Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Great video that Bob Stumpel posted on his Web 2.0 blog. You can view it here. It’s a panel moderated by Guy Kawasaki with lots of different entrepreneurs talking about how they started, what their business models were and are now, what the good and bad sides of founding a business are and why you just have to work yourself through the ups and downs.

Great stuff to listen too and a good mix of sites that partly didn’t or still don’t have a real business model.

Sadly, this is in German, but it’s a great study project from 2005, in three parts, explaining the power of money. In short, you need to make people work to control the planet. To make people work, you invent money, because that makes exchanging things very easy. Of course some people have more money, and they give it to you because they are afraid to loose it. You give them a bit more money back in return, like 2% per year. Of course, because there is a law the requires a bank to only hold 2-10% of the money they lend out, you can then lend out 10 times that money for a credit of 10% per year, making you money for nothing. This goes on an on. Very well done. See it here.

BBC is reporting about Koopa. Starting this month, you do not need an album in the shops in physical form anymore in the UK. If you have your song as a buyable item in any of the valid online shops, these sales will be counted too and it seems that Koopa is at place 17 of the unofficial UK charts for Monday, poised to break in the top 40 of the official week charts at the end of the week. Unsigned. No record label. Free. If you speak german and want to read a great book about the music industry, check out Tim Renner’s “Kinder, der Tod ist doch nicht so schlimm.” (Kids, death is not that bad).

(Originally published on the OUBS Blog)

There is a potential for conflict between the interests of any and all stakeholders in an organisation.

Society and business depend on each other.

Business:
- Employment
- Wealth creation: wages, dividends, taxes
- Material needs: goods, services
- Commitment: innovation, investment

Society:
- Means of production: labour, raw material, land
- Infrastructure: transport, services
- Means of exchange: currency, banking, credit
- Supportive environment: law and order, justice, stability

Organisations need to achieve a balance between philanthropy and self-interest in their community activities, aiming for social responsibility and avoiding the cynical use of cause-related marketing and pure philanthropy (Cannon’s enlightenment matrix)

You also need to establish priorities based on predictability, competition and capabilities.

Uncertainty can be assessed in terms of objectives and consequences (Earl and Hopwood’s uncertainty matrix). The greater the level of uncertainty, the more managers need to be inspirational rather than mechanistic in their approach (see organic or mechanistic organisation). If things are unpredictable, then keep your options open. Collaboration is far more widespread than you may think. But for competition one needs to consider:

a) objectives for customers, suppliers, resources and influence
b) in both the short and the longer term

In successful organisations, assets are converted into organisational capabilities which enable the organisations to survive and flourish.

- physical assets
- Know-how
- Skills
- Customer base
- Brands

If you are evaluating performance then your choice of what you measure and how you measure it gives a strong signal about your strategic direction and priorities. There are several indicators for performance:

- Economy: How cheaply can inputs be purchases.
- Efficiency: refers to the relationship between inputs and outputs; usually expresses as a ratio.
- Effectiveness: how well the final outcomes and impact of an organisation meets its objectives.
- Equity: (Gerechtigkeit) fair and equal treatment of all service users.

The balanced scorecard assesses performance from four perspectives: financials, customers, internal processes and innovation/learning