You can’t have a bubble absent widespread, intense belief. The incredible narrative about a tech bubble comes from people who are looking for a bubble. That’s more overreaction to the pain of the ‘90s than it is good analysis. Antibubble type thinking is probably somewhat more true. In other words, it’s probably better to insist that everything is going to work and that people should buy houses and tech stocks than it is to claim that there’s a bubble. But we should resist that, too. For bubble and anti-bubble thinking are both wrong because they hold the truth is social. But if the herd isn’t thinking at all, being contrarian—doing the opposite of the herd—is just as random and useless. To understand businesses and startups in 2012, you have to do the truly contrarian thing: you have to think for yourself. The question of what is valuable is a much better question than debating bubble or no bubble. The value question gets better as it gets more specific: is company X valuable? Why? How should we figure that out? Those are the questions we need to ask.'

'Progress comes in two flavors: horizontal/extensive and vertical/intensive. Horizontal or extensive progress basically means copying things that work. In one word, it means simply “globalization.” Consider what China will be like in 50 years. The safe bet is it will be a lot like the United States is now. Cities will be copied, cars will be copied, and rail systems will be copied. Maybe some steps will be skipped. But it’s copying all the same. -- Vertical or intensive progress, by contrast, means doing new things. The single word for this is “technology.” Intensive progress involves going from 0 to 1 (not simply the 1 to n of globalization). -- It’s worth noting that globalization and technology do have some interplay; we shouldn’t falsely dichotomize them. Consider resource constraints as a 1 to n subproblem. Maybe not everyone can have a car because that would be environmentally catastrophic. If 1 to n is so blocked, only 0 to 1 solutions can help. Technological development is thus crucially important, even if all we really care about is globalization. -- Teaching vertical progress or innovation is almost a contradiction in terms. Education is fundamentally about going from 1 to n. -- Companies exist because they optimally address internal and external coordination costs. In general, as an entity grows, so do its internal coordination costs. But its external coordination costs fall. Totalitarian government is entity writ large; external coordination is easy, since those costs are zero. But internal coordination, as Hayek and the Austrians showed, is hard and costly; central planning doesn’t work. The flipside is that internal coordination costs for independent contractors are zero, but external coordination costs (uniquely contracting with absolutely everybody one deals with) are very high, possibly paralyzingly so. Optimality—firm size—is a matter of finding the right combination. Size and internal vs. external coordination costs matter a lot. North of 100 people in a company, employees don’t all know each other. Politics become important. Incentives change. Signaling that work is being done may become more important than actually doing work. These costs are almost always underestimated. The familiar Austrian critique dovetails here as well. Even if a computer could model all the narrowly economic problems a company faces (and, to be clear, none can), it wouldn’t be enough. To model all costs, it would have to model human irrationalities, emotions, feelings, and interactions. Computers help, but we still don’t have all the info. And if we did, we wouldn’t know what to do with it. So, in practice, we end up having companies of a certain size. Anyone on a mission tends to want to go from 0 to 1. You can only do that if you’re surrounded by others to want to go from 0 to 1. That happens in startups, not huge companies or government.'

'It is the very stability of the cash flow that allows a business to form around it. In fact, most cash flows are older than the businesses that grow around them. Buyers and sellers alike see markets as an illegible and turbulent churn of transaction opportunities. But really, they are landscapes carved out by great, ancient rivers of money and their tributaries. These rivers change course rarely. Cash flows are also among the most basic financial ideas. Some rivers of money are very old and very stable. You can at most fight to displace others from prime positions along the banks. Organizations are like riverbank communities. They are as old as the last significant course change or waterfront battle. The stability of the river, not the attitudes of people, is what makes old organizations seem set in their ways. Perhaps people resist new ideas not because they have specific personalities, but because they have settled on the banks of a river of money of a certain age.'

'Mr. Ries points to his own experience as a study in contrasts between the traditional start-up model and the lean approach. He was a senior engineer at There.com, a 3-D virtual world, from 2001 to 2003. There.com raised $40 million and spent years in stealth mode, building impressive technology, he recalls. But it had so much invested in one technology path and one business plan that the company lost its ability to change, Mr. Ries says. To switch course, Mr. Ries joined a founder of There.com, Will Harvey, and in 2004 they started a company called IMVU, a social network in which users chat online and create personalized avatars. By design, it raised no outside money in the early going. “I didn’t want us to have the freedom to go for years without customer feedback,” recalls Mr. Harvey.'

“If you as a company tell me that you have a brand name, I’m going to ask you a question: ‘Do you have the power to charge a higher price for the same product?’” Damodaran said, “If your answer is no, I don’t think you have a brand. You may think you do, but I don’t think your brand has any value.”

DB: Comment: 'After the crash, a new form of company was created - the "public" company - and one responsibility of the public company was to provide by MANDATE audited financial statements every year. What was the result? A market-driven service to consumers (a voluntary audited statement) was turned into an obligatory presentation. The result was that companies began to spend their time and energy seeking ways to make the statements fairly indecipherable and not representative of the true state of affairs, necessarily. What was once a voluntary good in a competitive marketplace became a kind of complex mess. Companies with sterling audits still went broke unexpectedly and because the audits had become mandatory, their competitive value was voided. Just another example of how mandated "complete disclosure of risk" within a regulatory environment is a chimera, a false hope. You are correct that the disinfectant is sunshine. But sunshine is only available via competition.'

'#1. Product and Platform risk, #2. Market risk, #3. Business model risk #4. Deep risk, #5. Macro risk' -- Comment: Paul Sweeny: "If the product is free to use, you are the product. In such freemium models it's usually specific data you produce in your use that is useful to the premium user or third parties." -- The user is product

'Next Media publications are also known for highly academic articles which attract a wide range of readers, including critics. Next Media has often taken a clear and sometimes proactive support for democratic groups in Hong Kong. Some companies with ties to the government of China never advertise in any papers or magazines owned by Next Media. The bold style of journalism seems to trigger constant troubles with the triads with incidents of criminal damages at the offices of Next Media. Apple Daily and its parent company Next Media are thought to be pioneer of paparazzi and yellow Journalism in Hong Kong.'

'When Gerald Roush died in late May, he left behind the Ferrari Market Letter. This newsletter, which he started and ran, had nearly 5,000 subscribers, paying him $130 a year for a subscription. Do the math! It's a good living--even without a fancy website. The Roush effect involves extraordinary domain knowledge, a market small enough to understand and diligently earning the role of data middleman. The players in the market want there to be one clearinghouse, one authority who can connect the data, see the trends and publish the conventional wisdom. Just about every tribe needs a Gerald Roush. And in many markets, they can afford to pay someone like him very handsomely.'

'The future of advantage: #Allocative. Google's advantage was built on allocating attention to content and ads better than its rivals. Google's real secret? Relevance, media's measure of how efficiently attention is allocated. #Creative. Apple... Creative advantage asks: is our strategic imagination 10x or 100x richer, faster, and deeper than our rivals? -- And the past: #Extractive. Over two decades, Microsoft has honed its extractive edge, coming up with cleverer and cleverer ways to extract profits from customers and suppliers. #Protective. Monsanto's made sure that farmers are locked in to Monsanto as tightly as possible. Protective advantage asks: are buyers and suppliers locked in to dealing with us, 10x or 100x more tightly than to rivals? -- These dimensions are mutually exclusive. The opportunity cost of protecting yesterday is creating tomorrow. The opportunity cost of extracting resources is allocating them in better ways.'

'First: The new reality'

'Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements. -- Demand for a product increases when the price of its complements decreases. In general, a company's strategic interest is going to be to get the price of their complements as low as possible.'

'Galco’s Soda Pop Stop' -- Fucking awesome! Honest, anti big business, anti big government, CAPITALISM. -- "What I wanted to do was do business with other businesses my size – to help them become unique businesses." (via: Seth Godin)

Comment: Dan G: "There is more room for happiness and satisfaction in being a believer (’clueless’) than a player (’sociopath’). Life for those who find value in what they are doing and get satisfaction out of it can be happy, fulfilled and peaceful. All they need to do is find their true interest and vocation — their true belief, not a delusion. The life of the player-sociopath is bound to be a constant war; and because it is a competition, satisfaction and success are not under their own self-control. It is contingent on the failure of the other player-sociopaths with whom they need to compete. It is ultimately foolish to make your own hapiness contingent on the payoff of a zero-sum game. -- From the point of view of society as a whole, praising sociopathy is a disaster. A society of believers will always thrive and progress; it will be the Utopia. A society of players will stagnate and self-distruct; it will be a Mad-Max style, pre-Hobbesian Dystopia." -- *nodding*

'#The Organization as Psychic Prison: ...it divides people into those who get how the world really works (the sociopaths and the self-aware slacker losers) and those who don’t (the over-performer losers and the clueless in the middle). This is where Gervais has broken new ground, primarily because as an artist, he is interested in the subjective experience of being clueless. ...the ultimate explanation of Michael Scott’s (and David Brent’s) careers: they are put into a position of having to explain their own apparent, unexpected and unexamined success. Remember, they are promoted primarily as passive pawns to either allow the sociopaths to escape the risks of their actions, or to make way for the sociopaths to move up faster. They are presented with an interesting bit of cognitive dissonance: being nominally given greater power, but in reality being safely shunted away from the pathways of power. They must choose to either construct false narratives or decline apparent opportunities.'

'The rise of China is no mystery but, no doubt, the historians will manage to find controversy, manage to bury all of this under complexity. The economists will meanwhile suggest that the transfer of economic power emerged out of the banking crisis. The reality is far simpler. The Western world was complacent, arrogant, and bloated. Collectively, the West allowed the emergence of a new competitor who used mercantilist policies to accumulate the modern equivalent of bullion, they allowed the export of all that had made their economies such a success and, when confronted with reality buried their heads in the collective sand of borrowing and money printing. Whatever happened, once China opened to the world, a new economic challenge was inevitable. However, the way that the West met the challenge has ensured that China will emerge as the great economic power.' -- Some comical insights on Chinese deal-making inside

'It still blows me away that David’s talk at Startup School 2008 was met with such enthusiasm (I know David was surprised too). The talk was simple. Come up with a product, charge money for it, make more money than it costs to run it, and you turn a profit! This is the formula that’s been in place since business began. Yet in front of a group of new tech entrepreneurs it seemed like a revelation, a brand new story never told before. David said people were coming up to him in droves after the speech thanking him for opening their eyes. Who closed them?' -- CAN HAZ MUNETIZASHUN L8R PLOX?

'A new class of global actors is playing an increasingly important role in globalization: smugglers, warlords, guerrillas, terrorists, gangs, and bandits of all stripes. Since the end of the Cold War, the global illicit economy has consistently grown at twice the rate of the licit global economy. Increasingly, illicit actors will represent not just an economic but a political force. As globalization hollows out traditional nation-states, what will fill the power vacuum in slums and hinterlands will be informal non-state governance structures. These zones will be globally connected, effectively run by local gangs, religious leaders, or quasi-tribal organizations – organizations that will govern without aspiring to statehood.'

'I think the best definition for this kind of marketing is that it is: an aspect of internal operations that has been made transparent to customers and in doing so has become a driver of loyalty or additional business. -- In most cases, their value is obvious or easy to measure. There’s no need to create a secondary measure like “engagement” in order to figure out the value of these ideas to the company. They’re also really smart and really inventive solutions to business problems. They solve marketing problems by saving money or making more money rather than by “investing” in marketing programs whose returns are questionable.' -- Business as Massively Multiplayer Real-time Strategy Game: Examples listed by factors of (re)production: #Delivery #Sourcing #Construction #Billing #Payment #Internal metrics or data #Repair #Saving money

'It appears that in America the very business of published news is in the midst of widespread atrophy and now carries forward as does a sickly and aging man, coughing up blood and gasping for breath and bearing the pronounced stench of inevitable failure. Disloyal Americans! Your obsession with personal liberty has been a burden on your nation's success for generations, and now you sit there like livestock as an entire industry falls to dust around you—the very industry upon which you construct your imaginary foundation of free speech! Why did no one inform us of this? Submission is deficient in this culture of indolence, where citizens would rather have the unmitigated thoughts of others poured into their heads by the Internet than read diligently the printed word, as decent people do ...take notice: the Onion newspaper is for sale.'

'... two new qualities of leadership: #The first is the ability to distribute a leader's influence to as many followers within a given time. #The second is the ability to be sufficiently persuasive to change and hold the allegiance of followers who they can influence. When these factors come into play, the balance of power depends on the distribution of leaders. ...the key to seizing power, or at least gaining a significant foothold, is the effective distribution of a small number of leaders within a larger group. "A better distribution pattern has larger influential region and greater clustering factor, which can equip the leaders with the capability of influencing more followers in a given period and strengthening the persuasion power on the followers as well."' -- In the linked paper: '...the mechanism underlying such an apparent “following the minority” in the whole group is due to the scheme of “following the majority” locally.'

"You can only make money if you influence behaviour. Your starting point must be getting people to do something, rather than getting them to think something."

"... for many women the site holds out the hope of successfully combining meaningful work with motherhood in a way that more high-powered careers in the law, business, or sciences seldom allow. In other words, what Etsy is really peddling isn’t only handicrafts, but also the feminist promise that you can have a family and create hip arts and crafts from home during flexible, reasonable hours while still having a respectable, fulfilling, and remunerative career. ...as in much of life, the promise is a fantasy. There’s little evidence that most sellers on the site make much money. -- ...many posters admit that their husbands are the main breadwinners, and their work on Etsy amounts to little more than a glorified hobby. -- Etsy exerts a downward pressure on prices. At the local craft fair, an artist could charge a premium for homemade goods, because the buyer had few options. But Etsy puts the artist in Brooklyn in direct competition with the artist in Dubuque, or London."

Like the meaning of life being 'life', I think he's nailed the "what does twitter mean?" thing, here: '#1. Ideals beat strategies: What infuriates people most about Twitter is that it seems to have no plan, scheme, or angle. "Hey, Twitter" say the pundits: "don't you know the business of business is to profit, by any means necessary?" The business of business is to create value — and that's why Twitter's not playing the tired, old game of value extraction. It is trying, instead, to create a more authentic kind of value — and to do that, you need ideals. Twitter pursues its ideals — democracy, peace, equity — with the quiet intensity of a true revolutionary.' -- '#2. Open beats closed. #3. Connection beats transaction. #4. Simplicity beats complexity. #5. Neighborhoods beat networks. #6. Circuits beat channels. #7. Laziness beats business. #8. Public beats private. #9. Messy beats clean. #10. Good beats evil.'

'It's the root of all evil: Azerothian gold. The irony is that the players never actually see their gold — no piles of virtual treasure to roll around in, just an icon in their backpack with a number next to it. This number is the key to the finest mounts, good equipment, life-saving potions, power-enhancing elixirs, food and drink, ammunition, armor repair bills, and everything needed to play more World of Warcraft. to continue earning gold, to play more WoW, to make more gold, to play more WoW, and on into infinity.'

Sex (Dating), Drugs (Food, Music, TV), and Gambling (Money)

"20th century capitalism is eating itself... we have reached the boundaries of a kind of growth. Tomorrow's growth won't come from a person, place, or technology - but from understanding why yesterday's growth has failed. The same growth models applied to new people, places, and technologies will simply result in the same crises, over and over again. We have to reboot growth: the problem is not what is growing versus what is not, but how we grow. Here are the four pillars of smart growth - for economies, communities, and corporations: #1. Outcomes, not income: Are people healthier, fitter, smarter, happier? #2. Connections, not transactions: Smart growth seeks to amplify connection and community -- because the goal isn't just to trade, but to co-create and collaborate. #3. People, not product #4. Creativity, not productivity: How many new industries, markets, categories, and segments an economy can consistently create. Smart growth is creative -- not merely productive" -- A classic.

#1. Fire your ad agency. #2. Build your website in HTML. #3... (Better not)

"Tomorrow's radical innovators will reconceive currency itself: they will design next-generation currencies that are globally accessible, ubiquitously liquid, and that are inherently, permanately hedged and insured - so instead of getting inflated, deflated, disinflated, and eviscerated, currencies can do what, well, they were meant to do: serve as a durable store of authentic value." -- Gold

"... it was clear that Pierce's undoing had also been the result of uncertainties about the nature of virtual goods in general. Who really owns them? Who determines their value? These are the kinds of questions that a case like Hernandez's should have helped resolve. And as long as they remain unsettled, no game company will ever let any single independent entity control the amounts of virtual wealth that Pierce and IGE once did."

"That toxic recipe cannot power global economic growth in the 21st century. When your market cap, for example, can be utterly vaporized in a matter of days, it's a stark reminder that shareholder value is a videogame - and it is human outcomes that make work meaningful."

'Professor Willian O'Hara, in one of his books mentioned about family business the following: "Before the multinational corporation, there was family business. Before the Industrial Revolution, there was family business. Before the enlightenment of Greece and the empire of Rome, there was family business.'

"What's happening at your company? Share status updates with your co-workers." -- With Hashtags too. Kinda interesting way of tagging company processes.

Useful. ;^)

"The macro crisis is the reflection of a global financial system that wasn't built to last. It's riddled with moral hazard and adverse selection because incentives are myopic, information is poor, ethics are totally absent, valuation is a black art, models are divorced from reality - and that's just the tip of the iceberg." -- Comment: Ray "add 'shallow innovation' to the list too"

"Brands within the infrastructure of the cultural mechanism, are the verbs of life, they are not about trying to facilitate the consumers interests - it’s deeper, more transparent, more beneficial - it’s about the organisation working towards a common goal - and that is - mutuality. If Brands think that their role is to rise above ‘acceptability’, then they are going the wrong direction. Brands, if they want to be the life of the consumer, must be the reasoning of the consumer."

"At our recent Zeus Jones mid-year review we decided there was too much loosey goosey creative stuff going down and implemented some standardized processes and procedures." -- Zeus Jones refactors.

"Today, advantage is, to use an unintentionally ironic metaphor, in a company's operating system - not in its hardware. Advantage begins in the DNA. It's a function of the principles you use to organize and manage..."

"... being good seems to help startups in three ways: it improves their morale, it makes other people want to help them, and above all, it helps them be decisive.... I'm suggesting [being good] because it works."

"the real root cause of the macro crisis: the exploding divergence between today's economics and strategy trapped in a faded, rusting past – consigning firms to act out, like mute players on a stage, moves bereft of imagination, meaning, and purpose."

"Several years ago, I formed a Board of Directors for my career. They treated me like a business entity and almost overnight my life changed (for the better). I can certainly see why people in the entertainment business have agents."

"A group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake tribe. The number of people you interact with is about right. But something is missing: individual initiative." -- "In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally."

"...as it stands, strategic planning is going nowhere, fast. In the long term, we are all dead. Only the paranoid survive." -- What are planners for anymore?

"The greatest hoax ever played on the Internet is the idea that Google's growth was somehow "natural" or "viral", and that [it] propelled them to their insane 70% market share. ... Google bought as much search space as they could from OEMs, portals, etc."

"The widget is free for you for the first week. It then costs For: Ireland €2 per week, UK $1.50 per week, Australia $3 per week and, US $7.99 per month, all billed direct to your phone, for unlimited text messages. Could this be the first widget that u

"#mystery to #heuristic to #algorithm to #binary code.... businesses create value as the move information from one state to the next."

"Alternate reality games [and] 10 collective-intelligence competencies: #mobbability #cooperation radar #signal/noise management #protovation #emergensight #open authorship #influency #multicapitalisml #longbroading #high ping quotient"

"Maximizing shareholder value at the expense of all of the other stakeholders is bad for business and bad for capitalism. It drives a wedge between those who create the economic value -- the employees -- and those who harvest its benefits."

101 on the value of a brand (Adliterate)

Video: Russell Davies (Very funny. (Not sure he meant to be. (The truth is always funny.))): “If you never said the word ‘brand’ again and said only product, company, reputation, things would get a lot clearer” Source: AdStructure(?)

"How do you make the marketing so interactive that it is invisible?"

"While wimpy Americans can whine about "cheating" in online games [...] the most popular game in China, ZT Online, from Giant Interactive has embraced all of these things.. and online gambling to boot." Utterly ruthless. The Ten (Crack) MMO Commandments?

"UnLtd is a charity which supports social entrepreneurs - people with vision, drive, commitment and passion who want to change the world for the better. We [provide] a complete package of funding and support,to help make ideas a reality."

"Grants Online is designed to maximise funding opportunities for public, private and community based organisations and partnerships."

"The diagram below shows a regional map of the Middle East. The coloured lines represent: Build (green), Under construction (Orange) and Proposed (red) Oil and Gas pipeline since the start of Operation Shock and Ore (March 2003)." Yup. A right carve up.

Funding. Doing. Funding. Doing.

Quality services grounded in experience and delivered on time, on message and on budget

"You could argue that financial services is a big MMO. It's massively multiplayer and it's online. Maybe it's not a game, but the information that traders are working off of is like an event in one of these virtual world role-playing games."

“You are so much more productive in your own office than when you are being distracted by the people either side.” Ha. We have those here. They're called bedrooms. Seriously though, this a big problem in the so-called 'creative industries'.

"Japanese firms [do] best in manufacturing industries with closed product designs that do not require collaboration with the rest of the industry, and worst in fields based on open standards and modular architectures."

Damn useful. Integrates with Basecamp: "Pulse is a web-based cash flow management tool that allows you to easily monitor the heartbeat of your small business - your cash."

"having an avatar alter ego is simply going to be a fact of life... As a result, avatar support services will become more visible, from in-world makeovers; parents grinding for their kids; power-leveling / gold farming / gray-market virtual trading."

"Charging too little for rent? Paying too much for rent? Enter your rental info below and find out!" Disruptive!

"What students do in their classes will change too. Instead of trying to get good grades to impress future employers, students will try to learn things. We're talking about some pretty dramatic changes here."

The creepy backend to Facebook. Surprisingly easy to set up up stuff for - ahem! - research purposes.

"Chinese are not constructing virtual worlds for fun; they are deadly serious. Although online games will be part of the mix, the underlying strategy is strictly economic: to boost the profits from the country's booming industrial base." Great article.

"Invest wisely. End poverty. At MicroPlace, you can make investments that reach millions of hard-working poor people worldwide." Hmm... I can easily be jokey cynical about this, but good idea and very dignified.

"Are you afraid no one wants your information? Then maybe you'd better do some research and make a product that people actually want to know about." *Rolls up sleeves* PRODUCTS!

Mobile Butler?

"Investing $750,000 in Al's pontificat[ion] on behalf of his carbon trading business could pay Norway and OPEC handsomely... Al's crusade should translate into far higher prices for the [Norwegian's] lower carbon North Sea oil and gas."

"Let’s say Richard, John, and the guys at Open Intelligence Agency teamed up and wanted to create a CPO. They would need to win some business. They would say, this is what you need to do with your brand and this is how we would buy the execution."

Haha: "Craig Ulliott, Where I’ve Been --10:47am: Wouldn’t recommend starting a company in the UK, very expensive and very hard, would recommend doing it here."

"‘Pre-paid porn cards'.. this code then allowed you access to a network of pornographic sites, so that you would never have to enter in your credit-card details. As a marketing strategist, I found the idea quite ingenious."

"I am a new kind of physician. I strictly make house calls either at your home or work. Once you become my patient and I've personally met you, we can also e-visit by video chat, IM, and email for certain problems and follow-ups."

'Brooklyn Doctor Opens IM Practice: "They're young and wired. Once you figure out an issue, you can follow up with e-mail, IM and video chat. The vast majority of these people don't need repeated physical exams."

"whether shoppers want more convenience or to do more for themselves; perhaps buying more locally sourced products with more information about what their families are eating and wearing."

"... the internet is radically lowering the cost of collaborating. Companies - certainly big companies - are losing their raison d'etre. Individuals, and tiny companies, can collaborate without corporate behemoths to organise them."