Jason Kottke writes on: My business influences

As you may have noticed by reading the site in the past year, I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about companies…how they succeed, why they fail, how to approach them from a holistic sense so they make sense on a human scale and not just from a business perspective, that sort of thing. In deciding to start my own little company of one, here are a few things I’ve run across that have influenced how I’m approaching it.

…

I don’t have many heroes, but Craig Newmark is definitely one of them. He’s had offers to sell craigslist for millions of dollars, many offers from VCs, he could charge for all listings on the site, or he could fill the site with advertising, but this is what he wants out of craigslist (via Wired): “get yourself a comfortable living, then do a little something to change the world”. The many articles I’ve read about Craig have really reinforced for me that you need to let your values drive business decisions and not the other way around.

I’ve mentioned this a few times on the site before, but Ludicorp, the makers of Flickr, has the one of the best quotes about business I’ve ever read on their about page. It’s an excerpt from Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores & Hubert Dreyfus:

Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

…

Dave Eggers gets a lot of crap, but I like the way he’s trying to run McSweeney’s:

But the way that McSweeney’s is run is, “Can there be a way that what they call mid-list authors, people who don’t sell in the Danielle Steel category, can still have an audience and still make a living?” McSweeney’s has very little overhead, to the degree that we can sell 6,000 copies of somebody’s book, and he can still get a decent amount of money, because he’s getting more per book because of the low overhead. That’s still our goal. I was just sort of going along with the same business model, like, “If we sell 50,000 copies, then everyone will do fine, and life will stay quiet.”

Not trying to take over the world, just doing something in balance with the lives of everyone concerned.

…

There are lots more people other there doing wonderful things with their business lives (37signals, the independent Mac developers like Ranchero, Delicious Monster, and Panic, etc.) but that’s enough for now.

Only just come across this, from The Guardian’s Newsblog. Bizarre…

Slough Tory sacked

Assiduous readers may recall our story revealing that the Conservatives’ prospective parliamentary candidate for Slough, Adrian Hilton, believed the EU was part of a Catholic conspiracy to impose Vatican hegemony on Britain. Well, last night Michael Howard sacked him….

Not if his blog is anything to go by. Full of interesting information on getting published.

One recent highlight was In Search of the Perfect Computer Book:

I’m going out on a limb here to say that the “perfect” computer book has yet to be published. Code errors, incorrect steps, typos, etc., somehow manage to infiltrate the book no matter how meticulous the development editor, copy editor and tech editor are. Everyone involved in the project generally works hard to eliminate the problems. It’s human nature to want to do a good job, right? It’s also human nature to make mistakes.

Some publishers don’t like to promote the fact that errata exist – they feel it’s an unnecessary admission of a less than perfect system. I don’t like to see errors in my books any more than the next publisher, but:

1. I’m willing to admit they happen,
2. I want to get corrections to customers as quickly/easily as possible, and, most importantly,
3. I want to continue looking for ways to improve the system.

I think every book page on a publisher’s website should have an errata link. Shouldn’t we go further though and offer errata via RSS feeds so that customers won’t have to hunt for the corrections? Is this something you would like to see? What other suggestions do you have?

Joe has only recently started blogging, but his approach is excellent, offering genuinely useful and informative information and also asking for contributions from readers.