business management

About Sales Commissions

January 9, 2012

Dan Ostlund at Fog Creek Software talks about how they have got rid of commissions for sales people: We did it because we were having a lot of the problems with commissions described above even though all of our salespeople are ethical and decent. Commissions just encourage certain kinds of behavior; dysfunction is built into […]

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Trello and Siberian Cake Shop Owners

November 17, 2011

I was reading this amusing post on the Fog Creek blog by Rock Hymas illustrating Clayton Christensen’s disruption concept through the story of a cake shop owner in Siberia (!) who has some competition in the form of an ice cream stand. It is a good analogy, but it fails to explain why the cake shop owner makes […]

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The Departure of Steve Jobs from Apple

August 25, 2011

It had to happen some day and, like Bill Gates leaving Microsoft, Steve Jobs’s resignation from Apple seems like the end of an era. Since Jobs will continue as the Chairman, he will still maintain influence, though how much remains to be seen since this development seems to be driven by medical reasons. He is […]

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Demand Insensitive Pricing

August 9, 2011

Travis Houium makes a great point in this article from DailyFinance:  I looked through the prices of on-demand movies, and I was shocked at what Comcast (CMCSA) charges for a movie. Why spend $5.99 for 127 Hours when I could purchase it from Barnes & Noble for $13.19 and own it forever? And why would I […]

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A Thought About Ransackgate

July 31, 2011

The topic of the week is the horrible experience of a customer of the online vacation rental service Airbnb who had her house trashed and valuables stolen. It has been a major public relations disaster for the company. Hopefully it will end with the perpetrators captured, the victim properly compensated and Airbnb able to continue their […]

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Women in Technology

July 26, 2011

Anna Lewis at FogCreek has done the programming community a favor by looking at history and finding that computer science was not a male-dominated field as commonly assumed: In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. Women had started to flock to […]

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When Sales Rules the Roost

May 28, 2011

[Update: Cloud9 have promised to look at a clearer pricing model. See comments.] Cloud9 IDE is a service with a good idea — provide an online IDE, and they seem to have several great features implemented. On the other hand, this is remarkably stupid: It makes it seem that having a single workspace is 100 […]

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No Management Myth

May 4, 2011

The Atlantic has an interesting article by Matthew Stewart where he posits that most management theory is useless and you don’t need an MBA to succeed in business. Some of the major points that he makes are He worked seven years as a successful management consultant despite having no MBA, but only a doctorate in philosophy. […]

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Do Companies have Freedom of Data?

April 23, 2011

A little shocking to see the corporate skeptic Scott Adams write this unrealistic view of corporations just to make a point about China (or maybe this is all tongue-in-cheek): In a corporation, you’re generally free to disagree with higher ups if you do it with data, and in a professional manner. Usually you need to go through […]

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Necessary and Sufficient

April 22, 2011

A useful nonsense detector method for assessing the quality of someone’s argument is to use the “Necessary and Sufficient” Test. Let us say someone makes an assertion, “If X is done, then Y will happen”. There are two questions to ask here: Is it Necessary?: “If X is *not* done, will Y *not* happen?” (i.e., is […]

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