Taken in Morro Bay, Ca. This photo is so good that it has already lost me a photo contest. But I like it. Click for a little better view.

I don’t know where I heard or saw this originally, but in my semi-regular bill paying/junk shredding/paper filing, I found a post it note on which I at some point wrote the following:

Fundamental Theorem of UI:
Value > Pain = Conversion

So think about that.

Not long ago, I wrote about what I call “The New Business” in a series of articles arguing, essentially, that if businesses want to “win” they need to differentiate based on something other than price, location, or local hegemony due to the flattening of barriers to entry. The series was both wishful and (hopefully) prophetic.

It was probably also nothing new. The series was born of a confluence of ideas, both mine and others’. I find it highly unlikely that the output of said confluence is unique to me.

Though I do my utmost in the situation I find myself, I am largely powerless to leverage the ideas, which leads me to question the validity of my points; a lot of businesses make money by being big, stupid, and intractable. Am I full of crap?

I don’t think so for a few reasons:

• First, “good” times mask a lot of problems. People and businesses tend to make bad decisions even if the cost is high so long as it is not painful. For example, in much of the United States little thought, if any, is given to using land efficiently: it is not a scarce enough resource for most people to consider how widely it is misused. If the cost associated with land misuse was similar to the cost of losing one’s house to foreclosure, our farm production, housing and commercial development would be quite different.
• Second, the Old Business culture is very entrenched in many industries and parts of the country. Like any movement of dissension, the status quo can circle the wagons and are already doing so to the degree business, employee, and consumer cultures allow it. The wagons are circled in all the “traditional business” places but in the predictive edges, change has already come.
• Third, it occurred to me in writing this article that this “New Business” has some structural similarities to the pre-industrial, small-town Norman Rockwell business climate. Personal service was the norm because your customers were your neighbors. That time may be an idealized construct–I haven’t done the research to know–but either way, there is an expressed desire for that feeling merged with the convenience and pricing a WalMart provides. In this Brave New World, The New Business can provide both price and service with a narrow scale.
• Finally, as has been plainly demonstrated in the last six months, bad decisions (and good ones as well I suppose) can have a very long fuse.

So economic growth, a large infrastructure and a lot of capital make it difficult for Circuit City to realize they aren’t a viable business. Or more accurately, that opening stores everywhere Best Buy does with the same products, pricing, experience and (lack of) employee culture is not a viable business model.

So this follow up is really an unprovoked defense (since there was no feedback at all) of my first articles on those grounds.In the first article in my “The New Business” series I said a business also needed a story for the employees. More on that soon.