Author Archives: Ric Merrifield
I have written before about businesses predicting how lazy we want to be, or how increasingly we perceive ourselves too busy to perform pretty basic tasks. Well, once again the envelope has been pushed. “No one ever went broke underestimating the American public” – that’s a pretty famous H.L. Mencken quote. And comedian Jim Gaffigan is well known for his observations about bacon, including the point that bacon is so good, that people wrap certain foods in bacon to make them taste better. Good point. This past weekend, my friend Tracy and I were at the grocery story picking up a couple of items when we saw a large display in the middle of the aisle and it was a product from Oscar Mayer (Gaffigan also has some thoughts on a product for which they are known – bologna). There it was. Far from refrigeration. …
In fairness, this issue isn’t limited to UPS, that just happens to be the source of my most recent bad experience with this. What’s the shipping dinosaur? SIGNATURE REQUIRED. When you ship something to your workplace, it’s no big pain. The delivery person seems completely disinterested in who signs as long as they get a scribble on the wireless device they use to document receipt. I get that, but it’s not really a very useful step in the process when anyone in your office can sign for something, whether they are your boss or a temporary worker you don’t really even know. At home it’s an entirely different story. I recently ordered a birthday present for my son who will be ten next month. The shipping organization chose to send the package “signature required” and didn’t give me any other alternative. So when it shipped, …
I spend a lot of time looking at and writing about disruptive business models (many of them are discussed in my most recent book, Surviving a Business Earthquake, and lately I have been talking about a handful that I think are really meaningful that will continue to mature over time and work their way into lots of other industries. 1. Friending No, it’s not new. At all. But the friend trend that I have noticed is that the practice has jumped the social networking fence and is becoming useful as a function in not-so-social industries. A company that I have blogged about before, doxo, is the one that really opened my eyes to this. What doxo figured out is that it’s OK for us to have to log on to our credit card site and our utility site, and our Fidelity site with our passwords and what not, …
For years I have wondered why health insurance hasn’t been treated like other insurance, like car insurance. With car insurance, the riskier your profile, the more expensive the insurance. You get caught driving drunk, you have accidents, you drive a sports car, those all make you higher risk to an insurer, so your rates reflect it. Not so with health insurance. There aren’t really checks in place to know if you smoke, or if you have a horrible diet and become obese. But when I bring it up people would say “oh, that’s too personal, that will never happen” – talking about giving people incentives to be more fit and eat/drink smarter, and stop smoking. But every time I hear that, I can’t help but think it’s just bad business and that usually drives corporate behavior. That said, as long as the insurance companies are making enough …
The Top 10 Rethinking Ideas of 2010 – Plus One by Ric Merrifield Looking forward to next year – in true “This is Spinal Tap” fashion – we will go to 11, so forget the top ten list. this is a top 11 list for 2010. The majority of these ideas are so simple (in retrospect) they make you want to slap your head for not thinking of them. 11. NETFLIX $600M Investment Netflix gave $600,000,000 (six hundred million dollars) to three different movie houses to get earlier distribution rights to the most popular movies. It’s actually a billion dollars but 600 million dollars of it is in 2010. When I first read this I wondered where that number came from, but as I read more in the article in the paper, that is how much they spent on US postage last year and since over 70% of their business … Continue reading
When you think about who might topple a software giant like a Microsoft or a Google, you might be inclined to think of Goliaths like, well Google and Microsoft. The same is true of any industry, you probably think of a company of similar size or larger as being the type of company that would win a battle, or a war. Actual battles and wars end up being an interesting analogy. If you think if big battles like World War I and World War II, that’s exactly what happened – giants fighting giants from big, knowable centralized points of command. But there are some other wars that have been fought where the little guy won (or hasn’t lost in the case of one ongoing war) and there’s a common element in all of them. No centralized physical location to “take out” to win. When everything is …
