Thoughts on Business Model and Strategy

While talking about successful companies for the past few years, people always points to companies such as Google and Apple for reference. In Apple's case, Steve Jobs is always claimed to be the one that has great vision and thus has led Apple to its success. However, from a business case study perspective, many of the analysis is retrospective in nature. For example, nobody claimed Jobs as a visionary leader when he was working on NeXT which failed later. Apple was used as a successful case in the 1st Edition of "Crossing the chasm" but was removed in the 2nd Edition during its miserable times. Business school students can analyze the hell out of why Google is successful, but it was really not Sergey Brin and Larry Page's master plan from the very beginning that made Google successful. Instead, Google's success can be attributed to a number of small successes building up to its status today. (Check the unorthodox opinion in coincidences that made google successful.)

The term "visionary" or "innovation" is always also associated with failures and trial-and-error on the other end of the spectrum. The distribution of innovation and failures can be viewed as a normal distribution. If the variance is small, it is easy to guarantee that majority of the ideas will be within the regular limit, however, this also reduces the probabilities of both the innovative ideas and foolish ideas. By allowing large variance, the probability of getting innovative idea will be high, but the probability of foolish ideas increase as well. It is important to allow trial and errors if an organization would like to encourage innovation. If we divide the idea space into four quadrants with (consensus, non-consensus)x(right, wrong), then it is the non-consensus+right idea that will generate the most return. In reality, most people are comfort within the consensus+right or consensus+wrong area just to appear normal.

Innovation itself is not enough though, the organization should also be adaptive enough to adjust its scope and areas of expertise to the challenges that the market presents.

You are dominated by "Network Power"

The original article titled "Network power that works too well" is available at Financial Times.

The theory is very interesting. The basic idea is very simple: people have the tendency or are even obliged to join a network with more users. The idea itself is not dramatically new as it is evident that companies are striving hard to gain their "network power" every day around us: in-network free calling or fav-5 like promotions from wireless carriers, referral plans from advertising companies, social networking from internet companies.

Small App to get latitude and longtitude information from Google

Have to get the lat/long values this way because the embedded geocoder is not working well with large amount of data:

Before developing this small application, I got most of my geo data from this website: http://www.realestate3d.com/gps/world-latlong.htm

To change the icons on the map, this site (http://econym.googlepages.com/geicons.htm), provides some quite detailed reference to what icons are available from google.

China Earthquake and Efficiency for Charitable Organizations

This morning Chinese news just announced that the country will put most activities on hold for three days to mourn for the huge losses in the earthquake in the southwestern region.

To find out more about the earthquake, check the following links:
** CCTV News Update (Magnitude of SW China earthquake revised to 8.0)
**Full Coverage from Yahoo
**NY Time Report
**MSN News
**Wikipedia
**China-quake.com

While making donations, both my wife and I started to look seriously on the overhead or charitable efficiencies of various organizations. It is surprising to see that many of the organizations we checked, they don't have the actual efficiency/overhead number of organization readily available from their website. There are some useful information from Charity Watch and Charity Navigator but the information is far from complete and is not very accessible.

We have put out faith in the organization sponsored by some alumni: Tsinghua Foundation, which claims to forward 100% of the donation money to China Red Cross. However, I heard rumors that the overhead of China Red Cross is over 30%, I have not been able to confirm this number from any official sources, but just hope that it is a real rumor instead of a fact.