viernes, 20 de diciembre de 2013

Small Business: $50,000 por arrancar en San Luis...(BusinessWeek)

Economic Development

Wanted: More Startups in St. Louis. Reward: $50,000

 

viernes, 13 de diciembre de 2013

Exporting: Small Business taking advantage of...Pollution (BusinessWeek)

Chinese in Smoggy Cities 'Are Dying' for This Austin Startup's Air Purifiers

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How to Stay Cool When Inspectors Show Up at Your Small Business...(BusinessWeek)

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viernes, 6 de diciembre de 2013

SMALL BUSINESS : Por qué la demora en un nuevo jefe para el Small Business Administration? (BusinessWeek)

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President Obama and former Small Business Administration chief Karen Mills in Cleveland in 2011






 

lunes, 25 de noviembre de 2013

El problema de SBA con las Franquicias: $1.5 Billones...(BusinessWeek)

The SBA's $1.5 Billion Franchise Loan Problem

 
 
 

viernes, 8 de noviembre de 2013

Las pólizas de seguro de vida siguen subiendo...(BusinessWeek)

Policy

Small Employers' Health Plan Costs Are Up, Says the NFIB

 
 

viernes, 11 de octubre de 2013

Por qué tanta gente odia su trabajo? Tomado de las Redes Sociales


 
Job dissatisfaction can be all-consuming. If you’re lucky, it can also lead to promising new careers. Here are some reasons why some people loathe their jobs:

• “Feeling undervalued is a huge one! Employees need to be appreciated.”
– Jan Addams

• “I think many people have been forced to take jobs that they don't love in order to maintain their lifestyle or stay in a location they like. I have highly overqualified candidates applying to positions every day that are several steps below their level.”
 – Stephanie McDonald

• “They may love what they do, but in the end, they have no control over their own destiny (even if they are hard workers). This leads to frustration especially if they have to answer to people who make doing their job more difficult.”
– Steve Messineo

• “In my experience, people hate their jobs because they have little to no chance of a promotion no matter how well they do their jobs. Or they’re bored of their current position and are not allowed to change roles.”
– Dryw Vanderelburg

• “They do not feel included as being vital to the company's success. They do not fulfill their own self-interest through working on company goals.”
– Anita Pugh

• “Most people haven’t taken the time to find out who they are and what their purpose is on Earth. They are only working because they have to in order to live.”
– Ms. Odara

• “I believe that many individuals have a misconception of what level of happiness a job/career will bring to them. There are several factors that contribute to happiness in a person’s life, including family, leisure/recreation, and friends. Try to strike a balance with the other important things in life, and we just might see a change in our overall feeling about all aspects of our lives—including our jobs.”
– Kenny Bryant

• “Most of us have to settle for any ol’ job just so we can make ends meet. Also, sometimes doing what you love doesn't automatically equate to dollars.”
– Brittni Abiolu

Why do so many people hate their jobs?

 

 

The Secrets of Bezos: How Amazon Became the Everything Store (BusinessWeek story)

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Amazon.com rivals Wal-Mart as a store, Apple as a device maker, and IBM as a data services provider. It will rake in about $75 billion this year. For his book, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone spoke to hundreds of current and former friends of founder Jeff Bezos. In the process, he discovered the poignant story of how Amazon became the Everything Store.
 
Within Amazon.com (AMZN) there’s a certain type of e-mail that elicits waves of panic. It usually originates with an annoyed customer who complains to the company’s founder and chief executive officer. Jeff Bezos has a public e-mail address, jeff@amazon.com. Not only does he read many customer complaints, he forwards them to the relevant Amazon employees, with a one-character addition: a question mark.
 
When Amazon employees get a Bezos question mark e-mail, they react as though they’ve discovered a ticking bomb. They’ve typically got a few hours to solve whatever issue the CEO has flagged and prepare a thorough explanation for how it occurred, a response that will be reviewed by a succession of managers before the answer is presented to Bezos himself. Such escalations, as these e-mails are known, are Bezos’s way of ensuring that the customer’s voice is constantly heard inside the company.
 
One of the more memorable escalations occurred in late 2010. It had come to Bezos’s attention that customers who had browsed the lubricants section of Amazon’s sexual wellness category were receiving personalized e-mails pitching a variety of gels and other intimacy facilitators. When the e-mail marketing team received the question mark, they knew the topic was delicate and nervously put together an explanation. Amazon’s direct marketing tool was decentralized, and category managers could generate e-mail campaigns to customers who had looked at certain product categories but did not make purchases. The promotions tended to work; they were responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in Amazon’s annual sales. In the matter of the lubricant e-mail, though, a low-level product manager had overstepped the bounds of propriety. But the marketing team never got the chance to send this explanation. Bezos demanded to meet in person.
 
At Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, Jeff Wilke, the senior vice president for North American retail, Doug Herrington, the vice president for consumables, and Steven Shure, the vice president for worldwide marketing, waited in a conference room until Bezos glided in briskly. He started the meeting with his customary, “Hello, everybody,” and followed with “So, Steve Shure is sending out e-mails about lubricants.”
 
Bezos likes to say that when he’s angry, “just wait five minutes,” and the mood will pass like a tropical squall. Not this time. He remained standing. He locked eyes with Shure, whose division oversaw e-mail marketing. “I want you to shut down the channel,” he said. “We can build a $100 billion company without sending out a single f-‍-‍-‍-‍-‍- e-mail.”
 
 
An animated argument followed. Amazon’s culture is notoriously confrontational, and it begins with Bezos, who believes that truth shakes out when ideas and perspectives are banged against each other. Wilke and his colleagues argued that lubricants were available in supermarkets and drugstores and were not that embarrassing. They also pointed out that Amazon generated a significant volume of sales with such e-mails. Bezos didn’t care; no amount of revenue was worth jeopardizing customer trust. “Who in this room needs to get up and shut down the channel?” he snapped.
 
Eventually, they compromised. E-mail marketing would be terminated for certain categories such as health and personal care. The company also decided to build a central filtering tool to ensure that category managers could no longer promote sensitive products, so matters of etiquette were not subject to personal taste. For books and electronics and everything else Amazon sold, e-mail marketing lived to fight another day.
 
Amazon employees live daily with these kinds of fire drills. “Why are entire teams required to drop everything on a dime to respond to a question mark escalation?” an employee once asked at the company’s biannual meeting held at Seattle’s KeyArena, a basketball coliseum with more than 17,000 seats. “Every anecdote from a customer matters,” Wilke replied. “We research each of them because they tell us something about our processes. It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers. We treat them as precious sources of information.”
 





Stone is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in San Francisco. He is the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, to be published in October by Little, Brown. Follow him on Twitter @BradStone.

The full article at: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-10/cover-trail-the-secrets-of-bezos

lunes, 7 de octubre de 2013

Wharton Knowledge Newsletter

Una de las Escuelas de Negocios más reconocidas (Wharton) de la Univwersidad de Pennsylvania nos hace llegar estos interesantes temas, que pueden leer nuestros lectores y miembros:
1.- Innovación médica contra costos:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/medical-innovation-costs-outweigh-benefits/

2.- Los incentivos hacen crecer la industria fílmica en Latinoamérica:

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/lights-camera-action-government-incentives-latin-american-film-industry/

3.- Creatividad y Construcción de Negocios en la WEB:

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/felicia-day-creativity-building-business-web/

 

jueves, 26 de septiembre de 2013

Small Business : El Estado de Nueva York contra los falsificadores de opiniones en Internet

Marketing

New York State Cracks Down on Fake Online Reviews

                                                                                                             
 
New York State Cracks Down on Fake Online Reviews
 
Every butcher, baker, and candlestick maker who has ever contemplated the dark arts of online reputation management should take note: The seemingly benign practice of posting fake business reviews isn’t so benign these days.
 
A month ago Yelp (YELP), sued a San Diego lawyer for planting fake reviews about his solo practice in California state court. Today, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced a deal with 19 businesses that agreed to stop writing fake reviews and pay more than $350,000 in penalties. Yelp and Schneiderman, powerful players stooping to take on local business owners, each asserted that posting fake reviews violates false advertising laws.
 
Schneiderman’s announcement today about the state’s yearlong investigation is bizarre. State investigators pretended to be the owners of a fictitious Brooklyn yogurt shop in order to nab a handful of search engine optimization companies that posted positive reviews for clients. The attorney general also entered into agreements with an odd assortment of real local businesses, including a teeth-whitening boutique, several laser hair removal spas, a strip club franchise, and a charter bus company.

“This investigation into large-scale, intentional deceit across the Internet tells us that we should approach online reviews with caution,” says Schneiderman in a statement. It shouldn’t have taken a yearlong investigation to figure that out: As the attorney general’s press release points out, a year-old Gartner study predicts that 10 percent to 15 percent of reviews will be fake by 2014.
 
There’s good reason to try to game the system. Research generally indicates that people place faith in consumer reviews, buying from businesses that appear to be well liked. That presents a predicament for such companies as Yelp and Angie’s List (ANGI) that want to be known for providing trustworthy recommendations, as well as government officials charged with protecting consumers.
 
Customers are vulnerable to being duped. Because bogus reviews are effective, lots of businesses are planting fakes. As Schneiderman points out, there’s even a cottage industry of companies that specialize in getting planted reviews past algorithmic filters and employing freelancers from far-flung locales such as Bangladesh and the Philippines to write positive notes.
 
Suing violators is hardly scalable, and computer algorithms are probably a better bet than undercover prosecutors for sniffing out bogus reviews. That doesn’t mean small business owners—many of whom already feel antagonized by local reviews sites—shouldn’t heed the recent lawsuits. Lawsuits alone may never stop companies from posting fake reviews, but no business owner wants to get stung.

Clark is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek covering small business and entrepreneurship.