Category Archives: change

In Many Ways, Success is in the Stars

Posted on
Reply

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 →

a “peach” of a healthcare system

Posted on
3

Imagine if you could find a healthcare plan that offered excellent coverage, didn’t exclude pre-existing conditions, incorporated several features to promote better health, and was incredibly affordable to boot?

Let’s call such a plan the Neighborhood Health Improvement Plan – NIP for short. Here’s how it works. A group of neighbors gather together to develop a more sensible and less-costly alternative to our crazy-quilt system of health insurance. They decide to join up with other neighborhood groups with similar intent to create a self-insurance system, which increases their buying power and spreads the risk across a wider number of people.

Each neighborhood NIP chapter pays a small monthly fee per member per month for medical coverage. Each chapter is also responsible for paying the first $5000 of medical expenses incurred by all the members in its group. After that deductible, NIP pays 90% of all expenses. Continue reading →

technology displaces workers; time for a paradigm shift

Posted on
Reply

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?

Posted on
Reply

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?