What is a business - anyway? As usual, Wikipedia offers a pretty good definition: “In economics, business is the social science of managing people to organize and maintain collective productivity toward accomplishing particular creative and productive goals, usually to generate profit.” Not surprisingly, as is the case for any highly complex system or entity, this is just one of multiple definitions.
In quantum mechanics we learn that questions like “what is an electron?” are meaningless unless one also asks “what is your purpose in asking this question?”
An electron is sometimes best thought of as a particle, and sometimes best thought of as a wave depending on what models or measurements one is after. Similarly, one cannot separate asking what a business is from how one wants to use the answer. But I am actually most satisfied with the people-centric definition Wikipedia gives, because I truly believe it is the most important one.
[via Irving Wladawsky-Berger]
NPR has an interesting article on the switch from land-line telephone companies to wireless. This reminds me of the AP piece that talked about how cell-only households now outnumber traditional phone households.That statistic points to problem in our current method of landline national polling for elections, which was brought to everyone’s attention in 2008. As technology improves, we must ensure that industry follows suit, even if we’ve been doing it one way for years. The old adage: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” does not hold true in the Internet age.
[note: why could I only find that AP article archived on the Utah Daily Herald site? I know it’s archived elsewhere. Google let me down for the first time in my life!]
When was the last time someone called at an inconvenient hour to ask if you want to switch long-distance telephone companies? What used to be a frequent annoyance now appears to be a thing of the past because the long-distance telephone business has undergone some big changes.
On AT&T’s Web site you’ll be hard-pressed to figure out the company even offers long-distance telephone service. That’s a big change from the 1990s when Ma Bell’s pitchman Cliff Robertson was on television attempting to woo customers back from Sprint and MCI.
According to the Federal Communications Commission, the long-distance business reached its peak in 2000, when it raked in over $109 billion. By 2007, revenues were down to $58 billion.
I was having a discussion the other day with one of my employees about the benefit of twitter and how it can be utilized in a business setting as a value-adding marketing tool. He was not so convinced. He could only see twitter as a way to tell people what you were doing at any given moment. “I’m sitting on my couch” or “I’m going to the bathroom!” were his tweet examples to show the inanity. He was all about what you could do with Facebook – in his eyes – a much richer experience.
I think the twitter and micro-blogging phenomenon is a lot more telling about social media in general than most would give credit for, and if you can find a way to use this tool to your advantage, you’re instantly ahead of the pack. At least for now.
What can you do with 140 characters or less, the length of each tweet? A lot, restaurants are discovering - everything from posting daily specials to luring followers with offers of free appetizers to offering a glimpse of kitchen life. It’s all good for business.
“It’s instant and free marketing,’’ said Chris Barr, a manager at L’Espalier, which joined Twitter this month.
Restaurants are starting to sign on by the dozens, inspired, perhaps, by the success of Kogi, a Korean barbecue taco truck in Los Angeles that gained national notoriety by tweeting its whereabouts. In February, Newsweek called it “America’s first viral restaurant.’’
[via The Boston Globe]
Found this great picture while browsing through the Life archives over at Google Images. It’s such an interesting photograph. Were they posing? The suits are wonderfully 1950s: a large lapel, white shirt and a “smart tie.”
The caption reads: Italian-American working as a clerk for International Business Machines Corporation with its motto on desk “THINK.”
I’m afraid I was not aware that employees put the “think” motto on their desks… Do they still do that? In any event, it’s a great snapshot back into the world of yesteryear.
Photographer: Ralph Morse, New York City, March 1953
[via Life Archive: Google Images.]
