The litter in littérateur. Ricky Opaterny on Books, Music, Art, and Sports

10/7/2009

The Management Myth reviewed in the Journal

Philip Delves Broughton, whose book on HBS I wrote about last fall, reviewed Matthew Stewart’s The Management Myth in the Wall Street Journal a couple months back. I’m currently enjoying Stewart’s skewering of business theory after having read his Atlantic article that spawned the book a few months ago. His thesis—that management theory is a false science—should be studied by anyone who has ever thought of employing SWOT, Five Forces, the BCG matrix, or any other fallacious framework.

8/10/2009

The price of a logo

Filed under: General,Technology — Tags: , , , , — Ricky @ 1:44 pm

I had a few logos made for projects over the past four years. Fortunately, I’ve been able to work with friends on many of them. However, I continue to encounter the misconceptions that logos should be cheap, say a couple hundred bucks, or involve a lot of constant feedback from the client to the designer on all possible designs. Here’s why neither is true.

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7/17/2009

The NewsHour on the future of publishing

Yesterday on the NewsHour Ray Suarez discussed the future of the book publishing business and its handling of e-books with Jonathan Karp of Hachette’s Twelve, one of my favorite imprints. Karp likens the publishing business to gambling, but what business isn’t like gambling? I found his analogy between the Kindle and the Walkman to be a little misleading, however. Sony, though it had a music library when the Walkman came out, didn’t have the same retail relationship with customers. The comparison would be more apt if Karp’s employer, Hachette, was the one behind the Kindle and not Amazon.

Suarez prefaces the conversation with a brief segment about the book business as a whole, including a story about layoffs at Tattered Cover in Denver and a customer’s book buying binge of a response. (more…)

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