December 10 Carnival of the Capitalists

Welcome to the December 10 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists.  There are a bunch of cool entries this week, listed in the order received, plus a few of my choosing inserted here and there.  Before we proceed, though, a commercial interruption.  Hey, what could be more appropriate.

Deb runs an Etsy shop, also called Neatly Tangled.  It carries hand made items that you might find appropriate as distinctive gifts or accessories, given that it’s December.  This week is the time to order.  First class shipping is free this week, on anything ordered through Sunday.  Check back there during the week if nothing catches your eye initially, as there will be a ton of new items being listed that were not sold at the craft fair (speaking of posts that fit CotC; marketing and venue lessons learned).  They just need to be photographed first.  I would tout her willingness to do custom orders, and she does, but time may be tight if there’s too much of that before Christmas.  It can’t hurt to ask.  Now, on with the show!

The Corner Office, a BNET blog, asks Do Sears’ Troubles Hint At Coming Wave of Bankruptcies? I haven’t seen Sears mentioned to speak of, well, since the merger.  Rob has posted about the company now and then (ah, including just recently, fairly positively, which I missed), and on one of those posts a few years ago I commented expansively about how to fix what was then Sears without Kmart.  It’s sad to see such a venerable company bleeding to death, lost in time.  The post isn’t entirely about Sears, but that’s what got my attention.

Reflections of a BizDrivenLife reflects on the triumvirate of better, faster, and cheaper when it comes to competitive advantage, in Creating a Brand Premium.  You can’t be all three.  This reminds me of software project management’s tradeoffs between speed, quality and cost, and the failure of some in management or among prospective clients to realize that you can’t have the prettiest, most bug-free, most usable program… in a ridiculously short time for little money.  Since competing on price has limitations, developing a brand premium matters.

Recent host and new blog The Startup Blog at PartnerUp doses us with reality in asking So you’ve got a business idea… Now what? Again with watching your proposed pricing, this time from a perspective of covering costs, crunching numbers and making sure it even makes sense to proceed.  Not that there isn’t much more than that to the meaty post; it just happened to catch my eye.  I like the part about pricing for what overhead will be, not merely what it is now when you start up out of your home.

Don’t let The Scratching Post scare you away if you have no clue what Six Sigma is.  It’s just plain funny, in a sorry sort of way, reading the all too imaginable A Post-Mortem on a Lean Six Sigma Training Disaster.  The turkey shoot picture will make you feel at home if you like gun blogs, while the caption alone is worth the visit.

Fundmastery Blog could have been left out by a discerning host for two reasons.  First, How Much Should You invest In Stocks? is really a personal finance post, and those are borderline to CotC, subject to host discretion.  Second, an awful lot of the post is quoted content from an article.  It’s about half and half, which is borderline.  The manner in which commentary is interjected tips it over to reasonable, to me, and makes sense.  As does the market psychology and portfolio rebalancing commentary to be found in the post.

The Financial Blogger has a blog name that automatically makes me expect a personal finance post.  While related to personal finance too, and a somewhat different entry, Comparing Primerica To Other Companies may be of some interest for its analysis of how sales and agents are presented, organized, handled, and compensated.

Small Business Essentials hosted recently, and is scheduled to be the first host of 2008.  She looks to improved productivity in 2008 with Entrepreneurial Time Management and Discipline.  I could certainly use more of that, and can totally relate to the problems of working from home.  No dogs, but three kids who are intense make things interesting.  My TV watching isn’t that extensive, but I love the fact you save time watching episodes on DVD, or that you’ve taped.  I seldom reduce it that much, but instead of e-mail running at all times, I sometimes go hours at a time between checking it.  It depends how you use it.  My former client was on a much more immediate e-mail response basis than a couple times a day, so it needed to be running.

Wills Perspective can be seen in Ethical Ideas and Consequences:

An examination of the role of ethical behavior in free markets.Originally written for an essay contest.

It’s a bit dated (no more Soviet Union), and heavy reading as such things can be, but it’s the kind of philosophical/theory post I had hoped to see more of entered into CotC alongside the mundane business and economics posts.

Sales Machine, a BNET blog lists Everything You Need to Know About Customers and wonders if anything has been overlooked.  I like “Customers buy emotionally and defend logically.”

Strategy Stew is a great blog name.  It is also home of How to Get Emotional and Get Customers, an actual how-to post on generating an emotional response with customers, helping you make the sale.  I love the inclusion of the proverbial 12 year old (or younger) kid, and how to bore them into never wanting to talk to you again.

Last week’s host, One Man Band, quotes others usefully in Understanding and Meaning in Marketing, exploring the not always grasped distinction between direct marketing and advertising.  Reminds me of the distinction between cold calling and warm prospects.

VesTopia makes a good point and turns a great phrase with “casting their nets beyond the ponds of statistical cheapness” in Is Ben Graham Turning in His Grave?: Growth as the New Value.  In short, it’s a discussion of whether growth investing has become a form of value investing.

Searchlight Crusade talks loans and real estate in describing The Doctrine of Delaying The Moment Of Truth, but obfuscation in sale and transactions is certainly not limited by industry.

American Consumer News arrives at the intersection of business and personal finance, presenting an old and standard business practice in search of outrage in Citibank Busted Issuing 3.5 million Credit Cards to People Who Never Even Applied.  While it may be worth raising customer awareness of the potential impact, it’s not actually a case of completely out of the blue cards to new customers, as the nascent credit card industry did at great cost in its early years to create a customer base.  Accounts change hands all the time.

Insureblog visits the political and business borderline with a What If? post comparing health and property insurance and the problem of underfunded insurer liabilities coming to roost.

Sox First explores the problem of groupthink in business and, beware, government policy, in Madness of groups.

Financial Hack brings us Lessons of the Square Watermelon, helpful in looking at business problems.  The impossible isn’t always so.  The solution doesn’t surprise me, having grown watermelons with my grandfather.

Catching Flack, one of the BNET blogs, presents a cautionary PR tale of The Losing Battle of Arguing With Bloggers.  It’s the old “ink by the barrel” effect, so businesses beware.

SportsBiz is down as I type this, apparent Google code issues, but in case the blog comes back to normal in the future, regarding My Own Hockey Team the entry says:

Two guys in Canada are trying to get a group together to try to buy a minor league hockey team using a crowd sourcing model.  It is similar to a model being used in England for a lower division soccer club, although it turns out this was in development for several months before they found out about the soccer club.

You might want to click through in case it’s up, or try again later.

James Alenteal’s Conversion Rate Clinic arguably skitters over the edge into tech territory in an effort to advise why you should Deep 6 Your HTML Tables With CSS on your sales web site.  Not sure I see load times as the issue they might have been in, say, 1997, when broadband was unheard of for most of us.

Trust Matters, and who can trust the lending industry very far?  Seriously, though, here’s a look at How To Get Your Industry Regulated, in 6 Easy Lessons, regarding the recent overlending and housing bubble issues, and legislation being considered as a result.

More Than WE Know brings us Today’s Woman Entrepreneur - Claudia of NiÉriu, about which she says:

Ninety percent of Americans identify themselves as Conscious Consumers who prefer eco-friendly products. Go behind the scenes of one woman entrepreneur’s business to find out how she appeals to this target market.

At the start it looks a bit like an ad or paid post, but then it gets down to the interview and business discussion.

Blog Business World covers a topic that hits close to home in Avoiding decision paralysis: Taking positive action.  Panic!  Indecision!  What to do?  Nothing?  Well, inaction is a decision as much as choice of a specific action is, but usually worse.  Not the sort of thing a company’s culture ought to encourage.

Political Calculations intrigued me with a post I expected to be boring: The Sun, in the Center.  It’s about a method of measuring appropriate stock values without relying on the traditional earnings per share.  The correlation over time, using dividends as a leading indicator, is remarkable.

Wally Bock’s Three Star Leadership Blog reminds us in Leadership and command that command, issuing actual orders one can understand and follow, is imperative to good leadership.  Makes sense to me.  It’s no fun being not told what you are expected to do, then being criticized for not doing whatever it was you were imagined to have been doing.

BNET Intercom, one of the BNET blogs, says there is productivity value in unified opinion about the boss among colleagues, which can be Why It Pays to Be Hated by Your Team.  That makes sense, as it creates similar common pressures to being in a high stress environment.

CotC co-founder Rob of BusinessPundit, Daily Idea, Outside the valley, and MBA by Blog didn’t enter a post this week, perhaps in honor of his birthday Sunday.  While it’s neither usual CotC fodder or Business Pundit fodder, I liked Will The United States Go Bankrupt?

Speaking of birthdays and blogging Robs, next week’s host will be the newly married Rob Sama, whose birthday is Friday.  He hosts each year immediately before or after his birthday, which I guess is one way to celebrate.  The December 24 edition will be hosted by The Journal Blog.  SEO ROI fills out the year in the December 31 slot.  First edition of 2008, January 7, goes to Small Business Essentials, then it’s wide open from there.  Feel free to volunteer to host.

1. Great job, Jay!

   Thanks for hosting this week, and for including our post.

   Posted by hgstern  on  12/10  at  11:38 PM  from 

2. Great job Jay. And Happy Birthday to Rob and Rob!

   Posted by Nikole Gipps  on  12/11  at  04:11 AM  from  Concord, CA

3. Great Carnival this week, lots of great bloggers included!

   Posted by Sue  on  12/11  at  12:39 PM  from  Crystal Lake, Illinois

4. Thanks for hosting it this week.  I threw you a link back.

   Posted by K T Cat  on  12/11  at  04:16 PM  from 
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