Businessweek Feature Stories: on Jay Heinrichs / DNA Fold Manufacturing / 3D Printing / Manufacturing Efficiency / Clayton Christensen

There's been a number of interesting feature stories to mention from Businessweek lately.

From the Mar 19 issue, Peter Heller wrote the feature "Jay Heinrichs's Powers of Persuasion" on the communications consultant who charges five figures for corporate sessions. Specifically, he teaches Aristotelian rhetoric to organizations doing either leadership development or message creation. Heller covers Heinrichs's use of Aristotle's persuasion tools of ethos (argument by character), logos (argument by logic) and pathos (appeal to the emotion) and the assertion by Heinrichs that ethos carries the most weight of the three (though all important). Heinrichs sounds to have interesting ideas about this important area of communication effectiveness and he published in 2007 the book Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion.

The May 7 issue had two features of interest, with "Clay Christensen's Life Lessons" by Bradford Wieners and "Is Origami the Future of Tech?" by Drake Bennett.

This second piece was particularly fascinating and covers the topic of DNA fold origami manufacturing... and brings to mind some other interesting BW stories on the same topic of building stuff, like "3D Printers: Make Whatever You Want" by Ashlee Vance and "My Week at Private Equity Boot Camp" by Brendan Greeley on (among other things) efficiency gains in production.

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Blog post addition: After continuing to think back on (and then reread) the Drake Bennett piece, it seemed this story and it's topic of DNA fold orgami as a manufacturing method merited more written on it here. It's an amazing idea that departs completely from manufacturing paradigms based on sculpture (take a block and chisel away what's not needed) or piece-together assembly. Instead, Bennett describes a process of manufacturing for objects (both large and nano-sized) based at least in part on the work of mathematician and computer scientist Erik Demaine...

"Fold-and-cut allowed you to make any shape in the world, any collection of shapes, even, as long as they had straight sides. One could, in an angular font, create the entire text of this page with the right folds and the right cut. In a paper published two years later, Demaine expanded on this idea, extending it into three dimensions: Any faceted solid, he showed, no matter how complex or irregular, could be folded from a single uncut sheet of paper. Start with a piece of paper big enough, and you could model Notre Dame down to the last gargoyle."

The idea seems outlandish, but is actually based on objects in the natural world like flowers or snowflakes (with the idea of folding illustrated by paper snowflakes usually made in school). Remarkable concept that seems to me likely the type of innovation Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Perlman had in mind when he said the following (from an April 2011 Businessweek story that I wrote about in this blog post)...

"Facebook is not the kind of technology that will stop us from having dropped cell phone calls, and neither is Groupon or any of these advertising things," he says. "We need them. O.K., great. But they are building on top of old technology, and at some point you exhaust the fuel of the underpinnings."

It's not to find fault with communication platforms like Facebook or Twitter, but rather to highlight this case of what could be real true breakthrough innovation in the field of manufacturing.

Businessweek Dec 12 Issue: Vegas Real Estate Fraud, OnLive Video Games, TV Remotes, Tableau Data Analysis

Quite a few interesting pieces from the Dec 12 issue of Businessweek.

Cover story by Felix Gillette was The King of All Vegas Real Estate Scams on fraud run amok in the area of faulty condo construction. It's a fascinating look at the illegal practice of taking over homeowner association boards and then funneling damages and repair contracts to businesses tied to colluding board members. Not surprising to read of something like this given legal Vegas real estate practices like buying larger and walking away from old property, but the scam described by Gillette shows a remarkable amount of fraud and deception.

Also from this issue were three smaller pieces that each dealt with interesting companies and topics previously noted on this blog...

- OnLive Mobile Helps Gamers on the Go is on the cloud gaming service from startup veteran Steve Perlman and stood out both with Perlman being someone I've linked to previous BW features on and with the described OnLive efforts around online tablet and smartphone gaming.

- Voice Control, the End of the TV Remote? covers innovation already occurred and especially to come in the future around the home television. Topic is especially interesting given rampant speculation about what Apple may eventually bring (in conjunction with the iPhone and iPad) to the TV market.

- Pat Hanrahan's Tableau Analytics Software provides a brief look at data analysis tools way beyond simple Excel in terms of both user interface and display of information. It's an interesting subject area and Hanrahan as a guy (and his Tableau Software by extension) is interesting with his time spent as an early stage Pixar engineer and two Oscars awarded for animation work.

Interesting Companies Posted On

A post that I've wanted to do for a while now has been on interesting companies and the below list represents alphabetically the businesses (large and small) that I've found of note and posted on from the past year...

1. Airbnb - company website here and blog search results here

2. Amazon - company website here and blog search results here

3. Apple - company website here and blog search results here

4. Ford - company website here and blog search results here

5. Google - company website here and blog search results here

6. Hewlett-Packard - company website here and blog search results here

7. Khan Academy - company website here and blog search results here

8. LinkedIn - company website here and blog search results here

9. Rearden Companies - company website here and blog search results here

10. Salesforce.com - company website here and blog search results here

11. Subaru - company website here and blog search results here

12. TED - company website here and blog search results here

Granted, this blog is still primarily about great writing (both found and the process around producing it), but there are me thinks some interesting companies out there doing cool things.

Businessweek Pieces: Steve Perlman / Google+ / Most Popular Things

Quite a few interesting stories and mentions in Businessweek lately... particularly in this week's edition labeled the Popularity Issue.



The cover feature looks at an eclectic blend of companies and products and below are three which had fairly sizable write ups in this BW... and three with only brief vignettes, but that still stood out as interesting.

- "Behind Five Guys’ Beloved Burgers" profiles the expanding burger chain noted for it's simple menu and "authenticity" (perhaps like Chipotle).

- "Vibram's shoes: the next best thing to nothing?" is about the FiveFingers shoes that were heavily mentioned in the excellent Christopher McDougall book Born to Run (posted on here earlier this month).

- "How Nordstrom Bests Its Retail Rivals" features the department store with the exceptional customer service reputation. As part of this, the piece has some interesting content about how the family (three brothers and a cousin) runs Nordstrom.

Three additional products mentioned in this Popularity feature that stood out as interesting were the all-electric Nissan Leaf, the not killed by the iPad Amazon Kindle and Story Cubes... the dice game where people make up stories based of the various images on each die rolled.

From this same issue of Businessweek was also mention of an interesting retail product and restaurant chain... neither of which I had heard of previously and both of which are coming soon to the US market. The story "Toys 'R' Us Wants a Robot (to Sell) for Christmas" is about the My Keepon toy and "A Spanish Starbucks for Sandwiches" details the casual dining chain 100 Montaditos and it's planned (major) expansion into the US.

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Two other stories featured in Businessweek lately that stood out...

From the July 21 issue was "Google+’s Circle Logic" on the latest Social Networking foray from the search giant (and what appears to be their best effort yet to compete with Facebook in this space). Finally, the July 27 edition had "Steve Perlman's Wireless Fix" on the successful inventor and his latest company.

Perlman's previous ventures include WebTV (sold for half a billion to Microsoft), the graphics company Mova (whose technology has been used in a number of studio movies) and streaming video game venture Onlive. Pretty remarkable background and the BW story subtitle gets at both Perlman himself and the subject of this piece...

"Silicon Valley’s self-styled Thomas Edison has found a way to increase wireless capacity by a factor of 1,000."

It's very interesting stuff about Perlman's DIDO wireless technology and the guy himself (who is also noted in the BW story as having founded the business incubator Rearden... as in Ayn Rand's Hank Rearden from Atlas Shrugged).

Businessweek Pieces: Groupon / Innovation / FIELDf/x

Couple of interesting features from BusinessWeek lately that almost serve as point-counter point articles.

From the Mar 17 issue was "Are Four Words Worth $25 Billion for Groupon?" about the Chicago company that turned down a $6B purchase offer from Google. The Brad Stone and Douglas MacMillan article chronicles the history behind the site... and delves quite a bit into the coming development from Groupon that may help make their refusal to sell a great business move.

To whit... what Groupon is looking to do is move beyond coupons and to point in time and point in location deals. Concept is that consumers would use a Groupon app on their phone and select either "I'm hungry" or "I'm bored" and then receive targeted local offers. A time window would likely be associated with each offer... making it more valuable for companies looking to immediately reduce inventory or have non-prime table times utilized.

It's an interesting piece on an interesting company, but as noted at the top... there's a second BusinessWeek story that serves as a counter-point of sorts. It's not that the prospects of Groupon are marginalized, but rather that the business impact is questioned. From the Apr 14 issue of BW was "This Tech Bubble Is Different" by Ashlee Vance.

As a piece of writing, it's probably not the greatest in the world as it seems to wander a bit, but does have a compelling idea put forth and examined. What Vance and the experts she quotes look at is the true innovation (or lack thereof) from companies like Groupon, Facebook, or Zynga that don't really create anything new... other than perhaps a new experience to spend time or money on.

It's not to be overly critical of a business with this model or intent (companies exist to make money after all), but perhaps there is something to the words put by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Perlman...

"Facebook is not the kind of technology that will stop us from having dropped cell phone calls, and neither is Groupon or any of these advertising things," he says. "We need them. O.K., great. But they are building on top of old technology, and at some point you exhaust the fuel of the underpinnings."

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Another piece from BusinessWeek lately that was interesting enough to bear linking to was "Baseball: Running the New Numbers". Written by Ira Boudway, it looks at the company Sportvision and it's FIELDf/x system of cameras and data analysis designed to truly quantify the performance of a fielder.

Similar to the companies noted above, it's not curing cancer... but is something that could impact baseball and the business around the game.

Fast Company Magazine - Oct 2009 Issue

Some interesting stuff (for various reasons) from the latest issue of Fast Company Magazine...



The NextTech feature "OnLive Goes Online--And It Could Kill the Game Console" chronicles serial tech entrepreneur Steve Perlman and his latest venture... OnLive. The company itself is about streaming video games over the Internet, but I was struck by the piece not so much because of OnLive, but because of Perlman himself.

After hitting big by co founding and then selling WebTV, he created the business incubator Rearden (which I think was originally named Rearden Steel). Yep, he named it after the main guy in Ayn Rand's manifesto/book "Atlas Shrugged". Onlive is actually the third venture to come out of Rearden, with the first two being a set-top box maker and motion capture company that provided technology to help make "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"... a most excellent film with stellar effects.

I suppose my only data point is that he named his company after an Ayn Rand character, but out of that, I'll say he's an interesting guy... whose companies definitely work on interesting stuff.

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I also found of note the cover story on Coca-Cola VP of Design David Butler. While I have to admit personal envy of Butler's cool (at 43) look and job, I also appreciated his interest in and ideas around systems and platforms.

Additionally, I found interesting Butler's commentary around the role of design not just for the sake of design itself, but to put things in place to sell more stuff. As evidence of this, Butler's big step forward after arriving at Coke was his three page memo "designing on purpose" about the overarching role of design within the company.

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The other design piece I really liked this this issue was that on information architect Lisa Strausfeld. The whole idea behind her area of interest is information and how it tells a story to the people who interact with it.

I also found interesting her mention of her late mentor Muriel Cooper and how she "wanted to do hard-core information design rather than entertainment-oriented work." I love things that entertain, but even more so completely get what Strausfeld finds appealing about this concept of working on something lasting with teeth.