Entrepreneurship – Page 38 – artdiamondblog.com

How to Avoid Bureaucratic Time-Wasting Lines

(p. 9) London — ITALIAN bureaucracy is legendary for a reason. Italians spend so much of their lives waiting in line — an estimated 400 hours a year per person — that some are now willing to pay freelancers to wait on their behalf. The rich can pay a “codista,” a neologism for a trained line sitter, to maunder at the post office or bank while they get on with something more important.
. . .
Brazil has its “despachantes,” meaning dispatchers. Venezuela has its “coleros,” which, oddly, can translate to “top hats”; and Spain its “gestores” or agents. Meanwhile, in South Africa there is a company called Q4U that takes care specifically of the irksome business of applying for a British passport.
In New York City, the cash-rich and time-poor use the service Same Ole Line Dudes, which describes itself as “New York’s only professional line sitting team.” The Dudes will charge you $25 for the first hour, plus $10 for each additional 30 minutes, to put in the necessary time to obtain coveted concert tickets or rare new sneakers. Their slogan is, “We wait for your wants.” I am told that they will even wait at the Department of Motor Vehicles for you.

For the full commentary, see:
TOM HODGKINSON. “How to Get Paid to Do Nothing.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., July 10, 2016): 9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 9, 2016.)

Crony Credentialism Is Regulatory Barrier to Telemedicine

(p. A11) Telemedicine has made exciting advances in recent years. Remote access to experts lets patients in stroke, neonatal and intensive-care units get better treatment at a lower cost than ever before. In rural communities, the technology improves timely access to care and reduces expensive medevac trips. Remote-monitoring technology lets patients with chronic conditions live at home rather than in an assisted-living facility.
Yet while telemedicine can connect a patient in rural Idaho with top specialists in New York, it often runs into a brick wall at state lines. Instead of welcoming the benefits of telemedicine, state governments and entrenched interests use licensing laws to make it difficult for out-of-state experts to offer remote care.
. . .
Using its power under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, Congress could pass legislation to define where a physician practices medicine to be the location of the physician, rather than the location of the patient, as states currently do. Physicians would need only one license, that of their home state, and would work under its particular rules and regulations.
This would allow licensed physicians to treat patients in all 50 states. It would greatly expand access to quality medical care by freeing millions of patients to seek services from specialists around the country without the immense travel costs involved.

For the full commentary, see:

SHIRLEY SVORNY. “Telemedicine Runs Into Crony Doctoring; State medical-licensing barriers protect local MDs and deny patients access to remote-care physicians.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 23, 2016): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JUNE 22, 2016.)

Creative Destruction of Polaroid by Digital Photography

(p. A17) There aren’t many 3-year-olds who can take credit for inspiring a revolution in the way millions of people view the world. According to a legend that begins Peter Buse’s welcome history of the Polaroid company, “The Camera Does the Rest,” it was engineer Edwin Land’s daughter, Jennifer, who asked one evening in 1943 why it took so long to view the photographs that the family had shot while on vacation in Santa Fe, N.M. Land set out on a walk to ponder that question and, so the story goes, returned six hours later with an answer that would transform the hidebound practice of photography: the instant snapshot.
. . .
“In 1974 alone there were about 1 billion Polaroid images made, and by 1976 . . . 15 billion in total,” the author writes, “and this before the real explosion in Polaroid photography in the late 1970s and early 1980s.” The party might have gone on forever had it not been for the same type of creative destruction that Polaroid itself had stirred up in the 1940s–this time brought about by the digital revolution.
By the time the company joined that revolution in the 1990s, it was too late. Their digital products were inferior to those being turned out by competing companies. Polaroid had always done well selling cameras, but the real money was in the film, the demand for which was falling precipitately. In July 1997, the company’s stock price was $60.51. Four years later, as the company spiraled toward bankruptcy, it was $0.49. The author writes that Polaroid joined the “analog scrap heap” that included “vinyl turntables and the Sony Walkman.”

For the full review, see:
PATRICK COOKE. “BOOKSHELF; The Original Instagram; Purists grumbled that Polaroids were ephemeral, but Ansel Adams created some of his most enduring photographs using the camera.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 17, 2016): A17.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 16, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Buse, Peter. The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

The Role of Steve Jobs in the Creation of Pixar

(p. B4) . . . [a] book that isn’t out yet (until November [2016]): “To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History” by Lawrence Levy, the former chief financial officer of Pixar. What a delightful book about the creation of Pixar from the inside. I learned more about Mr. Jobs, Pixar and business in Silicon Valley than I have in quite some time. And like a good Pixar film, it’ll put a smile on your face.

For the full commentary, see:
Sorkin, Andrew Ross. “DEALBOOK; Tell-Alls, Strategic Plans and Cautionary Tales.” The New York Times (Tues., JULY 5, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed word and year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JULY 4, 2016, and has the title “DEALBOOK; A Reading List of Tell-Alls, Strategic Plans and Cautionary Tales in Finance.”)

The book praised by Sorkin in the passage quoted above, is:
Levy, Lawrence. To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Tesla and Google Bet on Different Paths to Driverless Cars

(p. B1) SAN FRANCISCO — In Silicon Valley, where companies big and small are at work on self-driving cars, there have been a variety of approaches, and even some false starts.
The most divergent paths may be the ones taken by Tesla, which is already selling cars that have some rudimentary self-driving functions, and Google, which is still very much in experimental mode.
Google’s initial efforts in 2010 focused on cars that would drive themselves, but with a person behind the wheel to take over at the first sign of trouble and a second technician monitoring the navigational computer.
As a general concept, Google was trying to achieve the same goal as Tesla is claiming with the Autopilot feature it has promoted with the Model S, which has hands-free technology that has come under scrutiny after a fatal accident on a Florida highway.
But Google decided to play down the vigilant-human approach after an experiment in 2013, when the company let some of its employees sit behind the wheel of the self-driving cars on their daily commutes.
Engineers using onboard video cameras to remotely monitor the results were alarmed by what (p. B5) they observed — a range of distracted-driving behavior that included falling asleep.
“We saw stuff that made us a little nervous,” Christopher Urmson, a former Carnegie Mellon University roboticist who directs the car project at Google, said at the time.
The experiment convinced the engineers that it might not be possible to have a human driver quickly snap back to “situational awareness,” the reflexive response required for a person to handle a split-second crisis.
So Google engineers chose another route, taking the human driver completely out of the loop. They created a fleet of cars without brake pedals, accelerators or steering wheels, and designed to travel no faster than 25 miles an hour.
For good measure they added a heavy layer of foam to the front of their cars and a plastic windshield, should the car make a mistake. While not suitable for high-speed interstate road trips, such cars might one day be able to function as, say, robotic taxis in stop-and-go urban settings.

For the full story, see:
JOHN MARKOFF. “Tesla and Google Take Two Roads to Driverless Car.” The New York Times (Tues., JULY 5, 2016): B1 & B5.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JULY 4, 2016, and has the title “Tesla and Google Take Different Roads to Self-Driving Car.”)

Most Eventually Successful Entrepreneurs Don’t Quickly Quit Their Day Jobs

(p. B4) For people who prefer an introspective read that is both inspiring and has a dash of self-help, Adam Grant’s “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World” is truly original. Mr. Grant, the youngest-ever tenured full professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, dives into what it takes to be a shoot-the-moon, Steve-Jobs-like success. Many of his conclusions are counterintuitive and based on deep research.
The biggest surprise for me was that the most successful entrepreneurs didn’t quit their day jobs to pursue their ideas; instead, they stayed at work until they had worked all the kinks out of their plans and gotten them off the ground. The other head-scratcher in this book? Procrastination is a great thing. (This was a terrific revelation.)
Mr. Grant’s research shows that some of the most creative thoughts develop during periods of so-called procrastination.

For the full commentary, see:
Sorkin, Andrew Ross. “DEALBOOK; Tell-Alls, Strategic Plans and Cautionary Tales.” The New York Times (Tues., JULY 5, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JULY 4, 2016, and has the title “DEALBOOK; A Reading List of Tell-Alls, Strategic Plans and Cautionary Tales in Finance.”)

The book praised by Sorkin in the passage quoted above, is:
Grant, Adam. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. New York: Viking, 2016.

Tech Support Causes Rage By Taking Away Sense of Control

(p. B4) Especially frustrating when talking to tech support is not being understood because you are trying to communicate with machines or people who have been trained to talk like machines, either for perceived quality control or because they don’t speak English well enough to go off-script.
“It’s utterly maddening because the thing about conversations is that when I say something to you, I believe I’m having influence on the conversation,” said Art Markman, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and co-host of the podcast “Two Guys on Your Head.” “And when you say something back to me that makes no sense, now I see that all these words I spoke have had no effect whatsoever on what’s happening here.”
When things don’t make sense and feel out of control, mental health experts say, humans instinctively feel threatened. Though you would like to think you can employ reason in this situation, you’re really just a mass of neural impulses and primal reactions. Think fight or flight, but you can’t do either because you are stuck on the phone, which provokes rage.
Of course, companies rated best for tech support often charge more for their products or they may charge a subscription fee for enhanced customer care so the cost of helping you is baked in, as with Apple’s customer support service, AppleCare, and the Amazon Prime subscription service.
You can also find excellent tech support in competitive markets like domain name providers, where operators such as Hover and GoDaddy receive high marks. Also a good bet are hungry upstarts trying to break into markets traditionally dominated by large national companies. Take regional internet and phone service providers like Logix and WOW, which rank near the top in customer support surveys.

For the full story, see:
KATE MURPHY. “Why Help on Tech Is Unbearable.” The New York Times (Mon., July 4, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 3, 2016, and has the title “Why Tech Support Is (Purposely) Unbearable.”)

The Lucky Success of the Half-Blind “Becomes the Inevitable Coup of the Assured Visionary”

(p. B1) The most fun business book I have read this year? “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley,” by a former Facebook executive, Antonio García Martinez. I was sent a galley copy several months ago and picked it up with no intention of reading more than the first couple of pages. I don’t think I looked up until about three hours later.
This is a tell-all of Mr. Martinez’s experience in venture capital and later at Facebook, filled with insights about Silicon Valley — what he calls “the tech whorehouse” — mixed with score-settling anecdotes that will occasionally make you laugh out loud. Clearly there will be people who hate this book — which is probably one of the things that makes it such a great read.
The dedication page includes this gem: “To all my enemies: I could not have done it without you.” Mr. Martinez is particularly incisive when it comes to illustrating how failed ideas that happen to work are often spun into great successes: “What was an improbable bonanza at the hands of the flailing half-blind becomes the inevitable coup of the assured visionary,” he writes. “The world crowns you a genius, and you start acting like one.”

The book praised by Sorkin in the passage quoted above, is:
Martinez, Antonio Garcia. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. New York: Harper, 2016.

Good Niche Movies Can Be More Profitable than Blockbusters

(p. 5D) “Counterprogramming is the framework to get the most
bang for the buck for movies that aren’t necessarily going to be blockbusters. ”
Counterprogramming has become a crazy expensive game of chicken, Dergarabedian says.
Scheduling a rom-com next to a superhero franchise or a horror movie on Valentine’s Day is a classic ploy, he says, but there’s no formula that’s guaranteed. “You still have to be able to deliver the movie,” Dergarabedian says. “People are looking for different and good. You can’t just rely on being the other option.”
. . .
“A lot of these are David and Goliath matchups,” Dergarabedian says. “But it’s about who wins the profitability derby. That can ultimately be more important than where you rank on the chart.”
To determine success, look at how well the audience is served rather than money, says Erik Davis, managing editor for Movies.com and Fandango.com. The greater the disparity in the genres, the better the position to succeed, he says.
Though Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 performed modestly against BvS, Davis considers that scheduling a a win. “They (both) have potential to mine their specific audience,” he says.

For the full story, see:
Heady, Chris. “Studios Think Outside the Box (Office).” USA Today (Thurs., July 7, 2016): 5D.

“Entrepreneurs Can Appear in the Most Unpromising Environments”

(p. A11) Adam Fifield’s entertaining biography of the little-recognized Grant shows that entrepreneurs can appear in the most unpromising environments–such as within the dysfunctional bureaucracy of the United Nations.
. . .
While top-down planning is usually misguided in aid (and most everywhere else), it turned out to be suitable for the particular challenge of vaccinations. Unfortunately, the aid establishment learned the wrong lessons from Grant’s career. Instead of seeing him as an entrepreneur who saw a very specific unrealized opportunity to spread vaccination and oral rehydration salts, they viewed his success as vindicating top-down planning in general.
. . .
Those who came after Grant . . . seem to have developed even more of the paternalistic savior complex than he had–his counterparts today are the likes of Bono, Jeffrey Sachs and Bill Gates. But the condescending image of a powerful white male as the savior of helpless nonwhite children is thankfully a lot less acceptable today than it was in Grant’s time. Since 2000 we have witnessed the mainly homegrown economic growth of low- and middle-income countries surpassing that of rich countries–plus many other positive long-term trends from democratization to the explosion of cellphones. Aid alone cannot explain these large triumphs in poor countries. There is still room for humanitarian entrepreneurs like Grant to find new breakthroughs, but we can appreciate much more today that the poor are their own best saviors.

For the full review, see:
WILLIAM EASTERLY. “BOOKSHELF; The Father of Millions; The Unicef breakthrough on vaccinations and oral rehydration salts is still cited today as one of the few successes in foreign aid.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Oct. 16, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Oct. 15, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Fifield, Adam. A Mighty Purpose: How Jim Grant Sold the World on Saving Its Children. New York: Other Press, 2015.