Great Exchange on Newspapers’ Future Dave Morgan and Jeff Jarvis trade excellent thoughts here on the future of newspapers. Read the posts in this order: Jarvis: Why newspapers aren’t making it in the new world (and what they can do about it) Morgan: What they can do about it (disaggregate their vertically integrated business models) Jarvis: Disaggregate even further! The exchange is really thought-provoking about other forms of traditional media whose businesses are being turned upside down by the Internet. Yellow Pages. Music. Movies. The current Hollywood writers’ strike may actually be unsolvable with the Movie and TV industry’s current structure.
Archives / December, 2007
An Unusual Christmas Present?
An Unusual Christmas Present? Has anyone else noticed a precipitous drop in spam volumes this week? Perhaps the Internet Axis of Evil is taking a few days off to sharpen their horns…or maybe they’re just giving the world an unusual Christmas present!
When Good Companies Go Bad
When Good Companies Go Bad This post could just as easily be entitled, “When Small Companies Go Big.” I know risk management is an important part of business, but I have run into several examples in the past few months where another company’s insanely aggressive staff roles — legal, procurement, and HR in particular — have driven me batty. We have a big financial services client who, after much wrangling with their legal time, signed a two year contract with us that was based on our standard form of agreement, though modified quite a bit to their specifications. A few months into the contract, we and our client wanted to add a new service into the agreement via a simple addendum. Someone…
Book Short: a Corporate Team of Rivals
Book Short: a Corporate Team of Rivals One of the many things I have come to love about the Christmas holiday every year is that I get to go running in Washington DC. Running the Monuments is one of the best runs in America. Today, at my mother-in-law’s suggestion, I stopped i8n at the Lincoln Memorial mid-run and read his second inaugural address again (along with the Gettysburg Address). I had just last week finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and while I wasn’t going to blog about it as it’s not a business book, it’s certainly a book about leadership from which any senior executive or CEO can derive lessons. Derided by…
Holiday Cards c. 2007
Holiday Cards c. 2007 Every year, I get a daily flood of business holiday cards on my desk in the second half of December. Some are nice and have notes from people with whom we do business – clients, vendors, partners, and the like. Some are kind of random, and it takes me a while to even figure out who they are from. Occasionally some even come in with no mark identifying from whence they came other than an illegible signature. And every year, I receive one or two email cards instead of print & post cards, some apologetic about the medium. Until this year. I think I’ve received about 10-15 cards by email this month. None with an apology….
Eight is NOT Enough!
Eight is NOT Enough! Today is the eighth anniversary of the founding of Return Path. No offense to Dick Van Patten or Grant Goodeve, but Eight is NOT Enough. We are just hitting our stride here! Congratulations to our incredibly hard working and dedicated employees, and thanks to our clients, partners, and investors for all their support these past 8 years. Eight may have been Great…but Nine will be Fine!