Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

If you have access to Bloomberg TV, you can see me talking about the IPO market around 9:40 Central time this morning. I’ll be drawing heavily from the Hoover’s IPO Scorecard we issued last week.

Wish me luck!

UPDATE, after the fact: The spot went pretty well, I thought, although it seems that I’m much more bearish on prospects for the IPO market than Monica Bertran is.

Haven’t been able to find online video of the spot so far, but I’ll post it if I do.

Tell me, folks, what can I do for YOU?

If you’ve spent any time here, you know that I’m prone to talk about the world of work from my own perspective — which is certainly slanted in favor of my own priorities and interests. I hope that’s part of what brings you back for more.

But beyond that, I want to make sure I’m talking about topics that interest YOU. So, if you’d be so kind, please leave a comment here to tell me what YOU would like me to address, whether that means a single topic, a major theme of business, or what-have-you.

For more thoughts on my approach to this blog, see this recent post:

• The nature of this beast.

Thanks for your feedback!

(Photo by hashmil.)

A happy Monday morning to you, dear readers. I hope this week will treat you well.

In case you’re burning to know my opinion on some matter affecting the business world, let me help your week to go along more swimmingly by extending this offer: Please tell me what you’d like to see written up here, and I’ll oblige if I can.

For a general-purpose firestarter, see the previous post, which lays out this blog’s central themes. Or just graze around to see what interests you. Or just fire off a question ripped from the headlines. You know — suit yourself.

(Image via mybeatles. See how I flatter us both on a dreary Monday in Austin? You get to be the sovereign, I get to be the Beatles. It’s fun to pretend . . .)

More than 500 posts along in the life of this blog, my ideas of what it can achieve are coming together better than ever. With this post, please let me share some of those ideas with you — and solicit your own ideas in return.

Hoover’s covers all sorts of companies — literally, every single sort of legitimate enterprise — and I’ve been given the luxury of a very wide remit by the deeply wise powers-that-be here. (Did I mention that they’re deeply wise, my bosses? O, how I esteem them!)* So in theory I can talk about anything.

If you’ve been reading this blog very long, you’ll know that indeed the conversation has ranged widely across industries, across geographies, across concepts. But the more I sit and think about what value I can bring to your busy day, the more I’m convinced that my real “beat” lies at the intersection of:

• human psychology and
• prevailing commercial modes of operation.

Let me explain: We read all the time about how a deal is going down, about a new policy or piece of legislation, about an executive who’s making waves, about a company or an industry in ascent or decline. And so on. You can be pretty sure that there will be another deal, policy, executive, company, or industry to talk about tomorrow. My mates in the Hoover’s editorial department will make sure that we stay all over that like we always have, and some of them will write up their thoughts on the Bizmology blog (which you’d do well to check out, if you haven’t already).

That’s our stock in trade, and we do it better than anyone else, if I do say so myself. But while Hoover’s as a whole continues to excel at that, what can li’l ol’ me offer as icing on the cake? How about a bigger picture? Something for the longer term? Something that straddles companies and industries and geographies and eras? Something to help you think beyond the here-and-now? That’s what I want to provide.

My belief is that many of the dumb things we see in the business news every day are rooted in basic (or not-so-basic) principles of human thought — the sorts of hangups and blind spots and leanings that affect even the most brilliant among us. Conversely, many of the successes I see come from human beings who remember that business is a human endeavor, and that they should watch out for their own foibles and irrationalities as they make decisions and press ahead in their commercial relations.

In part my focus is an effort to make a virtue of necessity. I love me some nitty-gritty details, and I love my daily swims in the ocean of news and information, but at heart I’m a big-picture thinker, and my fascination for history and for psychology means that I’m forever trying to put the business affairs of today into those larger contexts.

It doesn’t always work — and I’m counting on you to tell me when it doesn’t. Sometimes a simple and direct comment on the latest news is welcome — and I’m counting on you to tell me when it is. But over the long haul, I believe that the best thing I can do for you is to work from my own (unique? oddball?) perspective to suggest ways that current happenings in the business world reflect deeper human realities that will affect the way you do business forever.

This gets all the more interesting because of enormous ongoing trends, including:

• radically increased interconnections across global economies;
• immense geopolitical challenges;
• the threat of broad-scale environmental degradation in our lifetimes; and
• wave upon wave of new tools and media that will continue to unsettle prior arrangements for doing business.

In other words, we have plenty to talk about. I look forward to what comes next in this conversation. And above all, I look forward to learning what only you can teach me.

A-a-and away we go!

~

* I lay it on so thick because I’m a kidder. In all seriousness, this is the best place I’ve ever worked, and for me it just gets better over time.

After a not-too-horrible wait in line for credentials, I’m up and running inside the Austin Convention Center, looking forward to some light festivities this evening before the panels etc. get started tomorrow.

If you see me around the conference, please stop me to say Hi. If you’d like to meet me at SXSW, drop me an e-mail at twalker AT hoovers DOT com or tweet me at Twalk.

(Photo of an ocean of SXSW swag bags by Richard Moross.)

Well, actually I’ve just emerged from the sick ward of my house. My apologies for suspending posts without warning over the past few days, but I’ve been waylaid by the same flu (or “flu” — we tend to use the term loosely) that has passed through the Hoover’s HQ like a scourge.

The good news is, unlike all too many companies, Hoover’s parent company Dun & Bradstreet has one of the most enlightened sick-leave policies you can imagine. I’ll spare you the details and summarize the policy like this: if you’re too sick to work, stay home. When you’re better, come in. If you’re really sick — such that you’re going to miss more than several days — let’s talk.

A refreshing dose of humanity in an unfeeling corporate world, eh? It’s amazing what a little common sense can do. I think Cali and Jody would be proud.

(Photo by scol22.)

Look over to the “Worth Reading” section in the sidebar on the right and you’ll see a set of bullet points accompanied by headlines. Those links will take you to stories that I’ve bookmarked using the service del.icio.us.

When I bookmark stories — sometimes with their original headlines, sometimes with titles of my own device — I usually take a second or two with the del.icio.us interface to write a short description or bit of context to accompany the link. So, if you want to know my thumbnail opinion on any of the stories I mark, feel free to bookmark my del.icio.us page. (There’s also an RSS feed at the bottom of that page, if you prefer.)

The rationale behind this: Every day I encounter stories that are interesting, but that don’t warrant a full post from me. This allows me to share some of these stories with you less formally — and the slick tools of del.icio.us make it easy for me to do this in just a few seconds.

As always, your feedback is welcome.

What, you may ask, does a deceased experimentalist Nobel laureate for Literature have to do with succeeding in business? Nothing except for the message embodied in his famous words:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This brings to mind another quote — one more obviously connected to modern business, since it comes from Michael Bloomberg’s business memoir:

“We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version #5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months.”

“Fail faster, try again,” is good advice regardless, but we’re taking it especially seriously here at the BIZ blog. Now that we have several months under our belt, we’re beginning to see what works and what doesn’t, and we’re sharpening our appetite for ongoing improvements.  Expect more improvements — and appeals for your feedback — in the weeks to come.

So, narrow application of the Beckett/Bloomberg dictum: better blogging here.

Broader application: Well, . . . why don’t you tell me? What’s the best example you know of people embracing the wisdom to “Fail better”?

[Hat tip to Tom Peters for the Bloomberg quote.]

Folks: Next Friday — February 1 — I’ll be speaking as part of the final panel session at the Social Networking Conference in Miami. For more information, see this page. (My session is listed waaaaay down at the bottom.)

Please let me know if you’ll attend. I always like meeting my readers!

What follows is a shameless plug for some hard work my colleagues have been doing:

Check out the new look of Hoover’s free company profiles — what we call 360° company information. This new 360° view gives you everything you’re used to seeing in a Hoover’s profiles — including our exclusive editorial analysis — but it’s reconfigured for ease of reading, and to allow room for even more good content — including your own discussions.

For a sample of what I’m talking about, check out this annotated example page that shows our reformatted record on General Electric. Since the 360° view has been implemented across our database, you can play with it for any of our records. Here are a few links to get you started:

• Ford Motor Company
• Berkshire Hathaway
• Whole Foods Market
• Royal Dutch Shell

Enjoy — and please feel free to leave feedback.