photo via Don­ald McMichael 

While I never going into depth about the finds, I do encour­age you check them out if they sound interesting. 

NYT Pay­wall, Huffpo Law­suit – Symp­toms of the same misconception

In this post about sur­viv­abil­ity of the New York Time’s (NYT) pay­wall Chris Saad comes at it from a unique angle. In almost all of the cases laid out, both pro and con, the core premise was that peo­ple – that’s you and I – are inter­ested in and derive value from the con­tent. We Chris’ posi­tion is that peo­ple have his­tor­i­cally paid for the medium not the con­tent. This was so because peo­ple per­ceived the medium to be scarce, a lim­ited resource. The point is that we live in a world of abun­dance where dig­i­tal space is vir­tu­ally infinite. 

Scarcity now is on the con­sump­tion side – con­tent providers have to fight for atten­tion. A total flip in the pre­vail­ing par­a­digm on the last 100 years.

If true, it’s kind of a King has no clothes moment for many media and enter­tain­ment concerns.

I’m still of the school that con­tent does mat­ter. The ques­tion that I’m cur­rently pon­der­ing is: ‘What’s the right bal­ance of inter­est­ing con­tent and deliv­ery vehi­cle (expe­ri­ence) that dri­ves the high­est finan­cial return?’

What do you think?

To review the remain­ing arti­cle visit my my main blog.

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Today’s tip on nego­ti­at­ing comes from our good friends over at Scot­work NA.

Ques­tion:

What is the first thing that you need to do before you enter a nego­ti­a­tion… or meeting?

Answer: 

Pre­pare in advance. In nego­ti­at­ing this is how one makes the biggest impact on out­comes for the your team. Take the time to think through exactly what it is that you must have, would like to have, and a win­ning posi­tion for your coun­ter­part. Here is how you go about it:

• Iden­ti­fy­ing objec­tives: iden­tify issues, define intended out­comes and real­is­tic expec­ta­tions, and deter­mine the limit to where you will move if you have flexibility.
• Cre­at­ing a wish list: if you are flex­i­ble in any of your issues and you move closer to your limit, deter­mine what you’ll ask for in return. If you come to con­clu­sions quickly, deter­mine what small thing you can ask for to enhance the deal.
• Deter­min­ing con­ces­sions: see where you can be flex­i­ble and what you can give to get what you want.
• Research­ing infor­ma­tion: ana­lyze power bal­ance and deter­mine the degree to which the other party under­stands your pri­or­i­ties and you under­stand theirs.
• Prepar­ing ques­tions: deter­mine what you don’t know and pre­pare ques­tions you should ask ahead of time.
• Devel­op­ing a strat­egy: be flex­i­ble so you can quickly adjust. Make it fairly sim­ple so you avoid daz­zling them with you know what.
• Assign­ing tasks ahead: iden­tify leader, sum­ma­rizer and observer to con­trol the infor­ma­tion flow and the shape of the negotiation.

About the insight con­trib­u­tor: Marty Fin­kle is the CEO of Scot­work (NA) Inc. Marty runs Scotwork’s North Amer­i­can busi­ness where he and his team of sea­soned nego­tia­tors work with over 100 com­pa­nies in over 20 indus­tries focused on negotiations. 

Posted via email from Don­ald McMichael’s pos­ter­ous

“You can­not dis­cover new oceans unless you have the courage to step away from the shore.”

Nobel Prize-winning author André Gide

Posted via email from Don­ald McMichael’s pos­ter­ous

photo via Don­ald McMichael 

While I never going into depth about the finds, I do encour­age you check them out if they sound interesting. 

Design Think­ing Is A Failed Exper­i­ment. So What’s Next?

In this blog post Bruce Nuss­baum, on of the biggest advo­ca­tors of Design Think­ing via his Busi­ness Week columns, has deter­mined that like many busi­ness frame­works Design Think­ing has reached an influ­ence plateau. Some of it is based on its large adop­tion fac­tor but Bruce argues that a larger than fair amount of his deci­sion was based on his obser­va­tion that many lead­ers had “turn­ing it into a lin­ear, gated, by-the-book method­ol­ogy that deliv­ered, at best, incre­men­tal change”. What con­ven­tional frame­work has he moved on to… Cre­ative Intel­li­gence. So what is Cre­ative Intel­li­gence, or CQ? Read this arti­cle, it is worth your time and as an added bonus it includes a video (go to my main blog) fea­tur­ing IDEO’s Tim Brown and Bruce Nussbaum.

Go to my blog to see the other 4 top articles/posts for the past week.

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The March 31^st post — 60 Sec­ond MBA: Res­cue Your Nego­ti­a­tions; 3 Com­mand­ments http://www.donaldmcmichael.com/60-second-mba-rescue-your-negotiations.htm — on nego­ti­a­tion drew a fair amount of inter­est. Why, because nego­ti­a­tion skills are impor­tant for every­one, no mat­ter what they do for a liv­ing. It is some­thing that most every­one uses often in life; skills to swing the deal in your favor come in handy. For this rea­son, I decided to put together a fail-safe list of nego­ti­at­ing insights that you can turn to in a pinch.

HBS (Har­vard Busi­ness School) pro­duces a ton of busi­ness research. It is a great des­ti­na­tion for free arti­cles on nego­ti­a­tion; http://hbswk.hbs.edu/topics/negotiations.html. Also, don’t for­get to check out their sis­ter depart­ment Har­vard Law at http://pon.harvard.edu.

Stick­ing in acad­e­mia Kel­logg School of Busi­ness’ site ‘Inside Kel­logg’ (http://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/) also has a great stash of nego­ti­a­tion articles.

On the lit­er­ary front flip through:  [go to DonaldMcMichael.com to view the full post…]

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