BNET Intercom

20 years ago today, the Berlin Wall came crashing down, taking with it the communist regimes that haunted Eastern Europe during the 20th century. World leaders are gathering in Germany’s capital to commemorate the reunification of Germany and the end of the Cold War.

Of course, the fall of the Wall has come to symbolize more than a political and military win for the West.  It also represents the idea that free markets work better than planned socialist economies.

However, a new global poll has found that today’s recession has many doubting pure capitalism.

According to pollster Doug Miller, “It appears that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 may not have been the crushing victory for free-market capitalism that it seemed at the time — particularly after the events of the last 12 months.”

Here are the poll’s key findings:

Only 11 percent of people surveyed across 27 countries thought free market capitalism is working well, while 51 percent believed its problems can be solved with more regulation and reform, the poll said.

In only the United States (25 percent) and Pakistan (21 percent), did more than one in five people agree that capitalism works well in its current form, the poll conducted for the BBC World Service said.

A majority now believe free-market capitalism doesn’t really work.  Were the eulogies over socialism’s demise premature?  Share your predictions below.

Everywhere you look, newspapers are dying. And even though there are plenty of old-school journalists shaking their heads and arguing we’ll miss miss them once they’re gone, many folks have actually been celebrating the “mainstream media’s” demise lately.

Vanity Fair’s Matt Pressman wonders what’s behind today’s hatred of the media.  After all, aren’t journalists some of our best defenders of democracy?

Here are a few of his explanations, edited down for length.

(more…)

92 percent of executives surveyed for MIT Sloan’s inaugural Business of Sustainability report claim that their company is “addressing sustainability in some way.” Considering that stat, it is somewhat surprising that we don’t hear more about the environmental moves of American businesses.  After all, you’ll always make some green by going green, right?

Well, not so fast. According to MIT Sloan Management Review’s editor-in-chief Michael S. Hopkins, even though companies such as Nike are taking green strides, they still tend to keep quiet about their efforts. That’s because some firms worry that their customers don’t really want them to go green:

Nike fears that by going out and saying look what we’ve done — and it’s really win win — customers will say “wait, I thought you created your product solely to make sure I got the best performance out of it. Sustainability has to compromise your other goal.” Nike is really worried about it, and as a result, they’re quite decidedly not pushing it.

The conventional wisdom suggests greener firms will usually win the reputation wars.  But apparently, consumers don’t always equate green with quality.

Have you ever decided not to purchase something that was marketed as green because you were skeptical that it wouldn’t work as well as the traditional option?  Please share your insights below.

Monday often brings the biggest mail haul.  You pluck through the stack and sure enough, despite previous assurances from clients that their outstanding invoices were processed, you still don’t see a bunch of checks you were expecting.

Years back, at a start-up I worked at, one of my main responsibilities was to make Accounts Receivables calls. I used to gripe about the task because of the pressure (cash flow is king and we aren’t a bank!) and the mind-numbing administrative aspect of it.  I found it a little degrading, too, once I learned that some AP departments, even at respectable companies, were straight-up lying to me.

But when I look back, I appreciate that I had the experience because the fact is, no matter what stage of your career you’re at, no one is above making that call to a delinquent client. So now, when I hear that the “check is in the mail” or that the “check must have gotten lost in the mail,” I conclude this client must think I’m a sucker.

We all know that checks simply don’t take months to get from point A to point B.  It wouldn’t take a horse and buggy that long to deliver your money across state lines.  As much as we all like to take shots at the US Postal Service, you have to admit that they can reliably deliver mail from anywhere in the United States to your office within a week or so.

Of course, the tact you take on the follow-up call depends on a ton of factors, primarily their payment history and whether you expect to continue doing business with the account.

So BNET commenters, I’d like to hear the most outrageous explanations you’ve ever heard from clients that don’t pay their bills on time. And most importantly, how do you respond to the “check must have gotten lost in the mail” excuse?

Seth Godin, the popular new media pundit and blogger, has caused yet another controversy this week.  His obscure start-up, Squidoo, which lets users create custom pages around their interests, announced a new initiative called “Brands in Public.” The idea is that companies can no longer control everything that’s created around their brands in the age of Twitter and YouTube. So Squidoo will aggregate all the content and let company’s organize that data in a positive light.

Godin got trouble, however, when his firm went ahead and created a bunch of “unofficial” brand pages (click here to see Trader Joe’s page, as a sample) without the permission of the companies behind them. As you might imagine, the backlash has been swift (and Godin now says they’ll delete these pages). Online-marketing consultant Lisa Barone labeled the venture “brandjacking” because Godin will “extort 5k a year” from companies so they can control a page they probably wouldn’t want anyways.  The monitoring tools on Squidoo’s public platform are not that complex; what you are really paying for is “hush money” on pages that could rank highly on search engine results.

It’s all quite ironic since Godin claims to be the father of “Permission Marketing,” the theory that customers will only respect brands that respectfully ask them to opt-in to receiving any company communications.

But the reality is that Godin’s approach is not that novel and many internet companies he admires on his blog already depend on some form of “brandjacking.” In fact, it’s the business plan of nearly all the Web 2.0 companies that don’t charge users for their services.  Let the crowd create the content, build a platform to aggregate and organize that data and then charge companies if they don’t like the results.  Good luck telling Google or Yelp that you want to opt-out of their listings.  Your company has been “brandjacked” all over the web whether you like it or not and you’re going to have to pay to put your ad above the rest.

But why would you want to opt-out of Google, you may ask?  Well, if you’ve ever Googled your name, perhaps you’ve seen a profile created on your behalf on directory parasites like Spoke.com or 123people.com. It’s the same shady deal.  Those sites claim they are doing you a favor by connecting you to other professionals.  But I can already connect with my network through better tools like LinkedIn and Facebook. If I want people to know my email address or phone number, I can list it.  So when I saw that Spoke.com’s spiders had scoured the web and listed an email account, phone number and bio related to me at a company I no longer work for,  I emailed them and told them that the info was not accurate and that I wanted them to immediately delete this profile.  Their response: You need to log in and waste your time before you can opt-out.  This was quite frustrating.  As a matter of principle, why should companies be able to exploit your brand or your person for commercial purposes without your permission?

An education “expert” hired by Pearson finds that students who rely on web searches rather than Pearson’s textbooks “are woefully inadequate when it comes to processing real information they need.” Barack Obama complains that his healthcare reforms have stalled because there’s been too much “misinformation” circulating over the last few months. Columnists at traditional newspapers warn the public about the dangers of relying on the blogosphere, rather than professional journalists.

The message from the gatekeepers of knowledge is the same: there is now too much information online and your Average Joe just can’t handle it.

It’s not like consumers seem to care, though.  Online at least, they’ve consistently chosen the almost-good-enough free option over paying for the professional version.   Nevertheless, many professionals who suddenly see their economic self-interest threatened by this revolution keep arguing that we should care and pony up for the real deal.  And if we don’t, society will suffer. Without facts from Pearson, tomorrow’s firefighters won’t be able to tell left from right.  Without the Washington Post, we could end up with a Palin presidency.

In many ways, I am sympathetic to these arguments.  Take the media, as the most obvious case.  Back when there were only a few media outlets for each region, the public could at least argue over the same set of facts.  Now one can get information solely from the endless feedback loop of partisan news sources.  Keith Olberman fans and Rush Limbaugh disciples might as well live on other planets.

But I am not so sure that the abundance of the web is causing this problem.  Perhaps the student who was too lazy to check whether 2+2 really equals 5 would have probably failed his math test, with our without a Pearson text book.  Maybe hardcore blog fanatics from the Left or the Right aren’t the type that can be persuaded to check opposing viewpoints, no matter how many media choices they have.

At the end of the day, I am an optimist who believes the web is more or less self-correcting and that most people can process a lot of information without the paid guidance of the gatekeepers. But I do concede that it just takes one misinformed loon to cause a lot of damage.  Please share where you stand in the comments section below.

There are already a bunch of organizations (Fortune, the EPA, Greenpeace) which score American corporations on their environmental and social responsibility efforts. But this looks like the most ambitious effort to date by an authoritative third party.

Newsweek has ranked every company in the S&P 500 to determine the greenest large corporations in America. Their top 10 are HP, Dell, Johnson & Johnson, Intel, IBM, State Street, Nike, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Applied Materials and Starbucks. Ideally, rankings like this will cause corporations to take real steps towards sustainability as they fight for customers and talent.  Such a green arms race could theoretically save the planet and the American economy.

The magazine pulled in some heavyweights from academia (Yale’s Dan Esty), the nonprofit sector (John Steelman of NRDC) and the CSR consulting world to help them develop their methodology, which primarily factors in greenhouse gas emissions, water use, solid waste disposed and acid rain emissions. The data was normalized by revenue to allow comparisons between corporations of varying sizes.

But the apples and oranges issue will nonetheless fuel the debate over the validity of Newsweek’s effort, as green business consultant Joel Makover has noted:

It may not be surprising that half of the top-10 rated companies (as well as half of the top 20) are technology firms, and that 8 of the 10 lowest-rated are energy utility or coal-mining companies. That makes sense: Most tech companies don’t actually manufacture anything themselves these days — they mostly purchase components from other manufacturers — while utilities and mining companies are known to make quite a mess, in terms of emissions and other impacts.

Furthermore, many of Newsweek’s greenest corporations are conveniently consumer-oriented companies that are more likely to advertise with the weekly.  That might also contribute to skepticism.

If most people don’t really buy into these rankings, Newsweek may sell a few more magazines as the world keeps on turning as before.  Please share whether you think these rankings will make a difference in the comments section below.

I enjoy tech pundit Seth Godin’s blog and have referenced a post of his in the past on BNET. Godin doesn’t shy away from telling it as he sees it and that’s what keeps his blog thought-provoking.  As you might imagine, one of his latest entries, which takes aim at nonprofits for supposedly resisting social media tools, is causing quite a stir in the advocacy community.

According to Godin, nonprofits exist to create change but actually “abhor” change.  His proof?  None of the top 100 Twitterers (according to Twitterholic’s top 100) are nonprofits because Twitter is too “scary” for the direct-mail crowd.

No doubt, on the surface, it seems crazy that Ashton Kutcher and Kim Kardashian have more followers than any group looking to protect human rights or improve healthcare for the masses.  But this metric doesn’t prove anything.  The celebrities and news organizations which dominate Twitter have wide fan bases.  Nonprofits, on the other hand, are usually focused on solving local problems.  Even the groups with global agendas work within coalitions fighting for the same cause.  Therefore, no global warming group will hit Kutcher’s numbers because there are many groups splitting the follow population.

Furthermore, most nonprofits do, in fact, “get” social media and have invested their resources to develop Twitter pages (one Twitter account is tracking more than 9000 nonprofits) and Facebook fan pages.  Some groups like the Sierra Club have even launched their own social networks.

Finally, one last point needs to be made.  Godin is wrong when he claims that social media tools are free and that nonprofits have the volunteer resources to build up these networks (but refuse because they don’t want to give up control).  Twitter may be free to use but it costs tons of time and money to craft a plan, develop these pages, train staff and monitor the community.  And as Godin said, the goal of any nonprofit is to create change.  If none of these “slacktivists” end up donating their time (in the real world) or money to the cause, then what’s the point of having 100,000 virtual fans?

@Jeff De Cagna My oversight: here’s the link to Seth Godin’s original post.

As my BNET colleague Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote last week, despite the conventional wisdom, change for change’s sake is often harmful or worse for organizational performance. It can be tempting to bring in new leaders from outside a company under the “change or die” mantra.  But those newcomers might let their egos get in the way as they try to put their stamp on an organization.  Big new ideas often flop and costs (plus cynicism) increase.  More often than not, it’s best to simply improve upon what already works well within an organization.

On the flip side, while outsiders might have a harder time understanding an organization’s strengths, insiders tend to perpetuate the weaknesses of their predecessors.  That’s according to a new joint study by researchers at Kellogg and Northwestern who found that if “new decision makers share a psychological connection with an initial decision maker, they may invest further in the failing programs of the first - even to their own financial detriment.”

Their experiment found that even the most arbitrary psychological connections (what they dub “vicarious entrapment”) influenced one’s ability to make independent decisions:

If the delegated decision maker was even subtly connected to the original - by sharing similar attributes like the same birthday or simply empathizing with the first decision maker, for example - he/she honored the original decision maker’s commitments and made further investments in that person’s losing decisions…

“Research has shown that once a psychological connection forms between two individuals, they are more likely to cooperate and favor each other financially,” said Adam Galinsky, the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics and Decision in Management at the Kellogg School. “The current research suggests that they are also more likely to escalate on each others’ failing decisions.”

The study’s authors argue that when a company really needs to right its ship, a true outsider without any connections to prior leadership might be the best person for the job.  From your own experiences, please share whether you think that strategy is correct in the comments section below.

We will never really know how much the Federal Reserve’s policies alter markets, considering that news organizations like Fox have met legal resistance as they try to check the bank’s books on the public’s behalf.  Right now it’s an academic question as to whether the recent bailouts will cause the next bubble.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, for his part, won’t accept any responsibility for the financial crisis.  That’s because he thinks human beings have an “unquenchable capability” to think the good times will last and always “take speculative excesses” during times of prosperity.

“Unless somebody can find a way to change human nature, we will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common, except human nature,” Greenspan argued in a recent interview with the BBC.

So what are the leading candidates for the next bubble? Business Insider has offered its top ten. Here are a handful for them, listed below and edited down for length:

• The China Bubble: Many believe the [Chinese stock market's] rally has been driven purely by government-supplied liquidity, rather than fundamentals.
• The Green Bubble: As the economic recovery takes shape, alternative energy could see excess investment on hopes of big future returns.
• The Gold Bubble: With some predicting a doubling of prices to $2,000 an ounce, too many people could jump in and spike the real value of the precious metal.
• The Trash Stock Bubble: Shares of junk financials — companies like Fannie, Freddie, AIG, Citi and Bank of America — are being pushed up by a short squeeze.
• The Education Bubble: Last year, the amount borrowed by students and received by schools grew some 25% over the previous year, to $75.1 billion. [Yet] as many as one-third of all private colleges surveyed said they expected enrollment to drop in the next academic year.
• The Life Insurance Securitization Bubble: Wall Street is planning on securitizing “life settlements” — policies that the sick and elderly can sell for cash while they’re alive — much like it did subprime mortgages.

Where do you think the next economic bubble will arise?  Share your predictions in the comments section below.