Your Logo makes me Barf

I was just surfing around brandlife.es website and couldn't help noticing this post!

It seems like a group of designers from the state of Missouri (USA) had the same idea as we did and started to fight against bad logo design. The result is that it isn't so hard to find examples...

There was no subtilty needed to communicate the message: they named their website www.yourlogomakesmebarf.com!

The objective is to give “funny examples of what happens if a non-qualified person (the friend of your neighbour's uncle for instance) designs your company logo."

El Libro Negro del Emprendedor

El autor lo pone de una manera original en su preliminar. Fernando Trías de Bes tecleó un día en Google "factores claves de éxito" y la búsqueda arrojó 20.900 entradas. Luego tecleó "factores claves de fracaso" y obtuvo nada más y nada menos que... 2 entradas!
Total que analisar el fracaso ocupa solamente un 0,02% de las estanterias de las librerias y de las búsquedas de Google.

Sin perderse en temas demasiado técnicos (de hecho no hay un solo gráfico en este libro) el autor me ha dado unas horas de lectura muy interesantes. Inteligente la estructura que sigue, creando 14 asaltos al mejor estilo del boxeo comparando el acto de emprender com subirse a un ring para un combate. Se terminamos los 14 asaltos de pié, o sea, se todo los "factores críticos de fracaso" no nos hicieren daño, estaremos listos para emprender y tirar por delante con nuestro proyecto.

Es un libro que puede ser inspirador o desmotivador, pero que sea como sea el resultado final te ha orientado para la toma de decisiones.

Me quedo con una frase de uno de los emprendedores entrevistados por el autor, Xavier Gabriel, fundador de La Bruixa d'Or: "Fracasar no es perder. Es no haberlo intentado."


Review de Casa del Libro:
Ser emprendedor constituye una postura vital, una forma de enfrentarse al mundo que implica disfrutar con la incertidumbre y la inseguridad de qué sucederá mañana. No existen ideas brillantes que, por sí solas, den lugar a negocios redondos: lo esencial es cómo un concepto se pone en práctica. Sin embargo el 90 % de las iniciativas fracasan antes de cuatro años y sólo el 3% de los manuales de empresa se dedican a explicar por qué. De ahí la relevancia de este libro. Fernando Trías de Bes, coautor de La buena suerte, analiza los factores clave del fracaso y define los rasgos que debe reunir un verdadero emprendedor: motivación y talento para ver algo especial en una idea que puede que otros ya conozcan. Pero, por encima de todo, es necesario disponer de un espíritu luchador: no fracasan las ideas, sino son las ilusiones las que se dejan vencer por falta de cintura, imaginación y flexibilidad para afrontar imprevistos.

If you want to badmouth someone, do it right

The Labour party in the UK has found itself in the middle of huge controversy due to the discovery of an email sent by one senior official, Damian McBride, to a blog associated with the party. This email apparently contained ideas to fabricate stories with false rumours about the opposition, including:

- That the opposition leader, David Cameron, had a sexually transmited disease (David Cameron is well know for his family values and one of his sons, who was severely disabled, died recently).

- That several embarassing photographs showing opposition Shadow Chancellor (a sort of opposition finance minister in the UK) existed and were about to be published (Osborne was photographed with a prostitute in 2005). These were said to include pictures of him "posing in a bra, knickers and suspenders" and "with his face 'blacked up'"

Now, my only comment is this: how stupid do you have to be to send these ideas to a mailing list of several people, and to actually leave these things in writing in the first place?!? We all know that politics is not exactly a clean game, and most likely all parties play as dirty as this or more. It is also likely that the  newspaper industry helps them spread unfounded rumours because it's good business, and the bloggers get more visits to their biased pages. But this was amateurish! What happened to having a quiet drink in an empty pub, writing the ideas down in a napkin and then burning it down? Didn't any of these muppets watch Mission Impossible and learnt from the "this message will self-distruct in 5 seconds" approach? Amateurs!

Hoover Promo Disaster

So promo actions are one of the ways to make your product more attractive to the consumer, right? Increasing the value you give him is a nice idea, so you will attract more customers or at least make them buy more of your product, thus your revenues and profits will increase! Yep! After all, the more you sell, the more money your company gets! But just make sure you don't do it like Hoover in the UK, in the nineties...

In 1992, Hoover decided to launch an incredible eye-opener promotion, with a clear aim – to drive up sales, minimizing a too expensive inventory. If you bought €100 on Hoover’s appliances (remember the vacuum cleaners?), you would receive 2 free return flight tickets to Europe. It was a generous offer! And the sales results were extremely positive!

So… they decided to run it a second time – but not exactly the same way, after all, one needs to innovate. This time you would have to expend £150, but you would receive 2 free return tickets to the US! Great! Genious! So much, that some say that about a third of all british households bought £150 on Hoovers appliances, and demanded their free tickets…

Lets face it! This would not be a problem… unless Hoover didn’t do their financial homework right – and guess? Hoover was giving more value to the consumer that they could afford – they were not extracting enough value from each sale to pay for the prize they were offering!

So, this a good example of how a promotion can be a finantial disaster. Hoover in the UK was driven to the verge of bankruptcy due to this promo and almost their entire Board had to resign. Basically, this lesson number one – make sure that you are generating enough value out of a promotion to meet your targets (and make sure that it pays off)! But if you think we are done… guess, we have a second lesson to learn from this promotional disaster – just check the paragraph to see what Hoover did next…

Hoover realized too late that they were running a disastrous action – and they decided to go off air and stop adverstising it But the problem was that Hoover made the decision that they couldn’t afford the promo – and so they decided to start raising difficulties and hurdles to the consumers who bought £150 off their products so they couldn’t ‘cash’ the 2 free return flight tickets they were entitled to! It was a PR disaster! The Hoover Holyday Pressure Group was started, and they numbered several thousand angry customers who brought the issue to the Parliament and to Hoover’s ‘mother-house’ HQs in the US… Some disgruntled consumers even stole Hoover’s company vans, as retaliation for the problems they were facing and the feeling they were cheated! The UK consumer would take a long time to forget about Hoover brand…

Depressing mistakes

I recently read this book by Paul Krugman that revisits all the mistakes that lead us to the present economic crisis. I will let you discover the book for yourself, including all the errors of Alan Greenspam, the IMF, and dumb politicians across the world, but my personal favourite is this quote from the depths of the Great Depression, by former US Secretary of Treasure Andrew Mellon: "Liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate... purge the rottenness out of the system".

This quote by a senior state official is credited as part of the reason why the recession turned into a depression in the 30's. Can you imagine today's politicians saying "Close down every business that is not doing well?". No mather how much we dislike the bank rescues that took place a little bit everywhere across the world, at least we seem to have learned something from past mistakes.

The Ten Commandments for Business Failure

Através deste livro, Donald R. Keough sustenta que nem todos os falhanços empresariais se devem a erros estratégicos, mas sim que o falhanço real está nas pessoas que lideram as empresas.
Depois de mais de 6 décadas no mundo empresarial (Keough tem 81 anos), em grandes empresas multinacionais como a Coca-Cola, o autor formula a teoria que, aprendendo com os erros, se pode chegar a ser um perdedor "com muito êxito".


Review from Booklist
Keough, a distinguished corporate executive, offers a perspective on failure that is especially applicable to leaders who have attained some degree of success. With a foreword by his longtime friend and associate Warren Buffett, the renowned investor, the author presents a chapter on each of his 10 commandments for failure and adds a bonus chapter about how losing passion for work and for life is a certain route to disaster. His failure commandments include stop taking risks; be inflexible; isolate yourself; assume infallibility; play the game close to the foul line (which offers thoughtful commentary on ethics); don’t take time to think; put all your faith in outside consultants; love your bureaucracy; send mixed messages; and be afraid of the future. Keough’s book is rich with examples of failure, and he gives advice on how to recover from mistakes while learning from them and moving ahead. This is an excellent book with valuable insight for corporate executives and those aspiring to corporate leadership.
Mary Whaley