Category Archives: business

In Many Ways, Success is in the Stars

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When was the last time you heard some super-successful entrepreneur say ”I owe it all to luck!” I’m going to guess maybe never.

And yet, our lives are often filled with chance occurrences, fortuitous encounters, or unlucky twists of fate that heavily influence success or failure. This is not to denigrate the role of knowledge, experience, courage, and skill. Being lucky usually won’t bring success if you don’t have the other prerequisites. But the opposite is true more often than we think – lots of people may hold the prerequisites, but good fortune often chooses the winners.

Let me offer an example from my own life. Continue reading →

Crafters on a Collective Mission

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Asheville craftsman Brian Boggs is a man on a mission.

Outdoor Chair Boogs CollectionAfter 30 years of working in wood, Boggs is recognized as a premier designer and crafter of custom-built tables and chairs. Now he has his eyes on a bigger prize. He has set out to create a new kind of business structure that not only makes his own business better, but also provides a sturdier business umbrella for other independent woodworkers. He calls it the Boggs Collective. Continue reading →

Tell Me Again – Who’s Investing in America?

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When historian Thomas Carlyle first called Economics “the dismal science,” his targets for scorn were the economists he feuded with in the mid-19th century.

If Carlyle were here today, he might observe that nothing much has changed. We are still plagued by mistaken beliefs that are passed along to us as something akin to gospel truths.

One of the zanier ones has popped up again. It goes something like this: it’s really good that rich people have lots of disposable income, because it is their investment and spending that creates all those jobs for the rest of us.

Of course, that is spectacularly untrue, but that does not stop its proponents from trotting it out, especially when there is talk of more taxes for the wealthy. Continue reading →

technology displaces workers; time for a paradigm shift

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One of my favorite pieces of technology is an IPhone app called Timewerks. I use it to manage billing for my consulting work. All I have to do is log my hours as I work, and then, at the end of each month, Timewerks calculates the billable hours and amounts, prepares invoices, emails them for payment, tracks outstanding bills, and archives all the data.

I love this software. It gives me a paperless, and easy-to-use billing system. It is, as they say, a “killer app,” and I bought it in the Apple Store for less than five bucks.

A year ago, I explored launching a business barter network for Western North Carolina.  At the core of any barter network is a complex piece of barter management software that combines the following: an online barter marketplace; a database of participating businesses; a banking component that tracks all of the debits, credits, and fees on thousands of transactions and businesses; realtime statements; 24/7 access to the system; and an accounting system strong enough to withstand IRS scrutiny.

You can’t run a barter system without this kind of software. If you built it yourself, it would probably take several person-years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Last year, it was available on the web on a sliding scale that started at $50 a month, plus a small piece of the network’s action. Continue reading →

180 million e-books and how many jobs?

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In my last article, I discussed the rapid spread of the Digital Economy, and its drastic impact on jobs.

Apple Inc LogoBy coincidence, Apple just released their 4th quarter earnings report. In a kind of footnote, their CFO, Peter Oppenheimer, reported that since the opening of the iTunes Store, more than sixteen billion songs have been downloaded, as well as 180 million e-books.

Those are truly stunning numbers. Can you imagine how many music and book jobs have been lost just to iTunes?