How To Think About A Presentation

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Wed, 02 May 2007 14:53:27 GMT

My friend and colleague Sean Murphy, who is a great synthesizer and sensemaker, came up with an excellent presentation idea a while back. He’s done this a few times now and if you’re in the San Jose/Silicon Valley area and have a chance to see Sean’s “12 Books for the Busy CEO” you should do so. Links to his next session is below:

Crucial Marketing Concepts for Consultants @ PATCA May 10
I will be presenting a revised and improved version of the “12 Books for the Busy CEO” presentation on Thursday May 10 at 6pm at the PATCA monthly dinner at the Embassy SuitesÂ Santa Clara - Silicon ValleyÂ onÂ 2885 Lakeside DriveÂ in Santa Clara.

I will cover a dozen books and offer a synthesis of the key marketing concepts (this is not a sequence of twelve book reports) that they offer. I will have an articleÂ on crucial marketing concepts that I will give out for attendees. There is good content here for entrepreneurs, whether they are starting out as consultants or embedding their expertise in software or a SaaS offering.

Spend an hour and leave with a summary of key marketing insights and some rules of thumb for successful innovation in Silicon Valley. You may even identify one or two books that you haven’t read that will be worth your time. IÂ will cover a dozenÂ books that form the basis for conventional wisdom on marketing in Silicon Valley. They provide the terms, the metaphors, the parables–in short the language–that successful high technology firms use to develop their plans and monitor their execution. Some of these books are old–most have stood the test of time, which in Valley years is a decade or more–but still provide succinct guidelines for new product introduction and sales.

I want to thank Mark Duncan for helping us turn a set of black and white PowerPoint slides that were primarily text bullets into a colorful and illustration rich article.

Rip-off 101: How Textbook Industry Manipulates Prices

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 00:15:08 GMT

A captive audience, naked price manipulation, over-reaching copyright laws, an apathetic education bureaucracy, and a student body that is rapidly losing respect for big corporations who abuse the market have created new tensions for the textbook publishing industry. Right now, publishers have a cushy, protected, contrived environment that they will fight to maintain, but students and consumer advocates are starting to fight back.

Oligopoly Watch author Steve Hannaford recently addressed the state of the textbook industry and the inherent issues of price fixing and consumer abuse now that only a few suppliers remain:

Textbook prices

College students across the US have just been hit with sticker shock. No, not from rises in tuition at private and public universities alike, though that is bad enough. The shock comes at the bookstore, where textbooks in most subjects now cost hundreds of dollars, ratcheted up year after year.

We don't often talk about naked price manipulation by oligopolies on this site, but this is a clear case of a captive audience and a few publishers that have "agreed" silently to raise prices. That's the opinion of Yale law professor Ian Ayres, writing in the New York Times (Just What the Professor Ordered, 9/16/2005). He quotes a government report that states that textbook prices have risen at double the rate of inflation. This the report attributes to the high cost of adding supportive CD and online materials to college texts.

But that same government report, according to Ayres. The real problem is the lack of price competition. A series of mergers has ensured that although there are hundreds of textbooks to choose from, the five largest publishers control 80 percent of the market The competitors don't need a secret meeting; they just look at others' rising prices and adjust them upward in return.

Strong corroborating evidence comes from a recent report by CALPIRG, the California Public Interest Research Group Rip-off 101: How The Current Practices of the Textbook Industry Drive Up The Costs Of College Textbooks (link via Dave Pollard via Stephen Downes) was based on a survey of the most widely assigned textbooks in the fall of 2003 at 10 public colleges and universities in California and Oregon. Student volunteers and staff also interviewed 156 faculty and 521 students about the cost of textbooks and their purchasing practices. Key findings from the survey include:

Student textbook expenditures have risen 24% since the 1996/1997 school year
Textbook expenditures are now equal to almost 20 percent of the average tuition and fees for in-state students at public four-year colleges nationwide
Half of all textbooks now come bundled, or shrink-wrapped with additional instructional materials such as CD-ROMs and workbooks. Students rarely have the option of buying the textbook a la carte or without additional materials
Sixty-five (65) percent of faculty rarely or never use the bundled materials in their courses
Seventy-six (76) percent of faculty report that the new editions they use are justified never to half the time. Forty (40) percent of faculty report that the new editions are rarely to never justified

The inclusion of value-added materials such as CDs and workbooks is identified as a major factor in rising costs. But the study finds no demand for these materials from either students or faculty. Yet publishers continue with claims these materials are necessary to to attract students and be competitive. Again from Oligopoly Watch:

The companies try to justify higher prices, as reported in a Washington Post article (Textbook Prices on the Rise", 9/18/2004):

The $3.4 billion-a-year higher-education publishing industry says that it must keep its material current to win schools' support and that prices are competitive in each market. Industry officials defend new editions churned out by major higher-education publishers Thomson Learning, Pearson Education and McGraw-Hill. They argue that texts must be continually modernized if publishers want to keep the attention of today's college students, who are used to the graphics and interactivity of the Internet.

Though that does not explain why the same companies sell textbooks at lower prices in other countries.

Ayres points out the parallels between the cost of textbooks and those of prescription drugs, where the person "prescribing" has no need to pay for the texts/drugs and may not even be aware of their costs. The consumer, who does pay, is given no choice.

This parallel between the pharmaceutical and textbook publishing industries is important, with a key difference. In medicine there is a massive layer of intermediating healthcare managers that have grown to balance the market power of the pharmaceutical makers. Doctors may not know what your medicine costs, but your insurer does and works to drive that cost down.

No such intermediary exists in education, and the entire burden falls to students, who have no representation in the process. Publishers are completely insulated from the people who have to pay them, creating a perfectly inelastic market where demand is unaffected by price. This sort of artificial environment is a gold mine for publishers, and ripe for consumer abuse and anti-competitive behavior.

The first of the CALPIRG policy recommendations is to inform professors of the cost of textbooks during their selection process, force publishers to disclose full pricing for all products, and require unbundling of value-added extras. Unbelievably, none of this happens today. The publishers create an artificial scarcity of information that allows them to dictate market conditions rather than respond to them. The university bureaucracies offer little resistance, exposing how disconnected they have become from their customers. In the past part of this financial pressure was mitigated by liberal use of photocopies. Professors would order photocopies of small, but key, portions of textbooks for their course paks. But a full frontal assault on copyright and Fair Use by publishers, and intellectual property holders everywhere, all but eliminated this practice.

Abandoned by university leaders, students have taken matters into their own hands and are finding innovative, affordable ways to make their own full-text versions of books. Over at The Student Tablet PC blog there is a wealth of information on setting up your own scanning and OCR process. Everything from what hardware and software to buy to ideas on annotation, file formats, and cataloging. Its not much of a stretch to imagine a substantial black market popping up in scanned, annotated electronic books created by students. Theyve already shown a complete disregard for interests of record labels selling overpriced CDs. It seems unlikely that textbook publishers will get any more respect.

b.cognosco

How To Think About A Presentation

Crucial Marketing Concepts for Consultants @ PATCA May 10

Rip-off 101: How Textbook Industry Manipulates Prices

Textbook prices