Long Tail Insight
I’ve been reading and enjoying The Long Tail, the best seller by Chris Anderson about high sales of products that are low sellers. That is, they are low sellers individually, but collectively large sellers. One …
Corporate Meetings and Employee Retention
The Economist magazine recently had a series of article on "The Search for Talent" (subscription required). In one of the articles, they mentioned two things people want from their employer: a sense of being part …
Steel Looking Glutted
Check out the Wall Street Journal article about steel (if you have the on-line subscription, which I recommend highly). Here’s the lead: Inventories of steel have been piling up in customer warehouses in the U.S., …
Resource for International Business
The World Bank has a neat resource for looking at foreign countries, the Doing Business database. You can look at an overall measure of how easy or hard it is to do business in various …
Electronic Commerce: My Good Forecast
Back in 2000, an investment bank asked me to study business-to-business electronic commerce. The resulting paper, E-comm Econ: The Economics of Electronic Commerce, turns out to have made some good predictions. It pooh-poohed the portals …
Selling During a Recession
Heard a good presentation on the topic this morning, from Ham Thorne, a mortgage originator. His first key points reiterate what I say in my forthcoming book: the time to prepare for the downturn is …
Can the Economy Be Strong If Poverty Is Not Falling?
Business leaders have asked me that, reacting to concerns that the income gains have been primarily at the upper end of the income distribution. I take these concerns with a grain of salt. First, estimates …
Entrepreneurs Interviewed
There’s a lot to be learned from the experience of entrpreneurs: how they got their idea, what their challenges were in implementing it, what worked as they expected and what didn’t. You can read over …
Weak Consumer Sales: What To Do?
What can a retailer do about falling demand? In yesterday’s post about restaurants I discussed possible causes of weak sales at restaurants. The subject has become more interesting with some retailers announcing weakness, as Calculated …
Weak Consumer Sales: Are Restaurants an Indicator?
The Wall Street Journal reports today that restaurant chains are hurting due to low sales. Stock in the corporation that owns Outback Steakhouses is down 40 percent from its peak. Down at least 20 percent …
The Future of Radio–And Your Business
Seth Godin was interviewed about the future of radio recently. He offered a few ideas about how radio might evolve. Even if you’re not in the business, thinking about this industry has some value. Seth …
Notes on the State of Business
Walking through a trade show at a meeting where I was speaking, I found a couple of interesting business people. I visited with the folks from Advanced Safety Wheel and Hub, which is an interesting …