Business Insight Zone

You may recall that some friends and I put together a panel for this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference, which was held here in Austin back in March. Well, now the votes have all been tallied, and I’m happy to report that our panel made the list of favorite sessions!

Here’s the item from the SXSW site:

The Numbers Are In: 2010 SXSW Interactive Attendees Rate Their Favorite Sessions

Our panel’s average rating was 4.57 on a 1-to-5 scale. I like that score, but I’m sure we can do better. Which reminds me that the Panel Picker process for SXSW 2011 has started …

Yes, I’ve made this joke before, when Visa Inc. was getting set, late in 2007, to dwarf the Blackstone IPO. But it’s worth making again, since the Agricultural Bank of China is now planning an IPO on the Hong Kong and Shanghai exchanges that could be nearly as big as VISA plus Blackstone:

Temasek to invest up to $300 million in AgBank IPO (Reuters)

. . . AgBank’s Shanghai-Hong Kong listing will be the world’s largest ever IPO if it exceeds $21.9 billion. . . .

If AgBank raises more than the $23 billion it hopes, it will be the world’s largest ever IPO, beating out ICBC’s $21.9 billion dual listing in 2006. . . .

What does the AgBank IPO mean? A couple of things:

• It’s a reminder that, even though China’s economy has cooled somewhat, business in China continues to boom.
• Overall, there’s a deeper appetite for IPOs now than there was six, twelve, or eighteen months ago.
• Some companies, because of their wealth (Blackstone), their name recognition (Google), or both (Visa) can “make their own weather” in the IPO markets — forging ahead even when broader conditions aren’t ideal for run-of-the-mill offerings. Given its vast scale and deep pockets, AgBank belongs in that category.

Now all we have to do is pop some popcorn, sit back, and see how investors react to the AgBank offering when it happens in early July.

It’s unmistakably summer here in Texas. But anytime is a good time for spring cleaning, in my book. This week I’ve found myself clearing out all kinds of junk things from the many trouble spots where information / documents / ephemera tend to gather:

• Computer desktops (work PC + my laptop);
• Inboxes (work, personal, Twitter DMs, LinkedIn invitations, Facebook messages, etc.);
• The file stand on the desk in my office;
• The stack of “to be looked at” papers on my desk at home;
• Browser bookmarks (Firefox and Chrome);
• The nightstand where I put books and magazines; and
• Whatever other corners I’m forgetting.

Here’s the thing: I’m lazy. Well, no, I work very hard in some ways, but I can be lazy about filtering out information when it first comes to my attention. I download a white paper, bookmark an article, set aside a magazine — thinking, of course, that I’ll get to it “later.” (Believing in the myth that we’ll have more time later is, by the way, a known cognitive bias wired into the human brain.) That particular type of “later” never comes . . . so things pile up.

Time to unpile them. Here’s the simplest sorting system possible:

• Big Deal — This is stuff that actually moves some kind of needle: Does it earn you money? Does it teach you something you desperately need to know? Does it solve some Big Problem in your life? Is it a message from someone important to you? Then do it.
• No Big Deal — Everything else. Throw this stuff away without ceremony. Or, if you can’t stand to, just file it.

Yes, I’m being cursory, but that’s on purpose. It’s too easy, otherwise, to get mired in the many trivial details that assault us, rather than focusing on the few things that actually move us ahead.

Once you’ve made the Big Deal / No Big Deal parse, then you can do the other smart stuff — delegating as appropriate, filing efficiently, building your task lists, executing against your larger plans. But if you’re anything like me, all of that will go much smoother once you’ve cleared the decks of all the junk.

One more tip, borrowed from “The Cult of Done Manifesto”:

Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

So, don’t worry about all the “interesting” things you’ve collected over the past several days / weeks / months / presidential administrations. Just focus on what’s important now . . . and toss the rest.

Like I’m doing now.

What do you do to keep the clutter from piling up? And how often do you do “spring cleaning”?

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Related post:

• “In economic terms, inventories represent waste.”

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Photo by cogdogblog.

It’s harder when — like right now — the indicators are all over the place.

Not a day goes by but what I see good-news headlines. Not a day goes by without bad-news headlines. In many cases, the headlines are covering different aspects of the same thing — housing, employment, the European economy, the U.S. economy, the Chinese economy, et cetera.

That’s because . . . economies are complicated, and even more so now than during the all the previous periods of our careers.

This means that decisions are more fraught. There are more risks, known and unknown, that ideally we’d be able to factor into every decision.

This doesn’t mean that we can stop making decisions, or that we can avoid risks.

Don’t lose heart, folks. Things are better than they were a year ago, mostly. And you have better tools to inform your business decisions (*cough* Hoover’s *cough*) than ever before.

Get the information you need. Ask smart questions. But then ACT.

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Photo by My Buffo, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

For this post, I’m deferring to Ryan Caione, a long-time Hoover’s editor who knows the financial industry like the back of his hand. Here are Ryan’s thoughts on the U.S. IPO market as it shaped up in May:

Despite the Dow’s worst May in seven decades, companies continue to file for IPOs apace.  During the month, 23 companies applied to go public, a number comparable to April and March, which 30 and 22 companies filed for IPOs.  In turn, those monthly figures eclipse the number of companies (12) that went public during the entire second quarter of 2009, when the IPO market was just beginning to stir from its recession-driven slumber.

Nonetheless, the IPO market remains notable mainly for volume rather than prominence. Offerings of more than $500 million are still relatively rare, as only the May filings from hospital giant HCA ($4.6 billion) and Toys “R” Us ($800 million) are slated to breach the half-billion mark.

There are definitely more companies in the IPO pool, but few seem willing to make a big splash.

What do you think — is the IPO market ready for a full recovery?

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Photo by Per Ola Wiberg.