What happened to the old school pig's bladder?

As the world’s largest sporting event nears its curtain raising game next week and 750 millions viewers get ready to draw up their chairs for the World Cup final on July 11th, a controversy builds around the most essential part to the world’s most popular game: the ball. An article in the New York Times on the subject caught my eye because it made me think, is this another example of a company not talking to it’s customer?

The newly designed ball, christened Jabulani {“to celebrate” in Zulu},  is ruffling the feathers of everyone who kicks it, particularly, goalkeepers. I wont repeat the entire story, you can read it on the NYT’s website.

“The ball was designed to be groovier than a Beach Boys album, made of molded polyurethane panels with a grippy feel, and engineered to provide the shooter maximum control. It has been tested in wind tunnels. Robots whacked at the ball to simulate free kicks and corner kicks. The party-hearty wives and girlfriends of England’s players took it out and got it drunk.”

So it seems that it was tested and researched in every way. Apart from one, that is – with those who are going to use it (the customer). Surely, they tried out this thing with players and asked them what they thought? Maybe not! Obviously, they didn’t take much notice if they did.

It served as a good reality check for me. Do the easy thing and talk to your customers, it’s not rocket science (some ideas). Maybe, i’m over sensitive about this since it’s currently a contentious topic of discussion at my own company, OpenStudy.com.

How great leaders inspire action

Building the right company culture and setting a mission everyone is behind is a prerequisite for success. Easy to say, much harder to do.

Simon Sinek, in his Ted lecture, articulates much of why this matters and how it can be done. There’s some good material in here and it can be useful for resetting the way you position your company or product. It’s a good piece to share with your own team, if nothing more than to get everyone thinking in a different way. Sinek uses a simple model for explaining why companies like Apple get it right and most other fall short – it might explain why Apple’s market cap has just over taken Microsoft’s .

Sinek, explains that your average everyday Joe would describe Apple’s business in the following:

• “We make great computers. They’re beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy one?”

Mr. Jobs, on the other hand, would describe it more like this:

• “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?”

Herein lays the answer…

If you have another 15 minutes handy, a great lead-on from from the Sinek video is Steve Job’s Commencement Speech given at Stanford in 2005. Again, a good starting point if you are looking for a culture tweak or you want to build some clarity around your mission.

Do your homework?

Find out what their strategic technology road map is and build yourself into it
Find out where they are in their budget process – what small things can you do to get started. They have small hidden pockets of money you can make work for you.

Get found by a partner (how do they know you’re there)?

Be a match maker
Consultants and brokers e.g. NineSigma, YourEncore, VCs
Escouting e.g. Yet2.com, LinkedIN (link with your target group and send monthly “ping” of information, leverage introductions).

Take an approach that works?

Select a business unit to go after
Write an email to business unit head (P&L owner) & ccEmail to CTO and the licensing person of the business unit (hopefully one will bite)
Through linkedin find a thought leader in the business unit

TIP: Make sure the subject line of your email stands out, otherwise it will not be read.

Create a Board of advisors:

Find 2 retired “lifers” from the type of companies you want partner with. Retired Business Unit head is the best.

Invite your IP lawyer to your meetings. He/she will pick up on new ideas that can be patented.

Here’s an email i received from a friend today. It’s a pretty common question for a small business looking to grow and i get this one asked quite a lot.

“What do you know about raising capital or private equity?   We’re getting our “financial management” service offering down and we’ve partnered with another company that brings an element of Intellectual property and Monitoring capability.  do you have some time to chat over coffee/lunch/beer this week?”

There is so much useful educational content out but it’s just a case of knowing where to find it.  I thought i would post my reply. Here’s my email reply back to him {i choose food for payment}.

“I  dont know where your knowledge level starts but this might help. Here’s a lecture that you mind find useful. Download it to your ipod or listen online. This whole series of lectures are pretty good (and they’re British so they must be good). You’ll want to start with lecture #5 -

• “Raising Capital and doing deals” from Oxford University (53 minutes)

And this guy is good as well (you may just hear audio first. Wait and you’ll see him start drawing on the blackboard):

• Raising money for a start-up (10 minutes)

• Getting seed round from a VC (11 minutes)

A previous blog post of mine:

• 3 reasons why your small business will not be able to raise money

If you get a chance to look at this, let me know what you think. I can get more or less technical when we meet.

phil”

Grow your business: 4 ways to find free educational courses on line

Wanting to brush up on my financial skills i have been taking a free online course in finance from Yale (ECON 252: Financial Market. While i cant claim to rub shoulders with New Haven’s elite, i can get pretty close to what they are learning and all for free.

Overall, I’ve been very impressed. The majority of this course i’ve been able to follow on my ipod without needing to do the heavy course reading. I especially, like class #9, the guest lecture by David Swensen. Basically, it’s a course on “What Wall Street Does Not Want You Know”:

• David Swensen, Yale’s Chief Investment Officer and manager of the University’s endowment, discusses the tactics and tools that Yale and other endowments use to create long-term, positive investment returns. He emphasizes the importance of asset allocation and diversification and the limited effects of market timing and security selection. Also, the extraordinary returns of hedge funds, one of the more recent phenomena of portfolio management, should be looked at closely, with an eye for survivorship and back-fill biases.

{click here to watch}

There are 2 main formats by which you can take the course, mp3 download or video. The transcripts of the lecture are also available if you really want to dig deep. Click here for the download page for the Yale finance course.

This has started me on a crusade to back fill my education with courses and content that have real relevance to me to day. I like being able to take a course and especially being able to apply it to my business.

Here’s a course on pricing from the Wharton School, liked:

How much should you charge? Why micro pricing pays off

The big challenge with the free online educational content is plowing through the vast volumes of content and finding what is of interest (believe me, there is something there for everyone and everything). One way to do this is to use some targeted search engines (see below). There are a bunch more tactics but that is a blog post in itself.

• ocwsearch.com – indexing OpenCourseWare material from MIT. More universities will be added soon.
• ocwfinder.org - OCW Finder helps people find free online courses called OpenCourseWares
• www.ocwconsortium – index currently contains 2,970 courses from 37 sources and 6 languages
• oedb.org – You’ll find digital archives, a variety of courses, Podcasts, videos and sometimes a mix of everything you can imagine.

Let me know if you want some specific recommendation for business, entrepreneurial or finance courses, I’ve  done a lot of digging around or if you would like more posts on this subject also let me know (make a post below).

Would you invest in these guys?

A friend of mine has just shown me some packaging designs for a new chocolate product she is developing: it’s actually healthy for you, the more you eat, the better you feel and the better it is for you. Sounds pretty cool (i haven’t had a sample yet!). She asked me “is this business invest-able?”. Well, the answer involves the usual suspects when it comes to this type of thing. It doesnt matter whether you’re talking chocolate or tennis balls, the same principles apply.

Here are the ten questions an investor will want answered:

• Do you have sales and distribution (e.g. orders in hand from a big retailer or predictable and scalable sales direct to consumers – like online)?
• Show me evidence that people love your chocolates and why?
• How am I going to make money out of the deal (sale of the company, return on investment etc)?
• What’s the competition like and what makes you different?
• What’s stops someone else copying you and killing your market?
• What’s the management team like – I’ll back the horse, not the jockey?
• How much money do you need now i.e. i want to make sure that my money is safe and you don’t run out of cash quickly so I lose my investment?
• How much money do you need to be profitable?
• (helps but not essential) = i’ve gotta love chocolate i.e. i just love your product personally?
• How many Umpa Lumpas do you have on staff?

Goodbye stock price, goodbye heady days

Happy birthday tech bubble high, you’re 10 today. Remember the heady days, when the only way was up. It was the beginning of the new millennium and my partners and i had just sold our business, Netzip, to to RealNetworks: all was rosy. Real’s stock price was riding the crest at $81.63 and all the chatter was how it would hit $150 in 12 months. The purchase was a stock deal and what an investment it was set to be. Fast forward 365 days to March 2001…stock price = $6.94 !!!! Ooooppps.

On 10 March 2000, the Nasdaq index of leading technology shares spiked, after that prices fell.

It was a boom that saw stock markets soar, as a whole new generation of companies focussed on the internet attracted a wave of investors’ money.

As the euphoria took hold, some people even quit their jobs to become full-time share traders.

Others claimed that the internet had done away with calculations based on the “old economy” – but the boom turned out to be a classic speculative share bubble like any other.

(compliments of the BBC )

What we are doing to our kids' education

So, I’m not the overtly political type. In fact, my wife often gets frustrated because I voice views that sit both sides of the party fence and in her opinion I should be neatly standing within the confines of a single political party. From this stance, you can consider me a lost ‘pigeon’ looking for a ‘hole’ (between you and me, i have no desire to find one).  Now that we’ve got that out the way, I can begin.

Reading an article this morning about how school districts are increasingly looking at moving to a four day school week to save money was incredibly disturbing to me. Doesn’t this set alarm bells ringing with you? OK, some argue that time is made up by lengthening the school day to compensate but this is not the point. The point is that bit by bit we are eroding our kids’ future by continually chipping away at what we invest in them. We shouldn’t be coming up with justification as to why it’s OK to reduce their education, we should be engaged in conversation about how we are spending more on their futures. I view many things in life like running a business and this is no different. We are disinvesting in an asset – our kids – at a time when we should be investing. In corporate speak, we are laying kids off, making them redundant; we are downsizing their future.

Let’s give some context to this situation. This is where i want to avoid being political and keep things to an economic debate. I’m not trying to have a discussion about whether we should or shouldn’t have gone to war in Iraq, I’ll leave that to others. I’m using Iraq as data point. So, let’s lay out the facts.

The government has just committed to plow $4 billion into education to help fix things. Given there are about 50 million school kids in the U.S., that equates to an investment of $87 per child. Now for a comparison: The total amount spent and committed to the Iraq war so far is $900 billion. If that money had been directed into education instead, it would equate to an investment of $18,000 per child.

Some other tidbits…

• Amount of spend per child on U.S. kids from Obama’s new education initiative is $87 ($4bn  / 50m = $87 )
• Amount of spend per child on U.S. kids if the all the Iraq war spend had been directed to education is $1,800 ($900bn / 50m = $1,800)
• 10 billion is the number of kids that could be educated if we took the Iraq money and spent $87 on each of these kids ( i.e. it assumes the same level of additional investment currently being made by the government on U.S. kids).
• Given there are only 560m school age kids in the world*, we could reach FIVE planet earth’s with the Iraq money ($900bn / $87 = 10bn kids)
• $1,607 is the the amount that could be spent on EVERY school kid in the world if the Iraq budget had been redirected into education ($900bn / 250m school kids in the world = $1,607)*
• The annual total amount spent on U.S. school education is $500bn, so the Iraq money could have educated the entire country for 2 years.
• The total annual education spend on the 29 top countries in the world is $1.1 trillion. The Iraq money would have educated the entire world for nearly a year (and this excludes virtually all the 3rd world countries).

So, we can preface all these facts and figures with the disclaimer that I am no statistician but they do give an order of magnitude. And yes, this may be info overload, but if you look at all this like a business the ROI in educational terms is dire and the sooner we get our priorities right the better.

*There are 2.2bn children in the world. Remove 28% (ages 1-5), gives the number school age kids in the world = 560m (yes, rough figs).

I like stories…

Using Tales For Business

These traditional Tales from The Market have been handed down and treasured for generations. Each story has outstanding analytics and has been rated AAA (“a super-good read”) by Shotzy’s Tale Rating Service.

One of the wise elders from the town of Greenwich tells this first tale, introducing us to the magic of The Market:

A fox and a hound waited in a copse outside of a farmer’s henhouse.

“Ooh, I can hear those chickens clucking from here,” said the hound. “Let’s go in there and snatch them all!”

“Not so fast,” said the fox. “If we take them all at once we can’t ever return. But if we take just one, then perhaps the farmer won’t notice and we can keep coming back night after night to get more.”

“That’s a good idea,” said the hound.

The two entered and went to work quickly. The fox grabbed as many chickens as he could, emptying the henhouse.

“Hey,” said the hound. “I thought you said we were going to take only one chicken.”

“That is what I did,” said the fox. “I limited myself to one chicken.”

“Forgive me, my friend,” said the hound, “but that is not accurate. I saw you take at least seven chickens.”

“The one chicken was my limit,” said the fox.

“And the other six?”

“Ah,” said the fox with a smile. “The other six were the bonus I gave myself for staying within my limit. And a very nice bonus it was indeed.”

The moral of this story? In The Market, a bonus doesn’t count. That’s why they call it a bonus.

•

The mouse king needed a ride to the other side of the river, so he called on a large alligator for help.

“Can you take me to the other side of the river?” the king asked. “I will pay you $20 billion from my coffers.”

“That’s a lot of money, even if it is in mouse dollars,” said the alligator. “I’ll take your offer.”

So they set out on the river, which was very shallow, allowing the alligator to crawl more than halfway across. Then they hit a deep spot and started to sink.

“Help!” cried the king. “I can’t swim.”

“Neither can I,” said the alligator.

“But you’re an alligator,” said the king. “Surely all alligators can swim.”

The alligator explained that he had once been able to swim. But the river was so shallow and so rich with fish to eat that he had grown plump and lost the skill.

“What do we do now?” cried the king.

At this point the subjects of the king who were watching from the river bank recognized what was happening. Many began paddling furiously to the sinking alligator. They used their little mouse legs to prop him up and propel him to the other side. Most did not survive the task.

When he was safe on the other side, the mouse king asked, “Why did you accept my offer if you couldn’t swim?”

The alligator said, “I will be honest. I did it for the money. I figured we would somehow make it to the other side. And sure enough, we did make it. You see, I was right.”

“But what about all of my subjects who drowned in the river?” asked the mouse king.

The alligator shrugged. “Hey, risk is a part of every transaction,” he said.

With that, they went to dinner at the restaurant on the other side of the river and shared a very nice bottle of wine. And forgot about the whole thing.

Daniel Greenberg is a writer in New Rochelle. He wrote this article for The Washington Post.
Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=901120&category=opinion#ixzz0gT08UYDY