Category: Big Business

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Unrequired Reading: 2007 Year-End Edition

As promised — somewhat spur-of-the-moment-ly — here’s a collection of posts that I’ve been holding onto for a while. I wanted to write about each one in more depth, but the last few months have been so busy that I simply haven’t been able to give them the attention I think they deserve.

I think one of the reasons I didn’t write about some of these is that they would’ve led me into the familiar and boring territory of my failures as a book-publisher and as a writer. When I’m work-stressed and in need of a break, I don’t tend to think, “Maybe some public self-flagellation will make me feel better!”

In that spirit, here’s the last batch of Unrequired Reading for 2007! (If you want more, go plunder the Unrequired Reading archives!)

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A new personal best/worst!

Thanks, federal government and state of New Jersey! I didn’t really want the other FORTY-FOUR PERCENT of my holiday bonus and online sales commission anyway!

Maybe in another year or two you can take more than half of my cash!

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Unrequired Reading: Dec. 21, 2007

The year-end 400+ page issue is finished at last! This one is dedicated to QuarkXpress, the layout program that includes such features as “This file cannot be opened by this version of QuarkXpress” and “Why would we bother making our font-handling system compatible with Mac? It’s not like the Mac is a computer of choice in the publishing industry!”

Time to embarrass myself and others at our office holiday party!

Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Dec. 21, 2007”

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Changents

David Byrne on the economics of the music industry:

Of course, not everyone is as smart as those nerdy Radiohead boys. Pete Doherty probably should not be handed the steering wheel.

Andrew Wylie on the economics of the literary publishing industry:

Um, it’s a very small business, there’s not that tremendous interest available at any given time, so people are interested competitively in what you have, especially if you’re only looking at quality. If you’re playing a higher-risk game, being in the business of quality is a fairly low-risk game if you do it right. The high-risk game is the commercial end. It’s high-risk for everybody, because if it doesn’t work, there’s a tremendous loss to be made—a loss of face, a loss of money. With work of quality, if you don’t make your money back right away, you will over time anyway. So I think we’re the soft and gentle side of the business. We’re the affordable shop in the industry. What we’re selling is going to earn out sooner or later, anyway.

Michael Lewis (a prof at WashU) on the economics of baseball:

The problem is that the teams receiving [revenue-sharing] payments have come to use them as a primary source of income — rather than to build winning teams. The most extreme example has been the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. In 2006, this team had a payroll of about $35 million, $42 million less than the 2006 league average. Not surprisingly, it won only 38 percent of its games and filled less than 40 percent of its seats for home games. It also collected more than $30 million in revenue-sharing transfers. This past season, the team reduced its payroll to $24 million and had about the same level of success. [. . .] The problem is that transfers are based on local revenues. Teams that receive money are encouraged to invest it in their payrolls. But if a team actually attracts fans by fielding a winning team, its revenue-sharing receipts will be reduced.

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Da boom

Yesterday was one of Those Days. I refer to them as “Blow Up The Outside World Days,” since I usually remark, “I will kill everyone on the planet,” at least three or four times.

They don’t happen very often; in this instance, it’s a function of getting our annual year-end issue ready for production. Last year’s book weighed in at 406 pages, and this year’s will be pretty close to that. My associate editor and I have to stay on top of 110 companies that are running profiles in first half of the issue, and the 450+ companies that are participating in the contract services directory. She’s been doing a great job on the profiles, but it can still be a monster to get this issue laid out, since the companies run alphabetically and a few companies — including one that begins with a “B” — is still on the fence about actually running a profile in this ish, about two weeks after the deadline.

I had a few ugly exchanges with people yesterday, and had to be the douchebag decision-maker. I also spent a lot of time muttering in a self-pitying sorta way. It’s not productive, but hey.

Anyway, the next two days are going to be spent laying out that directory, so don’t expect a lot of posting. I do have some Unrequired Reading together, so at least you VM junkies have something to look forward to!

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What am I, a farmer?

Last night, I was writing to a buddy about how tired I was from my autumn biz-travel schedule. I think I was attempting to elicit sympathy for going to Milan, Las Vegas and San Diego over the course of 6 weeks. “Boy, you think you’ve got it tough. . .”

In that spirit, I won’t even try to express any sort of discomfort over tonight’s gala in NYC. It’s a dinner/dance benefit event for Just One Break, an employment service for people with disabilities. Pfizer’s outgoing R&D chief is one of the honorees, and one of my pals at that company kindly invited me and my wife. (Thanks, Mak!)

I’m suspicious that this is just a plot by my (day job) readership to find out exactly what sorta woman would consent to spend the rest of her life married to me, so I’m thinking of asking Amy to wear a burka to the event.

I, meanwhile, am wrestling with the concept of “black tie optional.” I don’t think that covers leather chaps and a giant sombrero, so it looks like I’ll have to stop off at the dry cleaner and ransom my nice black suit.