Creativille

CBJ book review: Emotional Intelligence 2.0

2009-06-15T10:01:00.001-05:00

Emotional Intelligence 2.0
Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves
TalentSmart, 255 p., $19.95

Anyone with a copy of Gallup’s Strengthsfinder 2.0 on the shelf probably did a doubletake when they saw the cover of Emotional Intelligence 2.0. Save for a shift from red to orange and an additional stripe, the covers are nearly identical.

That’s likely intentional. Those looking to tap into core talents can take the Strengthsfinder test online, then read about who to put those strengths to work. The folks behind Emotional Intelligence 2.0 offer a similar tool, but in this case, it is to measure how well you react emotionally to situations.

In both cases, the book (and accompanying online component) promise to help the reader identify aspects of their personality that are often difficult to self-detect. And, once identified, they promise to help you maximize those aspects to achieve success.

“Emotional awareness and understanding are not taught in school,” the authors write. “We enter the workforce knowing how to read, write and report on bodies of knowledge, but too often, we lack the skills to manage or emotions in the heat of the challenging problems that we face.”

They go on to claim that emotional intelligence accounts for 58 percent of performance in all types of jobs, and is the single biggest predictor of performance in the workplace.

Emotional intelligence is made up of four skills: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. The authors take up several pages explaining what each of these is and how they affect your decision making and work habits.

The bulk of the book, however, is given over to strategies to improve your emotional intelligence in each of these four areas. After taking the online assessment (each book comes with a code that allows you to access the site), you can look for ways to address shortcomings.

Even if you don’t take the assessment, the book has valuable advice that can guide you through a process of self- improvement. For example, the section on self-awareness includes tips like “stop and ask yourself why you do the things you do” and “get to know yourself under stress.”

For those with low self-awareness scores, following such advice can help to boost those figures.

Beyond that, the book offers some brief information about emotional intelligence that helps to put the idea in perspective. It’s an interesting, helpful little book that, like Strengthsfinder 2.0, can help you on the path to self-discovery.

CBJ Book Review: Ignore Everybody

2009-06-01T16:12:00.002-05:00

This originally ran in the May 18-24, 2009 issue of the Corridor Business Journal.

Ignore Everybody
Hugh MacLeod
Portfolio, 159 p., $23.95

Having read Hugh MacLeod’s wildly successful blog, Gaping Void (www.gapingvoid.com), for the past four years, I feared that a whole book of his musings would be a bit too much.

That’s not a slight, necessarily. When you’re used to reading bite-sized nuggets from someone with an outsized personality like Mr. MacLeod, the prospect of 159 pages of the stuff is daunting.

I needn’t have worried, for Ignore Everybody was transforming. Where Mr. MacLeod’s blog posts offer the occasional burst of insight and inspiration, a book full of such thoughts was truly moving. I can safely say that this was the first business book I’ve been compelled to read in one day, and the first that made me actually feel like doing something immediately afterward.

Mr. MacLeod was a New York marketer with a cartooning background who started drawing cartoons on the backs of business cards while killing time in bars. He scanned these, uploaded them to the web and then wrote blog posts about marketing and cartooning to run with them. Today 1.5 million people monthly visit his blog, and screen prints of his cartoons sell for hundreds of dollars.

That in and of itself would be worth a book, and while Mr. MacLeod does share much about his own odd career path, he really focuses on his thoughts about creativity. He shares 40 such insights here, from “ignore everybody” to “none of this is rocket science.” In between, on pages liberally sprinkled with his funny, bawdy and incisive cartoons, he offers something that reads like a mash up of affirmation, advice and inspiration.

This may sound slight, and anyone paging through this in a bookstore would be hard pressed to argue otherwise. But it does what it sets out to do. Mr. MacLeod makes his point (“Ignore everybody”), amplifies it (“The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you.”) and then expounds on it for a page or two.

Each point is poignant enough, but it is the aggregation of all 40 points that drives home the key point: indulge your creative self, but don’t put so much pressure on yourself to make it your be-all end-all that you quash the energy that made that creative outlet so rewarding in the first place.

CBJ Book Review:

2009-05-18T13:15:00.002-05:00

This originally ran in the May 18-24, 2009 issue of the Corridor Business Journal.

Pow! Right Between the Eyes!
Andy Nulman
Wiley Books, 244 p., $22.95

I love comedy, but I find that when people try to blend comedy and business advice, the results are usually so stale as to be off putting at best, worthless at worst.

That makes Andy Nulman’s book a – wait for it… surprise. His book, subtitled “Profiting from the Art of Surprise,” certainly tries to get the reader laughing at the same time he is learning, but it does so with just the right balance of mirth and worth that it is the rare example of a comedic business book that works.

Mr. Nulman’s key tenet is this: “The element of surprise is the most important aspect in contemporary business.” In a world where you can go into a McDonald’s in India and get a burger that tastes just like one in Cedar Rapids, or walk into any Walgreens and know exactly where to find the cold medicine, that might seem a strange thing to believe.

But, Mr. Nulman writes, the problem with the expected is that it doesn’t generate any excitement about your product. “The end result is a yawn-inducing, decreasingly effective, peasoup-esque haze.”

Surprise your customer – or better yet, your potential customer – and “it slices through the dreariness of the dreaded ‘murketing’ message.”

Once he explains why surprise is vital and describes what it is, he spends much of the rest of the book telling the reader how to do it. Here, Mr. Nulman’s background in entertainment is put to full use. He knows how to present a case study and make his pitch, engaging the reader at the same time he stresses key points.

Two important chapters, however, are the difference between the book being a novelty and being seriously valuable. In them, Mr. Nulman warns against undertaking marketing efforts solely for the sake of shock and titillation. In one, he shares what a surprise is not, while in the other he cautions that while there is value in surprise, done wrong it can have unintended consequences. Constantly raising the element of surprise can be just as boring as having no surprise at all, he warns.

For those looking for quick takeaways, the chapter “The Art of the Business of Creating Surprise” is the best destination. Over the course of 60 pages, Mr. Nulman offers several ideas and anecdotes about ways to use surprise to spread the word.

CBJ Book Review

2009-05-05T11:13:00.002-05:00

This originally ran in the May 4-11, 2009 issue of the Corridor Business Journal.

So You Want to Start a Business?
Edward D. Hess and Charles F. Goetz
FT Press, 194 p., $18.99

There is an interesting distinction in the subtitle of this book, which reads, “8 Steps to Take Before Making the Leap.” In the introduction, the authors write that they actually are addressing the eight mistakes that typically derail startup businesses.

Further, they write that these mistakes are at the real culprits behind failures that have been attributed to a larger perceived problem: the lack of capital. “Running out of money is the result or consequence of more fundamental, underlying failures,” they write.

The book begins with an introduction that lays out what those eight mistakes are, then recasts the problem to state its solution when it is given its own chapter. For example, the first mistake is “choosing a bad business opportunity.” The related chapter is titled, “What is a Good Business Opportunity?”

The book wouldn’t be as valuable if it simply left things here. It’s one thing to know how to avoid a problem. It’s another to see why you’re prone to make that error in the first place and to recognize if you already have. An early chapter provides the needed context, better explaining what these errors are and what they lead to.

In the case of the first mistake about good and bad business opportunities, they authors write about ideas that seem good, but that won’t earn you enough to cover costs and make a living. Execution is more important than the idea, they write, and without it, a good idea can lead to a bad business opportunity.

With that context in hand, the first chapter makes more sense – as do subsequent chapters thanks to their own contextualizing introductions – and sets you up for the math-intensive discussion of product, customers and execution that follows.

Other problems covered in the book include selling at the wrong price, failing to hire and retain the right people and being unable to grow and scale the business. Each is discussed in a technical chapter that really uncovers the nuts and bolts.

As usual, this book might be of help to someone contemplating making the entrepreneurial leap, but it seems as if it would be better for someone who has already taken the plunge but who is dealing with challenges. Here, the immediate application of its concepts to a problem might be more helpful than the more abstract guidance they offer someone creating a business plan.

Flawed business plan revealed!

2009-04-20T11:02:00.003-05:00

Pearls Before Swine, 4/20/09

Gee, when you put it that way, it does seem kind of silly. Where was Goat when we needed him?

Josh Feese succeeds with unique sales pitch

2009-04-14T13:32:00.003-05:00

Radiohead made headlines in 2007 when they allowed fans to pay whatever they wanted to for their new CD, and several other artists followed suit. That was a great thing, for it was a fine example of offering choice to consumers. Rather than assume they would steal the music if given the chance, the band let consumers decide what the music was worth.

Drummer Josh Freese is building on that notion with his second solo album, Since 1972. He is offering packages that cost between $7 and $75,000. The low end price gets you a digital download, the top end gets you a five-song EP written about you and your life, recorded by Freese, one of his drum sets, "take shrooms and cruise Hollywood in Danny from TOOL's Lamborgini," and Freese's membership in your band for a month (plus much, much more).

It seemed like an inventive lark when it was announced earlier this year. But then a funny thing happened: People took him up on it. In a pos t on the Nine Inch Nails message board, Freese writes that "I have sold 150 of the $50 of the packages and all 25 of the $250 packages (those went in the first 24 hours.) In less than a week I have sold 4 of the $500, 2 of the $2,500, 2 of the $5,000, and the big old $20,000 package!"

The $20,000 package sale has earned Freese some press. Wired.com's Underwire blog has the story. It seems fan Thomas Mrzyglocki had some inheritance money and a desire to get away from things for a while, so he bought the package and hung out with Freese for a week. According to Wired.com, Freese said, "I really do like the kid and know that it's a bizarre experience for him."

Meanwhile, Freese has earned unbelievable press for an album that would likely have garnered a handful of reviews had it come out through traditional means. Giving fans a choice, and being willing to go well beyond the norm, has earned him some fans, some notoriety and some cash. Though, he tells Wired.com, it's not about that: "I've made a little bit of money," he said, "but I'm not out shopping for cars, you know what I mean?"

CBJ magazine round-up

2009-04-12T20:31:00.002-05:00

Originally published in the April 13-19 issue of the Corridor Business Journal.

The cover of this month’s Portfolio is either a few months too late or a couple of years too early. Either way, it’s odd to see one-time Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in thick coat and jeans staring somewhat defiantly at the camera. The cover story is about Ms. Palin’s plan to build a $40 billion gas pipeline out of Alaska, and how and why the plan has been derailed. Of more interest is a companion piece about Exxon and what are expected to be its battles with the Obama administration over environmental issues.

Another interesting piece looks at “the Steve Jobs Economy,” estimating the Apple CEO’s worth to the economy. Adding not only the sale of its products but also software and ancillary products sold for them and the products of competitors spurred by his innovation, it estimates a value of $30.8 billion.

Wired this month looks at the nation’s power grid and the challenges we face because of it. The piece suggests seven ways to fix the grid, and expresses hope that the Obama administration is poised to do so. The suggestions include generating power anywhere possible, storing it in “super batteries” and pushing conservation efforts more aggressively.

The issue also includes a fascinating article called “The Brain, Revealed,” that looks at efforts to more fully map and study the organ that controls it all. It’s a comprehensive look at what we know, and what we have yet to discover.

Fast Company’s cover this month profiles Chris Hughes, a founder of Facebook who was instrumental in creating the MyBarackObama.com web site that is credited with helping to connect Mr. Obama’s supporters, raise $30 million and form 35,000 volunteer groups. Just 25, Mr. Hughes is given considerable credit in the piece for Mr. Obama’s election. Regardless of the accuracy of such plaudits, he was clearly a factor, and that success shows how, in the right hands, social media can be a very powerful tool.

The issue also has a list of 10 ways to fix the auto industry. No. 1 on the list? Let Mr. Obama take over. Some critics would say that already has occurred. Stay tuned for the results.

Web is killing the business of journalism

2009-04-10T14:00:00.003-05:00

Jeff Jarvis is angry again, because of course he's right and others are wrong. This time his ire is targeted at those who responded to a very unscientific survey of " prominent members of the national news media" by The Atlantic for a piece about the affect of the Internet on journalism. According to the piece, 65 percent of those surveyed believe journalism has been hurt more than helped by the Internet.

This, of course, has Jarvis hopping mad: "Restrain me," he writes.

Alas, The Atlantic probably errs by not presenting the question more effectively, and Jarvis, myopic as always, errs because he's not savvy enough to see the real question and answer behind the piece. You see, the Internet has damaged journalism. There's no question. What Jarvis is angry about is that this would seem to indicate that web-based reporting is inferior. Most of it is, but that's not the takeaway here. It is that the Internet has damaged the business of journalism. Of that, there is no debate. Other factors have played a part in the demise of newspapers and other newsgathering organizations, everything from greed and managerial incompetence to the rising cost of newsprint. But the web is what has so thoroughly slammed newspapers. If the rest were the first small rocks to slide down the mountainside, then the web is the thunderclap that triggered the landslide.

Many wags have compared newspaper companies to buggy whip makers. Whatever. But using that analogy, the newspaper folks are saying that cars have damaged the business of making and selling buggy whips. Again, there is no debate there. But the Jarvises of the day would say, "How dare you say carmakers can't make a quality buggy whip!" That's not the point, is it? In that case, buggies and cars conveyed people, but they were very different. In this one, newspapers and the web both convey information, but they are very different. And yes, the car killed the buggy just as surely as the web is killing newspapers.

Now, The Atlantic doesn't ask, nor do the queried journalists respond, with answers to this exact question. But that is the overarching Q and A in this discussion. Sure, they say that reporting suffers, that attention spans are being shortened. But what they are really saying is that the way we once did business has been irreparably damaged. For some reason, this rankles Jarvis, who continues to push for the demise of print products despite the fact that some of us still prefer to have that option in the mix. Anything that gets in the way of that seems to make him see red. Too bad that so clouds his view.

What is killing newspapers? Not what you think

2009-04-02T15:45:00.005-05:00

Finally, a look at the real reasons newspaper companies are failing. Yes, revenues are down everywhere because of a soft advertising market and a loss in subscription revenue as readers flock to the web, but, as Daniel Gross writes today in Slate, "not every newspaper company in the country has gone bankrupt as a result. And the failures may say more about a style of capitalism than an industry."

He cites the examples of Sam Zell, who put down 4 percent of the $8.2 billion asking price for the Tribune Co., somehow leaving it with an impossible-to-manage $13 billion in debt. Other, slightly less egregious examples are cited as well.

This proves, of course, that the calls from this corner and elsewhere that publicly traded companies should be prohibited from owning newspapers is not the answer. I still think it's a start. taking papers out of the hands of public companies that put profit gains before all else would surely help. A bill introduced by Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin that would allow newspapers to more easily operate as nonprofits is worth following.

Of course, you can't legislate stupidity, so problems like those brought on by Zell and others are hard to avoid unless the marketplace does a better job of stopping such maneuvers.

Peabodys recognize online work

2009-04-01T16:06:00.004-05:00

This year's Peabody Awards reflect the ramped up online shift undergone by media in the past year, as YouTube, the Onion News Network and the New York Times web site.

The 36 winners of this year's award were announced today by the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, which oversees the awards. The awards recognize "the best in electronic media for 2008."

"The works recognized by the Peabody Board this year not only reflect great diversity of content and genre, but also true technical innovation and the varied roles of new distribution systems," said Peabody Director Horace Newcomb, in a release. "The list of winners this year clearly indicates a changing media environment that will continue to require judgment and evaluation through the Peabody Awards process."

In addition to the usual spate of television shows and documentaries, the awards this year reached into cyberspace to recognize digital excellence. The organization called YouTube "the video-sharing web site that puts a boundless array of video artifacts, from historic political speeches to cell phone videos, at every Internet user's fingertips," in honoring it with an award, while the Onion News Network was noted for it's "video parodies of newscasts and newsmakers (that) are so shrewdly conceived and produced that they're often hard to distinguish from the real thing."

The latter is a strange one coming on April Fool's Day, though it is not unprecedented -- Stephen Colbert has a Peabody or two as well.

"We recognize the great transformations affecting dissemination of news and information," Newcomb said in the release. "The variety of choices available to citizens does in fact range from the best traditional journalism expanded for the web, to sharp critiques in the form of parody and satire. Both can achieve a level of excellence that reaches the Peabody standard and both require citizens to respond with careful analysis of their own."

Minneapolis Fed offers recession tracker

2009-03-31T10:28:00.001-05:00

The Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank has created an interactive presentation on its web site called “Recession in Perspective” that allows users to track the current recession against other post-World War II recessions.

The page can be found here. It includes data about the recession on a state-by-state basis, offering a look at the unemployment rate in each state for each of 10 recessions after 1945.

On a national basis, it also compares output among the various recessions. “This page provides a current assessment of ‘how bad’ the recession is relative to past recessions,” the creators write. This offers a perspective about the length and depth of this recession as it relates to those of the past.

The 10 previous postwar recessions have ranged in length from 6 months to 16 months, averaging about 10 1/2 months. The current recession has surpassed the postwar average, but its total length will only be known when the Business Cycle Dating Committee retrospectively determines the final month of the recession.

The site will be updated as new data are released.

Labels subsidize success in bid to break big acts

2009-03-10T16:34:00.003-05:00

Coolfer reported last week about comments made by Edgar Bronfman Jr. at the Deutsche Bank Securities Media and Telecommunications Conference, and I found one of his statements interesting. I agree with him, but he doesn't take things far enough, and his shortsightedness is part of the reason why the music business is failing.

Asked about artists releasing music directly to consumers as opposed to going through major record labels, Coolfer reports that Bronfman "firmly defended the value of the record label model and the company's role as financier and risk-taker. "This question is a decade old," he said while recalling his days with Polygram in the '90s. After ten years, Bronfman said, the answer is that it is still very complex, complicated and expensive to launch an artist. Record companies are only entities putting up the capital against the launch, and record labels will continue to be the only ones in a position to do that. He finished with a bang: 'The artist going direct is a false notion, has been a false notion and I think continues to be a false notion.'"

He's right, up to a point. Yes, it is extremely expensive and time consuming to launch an artist these days. There are examples of bands and artists that have gone it alone and made a fairly successful career for themselves (Ani DiFranco, for example), but they are few and far between.

The problem, of course, is that labels are fickle, and after putting hundreds of thousands -- if not millions -- of dollars into breaking an act, they'll cut their losses if it doesn't work. That, perhaps strangely enough, works very much to the advantage of artists.

No one can break an act like a major label. They offer top-flight production, graphic arts, tour support, ad buys and more. A band can go from a regional phenomenon to a nationally known entity in short order. Even if they do nothing more than flop, their name is out there, and their fan base will have expanded significantly. Once they are dropped, that name recognition doesn't go away. Many artists have taken that path, knowing they would make next to nothing during the major-label stint, but consider it an investment. I remember interviewing the Posies' Ken Stringfellow years ago after the band had been dropped by DGC. He said he'll always have the people that discovered him thanks to DGC's promotion as an audience who will likely pay attention to what he does in the future.

So, Bronfman is right: Major labels are still the best way to break bands. But any band with an ounce of sense would bolt at the end of that first contract, guaranteed, unless they're one of the tiny fraction of acts that blow up big, to make more money on their own. Meanwhile, the labels lose money because they spend so much trying to break big acts but don't have the patience to let an artist's audience grow over time.

Blurt: mag to web and back again

2009-02-04T12:49:00.005-06:00

This may be a first: A magazine that folded and morphed into an online-only product is now set to launch... a magazine.

Harp magazine, one of the best music titles to debut in the past decade, folded last March. It was purchased by JazzTimes parent Guthrie Inc. in 2003, and in announcing its closure last year, Guthrie CEO Glenn Sabin said, "Unfortunately, Harp's critical acclaim never translated into sustaining commercial success. Harp's lifecycle was ill timed with the precipitous decline of the music software industry, coupled with the consolidation of the consumer magazine newsstand business and rising paper and postage costs."

Those behind the mag, including publisher Scott Crawford, quickly regrouped and launched Blurt, an online magazine/web site. It is essentially Harp online, with a normal daily-updated web presence and a quarterly magazine. That product was essentially a magazine in all aspects but the presence of paper. Instead, users would click through pages in a dedicated web-based viewer.

At the time, Crawford lauded the “green-minded, digital-only format,” conveniently forgetting that Harp's old-fashioned print-on-paper format was doing just fine until commerce intruded. And now?

“It’s sort of a new paradigm,” Crawford told FOLIO: magazine. “We’ve gotten to the point of wanting a physical product to help brand the site—we want it to be the ‘soul’ of the web site in print.”

Translation: web ads sell at only a fraction of the cost of those in print, and if we want to survive, we'd best get ourselves on the newsstands. The magazine will appear quarterly and will retail for $4.95. It will debut in mid-March.

It's an interesting trajectory, the polar opposite of most newspapers and an increasing number of magazines. It will be interesting to see if the magazine repurposes online content, or vice versa, or whether it will offer completely original content. As a commenter on the FOLIO: piece points out, many web sites have tried and failed the move to print, including eBay and Motley Fool. Blurt's leg up comes from the fact that most saw that as an extension of a print title that already sold 60,000 copies a month, which should make Blurt's 30,000 print run a reasonable proposition.

I for one welcome the change. While I was a Harp subscriber from the beginning and have kept up with some of Blurt's coverage, I've read no more than the first digital issue. If I want to see stories laid out on a page, I want to be able to hold that page in my hand. Blurt online would do better to ditch that aspect of its presentation and stick to frequently updating its web page, leaving longer-form pieces to the print product.

A voice of reason in newspaper/online debate

2009-02-02T12:28:00.004-06:00

Allan Mutter offers the first analysis in the debate about whether newspapers could stop printing on paper that actually makes sense. Others, always unfathomably gleeful about the notion of the news no longer coming on paper, suggest that simply shutting off the presses is a logical solution to financial woes. Get rid of the cost of paper, printing and distribution, and you cut the business to its core, they argue. Cedar Rapids Gazette Editor Steve Buttry asserts that subscribers are paying for those costs with their subscriptions, not the news (thus ignoring the fact that they might also be paying for convenience or because they prefer that method of news delivery).

Jeff Jarvis raised interesting if flawed points in a December post about The Los Angeles Times when he took news that its online operation made enough to cover the editorial payroll as an indication that the Times could cease printing and go online only. What he ignores, of course, is that:

--the paper makes exponentially more on the paper product, and thus would lose those revenues,
--there are dozens (in this case) hundreds of people who sell and create those ads, as well as those who maintain the web site, none of whose salaries are included in this computation,
--no discussion of benefits or other costs is included in the discussion,
--any such move means drastic cuts in budgets and staffing. Preach all you want about crowdsourcing and the democratization of news, but coverage will suffer, at least in the short term.
--people might actually prefer the print product.

Mutter explores these (save for the last, which no one seems to care about) in his post. The most direct line, which I'm amazed even needs to be stated at this point, is this:

"But we are a long way from seeing a publisher make the proactive decision to pull the plug on a profitable print-on-paper operation. That’s because pulling the plug is not a decision a rational publisher can afford to make."

Those with no stake in the outcome but who have learned that being loud and cantankerous can double for veracity in the blogosphere will argue otherwise, but Mutter is exactly right.

Print may well go away as we move to online-only formats, but it won't happen any time soon. And I realize that the fact that I prefer to read a newspaper at the breakfast table with my family rather than sit by myself in the office scanning an RSS feed makes me some sort of out-of-step dinosaur, but as long as there are a few of us left, newspapers will need to cater to us if they hope to earn advertising revenue. If Jarvis got what he wanted and newspapers all stopped printing on paper tomorrow, most of those companies would be out of business by the end of the month.

Dilbert points to future of self-supporting comics

2009-01-25T10:09:00.002-06:00

A new media marketing lesson was offered in the comics pages of newspapers, of all places, last week. Scott Adams' "Dilbert" strip featured a story line in which Dilbert is so bored at work that he created his own company, Dilbertfiles.com. The first mention last Monday didn't raise and red flags for me, but by Wednesday's strip, which seemed a bit forced, I decided to check out the URL to see if it was a real company. It was. Adams has licensed Dilbert and Dogbert to a Dutch online storage and file transfer company, and used three of last week's strips to promote it.

By mid-week, comics purists were up in arms, according to Editor and Publisher magazine. Product placement in a comic strip? Blasphemy. Or is it? As newsprint, far and away the dominant channel for comics, makes way for online presentation, expect more of this. Those who draw strips will earn far less from digital presentation, where they'll likely only appear in a few (or maybe only one) spots, than they do from newspaper syndication, where they appear in hundreds. Not everyone is like Adams, with the ability to sell endless numbers of licenced products and books, so artists will need to look to other revenue streams to survive.

At some point, the evolution of this process will likely mean the end of syndicates. If there are no newspapers in which to place your strip, why syndicate? Better to have your own site where you can do your own marketing, sell your own products and talk directly with your audience. For the time being, however, it's still probably smart to align with a syndicate. Much like small bands that sign with major record labels with no hope of seeing much money during the course of the contract, they'll benefit from the elevated exposure. Milk the system until you become a household name, then go out on your own where you'll make much more per unit and have significantly lowered overhead costs.

White House starts blog: is it enough?

2009-01-21T09:12:00.003-06:00

It felt strange/exhilarating/preordained that when I added the feed for the White House blog to my RSS reader yesterday. Of course the Obama White House has a blog. That seems a given. Of course, the Bush White House may also have had one, but I didn't ever hear of one and was never compelled to check for myself. Politics aside, it simply didn't seem like something an administration that had such a contentious relationship with the press would think to have, never mind the ability if would afford to speak directly to the public without, in the words of Sarah Palin, the filter of the mainstream media.

But as I added the feed, I wondered what I would really gain. Will I learn anything I won't already have heard many other places by the time it hits this blog? Will it simply be propaganda? Without a comment function, and thus a chance to engage in dialogue with the populace, does it even count as a blog or is it really a press release machine? It feels like a good start, but just that -- a start. If Obama is serious about transparency and collaboration and accepting the best idea regardless of origin, then this needs to be the first of many online and interactive initiatives. The White House has caught up with the technology available when Bush took office; it shouldn't wait long to catch up with the rest of us here in 2009.

Hirschorn to Times: Drop dead (by May)

2009-01-07T13:24:00.005-06:00

Michael Hirschorn's provocative article in this month's Atlantic, "End Times," is the piece to read this week. In it, he suggests that the print edition of the New York Times, and thus, the Times as we know it, could be gone by May. Regardless of the math involved, that's a startling supposition.

My gut reaction is to rebel and worry. How could that be? But of course, business decisions that have nothing to do with the day-to-day operations of the paper are likely to sink it (and many others). I joked with someone today that my sound financial advice is "don't spend what you don't have." Sadly, a lot of media entities are going to go under in 2009 because they failed to follow that simple rule.

I'll get my main beef with Hirschorn's piece out of the way now. It's this ridiculous sentence: "It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind." Bold words from a former VH1 exec and Spin magazine editor. Ever worked in a real newsroom, Michael? I doubt it, or you wouldn't call the grueling work of a good beat writer "a quasi-bohemain" existence that is part of a "semi-charmed life of the mind." Sure, having an inside look at the world and being able to flex creative muscles as you convey your view of it to the masses can seem like a pretty sweet gig, but it's hard work like any other, and to dismiss it is to be blinded by the tall buildings obscuring your view from Manhattan. I've long railed against opponents of "the media" who are really talking about the Post, the Times, the Journal and the networks -- not the thousands of papers and TV stations in smaller markets. It's sad when someone from one of those larger markets paints his own industry with the same broad brush.

That aside, there are thought-provoking aspects to Hirschorn's piece, but he doesn't take them anywhere. He throws his bomb by declaring the Times near dead, and then seems content to sit back and watch for the fallout. There is an entire analysis to be spun off from this short paragraph alone:

The conundrum, of course, is that those 1 million print readers, who pay actual cash money for the privilege of consuming the paper, and who are worth about five figures a page to advertisers, are far more profitable than the 20 million unique Web users, who don’t and aren’t. Common estimates suggest that a Web-driven product could support only 20 percent of the current staff; such a drop in personnel would (in the short run) devastate The Times’ news-gathering capacity.

I don't read the Times in print, but I do read the local daily that is also the subject of much "kill print, move online" talk. But media companies will die an even quicker death if they simply ditch paper and move to bits and bytes, for web ads draw a fraction of that earned from print ads, and no one pays for a subscription to a web site (the Journal notwithstanding). Some editors, like the Gazette's Steve Buttry, have interesting notions about what people pay for with a subscription (he argues it's simply the paper and the delivery, I argue that while that might be what they are actually paying for, most subscribers would say they're buying the news carried on those pages. No one pays to have blank paper delivered to their door). Why kill the one thing actually making money for you in a rush to move online, knowing it'll probably kill your product thanks to the resulting cuts in the process?

Why not, to get back to the central tenet of this blog, offer choice? If people want something to read at the breakfast table, why not offer it until it becomes economically unfeasible to do so? Of course, some may say we're already there, but if papers didn't need to pay off billions of dollars in debt accrued by executives whose eyes were bigger than their wallets, that might be a long ways off.

One last point: I read Hirschorn's piece online, not in print. I might not have done so had it not been among the shortest things I've ever seen in the Atlantic. had it been one of the magazine's typical 20-pagers, I would have printed it out or sought out a copy of the magazine. Not everything works online; some things, gasp, actually work better on paper. 'Nuf said.

Ultimately, Hirschorn's piece is the latest in a long line from those on the sidelines telling newspapers how things ought to be.

2008 will be seen as a transition

2009-01-02T14:18:00.002-06:00

It seems a day can't go by without bad economic news here in the Corridor. Just this week, Cryovac announced a plant closing in Cedar Rapids that will idle 260, while Lee Enterprises over in Davenport is close to delisting on the NYSE because it's stock is trading for too little. These are just the latest in a string of bad news.

Moving into a new year, I'm guessing that 2008 will ultimately be seen as a transitional year. It was tough -- and early 2009 promises to be as much so or more -- but likely marks the beginning of the true transition to a new economy. Looking at what suffered, it seems to be old, established entities, from newspaper companies to music labels to car companies. At the same time, however, the new things that are springing up to take their place (in the case of the first two, anyway), aren't exactly lighting up the skies just yet. Yes, the web has overtaken print as a place where people get their news (both still far behind TV, however) for example, but few are actually making any money at it.

But things will change. The hardship of 2008 will see to that. Those uneager to do so have little choice now. If 2008 will be remembered for all of the bad news, it is also likely to be recalled as the beginning of something new. What that is remains to be seen. There are plenty of people ready to say that print will die, record labels will fold, that anything not intensely local will move away. They may be right. It will be interesting to look back at this time next year to see.

Digital is an option, not a replacement

2008-11-26T14:17:00.005-06:00

Two seemingly disparate things have come together in my mind that help to amplify a point that I think is lost in the rush to declare most forms of hard media dead and to anoint digital anything and everything as the new king.

First came yet another Jeff Jarvis-related firestorm, this time over a New York Observer profile in which he is pitted (wrongly, he writes on his blog) against mainstream media types like the New York Times' Bill Keller. Jarvis is earning a lot of ink (digital and otherwise) because some see him as gleefully dancing on the grave of print journalism. I don't think he is, but I can see why some people think it, and that brings me to the second thing that hit the news today.

Atlantic Records announced that for the first time, digital sales brought in more than those of compact discs. While on first blush that would seem to support the arguments of those who say digital is (slowly, quickly?) killing all other formats, I think it really points out something more interesting: Fully half (or, 49 percent if you want to be specific) of the sales of Atlantic's music products came in the form of CDs. Despite the fact that we are rapidly moving toward a digital-only world, half of the company's customers choose to buy their music on discs of plastic.

I buy more of my music digitally these days than I do otherwise, but I make a decision every time I do buy music whether to go digital or disc. It's exactly the same decision I made back when I was in college and CDs were becoming the norm, only in reverse. If it was an impulse buy that I didn't imagine I would be listening to years later, I would buy it on the cheaper, admittedly inferior cassette. If it was something I knew (or at least suspected) I'd want to keep around for a long time, I'd pay the premium for a CD. Today, I'll get something on digital for a quick reward, but I'll still opt for a CD for the long haul. The superior sound quality, security and storage of a CD far outweighs the convenience of zero storage space that an MP3 offers.

The same thing applies to papers. While Jarvis and others are quick to say that newspapers as we know them are dying off, what they seem to miss is that many, many people still get a lot of their news from words printed on paper. (This is a very small sample, but check out this poll at Old Media, New Tricks blog. Even some of these most-plugged in netizens get their news from a print paper). Steve Buttry of the Cedar Rapids Gazette acknowledged this during a recent online chat. While the digital audience is growing that is where he expects to see the company's growth, "the print edition of The Gazette has a huge audience and large revenue stream that we think will support a healthy business for many years to come."

When I get up in the morning, I like nothing more than to scan headlines in the local paper while having a cup of coffee. The last thing I want to do is get right back on the computer to try to nose around news sites. You simply can't scan or sample on screen the way you can with a paper spread out on the breakfast table. But later in the day, online news is all I peruse. It would be a shame to lose one of those outlets.

The key, then, is for all media to look for ways to improve and bolster the core product while embracing digital outlets as an enhancement. Heck, the digital outlet might soon become the core product, but that doesn't mean the paper product should go away, just like CDs don't necessarily need to completely give way to digital. Choice is the key. The economics of offering choices are the sticking points that need to be worked out, but there are niche markets available all across the spectrum for those who figure out how to do so.

Jarvis sums it all up

2008-11-24T15:51:00.003-06:00

Jeff Jarvis did something today that would be instructive for anyone pushing a particular point of view or who has written extensively on a given subject: He summed it all up.

In a post today on his Buzz Machine blog, he responds to questions from readers who were drawn to a fray between Jarvis and Slate writer Ron Rosenbaum over what Rosenbaum saw as Jarvis' gloating over the death of print journalism. Rosenbaum misrepresented Jarvis' POV, but Jarvis did himself no favors with a rather childish response. So, today's summary was a nice step back. Jarvis has been writing about the shift of journalism for a long time, so it was instructive to read his thoughts distilled in one post.

It put me in the mind of two of the most recent posts I've written here: Friday's reboot and one from a couple of years ago just before taking a long layoff. There I wrote about my efforts to wrap my arms around a unifying theory that could explain all of the things I was thinking. Friday I wrote that I still think, two years later, that those ideas are still valid, and that events over the past two years have only solidified that viewpoint.

Forcing yourself to summarize your position can be a positive thing. I coach writers to do the same thing. Summarize your story in a headline and a subhead. If you can't do it, you probably don't have a focus yet. And if your headline doesn't accurately reflect what a reader finds when they get to the story, then you probably think you're writing about something you're not.

Jarvis clearly knows where he stands, and this post is going to be referred to for a long time to come. Is he right? Not entirely, if I'm any judge. But it's compelling, well thought out and sure to spark discussion, and there is a lot of value in that no matter the accuracy of the prognostications.

Creativille (slight return)

2008-11-21T14:07:00.004-06:00

I’ve begun Twittering lately, and the resulting ability to keep tabs on the ideas of thought leaders from various industries has energized me in the same way that my immersion into blogs thanks to my first RSS reader did a few years ago. I’m not among those who think Twitter will displace blogs, much as I don’t believe the Internet will displace print media. But I do know that information consumers have much more to choose from these days, and that makes it an exciting time for those of us who revel in such freedom of choice.

This blog began a few years ago after I read books by a number of big thinkers – Thomas Friedman, Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Anderson et al – who sparked my own thinking about issues of business, technology, arts and culture. I used the blog to grapple with a unifying theory that could help all of these things to line up in my mind. I finally hit upon the idea of Unlimited Choice. It’s not great, sounding like a generic cell phone or cable television pricing tier, but it gets at what I’m after.

Essentially, the diversity of media through which information is shared means that people can choose how much or how little to absorb. They can choose what they want to hear, read, watch or experience. They can choose when to do so, for how long and at what cost.

This is all restating what I have written here before, but there is an amplification that comes thanks to the deafening debate about the fate of the media going on. As if it wasn’t bad enough to read constantly in online news reports and even-more-frequent blog posts about the impending demise of my industry, I now read such opinions and analyses on a minute-by-minute basis on Twitter.

I drifted away from Creativille (if that isn’t a Jimmy Buffet song in waiting, I don’t know what is) as other pursuits took precedence, but the recent conversation of which I’ve been a part has drawn me back in with a refined purpose.

There is no doubt that the news industry is in trouble. But there are plenty of people who are trying to point us all in the right direction. The diversity of media I mention above has sprung up because technological advances allow for it, of course, but also because consumers increasingly demand such choices. They no longer want to wait for the morning paper to see a sports score, or for the evening news to get the weather, or for the local CD shop to stock a CD to hear a song. They want it now.

At the same time, however, the still do want the newspaper and the evening news and the CD shop, but not for the same reasons they once did. The want the newspaper as a permanent record and a place to read longer stories. They want the evening news to see high-resolution video. They want the CD shop so they can hold that deluxe boxed set in their hands before pulling the trigger on a purchase.

So my purpose here is twofold. To explore the continuing ways that technology, business, media and culture intersect, and to look at ways the new age of unlimited choice is affecting the way people produce and absorb media.

I was able to engage in a brief dialogue about a couple of my ideas during an online chat with new Cedar Rapids Gazette Editor Stephen Buttry this week. I wrote that the media has three roles: gathering news, filtering out what is most interesting and then offering context and analysis. Buttry wrote that consumers can fulfill the middle role of filter just fine thanks to services like Digg.com, which is true. But I’ll stand behind the idea that we’re professional filters, hired by our readers to sift through all of the information out there and present the best of it. That job is harder now, because everyone has access to pretty much everything, meaning no one needs blindly trust our judgment.

So, welcome. I hope to pick up where I left off many months ago with similar content and some new ideas. The conversation is happening, and this is my attempt to be a part of it. In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter and, for those interested in more specialized writing about music and books (or even more specialized writing about the music of Robert Pollard), you can find me elsewhere. And, of course, there is always the Corridor Business Journal and CorridorBuzz.com, where I’m dealing with these issues from the front lines.

Meeting unknown needs

2006-12-19T11:57:00.000-06:00

The next step in the world of unlimited choice is figuring out what people need before they do. Case in point: I just picked up a new iPod Shuffle, as much for the shiny-new-thing factor as for discerning any true need for it. For $80, how could I not buy one? Thing is, I can suddenly see a number of different situations in which it would be handy to have a tiny batch of songs clipped to my coat. Without Apple having made such an appealing product, I likely would never have determined such a need.

A new beginning

2006-11-10T13:16:00.000-06:00

While I've been remiss about posting here of late, that is not an indication that I haven't been thinking. When I started this blog, I wrote about the fact that I've read many of the leading business/thought books of the past couple of years, and feel as if there is some unifying theme that ties them all together. I tried out ideas like "on-demand culture" and spent a lot of time writing about The World is Flat and The Long Tail, but seemed no closer to tying it all together.

I've been inspired lately by Traci Fenton, who runs the organization WorldBlu. Fenton's group pushes the idea of "organizational democracy," a concept she says is somewhat drawn from a synthesis of ideas from herself and others. She cites the work of Jim Collins, Thomas Friedman, Peter Senge and Margaret Wheatley, among others, saying they “have been coming at it from different pieces of the pie. What organizational democracy does is it brings it all together, and says it’s about creating an entire system,” she said.

I have similar thoughts about the Long Tail and related notions of choice and search. I'm a believer in Chris Anderson's notion that the Long Tail will revolutionize the world, as the availablity of more and more products liberates consumers. At the same time, I understand Barry Schwartz, who might be seen as the anti-Anderson, who preaches that too much choice actually can make us very unhappy. Somewhere in all of this is John Battelle, whose work in the field of search seems to be a bridging link, or at least a way to capitalize on Anderson's ideas while ameliorating the effect's of Schwartz's.

The result? An emerging sythesis of my own: Unlimited choice is the ideal, as long as people also are allowed to choose the level of choice from which to choose. As you can tell, that doesn't quite have the punch of a suitable book subtitle, so perhaps some amplification is in order. Essentially, the Long Tail can and should enable people to have as much choice as they like. Take books, for example (as Anderson does in his book). Those who want unlimited choice can shop at Amazon.com or whatever comes next, browsing digitally through hundreds of thousands of books. Those who want a more directed search with fewer options, could visit a Barnes & Noble or other superstore, with 150,000 some odd titles within reach. Those who are content to read popular works and who don't necessarily want to browse or explore will likely be happy with the 20-40,000 titles in a mall B. Dalton or Waldenbooks.

Thus, choice works best when consumers are allowed to choose the level of choice from which to choose. Can I integrate the work of Richard Florida, Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Friedman, Stephen Johnson and others into this? Perhaps. At least now, after more than a year of nibbling at the edges of this idea, I feel as if I'm starting to see it as a whole.

YouTube + WMG = ?

2006-09-18T11:36:00.000-05:00

An announcement that YouTube will partner with Warner Music Group would seem to be good news. According to a release from YouTube, the aggreement means that WMG music videos will be made available for viewing on YouTube, as will "behind-the-scenes footage, artist interviews, original programming and other special content." The surprisingly thing is that this content also will be available for YouTube users to incorporate into their own videos.

It's not clear what this means, exactly. Can I create a video of my vacation with a soundtrack drawn from WMG's roster? Can I mash up a WMG artist's video with my own sounds? That all remains to be seen, and I'd guess those things will be ironed out after YouTube and WMG execs see exactly what users do with the content.

One sticking point with potential agreements like this has been money. According to this agreement, YouTube will use a new "advanced content identification and royalty reporting system" that will allow for royalties to be paid on both WMG's own content as well as that created by users. It mentions sharing advertising revenue as well, which means YouTube is obvioiusly moving toward an ad-supported system, at least in this partnered content.

It's an idea whose time has come, and should benefit both parties; artists get better exposure and YouTube has some content of guaranteed quality to draw more viewers. One potential problem: WMG is likely to be more vigilant about limiting content featuring its artists to that which is official and sanctioned. Look up your favorite WMG band -- I chose Wilco -- and see how many live clips and assorted videos are up currently. It will be interesting to check back and see how many are still there once this partnership takes flight.

Participating in Hollywood

2006-09-11T13:13:00.000-05:00

Fast Company this month features an interesting look at Jeff Skoll, the eBay founder who has turned to Hollywood with the desire to create meaningful, socially relevant feature films. He has a heck of a track record: His Participant Productions company has funded "Syriana," "An Inconvenient Truth," "Good Night and Good Luck" and the forthcoming "Fast Food Nation," among others. The most compelling fact in the story is this: All of Participant's films thus far have been profitable save for "North Country." The takeaway from that? "Here's the first secret of pro-social business: When you give outstanding people the chance to work on something they care passionately about, often you get a great result."

MySpace announces music retail component

2006-09-05T13:21:00.000-05:00

MySpace took a step over the holiday weekend to offer serious competition for established online music retailers, partnering with Snocap to offer the sale of songs directly from artists individual pages. The site already is perhaps the top go-to place for those wanting to sample music and learn more about musicians; now, thanks to this partnership, it can keep fans on the site who previously had to leave it to go purchase music.

The service allows artists to embed a mini-store right on their page, giving fans the opportunity to purchase 192 kbps mp3 tracks for 79 cents each. The band the Format offers a good example of the service, offering tracks for sale from its album Dog Problems. Visitors to the band's page can sample latest single "The Compromise," check out the video and then, if they desire, buy it and other songs with a few clicks and access to a PayPal account. More importantly, perhaps, the songs are DRM-free, which means they can be endlessly traded, burned and uploaded by fans. That puts the site somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between DRM-free sites like eMusic, which limits its offerings to indie label artists, and Apple's iTunes, which leans more heavily on mainstream, major label artists, and which sells DRM-encoded mp3s.

Snocap is the company founded by Napster founder Shawn Fanning after that company's implosion. While it touts several successes on its web site, this is the first high-profile move that puts the company in a spot similar to that enjoyed by Napster in its heyday -- all nice and legal this time, of course. And because Snocap has or is working on deals with most major labels, there would seem to be no limit to the eventual offerings on MySpace. As Rusty Rueff, Snocap CEO said in a press release announcing the deal, "Now, every artist can distribute their music instantly and directly to their fans, making them relevant whether they sell one hundred tracks, ten thousand tracks or ten million tracks."

Can I see your ticket, please?

2006-08-31T12:36:00.000-05:00

Not satisfied with the stranglehold it already has on event ticketing in the US, Ticketmaster is looking to take a bite out of the increasingly lucrative resale market. According to an article in the latest issue of BusinessWeek, the company is pushing for legislation that would essentially make it illegal to scalp tickets unless you did so through, say, Ticketmaster. The move is a response to the burgeoning industry of ticket reselling that has sprung up thanks to eBay and more targeted outlets like StubHub.com.

It's an interesting situation. There is no love lost between Ticketmaster and fans who balk at paying a huge slice of their ticket price in "building fees" and "processing charges." At the same time, a select few are willing to pay all that and much, much more to get the best seats to the most exclusive events. It's a disconnect, as the type of person using the resellers likely is much better off and doesn't feel the same animosity toward Ticketmaster that the rank and file surely do.

Who needs The Man?

2006-08-14T12:27:00.000-05:00

This new world of choice is built on a premise: People are willing to seek out their own entertainments rather than rely on corporations to do it for them. That isn't the case with everyone, of course, but enough people are starting to do so that a power shift is clearly taking place.

A story in the Wall Street Journal last week offers evidence. More and more young bands are making a go of it through the word-of-mouth opportunities offered through sites like MySpace.com, actually choosing to forgo major label support in the process. They've heard a generation of bands tell of the ways major labels have left them penniless and without the desire to pursue what they once loved -- most famously recounted by noted musician/producer curmudgeon Steve Albini -- and are seemingly choosing a different path.

It used to be that authors and musicians needed the imprimatur of quality afforded by a major book imprint or major recording label to sell. No longer. That's still the easiest path to success, but not the only.

Those oppressive niches

2006-08-09T12:54:00.000-05:00

Salon writer Farhad Manjoo has one of the more interesting takes on The Long Tail that I've seen thus far, wondering if it is really more targeted at CEOs than Regular Joes. Beyond that, he offers a constructive criticism: Perhaps the Long Tail and the new world of choice that it promises for consumers is not necessarily a good thing.

"I've long wondered, and sometimes worried, about the flip side to the media ubiquity we now enjoy, the paradoxical way in which having access to everything forces you to choose what you're consuming," he writes, adding that he is so "hopped up" about this notion that he's writing his own book about it. Taking his thesis a step too far, however, he seems to assume that, forced to choose, people will pick niches to the total exclusion of more traditional, mainstream fare. People watch Fox News exclusively and get a distorted view of reality, he posits, worrying about selective exposure and confirmation bias "and a host of other psychological phenomena" that take over from there. "The tail may go on and on and on, but does that matter if you're only living in a few niches of it?"

The problem is that he is describing Ted Kaczynski, not your typical consumer. Most of us will remain in the mainstream for the most part, using the increasingly accessible niches of the Long Tail to augment what we find there. You can get your news from a reputable source and supplement it with the oddball news on BoingBoing, or read Entertainment Weekly for your entertainment news and get more specific news about indie rock from Pitchfork. Or, for that matter, you can choose to read Salon.

Just a reminder: Music is still evil

2006-08-08T10:30:00.000-05:00

The fellas at the Freakonomics blog weigh in on reports of a new study that draws a link between music with "sexually degrading" lyrics and early teen sex. It doesn't take a respected economist to point out the difference between correlation and causality, but it helps, because without such prominent rebuttals, potentially misguided attacks can lead to detrimental consequences.

The study, to be published in the journal Pediatrics, surveyed 1461 teens about their sexual activity and their music listening habits as they pertained to "more than a dozen musical artists representing avariety of musical genres." The researchers determined whether the sexual content in the songs were degrading or non-degrading.

From this, they concluded that "listening to music with degrading sexual lyricsis related to advances in a range of sexual activities amongadolescents, whereas this does not seem to be true of othersexual lyrics. This result is consistent with sexual-scripttheory and suggests that cultural messages about expected sexualbehavior among males and females may underlie the effect. Reducingthe amount of degrading sexual content in popular music or reducingyoung people's exposure to music with this type of content couldhelp delay the onset of sexual behavior."

Freakonomics author Stephen Dubner writes on his blog that "there does seem to be a correlation between sexual music and sex. But does that make the relationship causal? Wouldn’t it make sense that the kind of teenagers who want to have a lot of sex are the same ones who want to listen to sexual music, and the ones who don’t want to have a lot of sex (or at least refrain from doing so) are the same ones who don’t listen to such music?"

Exactly. That doesn't stop national media from jumping on it as it has with every other "music is evil" campaign.

Chasing the tail

2006-08-01T21:05:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal's Lee Gomes again misses the point about the Long Tail. In a widely blogged-about column last week, he called into questions much of the basis of Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail. I won't go into that argument here, but suffice to say I disagree. In a Tuesday column, Gomes again tilts at the book, arguing that hits are still a big deal. Again, Mr. Anderson didn't suggest otherwise. He simply writes that they are less of a big deal than in the past. Simple numbers back this up. Top films, books, TV shows and music recordings don't post the kinds of numbers they once did.

What Anderson is not saying is that companies should abandon producing what they hope will be hits. Instead, companies that perhaps don't have the means to produce a hit are finding it lucrative to mine the long tail, offering niche products to consumers who are increasingly able to seek out and purchase these products. No one is foolish enough to suggest that Hollywood studios stop trying to make big, dumb mass market films to separate teens from their cash. They are saying, however, that these same teens, bored with such pap, can make their own movies, upload them to YouTube and find ways to make a decent amount of money from their efforts. The Long Tail is about choice and accessibility. Mainstream entertainment entities are scared, of course, because they are about homogeneity and controlled distribution.

eMusic's model proves lucrative

2006-07-31T12:17:00.000-05:00

Either the hubbub surrounding The Long Tail has naturally brought tangential news stories to the fore, or perhaps I'm just seeing things through that new lens as I work my way through the book, but a story in today's USA Today again points up a shift in industry toward niche markets thanks to technology.

In this case, eMusic is the subject. The company offers subscribers the opportunity to download mp3s of songs with no DRM attached. That's usually the focus of stories about the company, and this one is no different. But as usual, if you read beyond the first few paragraphs, the real story is told.

eMusic has carved out an 11 percent market share in the digital music sales business, second to iTunes' massive 67 percent share, according to the article. But eMusic has done so with no major label offerings. Instead, the company offers more than 1 million songs from independent labels, essentially leaving the big hits to iTunes and other services. Far from being a losing proposition, the company sells about 5 million downloads each month. That's a healthy long tail.

Still, according to USA Today, CEO David Pakman does hope to lure major labels, but not necessarily with the idea of offering another place to sell their hits. Instead, he has proposed giving eMusic access to labels' back catalogs that aren't otherwise available so they can be marketed to eMusic's older, more passionate music fan base.

"The results would be dramatic," Koch Records head Bob Frank tells USA Today. "eMusic would market the hell out of those songs."

Of course, the answer has been "no." It's frustrating to see the labels essentially turn down free money with the misguided notion that they would lose something in the process. The future is based on choice, and the more people have, the better it will be, particularly for entertainment companies.

It's not a warehouse full of books

2006-07-30T20:02:00.000-05:00

The New York Times offers yet more coverage of The Long Tail, this time looking at the book industry. As with most things related to the book, it seems to miss the point, which is not necessarily that large corporations will get rich selling one copy of a million different things to a million different people, but that smaller companies selling a few things to those in several niches will find ample success where, prior to certain technological advances, they would fail.

The Times article finds that "publishers remain wary of the long tail theory, largely because they haven’t figured out how to make money off it." This, of course, is the point. Big publishers/record labels/film studios don't get it, because they're always after the hits. They won't stock 10 copies of a book for years in the hope that they'll someday sell, and the long tail doesn't suppose they'll suddenly start. It's the little guy -- or rather, guys in aggregate -- who will benefit from the long tail. The article eventually gets around to this in the, um, tail of the article, yet the writer seems not to notice that she has quite successfully buried her lead:

"Some small presses build their business entirely on the long tail, bringing back into print esoteric titles that are in the public domain or had been abandoned by other publishers as unprofitable," she writes, sharing the stories of the New York Review of Books Classics imprint, which, according to editorial director Edwin Frank, is "happy with any book that sells over 5,000 copies.” With lower overhead, a company that sells 5,000 of a few different things can do quite well for itself. Several of these companies can then equal the sales clout of the big houses.

Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine spins this off into a number of interesting directions. Print-on-demand, using blogs to promote obscure titles, etc. I think he puts a bit too much faith in the ability of blogs and hyperlinks to solve any ill, but it's thought provoking as always.

Riding the long tail

2006-07-28T11:16:00.000-05:00

The settlement between Kazaa and the music and film industries offers a way, should either industry choose to take a chance, for them to tap into the power of the Long Tail. The settlement, which calls for Kazaa to pay the music industry $115 million and the film industry an undisclosed sum, also will lead to Kazaa's operators legitimately licensing and distributing copyrighted material. Sure, you can argue the means, but the ends -- the music and movie industries having a ready-made network of people with the right tools and desire to download their wares -- are certainly enviable.

How does the Long Tail apply? Well, this isn't the first network the industries have aligned with to facilitate distribution of music and movies, but it's one that adds significantly to their reach. It can't cost much for labels or studios to digitize anything in their back catalogs and make it available for sale online. Yes, as critics of Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail have pointed out, hits will still dominate sales charts. But the one thing that keeps people from digging deeper when looking for something to buy is lack of availability (or even knowing something could be available). As more and more low-cost distribution networks become available, more opportunities to sell out of that back catalog are presented.

Andrew Taylor at the Artful Manager blog wrote about the theory and its potential impact on nonprofit arts groups. A commenter wondered if the Long Tail would mean so much choice that the potential audience for any one thing would become fractured. I don't think so, and in fact think that the same thing that makes the Long Tail possible -- near-limitless access to content and information, will actually make it easier to assemble groups of interested people around nearly everything. These niches still won't become mass attractions, but they certainly have a greater chance of finding a sustaining audience than in the past.

Hugh at Gaping Void makes a valid point that, as I wrote in my previous post, seems to get lost in the debate as people try to debunk Anderson's theory: He is a professional cartoonist who doesn't "really publish anything in the conventional sense." He does use his cartoons in indirect online marketing campaigns to help sell Stormhoek wine, bespoke tailored suits and other things. "Would this approach have been possible before the Internet and what Chris Anderson calls 'The Long Tail'? Of course not."

Perhaps Anderson does overstate things at present by implying that the head and the tail are drawing equal. But he is dead-on in anticipating a time when the tail looms very large for those who choose to embrace it. Offer access to enough niches, and you'll find yourself with a very viable business plan not reliant on hits.

Heads or tails?

2006-07-26T15:52:00.000-05:00

My return after a long layoff was spurred by The Long Tail Chris Anderson's new book about how online retailing has allowed those in niche markets to make a go of it against the world of blockbusters and limited choice at traditional bricks and mortar stores.

I've been reading Anderson's blog for more than a year, watching in near real-time as he sorted through the issues to be covered in the book. Given his focus on entertainment offerings, it struck a chord. Some of his postings sparked debate, but it wasn't until the book's release recently that people really started to discuss the merits of his theory.

There are plenty of people who think Anderson has hit upon something revolutionary, but it's the naysayers that offer the most interesting reading. Lee Gomes with the Wall Street Journal weighed in today, saying Anderson's numbers are flawed. "It would be wonderful if the world as Mr. Anderson describes it were true: one where 'healthy niche products and even 'outright misses' collectively could stand their ground with the culture's increasingly soulless 'hits,'" he writes. "But while every singer-songwriter dreams from his bedroom of making a living off iTunes, few actually do, mostly because so many others have the very same idea."

Two points: Anderson doesn't argue that bedsit singers are going to get rich thanks to the Long Tail; online retailers who offer the work of hundreds of such artists might. Also, while Anderson may be projecting a bit into the future (something he addresses on his blog in part by saying, "Which is why the language Gomes cites from the book jacket is actually all phrased in the future conditional tense"), his point remains valid. It is clear that those offering more choice can remain viable and even compete with those who do not. Does the Long Tail equal the Head right now? Might it soon? Would Amazon stock so many books if it thought otherwise?

Jane Jacobs, RIP

2006-04-25T13:56:00.000-05:00

Jane Jacobs, whose thoughts and writings on the urban landscape and metropolitan diversity still resonate in the works of admirers like Richard Florida, died today. She was 89. Though best known for her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs continued to work and write, penning the cautionary tale Dark Age Ahead in 2004.

Much like Peter Drucker, the management and business guru who passed last year, Jacobs' work deserves to be remembered and studied. Here's hoping that work enjoys the same posthumous re-examination as Drucker's.

Turning the page

2006-04-10T13:06:00.000-05:00

Business Week's April 10 issue had an interesting story about the publishing industry moving toward an on-demand model. It's about time. Things have followed the same path for decades: the hardback comes first, followed a year or so later (depending on the success of the hardback) by the paperback. Audio and, lately, digital, fall somewhere in between.

Much like the music and film industries before it, the publishing world is slow to change and resistant to any alteration of the formula. It resists at its own peril. But help is on the way. The Caravan Project, pushed by Peter Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs books, will use a MacArthur Foundation grant on a project that will involve publishing 24 books in five formats simultaneously during 2007. The formats are hardcover, digital, audio, print-on-demand and piecemeal.

It's an idea whose time has come, as people are quickly being trained to expect what they want now. Patience is something expected by an increasing number of boarded up businesses. On-demand is the future.

Critics argue on several points. An author is quoted as saying that he makes more royalties from hardback sales, while publishers worry about the "Napsterization" of their intellectual property. On the first point, how many sales are lost during the initial publicity push because people don't want to shell out $25 for a book they may or may not like? Offer those who simply want to read -- not just acquire a durable status symbol -- the chance to pay $12 for a book, or event $1.99 for a relevant chapter. As for the second point, should publishers really be worried about people taking illegal steps to obtain reading material? Napster and other file-sharing services can impact the sale of music and movies because those are things people actually want to buy. It's not as if people ever line up to buy a new book the same way they do to buy a CD from the latest chart topper or a ticket to the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Besides, reading anything longer than a magazine article online or off in digital form continues to be tedious. The lost revenue from such theft will be minimal.

The upside, as I alluded to above, is that publishers need only market a book one time. No need for the secondary paperback push. This can result in increased sales, of course, as people are reintroduced to something. But too often, particularly for non-fiction titles about current events, something better will have come along by the time the paperback hits the street.

This won't happen quickly or quietly, but it will happen.

Jettisoning brands?

2006-03-31T15:03:00.000-06:00

Business 2.0 editor-at-large Erick Schonfeld has an interesting piece in the magazine's April issue, offering five suggestions of ways to save Time Warner. He suggests dumping distribution, creating "nichebusters" instead of blockbusters, letting the audience play with content, becoming a content rebundler and structuring the company around customers, not products. It's that last one that seems most radical, as it most likely would mean the end of brands to a certain extent. For example, if I want business content from Time Warner (parent of Business 2.0 and a number of other content providers like CNN, Money and Fortune), is it enough to provide it to me in a way I want without being able to brand and market it a certain way? Perhaps there's a future where they'll be able to brand my own preferred content as "John's business news" and target ads to me, but I'll be willing to bet that TW and others won't make that leap without a lot of teeth-gnashing and hair-pulling.

Flatter world

2006-03-28T13:07:00.000-06:00

Publisher's Weekly reports that Thomas Friedman has prepared an expanded and updated version of his groundbreaking and controversial book, The World is Fla t. No surprise, save for the fact that the revised version will be in hardback. It's become typical for topical non-fiction to be revised for the paperback version, but a bit odd to do so with a second hardback. Either way, it will be interesting to see if this is simply an amplification of the original points with more examples -- PW reports that it will feature "new reporting, insights and commentary, drawn both from Friedman's 2005 travels (to India, China and the Middle East) and from his encounters with readers around the country who have shared their accounts of the flattening of the world as they have felt it" -- or if any of his assumptions will be altered or challenged.

Mea culpa

2006-03-15T14:57:00.000-06:00

I've had a few design problems of late, and that coupled with a busy work schedule and the introduction of a new family member has meant less time for blogging here. The design problems are fixed, however, and I have a backlog of things about which to write, so things will pick up here very soon.

Striking a balance

2006-02-13T11:23:00.000-06:00

Joel Kotkin weighs in again against the notion of the Creative Class, this time in a Chicago Sun-Times essay that is a minor rewrite of the one I linked to in October from the Prospect. Here, as there, he writes that the rush to embrace cool and pander to young creatives leads cities to overlook more pressing needs.

Paul O'Conner, executive director of World Business Chicago, rebuts Kotkin in a piece in which he is really rising to Chicago's defense. Kotkin, it seems, only referred to Chicago in the initial piece as one of the "foundries of the industrial age." Chicago has successfully embraced the "cool city" strategy, O'Connor writes, at the same time it has dealt with other issues like crime, good schools, neighborhood development and creating a favorable business climate.

O'Connor makes a good point: it is possible to foster a creative-friendly climate and still focus on more traditional city needs. One need not ignore public safety or potholes to give attention to the need for arts funding or the development of a cultural district. In fact, in order to do the latter well, the former must really be in order first. Those traditional amenities are the baseline; the embrace of culture and the arts is what sets a city apart.

Bum notes from a broken record

2006-01-31T16:10:00.000-06:00

Jon Fine makes a good point about the music industry in his most recent BusinessWeek column, but then tries to dig a bit deeper and ends up tumbling into something not quite right. In talking about the increasing need for bands to sell in the millions in order to make money at the top level (either for themselves or for their labels), he rightly cites the fact that there are fewer guaranteed multi-platinum sellers these days. But he goes on to say that the structure that once led to such second-tier hitmakers as Grand Funk Railroad and Foghat is no more.

"This type of band no longer exists and neither do the conditions that fostered their ascent," he writes. He goes on to lament the demise of rock radio, the splintering of genres and the spiraling cost of arena rock shows. And then... well, he doesn't really make a point or end on one. But, by supplying oneself that which is not there, it's clear his ode to days gone by is meant to suggest that things are worse today.

In fact, that's far from the truth. Thanks to the very fragmentation he laments, and rapid advances in technology, there is more and better music than ever before. Artists on the tier just below superstars today are just as popular and successful as Grand Funk was in its day, and there surely are conditions in place today that make that possible. The mainstream airwaves? They're gone, commodified in a marketplace that has long favored style over substance. Get over it. Mom and pop record stores are nearly gone, too, and as a digression, that's one never-ending eulogy I'm tired of hearing. A discussion that has arisen recently over independent labels somewhat naively signing off on a Best Buy promotion that found the big box retailer selling CDs for less than what the small independent stores paid wholesale makes this point clear: Small stores essentially need a subsidy if they hope to survive under the status quo. Offer better service or die, because you can't compete on price. Keep employing wannabe punk rockers who look on in disdain when I ask in vain for something other than the trip-funk-ambi-slowcore disc blaring through the speakers, and I'll gladly give my money to an online retailer. You haven't had a captive audience for about a decade now: deal with it.

In the place of radio, good record stores and cheap concerts is the Internet and its various modes of distribution. There is plenty of great music being made out there, and the access to it is so easy that it makes the choices dizzying. By overlooking the obvious, Fine is clearly missing out on some good music. While they don't offer the reheated boogie rock of Grand Funk, bands like the Killers or Death Cab For Cutie or the Gorillaz are certainly platinum sellers that aren't necessarily top-tier. Just a level below are even more (and I'd argue, better) bands. Once you get past the glitz of iTunes, which has become a slightly hip online Sam Goody/AOR radio station, you find outlets like eMusic, which posts about 2,000 new albums each month, none from major labels. The company's CEO, David Pakman, talks about the major-indie split in a recent interview on MP3.com: "When the digital music space first took off, the conventional wisdom was that it would grow the overall music market because you'll have more access, convenience, and unlimited shelf space. But that's not a foregone conclusion anymore, principally because the mainstream digital music services like iTunes are doing their very best to re-create the same things that happened in physical music retail. They're basically selling and marketing the hits. And there's nothing wrong with that. You can sell a lot of music that way because that's what most people want to buy."

If Jon Fine looks only at iTunes, he'll be disappointed to see that things do seem to be worse than ever before. In the push for profits, labels promote some hideously bad music and you seem to see and hear the same sad thing over and over again. But while he's busy lamenting that, there are plenty of people promoting and enjoying a wider variety of choices than ever before.

On the 'Bubble'

2006-01-23T15:59:00.000-06:00

The Chicago Sun Times has an interesting article about Steven Soderbergh's "Bubble." As the film's Jan. 27 release nears, the mainstream media is starting to wake up to this odd little film and its interesting release plans. As Creativille readers know, "Bubble" is Soderbergh's first film for HDNet Films, a venture that seeks to collapse the release window for movies by offering them in theaters, on DVD and on television at the same time. Soderbergh signed a six-picture deal with HDNet (owned by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner) to make films like this to be distributed in this flattened fashion.

The film will come out on TV and theaters on Jan. 27, and the DVD release will follow on Jan. 31 (the difference being between traditional Friday openings in theaters and Tuesday availabilities for DVDs). According to the Sun-Times article, "The goal is to put the film on as many screens as possible, including home TVs, to capitalize on viewers who do not or cannot go to theaters. It is estimated that only 10 percent of the U.S. population consistently attends movies."

As a new parent who isn't going to make it to a theater for several months (and who doesn't lament that fact given the dirty, noisy and downright annoying experience moviegoing has become), I welcome the move. It will mean changes for theaters, just as any technological advance means changes for the affected industry. But those changes will help, not hurt the industry. People already are staying away because they can see a film in 4 to 6 months at home. This only speeds up the process. Theater owners need to make theirs the desirable choice be enhancing the experience. A big screen with surround sound isn't all that special any more. Good service, clean amenities and an offering of things one can't get at home (food, beverages, live entertainment, shorts before the film, etc.) would set the theater-going experience apart and make it a worthy alternative again. Once again, choice is the answer.

More about the film can be found at its website, which offers interviews with Soderbergh about the film and its distribution schedule.

UPDATE: Boing Boing points to a response to all this from Mark Cuban's blog, where he responds to comments from John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners: "Guess what John, I can whip up a mean steak, but I still like to go to restaurants. Because I enjoy it. I enjoy getting out of the house with family, friends, who ever."

Media hybrids

2006-01-17T15:56:00.000-06:00

The Washington Post's Magazine Reader column has a review of the new DVD magazine Wholphin from the folks at McSweeneys and The Believer. This inaugural issue came free with the latest issues of both journals, as and a subscriber to both, I've had two copies sitting on top of the TV for the past couple of weeks. It seems like an appealing idea, this blend of media, but knowing the source, I haven't been able to convince myself to pop it in the DVD player just yet. The review isn't going to spur me to action, confirming my suspicions with passages like this:

"The idea of a DVD magazine full of odd little films still sounds great. But maybe it's the kind of idea that should be executed by somebody other than the editors of self-consciously weird literary magazines."

I'm all for cross-platform innovation, and applaud this effort. But just as the forthcoming Steven Soderbergh film "Bubble" isn't going to convince the mainstream that flattened release of movies is the way to go, neither will a knowingly clever DVD magazine from McSweeneys be the thing to show the masses that such a format is valuable. In such cases, the medium and the message are equally important, and it will take something a bit more mainstream to truly kickstart things. The avant garde always leads the way, however (hence the name), so if either experiment actually works, expect the rank and file to follow

A new distribution model

2006-01-08T16:58:00.000-06:00

I have found mp3 blogs and music blogs in general to be a great place to learn about new music I might like. I don't expect to add to my playlist when reading economics blogs, but a post at The Big Picture late last year led me to check out the latest music from Harvey Danger. The band isn't new, nor new to me. But I was never too high on its big late-90s hit, "Flagpole Sitta," so when I read that they were making a return, it didn't interest me much.

But as I read about the band and the way it planned to release this new music, my interest was piqued. Stung by major label whims that found it dropped after its sophomore disc failed to recapture the novelty kitsch appeal of its debut, the band decided to release its new disc, Little by Little on its own. More than that, however, it was making the disc available for free download, both as straight mp3s and a bitTorrent file complete with cover art. In an essay on its web site, the band explains the decision: "This is by no means a manifesto. We don't pretend to be the first band to spin a variation of the shareware distribution model... We're not a bunch of fake Marxists. We're just trying to be smart capitalists so we can sustain our lives as musicians."

That's a key; Harvey Danger has been kicked around a bit, and it knows that while this move might be politically savvy in these times of anti-major label sentiment, it's even more business savvy. There's no way a band on the far side of its popularity curve like this could make back an advance from a major label or sell enough to justify giving up the kind of control over their own art that such a move would require. Instead, they can get word out about their disc thanks to this unique distribution model, let people sample their music without limits and try to sell a few to those who really like it. Paying for recording and manufacture of the physical disc, plus the bandwidth to host the files is more than recoupable by the sale of a few thousand discs. To make sales more appealing when the music is available for free, the band is offering a "deluxe package" with a 30-minute bonus disc, all for $11.99.

According to a Wall Street Journal article from late November, the band spent $50,000 on the project, including recording, manufacture, promotion and distribution. Assuming a profit of even $5 per disc (which is probably modest), the band need only sell 10,000 copies to break even. That's not unrealistic. More than 90,000 people had downloaded the disc by that point, according to the article, while 600 people have donated something to the cause through PayPal and 3,000 copies of the disc had been sold.

And the music? It's not bad. Those who liked "Flagpole Sitta" and who have moved on and seen their tastes evolve will likely find much to like. Like fellow one-hit-wonders Nada Surf (whose own MTV staple "Popular" did more harm than good to its career) the band seems to have matured and put its industry woes to good use as fuel to create more sophisticated music that is a bit more organic and less jokey. I was about to use the cliche that the great song "Cream and Bastards Rise" is worth the price alone, but that isn't saying much. Maybe I'll put my money where my mouth is and go give them a couple of bucks as thanks for the song.

Meanwhile, other artists -- not just musicians -- would be wise to check out the band's site and distribution model. As band guitarist Jeff Lin tells the Journal, "I don't think a model like this works for everybody. It would be very difficult for a band that doesn't have any previous recognition at all." As quick as pop culture chews up and spits out hot new things, however, there are plenty of artists across many disciplines who do have that previous recognition. This may be a way to mover careers into the next phase once that recognition begins to fade.

Slight return

2006-01-04T21:49:00.000-06:00

My holiday break turned into an extended hiatus thanks to the arrival of our new son over Christmas. As he gets settled in, and I get used to the lack of sleep, I'll ease back into posting.

In the meantime, just a quick note pointing to some interesting pieces about the Mark Cuban-Stephen Soderbergh film partnership that led to the forthcoming HD film "Bubble." I've written a lot about this, and I'm not alone. The Fast Company blog has an interesting look at recent coverage of Cuban and his digital revolution in theaters and beyond, with particular note given to Cuban's feisty way of responding to the media, in this case the New York Times. Meanwhile, UK paper The Independent asks if "Bubble" will change the way Hollywood does business: "Is it the beginning of the end of the movies as we know them - or does it mark an exciting new departure into an almost unlimited future of digital entertainment?" Those need not be mutually exclusive, of course, and I think that the answer to both ultimately will be "yes." We'll see the latter much, much sooner than the former, but it will happen.

Predicting 'It' city status

2005-12-20T12:11:00.000-06:00

A tongue-in-cheek piece in the latest issue of Canadian magazine Maisonneuve offers an interesting critique of the whole Richard Florida/Creative Class argument. In the article, writer Edward Keenan declares Milwaukee the new "It" city for hip music. To reach that conclusion, he drew on several factors. First, he analyzed a New York Times article from last February in which David Carr declared Montreal the new "It" city, and determined what made Montreal the new king.

"Being the biggest destination in a region almost guarantees an influx of musically inclined, disaffected young people to both play in and listen to bands. Bad weather helps, because it keeps songwriters inside and bands rehearsing. And perhaps most important, a nascent musical scene requires lots of cheap real estate for musicians and their fans to hang out and play in," Carr writes.

Keenan also applies the Richard Florida indexing model to things, adapting the economists "Bohemian" index to create his own "It City" index from these categories: "population; industry; proximity to water; winter and summer weather conditions; number of universities and professional sports franchises; average income, rent and housing prices; relative importance of city to its region."

The one city in North America that best fit the ideal "It" city criteria? Milwaukee.

So far, so good. His analysis is interesting, if not scientific. His critique comes in next, when he dissects what Milwaukee has to offer musically: not much. The bands aren't particularly cutting edge, and no one seems to mind driving south to Chicago to find truly interesting bands, clubs and culture. What he points out in this round-about way, is that all of the number crunching in the world isn't going to make your city an arts & entertainment and/or culture and/or talent magnet. Having the right things in place helps, no question. But it takes people with energy and ideas to catalyze things. Having the right ingredients in the right-sized pot helps, to use a tortured metaphor, but you need some cooks to get things cooking. It can't be an either/or thing. So while Keenan might laugh at the notion that Milwaukee is the next big thing, what he has done is point out that with the right stimuli, it very well could be.

Disruptive technology and the arts

2005-12-13T11:16:00.000-06:00

The folks at strategy+business magazine have an interesting feature to celebrate their 10th anniversary. They asked readers and contributors to select the 10 "most enduring ideas" presented in the magazine over the past decade. Most of the concepts are fairly specific to the corporate world, but at least one applies to the Creativille world view.

Item no. 5 on the list is Disruptive Technology. "Technological innovation radically alters markets by undermining incumbent companies Â which are vulnerable because their offerings are all tailored to the needs of their existing customers," they write. Strictly applied to the business world, this points out the problem faced when you do everything for a customer today only to see an upstart offer something radically different tomorrow that trumps all of your efforts. But looking at this from the lens of arts and culture, it's clear it applies here as well. As the s+b authors write, "Thus the makers of personal computers trumped Digital Equipment; Wal-Mart trumped Sears; and downloadable music is trumping the recording industry."

Staying ahead of the creative wave is difficult, but as technology continues to push things in multiple directions at an ever-quickening pace, those who wish to succeed have little choice. That's why the Soderbergh/Cuban film distribution experiment makes so much sense and why the television networks' move to digital distribution is a wise move. It's also the reason why iTunes might become a great benchmark looked upon fondly in the rearview mirror.

The lesson of disruptive technology applies at that macro level, but also can apply at the micro level. Think of new and exciting ways to present your art/entertainment/etc. (and by new and different I mean truly new and different -- something that has never been done, at least in your market), and have patience. If you guessed right, yours will become the new standard. As s+b advises, "Preempt your own comfort zone, adopting a disruptive technology yourself before others beat you to it."

A new voice

2005-12-08T12:10:00.000-06:00

Salon has an interesting new feature that started this week, the blog How the World Works. In the lengthy but interesting introduction, Andrew Leonard writes about teaching Chinese in Taiwan in the 1980s, eventually realizing that he was helping to create the competitive edge for people who might one day compete with him for work, "seeding the future with my own nemesis."

The new blog then is "a stab in the dark at exploring the territory of globalization, at finding believable answers to complicated questions," he writes. His first two posts after that introduction deal with the increasing price of polysilicon and what that means for microchip production in China, and about what the recent announcement by Ford of layoffs and plant closings means in the larger context of global competition.

As a staff writer at Salon, Leonard has written some interesting pieces on the topic of globalization. Salon's blurb about the new blog says the beat of globalization is "too big for any one story or book." Perhaps keeping up with this fast-moving topic with the equally fast moving form of a blog will allow Leonard to stay on top of things. Stay tuned.

Collapsing windows

2005-12-05T14:14:00.000-06:00

This month's Fast Company offers a story about the coming digital revolution in Hollywood, and in doing so has summed up the Creativille manifesto-in-progress. In my short time in this space, I have preached about the need for accessibility and adaptability in arts, entertainment and culture. That's where the whole "intersection with business" thing comes in. Make what you want when you want, but if you want anyone to buy it, you'd better make it as easy as possible for people to get it.

In the article, "The New Wave" by Alan Deutschman, that argument is summarized nicely in a passage about how Hollywood must react to the quickly changing marketplace:

"What we have learned from the first decade of the digital era is that we’re the ones who will be in control of when, where and how we consume media. Give us cell phones, and we’ll tear out our landlines. Give us laptops, and we’ll chuck our desktops. Give us wi-fi, and we’ll take our laptops everywhere. Give us BlackBerrys, and we’ll leave our laptops at home. Let us download music, and we’ll never go to the store to buy CDs. Give us VCRs and TiVo, and we’ll watch TV shows whenever we want – and zap the commercials. Give us the news as it happens, and we won’t look at tomorrow’s papers."

That's the promise, and here's the threat: “If you don’t let us buy what we want, when we want it, we’ll take it anyway. But if you make it affordable and easy enough for us to get what we want – as Apple’s Steve Jobs did with iTunes and the iPod – then we’ll happily pay you and make you a star.”

Steven Soderbergh gets it. I wrote last month about his filmmaking venture with Mark Cuban's 2929 Productions. Soderbergh is interviewed briefly here as one of the 10 hottest people in Hollywood, and also is featured in a Wired Q&A that makes a nice companion piece to the Fast Company package. In the partnership with Cuban, Soderbergh plans to make six digital films that will be released in theaters, on DVD, on HDTV and possibly by download all at the same time. Asked about this radical change to Hollywood's longstanding cycle of successive windows that allow various segments of the industry to wring as much revenue from consumers as possible, Soderbergh hits the nail on the head: “Name any big-title movie that’s come out in the last four years. It has been available in all formats on the day of release. It’s called piracy." He predicts that all movies will go out in all formats within five years, and that “named” directors will start distributing their own films.

Now, you can say this is a response to piracy, but it's really a response to what consumers are demanding. There is certainly an element that will take what it can get for free, but mostly people just want choice. People who are willing to buy a crappy dub on DVD the day a film is released are doing so in part because it's cheap, but also because it's convenient. Similarly, people who want to hear a song right now are going to go download it, not trek down to the mall to line up at Sam Goody to pay $17.99 for a disc that might offer little reward beyond that one song. The music industry finally figured that out, and a look at sales figures that include iTunes downloads (the December Wired has a great graphic that isn't online yet) shows that the music industry is more robust than ever.

Will the shift to digital and same-day releases hurt the movie industry as a whole? No. Will some people get hurt? Theater owners can't help but be worried. But there's no slowing the march of progress, and those who stand in the way are sure to be trampled.

RIAA to Byrne: Don't work it

2005-12-02T11:39:00.000-06:00

The RIAA doesn't need any help when it comes to fodder for demonization. The group, whose mission is "to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members' creative and financial vitality," often goes to extremes to carry that out. When they seem to go against those very artists, things seem to be really out of whack.

That's the case with latest windmill tilt from the RIAA. The group took time away from filing lawsuits against music downloaders to slap musician David Byrne. Why? Because Byrne, a tremendous music fan, took steps to promote the music he loves on a streaming online radio show. The former Talking Head puts together an elaborate playlist each month that can be streamed from his web site. The feature, Radio David Byrne, has featured psychedelic tunes, Italian music, and other, more eclectic and less thematic song cycles. Byrne popped onto the RIAA's radar last month when his entire playlist was made up of songs from Missy Elliott. The set of 30 songs offering nearly two hours of music, was an aural loveletter to Elliott, who Byrne called "one of my role models."

The RIAA sent a warning, saying online playlists can only feature four songs by the same artist every three hours. Talk about fuzzy math. Byrne explains all of this better than I can, but suffice to say that the entire episode is a sign that the RIAA just doesn't get it. Downloading pristine copies of popular songs for free? That seems a reasonable thing to investigate. Streaming songs that most people can hear on the radio 24-7 anyway? Not a big deal. Anyone who takes the time to record these sound files as the stream has a) enough money that they probably wouldn't bother anyway or b) such an axe to grind against the RIAA or the music industry in general that any attempt to stop them is fruitless.

What the RIAA has essentially done is tell Byrne, an influential artist who has helped to uncover and promote a number of other artists who all sell records, not to use that influence. Were I Missy Elliott, I would complain. Why? Because I'm not Missy Elliott; I'm a music fan who appreciates her more than he has a desire to listen to her, but who might just be swayed by Byrne's impassioned advocacy (and the chance to hear several cuts without wading through endless, assaulting radio commercials to do so) to spend money on her work. So much for that.

The only silver lining here is that the entire ridiculous situation will clue people in to Byrne's project, which continues this month with the set "Rednecks, Racists and Reactionaries: Country Classics." Some nice, subtle commentary there, and a chance to hear Ray Price, Merle Haggard and Webb Pierce.

Open source flatness

2005-12-01T15:19:00.000-06:00

Todd at the 800-CEO-READ blog points to an interesting article in the Financial Times about Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, in which Friedman says he is mulling over the idea of turning the book into a wiki:

"It's been suggested to me that we actually turn the book into an open-source product. Just put it up on the web like Wikipedia [the collaborative online encyclopedia] and let people add to it."

That's a great idea for a book about the rapidly changing landscape in which U.S. businesses must compete -- make changes on the fly to ensure that the book stays up to date. It's an important book, and taking a step such as this means that people will continue to talk about it and keep thinking about his theories and how they impact the economy. Friedman notes that technology already has changed significantly since he wrote the book:

"What's really interesting is that when I started this book in March 2004, podcasting didn't exist," he says, noting that the audio version of the book became a top-selling podcast on iTunes in 2005.

The FT.com site has a lot more interesting information about Friedman and his book, which won its 2005 Business Book of the Year award, on the page announcing the award, including a transcript of the interview from which the above article was drawn.

Changing music industry landscape

2005-11-30T09:27:00.000-06:00

Chicago Tribune pop music critic Greg Kot had an interesting piece this weekend on the way technology is changing the music industry by changing the way people acquire and listen to music. Two points he makes early in the article drew my eye:

"Album sales have plummeted in three of the last four years; so far this year 265 million albums have been sold compared to 299 million last year, an 11 percent decline," while "Digital album sales have jumped to 11 million from 3.4 million, a whopping 226 percent spike."

This tells me two things, and the first isn't something the music industry wants to hear: People are buying less music because your product stinks. Specifically, they don't want to buy an entire album of garbage to possess one hit song. When they had no legal choice, that meant they downloaded the songs they wanted, for free, and left the rest. The second thing? Given a legal option, people are choosing to buy digital copies of songs, hence the tremendous jump in digital sales. However, because your overall product is still poor, overall sales are suffering.

Giving people the options they want in terms of delivery and media is a good start, reacting to a problem you had years ago. Now, if you want to rescue your dying industry, give them better product. Sure, you'll argue that you give people what they want, and that there are more artists in more genres than ever before. That's true, to a point. But people buy that to which they're exposed. Keep pushing one-hit pop stars on them, and that's what they'll buy. Cultivate career artists, and you'll build loyal customers who keep coming back for more.

This is something I'd love to see Chris Anderson at the Long Tail delve into: Are the pop music charts appreciably different these days, with more artists charting over the course of a year than in past decades? I'd guess they are, because it doesn't seem as if you have artists who spin three or four successful singles off an album any more. Artists would likely cringe at the comparison, but it's like the building of any other brand. If there is no trust that quality will continue, there is no loyalty and thus no assurance of future sales. Why buy the album when you can get the hit song for (something close to) free?

MPAA vs. BitTorrent

2005-11-23T13:22:00.000-06:00

The Motion Picture Association of America and BitTorrent have reached an agreement by which BitTorrent will somehow remove links to copyrighted material, putting up a small roadblock for those using the technology to download movies. It's a finger-in-a-dike sort of effort, more symbolic that effective, but it does show an interesting new side of the entertainment industry.

In the past it would simply lash out at services like Napster and Grokster; here, it seems to be willing to work a bit to find an equitable solution. What it will find, of course, is that people are going to use technologies to get what they want. If free is the easiest way, so be it. Seeing how a badly hobbled music industry has been able to rebound thanks to iTunes and other services, the MPAA ought to be looking for a way to harness the power and market reach of BitTorrent to facilitate sales of movies. Cheap, easy distribution is the key, and it would seem that this uneasy truce with BitTorrent might indicate just such a direction.

Friedman, Drucker & the arts-commerce collision

2005-11-22T10:11:00.000-06:00

Not that he needs any more publicity or plaudits at this point, but Thomas Friedman deservedly nabbed the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for his book, The World is Flat. The other finalists include Freakonomics, DisneyWar, The Search, and The Travels of a T-Shirt. Some of these are classic business books, of course, but some would certainly be included on a syllabus for Creativille, if there was such a thing. Most do more than simply talk about business techniques and management strategies. Rather, they comment on and offer context for a world that is increasingly interwoven, where arts, commerce, business and culture collide.

I have been reading more about Peter Drucker, and a phrase in a nice piece about the late management guru in The Economist caught my eye. "Mr. Drucker told his clients, who included the American Red Cross and the Girl Scouts of Amercia, that they needed to think more like businesses -- albeit business that dealt in 'changed lives' rather than in maximising profits." There will be those who fight this confluence of business and culture, but, in a with-us-or-against-us sort of way, they will be the ones left behind. Reading the above books, and others, is a good way to stay on top of that wave rather than let it capsize your organization.

Tribute to a thinker

2005-11-15T13:51:00.000-06:00

As a nascent business writer who reads a lot of books and articles on management practices, I have been bombarded over the past year with references to Peter Drucker. The author and, well, he's often called a guru, but thinker seems to apply best, passed away over the weekend, so there are numerous tributes and links to his work.

One that struck me the most is this interview in the third issue of Wired from 1993. Drucker has long been credited with coining the term "knowledge worker," and it's clear that he foresaw things that we now take for granted about the transition of our economy over the past several decades. But reading the interview, I couldn't help but feel like the recent spate of "creative economy" talk is just a new wineskin of sorts. How about this from Drucker in response to a question from Peter Schwartz about relative competition between the U.S. and Japan:

"The traditional factors of production -- land, labor, and capital -- are becoming restraints rather than driving forces. Knowledge is becoming the one critical factor of production."

That, in a nutshell, is Richard Florida's first big book.

Later, in the same answer in which he talks about how Japan, the U.S. and Germany approached the need for innovation as opposed to production, he offers this:

"Knowledge has become the central, key resource that knows no geography."

That's Florida's most recent book, and, to an extent, Thomas Friedman's. Now both clearly have dressed these thoughts up in new data and reporting that make them contemporary and relevant, and neither has claimed to invent the wheel here. But it's amazing that so much of what passes for cutting edge thought was being tossed off in an interview with Drucker a dozen years ago and in his books and other writings even earlier. Though I came late to the party, I'm going to take advantage of the deluge of information about Drucker and his work to immerse myself in it. He was clearly a visionary.

Silver screen blinking

2005-11-14T11:11:00.000-06:00

Over at the TEDBlog is a report that Leonardo DiCaprio will star in a new film called Blink. No big news there, until you read this: it's an adaptation of Malcolm Gladwell's book of the same name. Now that's strange. It seems the movie will tell the story of one person in Gladwell's superb book about snap judgements. If nothing else, Leo's presence ensures that there will be interest, and the resulting cross-promotion that will put this book about thinking in the hands of people who usually use their brainpower to think about DiCaprio... well, it sets the mind to spinning.

Measuring intangibles

2005-11-09T12:32:00.000-06:00

Andrew Taylor, author of the Artful Manager blog, has posted a keynote address he gave at the recent CAPACOA Conference in Ottawa, Ontario. Taylor, who also heads the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin, delivered the talk "If Culture Counts, How Do We Count It?" It's worth reading in whole, but a couple of his points bear repeating. He begins the point I find most relevant by putting the recent craze of measuring the value of arts and culture programs in context. At one time, he says, arts were an indicator of success. As nations competed on the global stage, having the best of anything -- the arts included -- was a measure of superiority. As the Cold War ended, that was no longer the case. So, arts organziations needed their own indicators to prove they were worthwhile.

But measuring the value of the arts and culture is difficult. As Taylor says, you can talk about having more butts in seats (I paraphrase) or helping to spur the economy by enhancing quality of life, but those are subjective -- if not arbitrary -- measures. Perhaps we're looking at things in the wrong way, or certainly from the wrong end of the telescope. Usually, those measuring such things look for desired results and then ascribe a cause. However, he says:

"Audiences don't engage in cultural experience because they seek to refocus encomic activity in the urban core. At-risk youth don't stay in theater programs to encourage their pro-social behavior. Students don't play in a school orchestra because they want better spatial reasoning. All these things are byproducts of the true value in what we do."

In another post on his blog, Taylor writes about an initiative in Silicon Valley where arts and culture groups created a "creative community index." It's another good read, and a valuable report that ought to be emulated around the country. The group first determined what it wanted to measure, then did so, determining how well it was accomplishing what it set out to do. That would seem to keep the cart and horse in the proper order. That's important, because (getting back to Taylor's keynote) "value is always a co-construction. It is not something delivered and received, produced and consumed..." and "value is always the product of multiple experiences, never just one." Success is rarely an instantaneous creation, and successful projects never do exactly what the creator hopes they will in the way he hoped they would. It's a collaborative process, which is an important thing to keep in mind when trying to create all of those cool amenities to please young professionals. Let them be a part of the process, and allow things to evolve and improve over time.

Teaching creativity

2005-11-08T14:26:00.000-06:00

A forthcoming study from the Creativity & Innovation Project at the Coles College of Business at Kennesaw State University finds that while students in MBA programs -- and the people hoping to hire them upon graduation -- say creativity courses are valued and desired, MBA programs around the country have been slow to offer such courses.

The 2005 Benchmark Study on Creativity and Innovation Curricula Among American Business Schools surveyed 117 accredited MBA programs around the country. According to a press release about the results, the survey found that about half of the MBA programs surveyed teach "some type of elementary creativity and innovation module or course, and only one-third of these business schools have freestanding courses."

Further, "among the schools lacking a course or module in creative thinking, 59% are likely to offer a course or module within the next five years, but 41% have no such plans."

Creativity obviously is a buzz word that can be injected into any conversation in an attempt to seem plugged in, and calling a part of the curriculum a "creativity module" doesn't make it so. But it's clear that the leaders of tomorrow are going to need different skills than those of today, and so perhaps these schools need to rethink their programs. Then again, the courses already are there; one need look no further than to the liberal arts catalog to find dozens of courses that help to teach creativity. Maybe what is needed is more cross-discipline cooperation and hybrid programs that will turn out people who are creative, business savvy and world wise.

Simple choices

2005-11-07T13:34:00.000-06:00

Each month for the paper I survey a handful of business and technology magazines and summarize the ideas behind some of the most interesting articles, offering our readers a snapshot of what's on newsstands in case they don't have time to get through the magazines themselves. This month, cover pieces in Wired and Fast Company seem to complement each other quite nicely.

Wired's piece deals with "The Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone," which offers analysis about why highly touted duds like the ROKR phone didn't excite the marketplace. In part, they write, it deals with not offering consumers what they have very clearly said they want, including a large amount of memory, easy on-board navigation and access to a lot of cheap music.

In Fast Company, the topic of the month is simplicity, Google, for example, offers it and does exceedingly well. Others do not, and pay the price. It offers a wonderful quote from Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer web products: "Google has the functionality of a really complicated Swiss Army knife, but the home page is our way of approaching it closed. It's simple, it's elegant, you can slip it in your pocket, but it's got the great doodad when you need it. A lot of our competitors are like a Swiss Army knife open--and that can be intimidating and occasionally harmful."

So what's the common thread? Not only giving people what they want, but giving it to them when and where they need it. Gadgets these days offer so much, but most of the time these extras get in the way. It's part of why the iPod was so successful even though it came late to the marketplace, and why Google has been able to fight off numerous challenges. The functionality is there, but only when you need it. A quickly evolving theme of this blog is to advocate for consumer choice. Part of offering that should involve listening to what consumers say they want, and then doing your best to offer it. It's clear from these two interesting pieces and the products they cover, that doing that will put you on the path to success.

Wider application for Collins

2005-11-04T13:35:00.000-06:00

Author Jim Collins, who has sold a gagillion copies of his business book Good to Great, will soon offer a companion in the form of a paperback monograph, Good to Great in the Social Sectors. As reported at the 800-CEO-READ blog, the 42-page work will offer supplemental material about applying Collins' ideas to the non-profit sector. His book and ideas are nothing new to those folks, but it's nice to see something more specifically targeted to that audience. Collins already offers a lot of material that likely will end up in the book in audio form on his web site, dealing with the idea that "the solution is not to be more like a business" and that "lack of resources is no excuse for lack of rigor."

The community theater director or the free medical clinic manager might wonder how the ideas of "Level 5 Leadership" and "the Hedgehog Concept" can work for them outside of the boardroom, but good thinking is good thinking. And in times of belt-tightening and an ever-increasing demand for return, it doesn't matter whether you're running a Fortune 500 company or a tiny service agency -- anything that can help you to get make the most of what you have is worth a look. Collins certainly has a track record in that regard. It will be interesting to see what kind of impact this new work will have.

Studying creativity

2005-10-31T14:53:00.000-06:00

New Scientist magazine has a cover package on creativity in its latest issue. The link (thanks to Business Innovation 2005 and, by extention, IdeaFlow) takes you to what is essential a tease unless you are a subscriber. The table of contents lists more than a dozen pieces about "the creative mind," and from the short sample bits of each article provided to non-subscribers, it looks like some meaty discussion. I think I'll be hitting the newsstand on the way home tonight to grab a copy.

Gazing into the (near) future

2005-10-25T11:35:00.000-05:00

A piece on Wired News deals with what futurists see for the, well, future. "Futurists Pick Top Tech Trends" outlines a handful of things the surveyed futurists expect in the next few years. The two most interesting sections deal with the idea of simplicity and mobile socialization. The first deals with the notion that the continual addition of functions to gadgets might reverse, with things being scaled back to their core uses. The second addresses the idea that all of these gadgets will continue to allow us to do anything anywhere. It doesn't seem like a crystal ball is needed to predict the latter.

The price of convenience

2005-10-24T12:19:00.000-05:00

Edward Jay Epstein, who writes for Slate as the Hollywood Economist, tackles the issue of Mark Cuban's movie distribution plans today. He writes that Wal-Mart is the true stumbling block on the path to simultaneous distribution of movies to theaters, television and home video. It seems the company doesn't want to compete with other delivery methods, and has threatened to deny shelf space to studios that shrink the window during which movies cannot be distributed digitally.

"If more and more independent film companies follow Cuban's lead, the studio system of artificial delay could cost Hollywood a significant part of both its movie and its DVD rental audience," Epstein writes.

The true indicator of Cuban's success, however, will be the quality of what he releases. No amount of convenience will make people try one of his films over a studio creation if they are inferior. Upcoming releases by Stephen Soderbergh and others are promising, but it will take consistently top-notch product if Cuban truly hopes to shift the market toward his way of thinking. Stay tuned.

No fear of homogeneous clusters

2005-10-23T21:18:00.000-05:00

In last week's issue, Time magazine featured a piece in which it asked a handful of "the smartest people we know" about what the future holds. These people, from Malcolm Gladwell to Tim O'Reilly to David Brooks, were asked about technology, religion, science and politics. The questions about technology were most interesting for our purposes, and help to frame some big issues. Asked what innovation will most alter how we live in the next few years, the discussion turned to the Internet and how it affects communication. O'Reilly talked about how the Internet allows people to be as isolated as ever, but at the same time allows them to communicate more widely than ever. "I suspect most of us in this room maintain communication with a group that is far larger, far more geographically diverse than we ever would have known without technology," he says.

A further question about technology possibly locking us into "homogeneous clusters" was met by interesting discussion about the fact that finding others like yourself can be a good thing. Author Mark Dery mentioned gay kids in small town Oklahoma once had no choices; now they can connect with others. Gladwell said reaching out to such groups can actually enhance diversity because there are many different clusters: "It may be that in each of those groups, I'm finding people who are precisely like me, but there are 10 me's," he says.

Travel and the way it changes the way people think about place and where they are from also was discussed, and the panelists brought that idea back around to the discussion of the Internet and people's ability to stay in touch with and communicate with people in far-flung places. It seemed to further the discussion that runs through many of the posts here thus far, following the notion that you can do anything any where at almost any time. And that, as Gladwell and others say, is a good thing.

Clarifying creativity

2005-10-21T12:17:00.000-05:00

Much of the criticism of Richard Florida's theories about the creative class stem from the misapprehension that he proposes excessive governmental spending on infrastructure and amenities in the attempt to attract young people. A new Q&A with Florida online at Fast Company's site does a good job of letting him address the issue.

When asked about the possibility of attracting the creative class through "top-down" solutions, he say that this isn't what he is advocating: "Creativity is organic. You can't plan for it. You can only allow it room and freedom to grow -- something that many leaders fail to do in their pursuit of maintaining the status quo."

Understanding this point is crucial, because it removes a common argument against his ideas. There still is plenty of room for debate here, but framing that debate around accurate information is key.

Distributing choice

2005-10-20T12:09:00.000-05:00

I learned about Steven Soderbergh's new film, "Bubble," because Robert Pollard did the music for it. Pollard, leader of the now-departed indie rock juggernaut Guided by Voices, is frighteningly prolific, which makes being a fan an expensive and time-consuming task. He announced a new release and I ordered it, really only learning what it was I had ordered when it arrived yesterday. A bit of Googling revealed that this was part of a very interesting project.

"Bubble" is the first of six films Soderbergh will direct for HDNet Films, the company started by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner to produce high-def product to be released simultaneously on theatrical, TV, and home video platforms. These films follow on HDNet's "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" and "The War Within," and point the way toward a potentially revolutionary new way to produce and distribute films.

Soderbergh already has been a revolutionary presence in the film world because he cannily alternates between big budget films like "Oceans 11" and the smaller, more experimental films like "Schizopolis," funded by the large paydays of those mainstream hits.

Now, in joining with Cuban and Wagner, he is helping to provide what would seem to be the calling card of the future: choice. Those who don't want to head to the theater to see a new film can rent or buy a DVD. Those who would rather just see it on TV will have that option as well. Cuban is a lightning rod for criticism, and many have predicted the a quick and spectacular failure for this enterprise. Even if it does, it surely points in the direction entertainment will eventually head. Call it the Long Tail or just common sense, things are going to become more convenient, more varied and more diverse.

The Big Moo

2005-10-18T13:02:00.000-05:00

In his latest book, The Big Moo, author Seth Godin revisits the notion that success in business comes from being remarkable. He last addressed this in his book, The Purple Cow, in which he wrote that the ordinary just doesn't cut it. Regular cows are boring, for example. A purple cow would be remarkable.

This then, is the next step. To be remarkable, you need "the big moo." To help you find it, Mr. Godin rounded up 32 fellow big thinkers from around the country to contribute pithy stories, advice and anecdotes with the purpose of making the reader think about ways to be remarkable. If The Purple Cow was a movie, The Big Moo would be the second disc of the collector's edition DVD, chock full of extras.

All 33 people contributing to the book did so for free; proceeds will benefit three charities. Mr. Godin has relentlessly marketed the book in the hope that business owners and managers will buy multiple copies, get them into the hands of employees and help everyone start being remarkable.

Plausible? Well, that depends on how suggestible you are. The book is easy to get through in a sitting or two, its short, anonymous bits from the likes of Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Peters and Mark Cuban easily digested. Some will move you; others, such as the one that begins "Play is tactile... play is active... play is experiential..." and goes on like that for two pages, will not. But over the course of the entire book, certain messages are beaten into your head enough, in enough different ways, that they become mantra-like. Be different. Dare to fail. Push the envelope. Listen. Any and all of these suggestions are worth remembering, and these stories are convincing, engaging ways to put them across.

You will learn about the organic wave of protests that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. You'll hear about Shaun Considine, who literally pulled the song "Like a Rolling Stone" from the dustbin of history. You'll read about Giorgio, a glassware maker who learned about cultural differences that were hampering his sales because he talked to his customers.

The book even handily highlights key phrases in italics: "It had never been done before," Those who fit in now won't stand out later" and "Once you make the standard, you've created a commodity" being just the first few.

Overall, the book's 73 short entries say one thing: Take a risk. As the cover copy reads, "Stop trying to be perfect and start being remarkable." Easier said than done, of course, but with The Big Moo as inspiration, you're off to a good start.

Restoring our competitive edge

2005-10-17T11:58:00.000-05:00

Thomas Friedman and Richard Florida have made the United States' eroding place in the world of science and technology a topic of conversation; now, the National Academies, at the behest of Congress, have weighed in on the issue. The report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future," was issued last week and was written by a 20-member committee that included university presidents, Nobel Prize winners, corporate CEOs and others.

In it, four recommendations for how to restore the country's place at the forefront of science and technology are put forth. They are:

--Increase America's talent pool by vastly improving K-12 mathematics and science education.
--Sustain and strengthen the nation's commitment to long-term basic research
--Develop, recruit and retain top students, scientists and engineers from both the United States and abroad.
--Ensure that the United States is the premiere place in the world for innovation.

All of these were once givens, now they are things that will take some work to restore. The report outlines specific steps that should be taken to get started. This should be required reading for education, business, science and governmental leaders.

An eco-city at every spike

2005-10-15T09:49:00.000-05:00

One can't help but think of the doomed Biosphere project when reading about this, but the idea behind Arcosanti is at least pushing some urban planners in an interesting direction. This article in the Financial Times about the Arizona development, which involves ecological city design geared toward pedestrians and efficiency, makes the idea seem like a logical extension of the "spiky" argument. If people really are gathering in centers around the world in which to pursue certain industries, there are worse ways to deal with that concentration of people than this. "Gathering a greater density of people to live and work in one place not only benefits the environment, by requiring less expenditure of energy for things like heating and travel, but also allows people to feel part of a community."

Shades of grey

2005-10-14T12:52:00.000-05:00

The follow-up to a cover story about Rebecca Ryan finds the Madison weekly Isthmus noting that not everyone is on board with her "cool cities, hot jobs" theories about how to boost local economies. Joel Kotkin with the New America Foundation has a piece in the latest issue of the UK mag Prospect in which he writes that the cities that embrace these ideas, put forth most forcefully by Richard Florida, do a disservice to their residents.

"If you can somehow make your city the rage of the hipster set, they insist, all will be well." But of course, he writes, all is not well. "Perhaps even worse, the lure of 'coolness' leads cities to ignore the fundamental issues -- infrastructure, middle-class flight, terrorism -- that have so much more to do with their long-term prospects."

It's an old argument, given considerable ink by Steven Malanga in a widely quoted opinion piece last year. Maybe Kotkin, Malanga and others are right; maybe city leaders in these places become so mesmerized by the notion of "coolness" that they ignore essential needs. But I can't help but think that his criticism paints with too broad a brush. Do leaders really ignore all else in the quest for coolness? Or do they still worry about essential needs and what are thought of as more traditional development policies such as maintaining proper zoning laws and low taxes, while at the same time starting to address more quality of life issues such as aesthetics, culture and diversity? It's no surprise that the debate has taken on such black and white tones; that's what things often are reduced to in politics. But it would seem that the truth -- and the best course, frankly -- is to find a way to maintain and enhance the more traditional traits that signify a prosperous city, including low taxes, good schools and proactive development policies, while also pursuing more progressive social and cultural initiatives.

Money magazine just published a list of the best places to retire, and focused its search on college towns. Many of the things cited by Money as being attractive lures for retirees are the same things Florida, Ryan and others tout as being draws for the young, creative class. No one ever accuses cities of catering to sixtysomethings, yet they seem to be doing so by offering the same things that appeal to twentysomethings. Coincidence, or might there be more value in the push to embrace creativity than so-called pro-business types are willing to admit?

On-demand culture

2005-10-13T10:26:00.000-05:00

Others will write more eloquently elsewhere about Apple's announcement of the new iPod that plays video, so I'll leave the proclamations about its capabilities and such to them.

But the announcement is exciting on another, broader level: This furthers the onset of our on-demand culture. Sure, audio has been this way for years, and people have been able to illegally download and watch video for nearly as long. But with this new device, Apple makes portable video convenient and legal, and those are two important components of any mainstream movement.

Without placing too much importance on this announcement, I do think it's safe to cite previous posts about the Richard Florida-Thomas Friedman debate in noting that this is just another way for people to do what they want, when they want, where they want. As we move away from appointment-style entertainment toward a more on-demand model, our reliance on the old ways of doing things is fading. With TiVo, we could tape a show and watch it later, using its original broadcast time to do something else. Still, we had to watch it on the TV, which meant we still were shackled to a place. With this, we now can watch a TV show while riding the train to work the next morning.

Arguments about the picture size and quality aside -- or those about the fact that Apple's pact with ABC means there still are few if any shows most people would want to watch available for purchase -- this is a beginning. Wednesday's announcement doesn't mean that you can watch "Lost" on a 2-inch screen, it's that you soon will be able to legitimately watch anything, anytime, anywhere. The on-demand culture is here.

Soul of the city

2005-10-12T14:50:00.000-05:00

Richard Florida is often referred to as the rock star economist, and while the bar isn't set very high when it comes to earning such designations, there is some truth to it. Hearing him address an auditorium full of business and community leaders, students and the simply curious last night, I'd say he comes off as a mix of motivational speaker, collegiate lecturer and evangelist. The first stems from necessity, the second from his calling and the third, if I had to guess, from a belief that what he says, if applied, can actually make a difference.

Will anyone listen? It's hard to know. His talk capped a long, somewhat disjointed evening full of ideas and promise, and in the very least, it sparked discussion in the lobby immediately after; that's a good sign.

His talk was discussion worthy. Having heard it twice yesterday -- once at an economic development group meeting and then again, in longer form, at the evening lecture -- I was taken with the simplicity of it all. People want to live in places where they are comfortable, and will then seek out the work they desire. Makes sense. But until talking with Florida last week for a newspaper interview and hearing him yesterday, the one question I had was, has anybody thought to ask people if this is actually true?

Florida shared some results gleaned from a new Gallup Poll called "The Soul of the City," which found that the things people value most in their city are aesthetics and diversity. There is little out publicly about the poll yet, but once it hits, I think it will be big, for it offers another way into Florida's theories and provides some hard data to back up his hypothesis. Before, he was essentially drawing conclusions from data: Certain cities were deemed to be creative, tolerant and diverse, and those same cities seemed to thrive economically. This new poll, however, shows that these are the things that actually draw people to and keep them in a particular city. That data can then be crossed with more specific information about the economies and industries in those cities to draw what I would assume will be fascinating conclusions.

Flat vs. spiky

2005-10-11T11:14:00.000-05:00

Two of the patron saints of Creativille seem to be engaged in an intellectual debate, as Richard Florida's recent piece in the Atlantic Monthly is seen as a direct response to the notion of a "flat world" as posited by Thomas Friedman in his book, The World is Flat. Florida says the world is actually "spiky," with a handy (and frankly, pretty cool looking) set of maps that show population centers around the world spiking up to reflect patent filings, population, light emissions and scientific citations. It's an interesting companion to Friedman's work, and it has drawn criticism from Chris Anderson at the Long Tail, who says Florida misses the point by being a "hitist," looking only for the places where big things happen, and ignoring the many other places where small but wonderful things occur. People can do almost anything anywere, he writes, and he says the interesting things happen "in the noise below the spikes."

But aren't both Florida and Friedman right? Friedman's flat world is one in which a talented person can do anything they want; they no longer need to come to the U.S. to create software, design computers, create movies, etc. But Florida's spiky world shows that while this is true, people still migrate to population centers where they find the kind of lifestyle they want, and the resources they need, to do so. The difference is that now you can do this in Bangalore just as surely as you can in New York or Los Angeles.

Perhaps I'm over-simplifying, but it seems that the argument here is over the fine points, while the broader views of Florida and Friedman are actually pretty well aligned.

A beginning

2005-10-10T18:55:00.000-05:00

I am the editor of the Corridor Business Journal, a weekly business paper covering the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids Corridor in Iowa. I came to the paper after years as a news reporter at the daily in Cedar Rapids, writing most recently about arts and entertainment. Partly because of the need to give myself a crash course in business thought and theory, and partly because I needed to fill space, I decided to review a business book each week. While a week isn't enough time to read even the most bulletpoint-laden book, I have gleaned enough from my purposeful skimming to learn a lot about business.

I have found that the books I've enjoyed most are those that transcend the bounds of the typical Eight Steps to Soar Like an Eagle and Manage your Nestlings for Success. From Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds to Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat or Freakonomics from Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, these books all seem to point to a new, deeper way of looking at the world. Seeing things only from a business perspective, or only from the point of view of the arts, is to miss the big picture.

So, after thinking on all of this for a while and coming no closer to consolidating it into a new worldview, I decided to do what everyone else seems to do: I started a blog. The major impetus for this comes from Richard Florida, whose work may well be seen as an umbrella of sorts over this whole mess. Florida is coming to town to lecture, and I had the opportunity to interview him. The unedited transcript is here. Tomorrow I'll get the chance to hear him speak a couple of times, ensuring at least one more solid post here. From there, who knows where this will go.