5 Fav Business and Strategy Post #30

photo via Don­ald McMichael

While I never going into depth about the finds, I do encour­age you check them out if they sound interesting.

NYT Pay­wall, Huffpo Law­suit – Symp­toms of the same mis­con­cep­tion
In this post about sur­viv­abil­ity of the New York Time’s (NYT) pay­wall Chris Saad comes at it from a unique angle. In almost all of the cases laid out, both pro and con, the core premise was that peo­ple – that’s you and I – are inter­ested in and derive value from the con­tent. We Chris’ posi­tion is that peo­ple have his­tor­i­cally paid for the medium not the con­tent. This was so because peo­ple per­ceived the medium to be scarce, a lim­ited resource. The point is that we live in a world of abun­dance where dig­i­tal space is vir­tu­ally infi­nite. 
Scarcity now is on the con­sump­tion side – con­tent providers have to fight for atten­tion. A total flip in the pre­vail­ing par­a­digm on the last 100 years.

If true, it’s kind of a King has no clothes moment for many media and enter­tain­ment concerns.

I’m still of the school that con­tent does mat­ter. The ques­tion that I’m cur­rently pon­der­ing is: ‘What’s the right bal­ance of inter­est­ing con­tent and deliv­ery vehi­cle (expe­ri­ence) that dri­ves the high­est finan­cial return?’

What do you think?

4 Ways To Fix Your Sales Strat­egy
Too often we are focused chas­ing the next close. If you really want your busi­ness to take off you have to real­ize that not every sale is a good sale, for your cus­tomer or you. To under­take this crit­i­cal analy­sis we first need to need to look inward. In this post b Eric Markowitz we are given four spe­cific ways to eval­u­ate the suc­cess of a sale.

Jump-Start Your Career With a Per­sonal Busi­ness Model
This post takes a look at if we can apply the core par­a­digm of busi­ness model gen­er­a­tion to a per­sonal brand. After all, many of the per­sonal brand­ing pun­dits say that we need to look at our­selves with regards to our career(s) as a busi­ness of one. Why a busi­ness model? Because busi­ness mod­els are devel­oped to increase to odds of a con­cern not only sur­viv­ing but also reach the aspi­ra­tional goals bestowed upon it by stake­hold­ers (owner, cus­tomers, part­ners, etc.). In other words, it explains how it pro­vides value to its cus­tomers – think per­son cut­ting the check.

Urban farm­ing expands onto school grounds
It’s always a good feel­ing when you run across a dou­ble bottom-line busi­ness (Fresh Roots) that has an edu­ca­tional com­po­nent that stays with kids for a lifetime.

Jay Walker Goes Nuclear: Price­line Founder Sues More Than 100 Com­pa­nies
The world of world of patent-trolling taken to a new level. Does he have a leg to stand on? In this low con­text coun­try that approves method patents you bet.

What is low con­text?  Low con­text cul­tures make lit­tle use of shared expe­ri­ences and expec­ta­tions to com­mu­ni­cate… or read into com­mu­ni­ca­tions what is meant. Want some exam­ples see Ger­many, Israel, Canada, and the United States. In our land ‘you word is your bond’ truly is just a phrase, we know that we need to get every­thing in writing.