Jon Ponzino – F Wall Street

May 4th, 2010

Since my thesis takes almost all of my time, and I have learned that I cannot go 250% into something, I have not read anything of interest the last few months, nor have I had a single moment to think of anything smart or funny. Therefore I am glad to recommend a book via a friend.

Ken Shaw, one of the nicest people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing, knows a thing or two about investing. He gives a great tip on a book on his blog. According to Mr. Shaw, the book is a great introduction on how to invest like the pros do – a must read if you want to make some serious mullah!

I suggest you check it out.

Chris Anderson – Free: The Future of a Radical Price

February 19th, 2010

Though I have not taken the time to read his first book, The Long Tail, I have more than the highest form of respect for Chris Anderson as a writer and journalist. I think it is because I am such a nerd when it comes to looking at the small stuff, and notice that it has huge potential. See my fascination of Freakonomics – here, and NETFLIX – here.

With his new book, released the Autumn of 2009, Chris Anderson takes a look at FREE, as a philosophy, the history of it, and how it has come to be a new form of how one can make money. He even goes as far as to give good example of how YOU as a business owner can make money buy sell your product for nothing.

I know that my views are not shared by many, but here’s my view of the whole “Give it to me for free, and I might pay you for it” scenario.

The minute after I had finished listening to the book, I decided to buy it. Thus, Chris Anderson will get what he deserves for writing the book, even though that was not his intention. For him, you can download the book from iTunes, and never ever give him another dime. He believes that if the book is good, people can hire him to come to there country and talk about it – and for that, he’ll charge. I agree!

The same might be the way that the music industry should look upon themselves. The artist gives away it’s music for anyone to listen to it, and if people like it, the artist might be able to come to their country and/or city to play. Chris Anderson shares this view – which is nice to hear. The generation of young people today are more and more interested in seeing the artist, then just to listen to it – seeing is believing. What could be one of the reasons why the industry does not like this way, is that most contracts in the industry gives the record company money for the number of records sold, and the number of times the song is played on the radio. The artist makes it’s money when “creating the music” – kind of like a worker at the mill. As long as s/he grinds the corn it gets paid. But it will not get money when the company sells the flower at the store – unless the worker is entitled to a bonus, but that’s different.So when the artist plays his/her songs live – it gets paid from the number of tickets sold. The record labels get close to none.

I will not go any further into how the music industry should change their point of view, but I have a plan.

If you want to hear it, you can reach me via my e-mail, but it’s going to cost you to hear it.

Download Chris Anderson’s book as a podcast here – from iTunes.

Gary A. Williams & Robert B. Miller – Change The Way You Persuade

February 18th, 2010

While I was gathering theory for my thesis, I stumbled across an article from Harvard Business Review published in 2002. It is almost a follow-up on what I was talking about here.

What was specific about Bramson’s book was that it was more written for a manager who had problems with his/hers employees – even though the book mentioned that it concerned both. The article I found was written FOR employees and and the authors had found five characteristics that seems to applicable on managers.

They are:

- Charismatic; “easily enthralled by new ideas, can absorb large amount of info, and tend to process the word visually.”

- Thinkers; “Most difficult decision-makers to understand, likes quantitative data.”

- Skeptics; “Highly suspicious of every single data point”

- Followers; “Makes decisions based on how they’ve made similar choices in the past.”

- Controllers; “Focus on the pure facts and analytics of an argument.”

Which kind of manager are you? I’d like to think that I’m a Charismatic, but I might as well be a Follower.

Watch out, that ice cream might be a murderer

February 16th, 2010

I just learnt a very important lesson that will serve as a mantra during my statistical analysis for my thesis.

“Ice cream does not make people kill each other!”

A researcher found a correlation between ice cream sales and homicides, which in simple terms would mean that as soon as people start eating ice cream they’ll go on a killing spree, or that after a killer struck, s/he goes on a ice cream binge.

Luckily, this not true. It is a classic example of partial correlation. What you need to find is the third variable that is missing from the equation. In the example fom above – weather. When do people eat ice cream? And when do people spend a lot of their time outside? Summertime. A does not cause B, or the opposite, you need to find variable C.

I will nurture this little lesson dearly.

Prof. Bryan Lukas

February 2nd, 2010

The International Co-ordinator at my university sent out an e-mail asking if anyone was interested in holding a presentation about their time as an exchange student. Since I love the lime-light, and has been granted to go abroad twice to top-ranked schools thanks to her, I signed up for it.

It was quite nice to put together a presentation about my time in Mannheim and Oslo, mostly because it gave me a chance to, not only, reminisce, but to look and see how much I had changed as a person. I actually grew up during these two semesters.

What I emphasized in my presentation was all the classes I had taken during my studies, and two people were highlighted.

One of them was prof. Bryan Lukas. He was my professor in an intensive class Value Based Marketing. He was the one who made me realize that it was marketing & branding that was what I was supposed to do. Somewhere in the back of my head I knew that this was the case, but he made me understand it.

He also thought me how to study. Without doing it. I took a glance at his notes and even today I can almost remember everything that was written on them. I needed to make everything into a comic book.

It is sad that I never got a chance to say good bye and thank him for what he thought me, and I hope that our paths will one day cross. Until then, I will keep his name on the streets.

University staff page – [here]

More info and articles – [here]

Who’s who – Prof. Lukas talk about his interests and his research – [here]

Lucas Conley – OBD (Obsessive Branding Disorder)

February 2nd, 2010

With all the branding woo-hoo going around, it is only a question of one it will spill over and people will grow tired of it.
And it is a valid question – Has this gone to far? Branding, that is.

More and more companies are turning towards viewing branding as a do-or-die method for seeing short-term sales generating long-term relationship. And it is!

All the signs are showing that it works. So how can some one possibly decide/believe/prove that branding is wrong?

Lucas Conley thinks that he is on to something, and even though I cannot find any proof that this whole branding-thing has gone too far, I must agree with mr. Conley that we are looking at a very perplexed situation here.

To brand things seems to work. But. Can you un-brand something. Because the second you say that you do not like branding, you actually done just that. You’ve branded yourself. You have put yourself in a category of people who do not like branding, together with Naomi Klein (among others).

Daniel Tosh (comedian) said it when he talked about people who referee to their belief as: “not being religious, but spiritual!” – His answer to this was: “Though he wasn’t honest, they sounded interesting.”

And isn’t a little bit silly fighting against this thing – branding.

The main argument to it is that companies use branding to fool people into believing that the product that the company offers, is the best there is. Or that this or that product will make you part of a certain community. Is that so bad?

Isn’t it good that we can, by buying a product, be part of a social group. If it weren’t for the things we buy we would be coloring our hair, or measuring our genders all the time – long and to the left would stand in line 2, thus forming one social community that could buy normal jeans, but needs a little extra length in the crotch area.

As one can clearly read, I’m not convinced by mr. Conley’s work, however, I am glad that some one tries to find some way to criticize branding, because nothing works better after being scrutinized and re-thought.

The book also convinced me that I, even though I tried long not to, have to read Naomi Klein’s No Logo.

Branding something isn’t bad, we as consumers have to start to face the consequences when we don’t search for the proper information on the subject. It is up to us to think for our self.

There you go, I just branded myself as a mr. Know-it-all! Awesome.

iPad and cracking the Keynote code

January 29th, 2010

The world has slowed down since last Tuesday. Seems as everything stopped, just to later hit full speed ahead and go berserk – over a digital notepad.

Understand me correctly, I will be one of those walking around with one, and I will tell everyone they they’re stupid not to get one.
However, I was, a bit disappointed. That’s it? No USB port, no running parallel programs etc. Come on, if I’m working on a presentation in Keynote, I might want to have some pdfs that I can flip trough, as well as having some webpage up and running. For now, the iPad IS an over-sized iPod Touch – even if it hurts for me to say it.

But, then again. Apple always listen – or a least that is what they make us think – to their customers.

Look at the first iPhone. Headphone connector was made so that only Apple signature ones would work. No 3G, and you couldn’t even send SMS to multiple partners. But, a year later Steve Jobs was in front of an audience telling us how much their customers had screamed about this and – presto – here was everything they wanted.

People were standing up, applauding, cheering, for something Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and LG had implemented during the beginning of this millennium.

Apple knew this. They are not stupid – on the contrary – they KNOW what they are up against.

They know that MANY of their user will buy a new iPhone just because of the 3G, or just to say that thy are one of the “chosen few” (oooh) to have the LATEST and the GREATEST of whatever Apple throws at them.

It wasn’t until this Keynote that it struck me how Steve and his comrades do to make the audience, including myself, cheer and scream of joy – for something so simple as sending text messages to more than one friend, or something as and iPad.

Listen to how they talk.

- It’s magical, wonderful, most technological invention yet, beautiful, special…etc. They do not mention what the technological things are, or mean, nor do they show how it measures compared to other – who cares?

When Microsoft presents a new OS, they come out, full guns blazing and then *boom* there you have it.

Not Apple, they show it, talk about, Steve Jobs takes a seat in a nice, comfortable chair, and show you – how you open an application that looks like a book case. He even takes the time to show you how to read a book – Ted Kennedy’s biography to add.

You sit there, on needles, almost wishing you could buy one now – because you want to read a book as well – just like Steve. Who cares that you have ten books that you can pick up and read right now – they are as good as firestarters when thinking about reading on an iPad.

So Apple will probably sell more of these, and in a year they’ll introduce the iPad X, with USB, maybe a lite version of Snow Leopard, double the hard drive, and a signature USB memory stick – only $69.99 at Apple Store.

And you will read about it here.

The text will be written on an old iPad, and I will once again praise Apple for everything.

Apple 19 – Johan’s common sense 1!

Robert M. Bramson, Ph.D. – Coping With Difficult People

January 28th, 2010

One year prior to my birth, 1981, Robert M. Bramson introduced the world to what came to be one of the pioneers in who we as human beings, mostly managers, were to deal with annoying S.O.Bs. Okay, so S.O.Bs. aren’t “correct” way to call them, but we all know that that is the first and original title of the book. Nobody comes home from work and tell who’s ever there; that today, you met a really difficult person. NO! You met a S.O.B.

Any way. The book is what you can expect from the title, it helps you define a difficult person, which kind of “difficulty” this person presents to you, and who to solve/deal with it.

There are seven identified “probelm makers”,

  1. Hostile-Aggressive
  2. Complainer
  3. Silent and Unresponsive
  4. Super-Agreeables
  5. Negativist
  6. Bulldozers and Balloons and
  7. Indecisive stallers,

all commonly found in an office.

What struck me the most while reading through all of these is, I have been everyone of these S.O.Bs.! My freaking God, I have been all of them. I have stalled, and have bulldozed, heck, I have even been negative for some unexplanatory reason. This book actually helped me more NOT to do these things again, than to help me solve the problem when others are the problem.

There are not many books that I would say that you should read, let alone, there are hardly none that I honestly say are a MUST-read. But this might be one of them. Because it can help you with yourself, as well as others. This is the best motivational book I have ever come across.

READ IT!

Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner – Superfreakonomics

January 18th, 2010

I have been waiting for this book for two years, ever since I digested the first book. Literally, that book somehow melted into some sort of hyper-intelligent mass and became one of the building blocks that is the foundation of what we call Johan today.

It is hard not to have ones hopes up to high for a seque when the first one was that good – they revolutionized how the man on the street looked at economics – this a sequel must either be so far different from the other, or contain much more suprising facts.
For this book, it was either one. I would not say tyt this was different from their first, nor was it the same. Somehow they managed to copy the first book, figurally.

Why should terrorist get life insurrance? What should we worry most about, global warming or cooling? How can we make doctors understand how important it is to wash their hands? And, how come that a new, modern, clean hospital full of doctors had a higher child mortality than if the children would have been born at home – on dirt floors?
All of these questions are answered in the new book, and in the end, you wish they could have continued writing a couple of more chapters.

For me, a full-time master student, set to major in marketing, this book could just been used as a suggestion for conversation starters/killers. But I see more than that. For me, this is consumer behavior at it’s best. The core of it. Think of it, aren’t terrorists customers at a bank? Aren’t people who visits the hospital just as much patients as customers?

When ever I read one of the two books on the subject, I tend to think out tens of different ways to apply it to my topic of study. Allready, I’ve found three things that I can use for my master thesis.

There are two ways to look at things – for what they are, and for what they could be: it is just a question of how much you want to think about it.

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams – Wikinomics (on Business 2.0)

January 17th, 2010

While prancing around at the BI library I came across a re-release of Wikinomics, written by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. I did not read the entire thing, but I felt that I needed to post something that I have talked about before, Marketing 2.0,  -> Marketing 2.0, but not Company 2.0

We seem to share the same views – It is hard for a company to adopt one thing when they lack solid base prior to it. However, Tapscott & Williams present four suggestions that might help your company to get started. After considering them, I believe that they are on to something.

  1. Be Open – Great that you have done things the same way for a long time, but would your results have been beter if you would have done it differently?
  2. Peer
  3. Share – Novartis (Medical Company) shared five years worth of data with the community, free of charge. By doing so they earned a good reputation in the science community, as well as letting others use the data that might solve medical issues faster.
  4. Act global - You might find your best friend on the other side of the world, but only if you let them know you exist.