Here’s the situation: Just sold my Wisconsin home, my car in Wisconsin is about to be sold and I’ve yet to purchase a new one in my new home state. So I’ll lack car insurance. I don’t want to pay my rental car company’s expensive insurance rates. My Wisconsin insurer can’t help me – they don’t do business in California. Who to call next? Of course! That clever Australian commonly known for his sage advice on car insurance. Never mind that he’s a lizard, and a cartoon, he’s a cracker-jack sales and service guy. I visualize his chartreuse coat and over-sized burgundy eyes first, then the name GEICO pops into my mind, true evidence of the power of effective advertising. GEICO has more than a well-known name and brand characters. It also has a largely on-line business for selling insurance, a business model…
A good-paying job has become a public good.
I hate being a pessimist. But if we continue to incorrectly view today’s problems through either a business cycle or deficit-reduction lens, our nation’s job generation will fall woefully short of what our nation needs and our children deserve. In moving from the closed markets of the Industrial Age to the open markets of the Information Age, the labor force grew from millions to billions. Unless physical proximity is required for an exchange – grocery stores, barbers, nursing– any service, product or product component can be produced offshore. Even a C student in Economics 101 could predict falling US real wages and a shortage of good-paying jobs. Welcome to the US in 2011. Despite enormous growth in GNP, wages and average family income are stagnant. Our distribution of income and wealth has dramatically worsened as Information Age winners leap past the losers. The…
5 open-market trends fueling business model innovation and disruption
Imagine being a 4h grade teacher with a class of 25 students with widely different levels of math aptitude and competency. How do you challenge the most adept students? How do you help the laggards without boring the stars to tears? The only practical option seems to be to teach to the middle. That it, unless you and your principal are lucky enough to have discovered Kahn Academy, which is in the process of disrupting the long-staid textbook publishers market and K-12 education. Kahn Academy is a stellar example of how any business today can thrive by capitalizing on open-market trends that are melting barriers to entry in most markets. Kahn Academy was started by a Salman Kahn, a hedge fund manager and brilliant communicator, an educator with a passion for teaching math and other lessons to kids. He developed effective on-line math…
To disrupt an industry, solve a costly problem with a new business model.
Writing on July 4th, I applaud a nation that produced a Rashaun P. Sourles, a compelling young man on a mission to improve health care and disrupt inefficient sales channels. Sourles grew up in a working class neighborhood and achieved top selling ranks at Johnson & Johnson, a Fortune 500 company. Sourles grew frustrated as one of J&J’s pharmaceutical representatives, with the considerable wasted time (up to 80% a week) spent trying to find, contact and set up meaningful exchanges with clinical and administrative decision makers. Had he been in the industry decades earlier, the hurdles would have been much lower. But an increasingly consolidated provider community now severely limits access of pharmaceutical representatives to clinicians to drive more volume over fewer drugs, thereby lowering costs. The barriers also reduce “hard-selling” – selling based on factors other than patient outcomes. In fact one-quarter…