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November 23, 2012
Vary the Customer Experience, Tweak the Markets, Fly the Colors: Do Instead Small Business Saturday Tomorrow.
Part aggregator, part pundit, Business Insider started up in early 2009 and is now edited by come-back kid Henry Blodget. We follow it here because of its breadth and generally non-partisan coverage of business and politics. Today, on Black Friday, BI has this suggestion for tomorrow in "It Makes Way More Sense To Shop On Saturday Than Black Friday", by Jill Krasny and Mandi Woodruff, who succinctly but deftly give a push to AMEX's Shop Small campaign for small business, launched in 2010. We agree. Stay home today. Go small Saturday. And to their reasons we would add these two. First, almost all businesses start up small. Many of them fail in the first few years--but more of them create jobs. Give them a shot. Second, if this is the Age of Nearly Limitless Choice for buyers, let's start acting like it. Go small, and help stir the cauldron a bit, folks. At least try it for one day.
My all-time favorite: Roland's of Capitol Hill, 333 Pennsylvania Ave SE.
Posted by JD Hull at 02:48 PM | Comments (0)
November 21, 2012
American Infrastructure and the November 6 Elections: The States Get Serious.
Will, more bucks and a much harder look. If you have clients in American construction or transportation, there are some signs of happier days ahead. It is true that critics in and out of the U.S. still marvel at our apparent patience with decaying roads, rail works and bridges. See, for example, LA-based Planetizen, citing European observers of our dodgy rail system, and asking "Why Do Americans Put Up With Decaying Infrastructure?" But for the states, interestingly, the November 6 elections were also about funding construction for road and transit projects--and most those ballot measures passed. An American Society of Civil Engineers blog noted on November 9 that voters in 39 states were asked to decide 188 ballot propositions, the most since 2006. The ASCE has a partial listing of states and municipalities passing a variety of measures. According to The Kiplinger Letter, about two-thirds of the 188 initiatives passed. The biggest one was in Arkansas, where voters approved a $1.3 billion bond initiative for roads and bridges.
Posted by JD Hull at 06:46 AM | Comments (0)
November 19, 2012
Charon QC's UK Law Tour: Why does it matter?
Answer: Because Western lawyers are famously resistant to change. English and North American lawyers, especially. We simply do not roll that well with the ups and downs of changing markets. And, certainly, we rarely see changes coming. Last month our friend Charon QC began his UK Law Tour--a legal Domesday census, if you will--to see how we are all dealing with the "new normal" for the profession. See his podcast yesterday with London-based Jeremy Hopkins, the operations chief of Riverview Law, a new kind of firm launched in North West England in May of 2011. And what does "customer-centric" mean? Is that something lawyers can be? Surely, you jest, sir.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)