The Individual and The Organization:  AOM 2010

The Individual And The Organization: Proceedings

The Wrong Stuff Blog

We seem to have a built-in tendency to want to learn from successful people and pay little attention to failures. We also have a hard time admitting mistakes. In fact, what dintinguihses mature and, dare I say, clever,  indivdiuals is precisely that they can admit mistakes and learn from them.  Kathryn Schulz, who is about to publish a book on the subject, has published on Slate a number of great interviews and reflections on being wrong. The one with Alan Dershowitz is particularly interesting. If you want to start with the most recent entry, start here: The Wrong Stuff

Constructing Relational Databases to Study Life Histories on your PC or Mac

Dramatic Challenge to Barnes & Nobles Business Model

This one of the most vivid examples of challenges to the existing business model of a firm. The Wall Street Journal reports:

After nearly 17 years of consistent growth, Barnes & Noble is stumbling. Revenue fell 3% to $5.12 billion for the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2009, while earnings dropped about 45% to $76 million.

When it launched the iPad last month, Apple championed a new approach to e-book pricing. Earlier this year, most large publishers agreed to establish a so-called agency model, where the publisher receives 70% of the digital price while e-book sellers act as agents and receive 30%. While some best sellers remain at $9.99, many major authors are priced at $12.99 or $14.99.

For many digital booksellers, the new model is good news: Instead of having to pay publishers half, or $12.50, for the e-book edition of a $25 hardcover book, and then sell that book at a loss—for, say $9.99—to match Amazon’s cutthroat prices, the bookseller now gets 30% of the newly-set $12.99 price, or $3.90. Since it hasn’t paid anything for the title, it is ahead of the game.
But for Barnes & Noble, the model can’t hide a brutal reality: $3.90 is a fraction of the $12.50 it now earns on a full-priced hardcover priced at $25. If e-book sales become a quarter to a third of the market, store revenue would plunge.

Faced with such a scenario, Barnes & Noble is re-examining its business model.

Read the full story in the Wall Street Journal.

Australian School of Business Team Teaching Award

Google’s New Search Homepage: Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Data as well as Intuitions

CEO Q&A: Greg Bourke

What is your number one tip for managing people?

Be empathetic: When you understand the issues that constrain staff from doing their job you will usually identify bigger issues in the organization.

Is there a lesson you have never forogotten?

Progress is not perfection.

From BRW, April 29-June 2, 2010, p. 12.

Excellent Overview of the Philosophy of Social Sciences

Daniel Little’s article for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides an excellent overview of the key issues in the philosophy of social sciences. You can read it here.

CEO Q&A: Lincoln Crawely

What has been your greatest regret in Business?

That I didn’t really get to know and accept my strengths and weaknesses earlier.

What is your number one tip for managing people?

Fairness and balance, which must not be confused with compromise.

From BRW, April 15-21, 2010, p. 10.

Logical Incrementalism in Product Development

This little exerpt from the NY Times explains well the concept of logical incrementalism in management.

Mr. Schmidt didn’t stop there. He acknowledged that “Google might not get it right the first time,” and said that Apple probably wouldn’t either, briefly alluding to some better features coming with the second generation of the iPad. But he said both companies would have “the next two to three years to figure it out.”

The Power of Infinity

Steven Strogatz explains beautifully how the concept of inifinity first tripped up philosophers but then provided them with a powerful tool to calculate things that could not be calculated without taking things to inifity. I wish I had had as good a math teacher as Strogatz. The lesson here is also that Strogatz does not provide a solution to Zeno’s paradox but that he shows that even without fully removing the puzzles around infinity one can use the concept to get more knowledge in other areas.
Read his column Take It to the Limit.

Evolutionary Economics Meets Business History at Trinity College in Dublin

I participated in a workshop bringing together Business Historians and Evolutionary Economists at Trinity College in Dublin.  Overview information on the workshop and the presentation slides have been posted in the Economic-Evolution.net discussion forum. 

Apple with only 7% of Sales account today for 35% of Industry Profits

According to a Business Insider article, the banking giant has aggregated numbers from the top ten PC makers in the world and determined that, while Apple only commands 7 percent of overall revenues in the PC market, its products account for 35 percent of the operating profits. See Full Article.

Warren Buffet’s Symbolic Leadership

Watch this great advertisement staffed by employees of Geico. Warren Buffet, whose companey fully owns Geico, participates in the ad to demonstrate that he is one the many co-workers. It is funny to see the 80-year-old billionaire impersonate Axl Rose.