Where the money is going

This article in the New York Times caught my eye.

The surging cost of necessities has led to a national belt-tightening among consumers. Figures released on Monday showed that spending on food and gasoline is crowding out other purchases, leaving people with less to spend on furniture, clothing and electronics. Consequently, chains specializing in those goods are proving vulnerable.

The article is about retailers but I assume the above paragraph will have an influence on non-profits who rely in charitable giving and also churches.

Al Gore's $100 million makeover

Fast Company also profiles Al Gore (back in 2007) who has gone on to win a Oscar, a Nobel Prize, and when you weren't looking, he made a $100 million.

As a political figure, Gore may be more palatable as a possible dark horse than an actual candidate--precisely because he seems incapable of turning his passions into sound bites. And in any campaign, he might find himself on the defensive for his business activities. In his slideshow tour, he has been paid by many companies, which could be used to challenge his integrity. (He routinely cuts or eliminates his fee for schools and other nonprofits.) He also headed the Apple board committee that cleared Steve Jobs of wrongdoing in the stock-options backdating scandal.

Sitting where he is, his outsider status makes him a potential kingmaker among the Democratic candidates. He has said he expects to endorse someone eventually. Whoever gets the nod can expect Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection to run its own campaign on the issues.

Gore sees no reason to apologize for not wanting to jump into the electoral fray. As a businessman, he can speak with a candor few successful politicians can maintain. He has made an enormous amount of money and achieved positions of influence from technology to financial services to media. He and Tipper are even setting themselves up as angel investors for a few early-stage tech companies they believe in. In doing one end run after another around the status quo, he has created a new life: a perfect amalgam of environmental activism and a new type of capitalism in which there is more than one bottom line to consider, more than one master to serve.

Interesting article worth reading.

Technorati Tags: Al Gore

The End of the Road for AOL?

Fast Company has a good article on what happened to AOL.  This paragraph from the article seems to sum it up.

In April 2005, he launched AOL Internet Phone, an entirely new product that he spent millions developing. To recoup costs, the monthly fee was set at almost double what competitor Vonage charged. "The rationale they told each other internally was that, 'Oh, well, we have all these extra features customers want,'" says a former executive. "In fact, people didn't want features. They wanted a phone, cheaper." And because of tangled billing systems, at first only AOL's ISP customers could subscribe to Internet Phone. This was no small glitch: Internet Phone ran on broadband only. So AOL's dial-up subscribers would need a separate high-speed connection to make it work. As if that weren't farcical enough, sources say that just before the launch the company's board refused to let the service compete in cities where Time Warner Cable was offering its own VOIP service. In the end, Internet Phone had a mere 2,000 subscribers when it was canceled in October 2006.

I don't read the amount of business books that I used to but this was painful reading.  How can a company this large be run so poorly?  Well then again they aren't alone; GM, Ford, Air Canada, ABC, AOL, and at different times, Apple.  via

Technorati Tags: AOL,Fast Company,business

RBC: "Saskatchewan is the new Alberta"

According to RBC, Saskatchewan's future is looking up.

"Saskatchewan is the new Alberta - holding the top spot nationwide on growth across all key housing indicators including housing starts, house prices, residential building permits and resale activity," Holt explained in a company news release.

Fox Business News has more. 

I grew up in Calgary in the late 70s and early 80s and still think of myself as a Calgarian at some times.  At the same time the Calgary where I grew up and left is a lot different than the Calgary that exists today.  The last couple of years in Saskatoon give me the same feeling.  Saskatoon isn't the same as it was a couple of years ago.  Yeah we have an Adidas outlet store but for many people, we now have housing that is no longer affordable for the middle class, rents now longer affordable for the poor, and now I am seeing friends who don't own, moving to other parts of the province which saddens me as well.

Technorati Tags: Saskatchewan,Alberta,Saskatoon,economy,RBC,growth

NHL vs. NBA attendance

I was stunned to see the NBA home attendance numbers.  The Indiana Pacers and New Orleans Hornets are drawing under 13,000 people a game according to ESPN.  A third of the league seems to have a problem drawing fans.  Of course this wouldn't be a problem if television numbers were not going down as well.  For me the big surprise isn't New Orleans drawing under 13,000 but Indiana drawing so poorly.

Now the NHL has some problems of its own but they are at least drawing over 80% capacity and they have some horrible hockey markets they are trying to break into (Nashville, Florida, Phoenix, Los Angeles)

Technorati tags: New Orleans Hornets, Indiana Pacers, NBA, attendance, NHL

The War Room by Warren Kinsella

Well I finally found the time to sit down and read Warren Kinsella's latest book The War Room: Political Strategies for Business, NGOs, and Anyone Who Wants to Win. The plan was to purchase the book when it came out but Wendy encouraged me to wait until after Christmas if I knew what was good for me and our marriage. Sure enough the book was waiting for me under the Christmas tree. After I read The Blind Side, I cracked this book open and started to read.

I had planned to review the book in one post but as I got more and more into it, I realized it was going to be too long to post here all at once. The plan is to review each of the ten lessons from The War Room here each evening over the next two weeks.

I read the book from the point of view of a political junkie (who somehow also holds a Hauerwasian view of politics) as well as from a perspective of someone who works at a NGO. My review will be more from the NGO point of view but I imagine some politics will work its way into the book as well.

More thoughts to come later tonight.

Capital

I finished Founders at Work today. It was worth the money I paid to get it and I enjoyed reading it. One thing that was a recurring theme in the book and in the stories of these companies that changed how we work and think is how hard it is to manage the relationship with investors who have a different vision than the founders. Paul Graham (who is featured in the book) has a Unified Theory of VC Suckage which probably explains a lot of why founders hate VCs. Phillip Greenspun has a good essay on how he got booted from ArsDigita

As I read the theory and reflected on the book, it explains why VCs are so evil but I was also thinking about the funding of church plants and how that can go so bad so often. In the case of VC funding, it is the need for a large and quick return on investment but funding for churches is similar but different.

Similar in the need for success to justify the spending so they can get more funding. People and churches like to give to success. Successful churches, successful colleges, successful ministries. They spend money but also attract even more money. In that way it is like business and the temptation is to fund "what works". Of course in the church, "what works" is equated with being "right". You know, the whole blessing/success thing.

It is different in another area and that is the preservation of a story dating back to the denominations or thought leaders founder. Methodists fund Methodist church plants. Purpose Driven churches want to see more Purpose Driven churches. WillowWorld (tm) churches want to see other WillowWorld (tm) churches started. Baptists plant Republican churches, etc, etc. It comes down to the idea that we know we are right and we want to see more of that in the world and all will be better.

As I was reading this, it reminded me of something I wrote earlier this year about ecclessial mercenaries and the need for funding. The problem is that you could find yourself caught in the middle of those two worlds. Being hit with the need to be successful and to conform to validate a model. If you look back at the illustrious history of "church within a church", those two things nailed more coffins closed then anything else. The need for success to justify existence and funding and also the conflict that happens if the values are unaligned, kind of like when a teenager starts to exert his or her independence.

Paul Graham wrote this in the forward to Founders...

Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least. It's that way with most startups too. The earliest phase is usually the most productive. That's when they have the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was like when 100% of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak.

The striking thing about this phase is that it's completely different from most people's idea of what business is like. If you looked in people's heads (or stock photo collections) for images representing "business," you'd get images of people dressed up in suits, groups sitting around conference tables looking serious, Powerpoint presentations, people producing thick reports for one another to read. Early stage startups are the exact opposite of this. And yet they're probably the most productive part of the whole economy.

Why the disconnect? I think there's a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. More often than not the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse. A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine modified the "sports" model of some production car to get the fastest possible standing quarter mile. You know how they did it? They cut off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car to make it look fast.

I like the last part. What if we started giving new ideas in the church, the permission to be the church instead of expecting them to look like the church before we believe in them.

Founders at Work

The book Founders at Work arrived in the mail yesterday and I dived right into it. The book is a series of interviews of founders like Blogger, SixApart, Adobe, Apple (Woz!), Hotmail, and a bunch of other startups that changed the way we live and interact. The underlying narative is: entrepreneurship is all about tactics, guts, not knowing that things are not done “this way,” and making do with not enough money. In other words there are a lot of lessons for church planters in this book as well.

Some thoughts from the book.

1. Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) on how he decided whether to tell venture capitalists the real idea he wanted to get funded. “If they passed the litmus test of not rejecting us for the wrong reasons and said, ‘OK, we don’t mind that you’re young, we don’t mind that you don’t have management experience, only when they would start poking holes in the actual idea would we share the Hotmail idea with them.”

2. Woz (Apple). “All the best things I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever.”

3. Evan Williams (Blogger.com) on how he raised money to buy more servers. “We posted it on our website, and it said, ‘Hey, we know Blogger is really slow. It’s because we need more hardware. We don’t have the money to buy it, so give us money, and we will buy more hardware and we’ll make Blogger faster.’”

4. Paul Graham (Viaweb): On raising money: “The advice I would give is to avoid it. I would say spend as little as you can because every dollar of the investors’ money you get will be taken out of your ass…”

5. Catarina Fake (Flickr): “So Flickr started off as a feature. It wasn’t really a product. It was kind of IM in which you could drag and drop photos onto people’s desktops and show them what you were looking at.”

Jack Welch's Legacy

Jack Welch's Legacy
I hope Jack Welch reads this editorial. If it would, it would leave him a legacy everyone would be proud of.