Bizosphere

March 5 Carnival of the Capitalists

Welcome to the March 5, 2007 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists, which unfortunately I am throwing together as fast as I can this morning. I’ve read the entries and flagged them yes or no, and I may reconsider some of the yes ones. This quality control thing is tough, because if I really applied it, there might be under ten entries, and some of what was excluded as off-topic is better and more compelling to read than anything included. Anyway, I was occupied yesterday and unable even to begin to compile it then as I would normally do.

There is something new we’re going to try: A featured mainstream business media article.

Submit a link and brief description of your favorite article of the last week or so from the online version of a more traditional, non-blog publication. We’ll select one to highlight in CotC and/or here, and attempt to notify the author or powers that be at the publication that the article has been chosen. The details will be subject to change, as this is an entirely new idea, a few days old. Submission deadline will be end of the day each Friday.

Send article submissions to bizosphere -at- gmail -dot- com.

Speaking of mainstream, last week’s Q&A with James Pethokoukis of the U.S. News & World Report blog Capital Commerce went great, generating tremendous traffic here and for the participating bloggers. James will continue this week, as covering other news took precedence. The three parts so far:

Anyway, on with the show, again in the order received.

One Man Band specializes in advice for increasingly common businesses of one person. I can relate both to that, and to Lights Out - The Significance of a Single Point of Failure. I pointedly maintain e-mail addresses that are not through my web host, and expect eventually to use a separate web host for alternate sites. One way I cope with potential e-mail outages, since clients primarily contact me via e-mail, is to have a passworded web page with an emregeny contact/problem report form that e-mails several addresses, including multiple of my domains, Gmail, Mindspring, Verizon, cell and Blackberry addresses. That’s a bit extreme, yet at the same time it has the weakness of being subject to the web hosting going down. Not to mention a different weakness; people forgetting it exists because the need for it would be so rare. But I digress, and if I spent this much time on each entry, I’d take all day to finish, even without the kids “helping.”

Disorganizational Behavior highlights the importance of organizational success in Individual vs Organization Success.

InsureBlog notes the importance of Profit Motive in the insurance industry, and the destructiveness of forcing insurers to pay extra-contractual claims.

The Digerati Life asks What Do You Make Of A Stock Market Sell Off? Analysis ensues.

Searchligh Crusade talks subprime loan industry in It Not Only Rolls Downhill, It’s Starting to Cascade. This is one I looked at three times as an undecided before giving in, due to the sheer volume of cited to original text. However, the apparent meltdown-to-be of the industry seems to be of particular interest currently, and could be fun economically.

Wally Bock’s Three Star Leadership Blog examines Lessons from JetBlue’s Valentine’s Day Debacle. What if you had to handle a “critical incident” in your business?

BusinessPundit exemplifies what we are talking about when we seek quality entries for CotC, in A Startup Idea Postmortem: Proof That Good Ideas Aren’t Always Good Business. Not the length, necessarily, but the subject, substantiveness, and readability.

Small Biz Survival presents Startup: Resources to get from Idea to In Business. On the surface this seems a bit of a laundry list close to those that get excluded, but there’s some potentially useful information here for the would-be business launcher. This is one I looked at a couple times before deciding to include it, as it doesn’t really fit what we’re looking for in CotC. Lists are easy. Thoughtful, detailed discussions of individual things like leveraging chambers of commerce, not so much, but potentially much more interesting.

Breaking the Shackles of the 9 to 5 follows the recent market turmoil with How to Survive Getting Hit by a BRIC, which is particularly interesting for its discussion of business logistics and trucking in China.

The New Business World discusses outsourcing of various HR-related functions in How and What to Outsource: Human Resources.

Cold Spring Shops presses one of my hotbuttons with what might normally be a post excluded for excessive quoted text: Emergence. Ultimately it’s about children discovering property rights, creating spontaneous order, and learning about economics through a Lego game, twisted by teachers to more communistic ends. This goes back to an earlier post, a TCS article, Betsy’s Page, Joanne Jacobs (one of the first two or three bloggers I ever read), and Bizzy Blog, which has the original case study. Fascinating stuff.

Personal Finance Advice has an example of just how creative business ideas can get, in The Coin Man - Pay For Your College Education With Other People’s Change.

Blog Business World talks about treating a downturn as an opportunity with Recession Marketing: Winning Market Share.

Econbrowser is on Recession Watch.

Photon Courier, appropriately, talks about Light Bulbs — The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. GE has developed much improved bulbs, and they should get even better, so what does this say about regulation that might kill such innovation?

Jim Logan explore The Big Picture of Creating a Fast Flowing Stream of B2B Sales Leads.

The RE Forum likes Innovative Marketing Ideas, and describes a great one in which a woman literally gave away her retail store.

All About the Money says to be a great recruiter, leading to greater market share, you need to be a Guerilla Recruiter.

Small Business Trends, where Anita Campbell will host next week’s CotC, features Andy Birol with Five Mistakes When Selling to Small Business Owners. You can add to the text of the post itself by listening to an associated podcast, or reading the transcript of same.

So there you have it; 19 entries, in the order received (except the last two so I’d be mentioning Anita hosting next week last), out of 34 total. That’s 10 fewer entries than last week, yet only 3 fewer included posts. That seems like a good sign.

As I said last week, if an entry was not included, it would have been for some combination of:

We’re looking for the best business and economics posts each week. Submit excellence.