Carnival of the Capitalists Rolls Through Atlanta

Welcome to week 57 of the Carnival of the Capitalists. This is an exciting weekend for me, yesterday this blog was highlighted in Barron’s and today I get to host the carnival. I encourage all of my new visitors to visit the blogs listed below. You may be surprised at the high quality of writing being done in the blogosphere.

As usual there are a lot of good articles submitted by bloggers on a variety of topics. I didn’t even attempt to categorize the articles, as many of them cross multiple topics. I did do a quick sorting of them, so the list below generally flows in this order: entrepreneurship, business, technology, blogging, marketing, internet, financial markets, economy and taxes. Enjoy…

• Dave Pollard of How to Save the World discusses Rule #1 for business start-ups — ‘find a need and fill it‘. This is a chapter from Dave’s upcoming book ‘Natural Enterprise’.
• Dr. Jeff Cornwall comments on the state of entrepreneurship in America by taking a look at the SBA’s 2004 Small Business Report. I’m with Jeff on obliterating apart the current tax code.
• Most people who’ve worked in organizations of any size recognize the underground organization - it is the informal and often unspoken (or at least spoken behind closed doors or softly around the coffee machine) network that defines the way challenges to the conventional “wisdom” are squelched or undermined. In this article Phillip Wilson offers three practical tips managers can use to implement double-loop learning in their organizations in order to surface the underground organization.
• Steve Rucinski discusses the importance of customer relationship management (CRM) and gives four key metrics to use to measure the effectiveness of CRM programs.
• Paul Noonan shares his observations of the consequences of running a business like a public utility. When customer satisfaction is not the focus, bad things happen. He uses the Chicago Transit Authority as an example and shows how they are apparently trying to encourage customers to get off the trains.
• Jay Allen, the Zero Boss, recounts a bad customer service experience with a Napster representative.
• Todd Sattersten explains why the lack of opportunities to do innovative work caused him to leave his job at GE.
• In part one of a four part series Brendon Connelly reveals the fine (and secret) art of managing your boss. The other articles in the series detail the three things that one needs to know in order to manage her boss effectively: 1) Understanding Yourself; 2) Understanding The Boss; 3) Understanding The Relationship.

  (As an aside, I’m glad to see that Brendon has been using David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” productivity system for four years. I just got turned on to it a few weeks ago and it’s already had a major impact on me.)

• Dave Foster puts a new spin on the old business parable about buggy-whip manufacturers and how they should have thought of themselves as being in “transportation” rather than “buggy-whips”
• Barry Ritholtz continues his excellent coverage of the music industry by asking if U2’s P2P release was a briliiant marketing ploy.
• On her RFID blog Anita Campbell takes a look at several emerging technologies (Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID), smart cards, kiosks, biometrics, and electronic shelf labels) which are converging to change the face of the retail industry.
• Wayne Hurlbert of Blog Business World reports that support for creating a ‘Blog Chamber of Commerce’ is growing. After reading his article I’m all for it. He says that “dispelling the myth that all blogs are online diaries and personal journals is a great place to start.” I would add ‘political soap boxes’ to that as well.
• The blogosphere loves memetics theory and ‘The Tipping Point’. This article by Evelyn Rodriguez is the first in an exploratory series looking at why when we’re talking ideological warfare - certain memes don’t crossover but remain contained within their group. Within their group, the memes amplify and self-reinforce - but cross-over doesn’t happen. This has far-reaching implications for persuasion and evangelizing: from the selling of presidential candidates to understanding the deep loyalty inspired by brands such as Apple or Harley-Davidson. (But may not necessarily apply to more benign products and services such as tissue paper.)
• Yvonne DiVita gives us advice on how and why to utilize some old-fashioned marketing, like newspaper ads, along with your Internet marketing, to make sales this holiday season.
• Russell Buckley explores the future direction advertising might have to take in order to continue to work.
• Sparked by James Surowiecki’s recent article about the decline of brands largely due to reputation systems, Arnold Kling of EconLog wonders if the same can done to the “brand” of government licenses (e.g. health care providers).
• James Cherkoff, from across the pond in London, writes that “the organisational model behind open source (massive web base collaborations by individuals outside of private organisations) is starting to starting to drive innovation in other areas.” He gives several recent examples of how open source techniques are being used in the world of marketing.
• David Jackson lays out four emerging Internet trends which will propel the growth of small Web sites. Although the article discusses the implications for Internet investing it’s also highly relevant to bloggers and anyone in the business of e-commerce or Web publishing.
• In ‘Really Emerging Markets‘ Roger Nusbaum compares iShares South Africa (EZA) to the South Africa Fund (SOA) as a way to invest in Africa. Roger cites two investment themes — Africa as an emerging market and a gold rally lifting the Rand (South Africa’s Currency) and helping stocks work higher with a low correlation to the US. I love the charts of both of those equities, but man are they’re thinly traded.
• Oracle is threatening to give up its bid for PeopleSoft if 50% of PeopleSoft’s outstanding shares are not tendered by November 19. Frank Scavo at the Enterprise System Spectator speculates on what might happen to PeopleSoft if Oracle wins, or if it walks away.
• Rawdon Adams writes that “Ignorance is a vastly underrated quality when it comes to investing; and their counter-parts - arrogance and over-confidence - can prove devastating.” Truer words have never been written.
• Martin Lindeskog reports in from Hungary with a look at how globalization of the financial markets is evolving.
• Don Lloyd writes that contrary to conventional wisdom, high rates of return in the private sector will not save social security.
• Stephen Karlson discusses the assertation by Chicago Fed economist William A. Strauss that President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” carrier landing signalled the end of major macroeconomic surprises at the beginning of the current economic recovery.
• Technofunk of the ‘Think Like Us‘ group blog takes a very interesting look at a possible effect of online banking and payment tools and what possible effect their increased usage may have on the economy, including personal savings and personal consumption.
• David Tufte does an excellent job of explaining one of the two reasons that Kydland and Prescott won the economics Nobel prize this year. He uses an analogy of traffic jams to explain how events propagate through the economy.
• M. Simon of Power and Control explores why profit is necessary and how it tends to drive down costs.
• Paul Asad of Truck and Barter provides us with his ideal armchair economics reading list. I know I could benefit from reading a few of those books.
• Brian Gongol says that contemporary economic development work by the public sector puts a lot of taxpayer resources to very inefficient use. He proposes that instead of providing special incentives to a small number of firms, states and communities should focus on creating a better organic environment for all businesses.
• Now that it’s year-end tax planning time, Mike Pechar reminds us that mortgage interest on second homes is tax deductible and a boat can easily qualify as a second home.
• Warren Meyer provides us with a roundup of the challenges of collecting and filing sales taxes, including some of the more egregious state practices he’s come across.
• Anita Campbell, at her Small Business Trends weblog, writes that “real estate investors trying to take advantage of 1031 exchanges are banding together into investor groups and overpaying for commercial real estate, just because of the tax advantage. This is a troubling trend that is inflating real estate values across the country.”

Next week’s edition will be hosted at SocialTwister Be sure to send entries to cotcmail-at-gmail-dot-com before next Sunday afternoon (the earlier the better — this is a lot of work!). Brian Gongol has set up a form to help facilitate CotC submissions. I think it would be very helpful to the hosts if people used that form.