I have been a subscriber to Forbes magazine for 30 years or so, and I got it from my grandfather who probably had it since it's inception.
Normally it's in that porcelain adorned reading library we all have in our home and I can spin through it in one visit. Usually it's hmm, and Meh, into recycle.
But this month, Rich Karlgaard did a nice piece on the "Ten Rules of the Cheap Revolution", see here. Yes, the last century has been a fascinating evolution of manufacturing prowess and global execution that has allowed us to keep getting more for less. But, how do you think Cheap?
Let's take those rules and use them to run your business? More hmm than Meh. Here is an excerpt:
- Consumers rule. Consumer technology is now ahead of most industrial technology, which forces businesses to change their operational practices.
- Solid-state rules. Hard-disk drives will be used for long-term storage. Any information requiring quick access will be stored on silicon.
- Interface rules. The friendliest interface will win. It's all moving in the direction of entertainment.
- Transparency rules. All those 1990s predictions of middleman destruction turn out to be true. Poor bandwidth only temporarily delayed this inevitability.
- Detail rules. The appeal of entertainment and sports on older TVs is weak but has blossomed with large screens and HD. Think soccer and the Tour de France. Similarly, business managers want lots of detail on their screens, too. Drill, baby, drill ... down for deeper detail. That's what consumers and executives want.
- Smart-aggregation rules. Some forms of content will always need human curating.
- Dumb-aggregation rules. And some forms of content won't. The trick is to figure out where algorithms beat humans, and vice versa.
- Speed rules. "Newsweeklies" now sell for $1. Mind you, not the product but the company.
- Self-learning rules. We are at the beginning of the Death of Credentialism. The ROI for a majority of college educations will be negative.
- Self-discipline rules. We are on our own. The most important software of all is our internal operating system.
Thanks Rich.
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