Death spiral
sethgodin.typepad.com
Death spiral
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: Death spiral
#2extending your cash flow runway does not have to mean degrading your product
Re: Death spiral
#3extending your cash flow runway does not have to mean degrading your product
After reading the article I felt myself thinking "meditation is far easier than field leadership, Mr. Godin", but he does have a point. To his defense, I would say that the first indicator of growth is found in your own mind. If you think you're headed for better things, none of these difficult times will matter; you would still run your business, frugaly of course, but you would also have that life-giving spark, the hope necessary to see far into the future. I would say take his positive energy and run with it!
Heh, listen to me, meditating.
Re: Death spiral
#4Cost cutting can be an effective strategy when all your competitors are struggling as well. The game becomes one of survival, not of growth. Survivors in a market receive a large discrete boost when their competitors fail.
Re: Death spiral
#5Cost cutting can be an effective strategy when all your competitors are struggling as well. The game becomes one of survival, not of growth. Survivors in a market receive a large discrete boost when their competitors fail.
I would agree if all things were otherwise static, but instead, one of your smart competitors are going to actually change (improve) how they conduct business and make your sliderule shop obsolete. Just because the economy is sluggish doesn't mean ideas are.
"Desperation is the mother of all invention" - somebody profound.
Re: Death spiral
#6Cost cutting can be an effective strategy when all your competitors are struggling as well. The game becomes one of survival, not of growth. Survivors in a market receive a large discrete boost when their competitors fail.
Yeah but if you're a local newspaper (which is what this post makes me think of), your competition isn't the other local papers (if there are any). It's Craigslist, Google, etc. You aren't going to beat them because they aren't playing the same game as you. Being the last local paper standing isn't going to win you anything.
Re: Death spiral
#7To summarize, if your business is in a positive-feedback loop make sure it's one that's going up and not down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback
Re: Death spiral
#8Newspapers should never have disbanded their R & D Departments...
Re: Death spiral
#9Why do costs get created in a company? Generally it seems that we create a cost because we think it will result in revenue greater than that cost or because we think that cost will prevent some other larger cost (such as fines from the gov't).
I'm all for efficiency and maximizing the revenue we gain from each expense but we've still gotta realize that when we cut costs, we're losing something that was intended to generate revenue.
I've seen this happen in a large company where they cut a ton of expenses thinking they are going to be profitable (and they are in the very short term) but all those expenses were there for a reason. A few months later, revenue drops like a brick.
Re: Death spiral
#10I wonder what prompted this.