Author Archives: Ryan Markel

Have We Learned From "Goldilocks and the Three Bears"?

Seth Godin:

A newspaper that only had a few dozen employees would be doing great today. But they have hundreds or thousands of employees because that was an appropriate scale twenty years ago. When I started my first web combany fifteen years ago, the idea that you could be successful with six or ten employees was crazy, but today many of the most successful companies have not many more than that. That’s 15,000 fewer employees than eBay has.

It’s tempting to get bigger. But is bigger better? In many cases, it’s worse, particularly when you can leverage reliable systems that are cheaper and faster and more stable in the outside world. If you can make your product better by assembling it yourself, you should. But if that action makes it worse, why do it?

Is your organization too big? Too small? Just right?

links for 2009-03-24

  • HarperCollins Catalogs
    HarperCollins has taken its catalogs for booksellers and made them completely digital, increasing the amount of exposure for authors and giving booksellers additional resources. Very neat idea, including nifty tools for booksellers.
    (tags: internet publishing books)

I Hear They Serve Coffee-Flavored Coffee

Michael Kelly:

The reason we have something to learn is that we have tried to be Starbucks. We’ve tried to be slick, trendy, and hip. We’ve tried to be a place that is non-threatening and easy to come to. And when you walk in, you see beautiful people in holy jeans and black glasses, all looking very intellectual and hair-frosty. Additionally, we have tried to make church a low-demand environment, much in the same way Starbuck’s is. It’s low demand in that even though the basic premise of the store is selling coffee, some people don’t even go there for coffee at all. And nobody’s going to pressure them about the coffee. That sounds familiar, too.

A good point.

(via Cyberbrethren.)

Are You a True Believer?

Mark Hurst, on Good Experience:

New technology + same old thinking = same old outcome with a buggy interface.

What we need is new thinking. We need some true believers to stand up and say: we’re going to serve the patient, serve the traveler, serve the student, serve the customer, rather than follow the script of the past. No longer will we make them pay, or wait, or suffer only because we can get away with it. Now we will work in their interest, because it’s the right thing to do for them, and it’s the right thing for us in the long run.

Read the whole thing.

links for 2009-03-23