My older brother Skip is a doctor who started and runs a substance abuse clinic in Rhode Island. His business is booming! But if you are not in the cheap food business, pawn brokerage, bankruptcy law, or other counter-cyclical activities you and your firm are probably looking very carefully at where you can help [...]
Our economy relies equally on rational economic transactions and mutually felt trust in the trustworthiness of the system. In this current economic downturn there have been many parallels made to the New Deal and its Keynesian simulative effect which was the palliative for social improvement before the Great War, which was the “real” engine of [...]
I get worried when a person who grew up in a slower software world (e.g. Autodesk) gets to be CEO of a firm like Yahoo! which sits in the hyper fast moving world of search and social media. Carol Bartz’s blog, promises that the brand will “kick ass” again, but the real thing they need [...]
I am optimistic that we will have the most innovative decade that this country has ever seen, and it is largely due to the fact that the internet has allowed the minimum efficient scale of starting a new business and scaling that business to be lower than ever before. Couple this with the fact that [...]
I believe that we are in the fifth wave of information technology adoption in society and organizations. The first was centralized mainframe computing, second was departmental mini-computing, the third was individual focused personal computing, the fourth networked based internet computing, and now social computing. What constitutes a wave? Every wave moves control farther and father [...]
There is something ironic about the fact that a company that sells navigation information inside the car is three times as valuable as the company that makes the cars! More specifically, Garmin, the navigation firm who derives three quarters of its revenue from autos has a market cap of over three billion when GM’s hovers [...]
When you share information on a social site: Who owns the content? Who controls it? This is a very complex and interesting question at the core of Facebook’s current turmoil around its terms of service. Last week they tried to keep more rights on content for themselves, and yesterday they backed away from it. Who [...]
“Good artists copy, great artists steal…” – Pablo Picasso
Great art always draws upon deep images which are familiar to us on a fundamental level. I’m certainly not the first to note that Picasso was not only a genius who could craft perfect drawings in his early teens, and painted almost every day ferociously for almost [...]
A recent New York Times article mentioned that the very famous Nina Zagat was entering the Doctor rating business for insurance company Wellpoint. The article goes on to worry about the dangers of rating doctors. I agree that the rating of doctors is both a vital, and a tricky issue. Patients are competent to speak [...]
No one disagrees that we need to take doctor’s records from their 17th century, paper-based, folio state into the electronic world, and the stimulus package signed by President Obama contains approximately $20 billion dollars for the creation of electronic medical records. Of that huge sum it is my prediction that little or none of it [...]
