Books in Queue
I’m a book lush. My reading aspirations, however, always outstrip my productivity.
Here are a couple of books that have my attention. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s read them.
Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
From the shuttered factories of the rust belt to the look-alike strip malls of the sun belt—and almost everywhere in between—America has been transformed by its relentless fixation on low price. This pervasive yet little examined obsession is arguably the most powerful and devastating market force of our time—the engine of globalization, outsourcing, planned obsolescence, and economic instability in an increasingly unsettled world.
“Around the world, people are being forced to reconsider the very idea of prosperity, and to ask what kind of wealth matters most and can be sustained. Cheap appears at just the right moment to enrich this discussion. This history of discounting and bargain-mania will change the way shoppers think about their next trip to the mall. As an examination of the global effects of the quest for rock-bottom prices, Cheap an important addition to arguments about America’s economic future. This is a valuable book for a troubled time.” —James Fallows, author of Postcards from Tomorrow Square
“More stuff for less!—the American recipe for material well-being. Now Ellen Ruppel Shell takes a hard look at this apparently simple notion and finds it isn’t so simple after all. Cheap pulls apart the old economic verities and subjects the glib new promises of Wall Street and globalization to scrutiny. How did we find ourselves in our current mess? Shell finds part of the answer in our confused ideas about what, exactly, is a bargain price.” —Charles C. Mann, author of 1491
To Serve God and Wal-Mart
The world’s largest corporation has grown to prominence in America’s Sun Belt—the relatively recent seat of American radical agrarian populism—and amid a feverish antagonism to corporate monopoly. In the spirit of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? historian Moreton unearths the roots of the seeming anomaly of corporate populism, in a timely and penetrating analysis that situates the rise of Wal-Mart in a postwar confluence of forces, from federal redistribution of capital favoring the rural South and West to the family values symbolized by Sam Walton’s largely white, rural, female workforce (the basis of a new economic and ideological niche), the New Christian Right’s powerful probusiness and countercultural movement of the 1970s and ’80s and its harnessing of electoral power. Giving Max Weber’s Protestant ethic something of a late-20th-century update, Moreton shows how this confluence wedded Christianity to the free market. Moreton’s erudition and clear prose elucidate much in the area of recent labor and political history, while capturing the centrality of movement cultures in the evolving face of American populism. ~ Publisher’s Weekly
Next Q: Online/Offline
I’m having a good time responding to questions from my 6/18/09 presentation to CPSE. Thanks, ladies.
Q: With so much moving online, what do you bother to print?
If a tree falls and no one hears it...
A: I’m not qualified to answer questions about e-commerce and web-based customer self-service. I’ll answer this from the perspective of the solo-preneur who asked the question.
What goes online and in print varies from a person to person and must align with industry norms. For example, when I ran an environmental contracting business my market was general contractors with public-bid jobs. Contractors are low-tech, and expect bids to be FAXED, not emailed. Most of them have Yahoo or Hotmail accounts and a LIGHT web presence if any. I could have senselessly spent a fortune on multimedia that would have been like the proverbial tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it. Instead, I hired a telemarketer who made personal contact with the estimators and then followed up with a customized packet that spoke to our expertise on the kinds of jobs the contractor bid.
On the other hand, when I ran a software and services consulting firm we had to demonstrate our tech chops — everything was online.
Answer these questions:
- Where do the people you most want for customers turn when they’re looking for your products and services? Referrals from people they know or from independent raters like Angie’s List? Straight to the Google search page?
- When you’re at a business mixer, how often do people ask you to send them a packet of information?
- When you present your qualifications/proposal to a new prospect, what materials do they spend time REALLY looking at? What do they repeatedly ask for that you don’t often bring?
- Why do your competitors do what they do? They may have best practices or they may be laggards, but it’s always prudent to check them out.
- Do you represent a product or offer a service that requires buyers to hunker down and study to make a decision? Offer that online for sure — also in print if you’ve got lots of money to spend. When I meet a new client I find it helpful to simply sit with them at a computer screen and go through pages on my site and elsewhere. This assures that they’ve seen my site and gives them a constant place to go if a printed piece goes astray.
Business cards & postcards
Business cards are, in my view, still a must. There’s an ongoing and lively discussion on whether you should include your social media “handles” on the card (for example, you can follow me on Twitter @TamelaRich). I can see all points of view.
I also carry 4.25″ x 5.5″ double sided postcards that act as a mini home page. Most people, when given the choice, will take a p-card instead of a b-card. Given the nature of my work, that’s all the print collateral I need, b-cards and p-cards. Your mileage may vary.
How ’bout it, experts? What else should entrepreneurs/small business owners consider?
Straight Talk on Compensation
Interesting piece in Sunday’s NYT on financial planners based on the news that James Putman and another employee of Wealth Management took $1.24 million each in kickbacks related to certain investments they were making for clients and fraudulently allocated $102 million in client funds.
The Times’ reporter said to “Check the legitimacy of planners’ credentials, and ask them to sign a fiduciary oath, promising to act in your best interests at all times. And read every word of every account statement. If you see something, say something. You should never be confused by jargon, strange numbers or anything else on your statements.”
Who can disagree with that advice? A lot of planners, brokers and advisers, from the sounds of things. As I’ve written before, my first career was financial services. I know earnest professionals and I know snakes in the grass. If ever there was a time for proactive client communications, this is it.
Financial & Consulting Writing Prompts
Financial advisers aren’t the only professionals with compensation conflicts. What about the IT firm that also sells the license to the software they’re installing…these prompts work for a variety of circumstances.
- If you own your firm, tell your clients why you decided to structure your compensation as you did. If you work for a broker or agency, tell your clients why you believe the comp structure you work under is fair to you and to them.
- Explain how you balance the competing interests of your financial future and theirs.
- Have an up-front discussion about how they can challenge your ethics.
- Do you belong to a professional organization that requires credentialing? Tell your clients about the credentialing process and how your preparation and credentialing benefit them.
- Publish your continuing education plans for the year.
- Solicit feedback from clients: what topics do they find most confusing?
More Word Cloud Love
As a student of whole-brain communications I love a good word cloud.
Here’s one from today’s presidential speech in Cairo.
Compassion Fatigue
As a ghostwriter with financial services clients, I stay abreast of developments in their professional publications. Ran across an article in Investment News on consumer-focused financial planners’ mental health challenges during this Great Recession.
Hard to be a Zen Master during the Great Recession
The article says mental health professionals coined the phrase “compassion fatigue” to describe a syndrome experienced by caregivers of individuals facing a terminal illness. “Instead of empathizing or ‘feeling bad’ for someone, the caregiver essentially tunes out the patient in an effort to prevent himself or herself from being drawn into a pit of despair.”
The article goes on to say that “many advisers are experiencing a phenomenon known as ‘shared trauma,’ which develops when an adviser has been as victimized by the financial crisis as much as his or her clients” and says this causes some advisers to avoid client contact.”
Jeffrey Goldbert complained about that in an Atlantic Monthly article I blogged about — said he fired his broker because his broker had de facto fired him by not communicating. Perhaps his broker was suffering compassion fatigue or shared trauma, but the article gave me the impression that his broker had simply gone under a tidal wave of corporate compliance.
The Investment News article quoted Patricia Smith, the founder of the Compassion Fatigue Awareness Project in Mountain View, CA as saying advisers “need to start with the fact that [the bear market] isn’t their fault.”
Hmmm, I have mixed feelings on that point. No, it wasn’t entirely the fault of financial advisers, but most of them signed on to work in an environment where they’re expected to toe the company line, including pushing instruments at the direction of their firms. If I called my Merrill Lynch broker to ask about X fund, he would be obliged to tell me what his research department’s position is on it. Maybe his entire knowledge of fund X is limited to the firm’s position. Firms go to great lengths to assure compliant client communications.
Because it’s difficult to set up shop as an adviser without the broker dealer infrastructure, is the best conclusion that system really is rigged?
Writing Prompts: Financial Services
- With so many people trying to cast a wide net for blame, how much should be shouldered personally by advisers? Are advisers equal victims? Well-compensated pawns in the larger game?
- Should advisers pull on their big girl panties and consider this stress an occupational hazard for which they were pre-compensated during the boom?
- Do these findings give the investing public room to empathize with their advisers?
- What reforms do you anticipate between firms and their representatives?
- Will the ill will between client and adviser push investors to instruments like index funds?
Trend This!
Get to know your farmer
Ah, a dose of good news about the food chain. Today’s NYT reports on a mass food producer offering up a big dose of customer intimacy and grower accountability.
Josh Dorf, who owns the Stone-Buhr flour brand, runs FindtheFarmer, which enables buyers to enter a code from their bag of flour and find the organic family farmers who produced it.
While the thrust of the NYT story was how even mass producers can behave as locals, it resonated with me as a former 4-H member whose grandparents farmed. Spending most weekends on the farm taught me the interconnectedness of all things. I didn’t have to learn about environmental cause and effect from a book; I saw it in the ebb and flow of daily life.
While I did my share of stupid things as a kid, spending so much time in nature kept me out of a lot of the trouble that my school peers fell into for lack of something better to do. I can think of no better way to grow up.
As I’ve written here before, there must be ways for us to blend the best of old and new capitalism. Great start, Mr. Dorf.
How about your business operation? How can you differentiate yourself from the competition using intimacy and accountability? Please post your best practices here.
Technorati the Wordsmith
Doing some site maintenance this morning including a Technorati update. Needed to upload a picture. Cracked up
Thumbs up, Technorati copy writers
when I read this:
Tip: Please do us a favor and upload a photo that does not show your very special but also very private parts. When you do that, we have to take time away from making our website faster and better to go find your profile and hide it, and that’s bad for you and us. Thanks for helping!
Not to sound elderly, but would this admonition have been necessary a short ten years ago?
A New Capitalism?
Some old stuff works
“Common knowledge” says we can’t have an economic recovery without our financial sector at its center. I wonder.
Would it be so awful to envision an economic system on a more granular, personal level? I’m no Luddite; I don’t wish for Ye Olde Banke or a total barter economy, but somewhere between there and the craziness that’s imploding around us might be just the right balance.
We need a Goldilocks solution– not too big to fail, not so small that growth is impossible, but just right for worldwide trade and solo-preneurs alike.
One reason microlending succeeds is its built-in social support system. Loan recipients work in groups of fellow borrowers and if one enterprise goes under everyone in the group is responsible for paying back the loan.
I attended an introduction to bartering a couple of months ago and that seems to have its merits.
With all the bright, unemployed minds in the world pooling intellectual resources and harnessing technology, I believe the decaying corpse of the current financial system can be put to good use as mulch. Bring it on.
Friedman and The Onion
Faux news I love
Although it can at times be raunchy, overall I love The Onion. Evidently so does NYT columnist and bestselling author Tom Friedman.
In his recent column he quoted a four-year-old Onion faux story on Chinese manufacturing that seemed to capture American consumption up to last summer.
“FENGHUA, China — Chen Hsien, an employee of Fenghua Ningbo Plastic Works Ltd., a plastics factory that manufactures lightweight household items for Western markets, expressed his disbelief Monday over the “sheer amount of shit Americans will buy. Often, when we’re assigned a new order for, say, ‘salad shooters,’ I will say to myself, ‘There’s no way that anyone will ever buy these.’ … One month later, we will receive an order for the same product, but three times the quantity.”
Friedman, who authored both “The World is Flat” and “Hot, Flat and Crowded” brought it back to reality when he cited Australian environmental business expert Paul Gilding, who named this point in history, “The Great Disruption”– when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once.
“When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us, ‘What was it like? What were you doing when it started to fall apart? What did you think? What did you do?’ Often in the middle of something momentous, we can’t see its significance. But for me there is no doubt: 2008 will be the marker — the year when ‘The Great Disruption’ began.”
I walk in entrepreneurial circles, where there’s an uptick in the number of people hanging out their shingle, joining multi-level-marketing schemes and trying to turn a hobby into a mortgage-maker. I honestly believe that all the laid off MBAs, PhDs, geeks and artists in the world today, enabled by social networking sites, will pool their intellectual horsepower and transform the world into something no one can yet envision.
Retooling takes time and takes a toll.
As Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
