New IP Think Tank Podcast

Duncan Bucknell, who co-taught the Strategic Management of Intellectual Property course that I took during my MBA at Melbourne Business School has just launched an intellectual property related podcast on his IP Think Tank website (you can get the first episode here).

Not only does Bucknell really know his stuff, his blog is the place to go to for all IP-related news, information, and resources. Indeed, it's the #1 IP blog in the world according to BlawgSearch. And the podcast is an excellent addition to everything he's already doing there.

MBS Video Content on Qantas A380s

Thanks to the Deloitte Leadership Academy, all passengers flying aboard Qantas' Airbus A380s will have free access to business courses -- ranging from five-minute videos to 40-minute lectures -- supplied by Melbourne Business School, Harvard Business School (including Harvard Business Review articles), Stanford Graduate School of Business, Macquarie Graduate School of Management, and the University of New South Wales.

Awesome.

For more:

MBA Skills at Work: Part 1

I've been working at Linfox for almost two months now and I've hardly even noticed. Time really does fly when you're having fun and working your butt off, doesn't it?

Now that my major project at Linfox is complete -- we re-launched Linfox.com last week -- I thought it would be a good time to do a quick recap of how things have been at work and how the Melbourne Business School MBA is helping me do my job really well.

But before I get to that...

Actually, funnily enough, the thing I found most immediately useful at my new job was not something I learnt during the MBA but is something related to the work I did in MBS' Information Technology Solutions department earlier this year. That is: I knew how to use SharePoint really well.

In May, MBS launched its new intranet (called 'MBS Direct') based on Microsoft's SharePoint technology. Just a month before that Linfox launched its own intranet (called the 'Lintranet') also based on that technology. Having learnt a great deal about SharePoint at MBS -- and many SharePoint tips and best practices from our vendor, Bullseye -- taking over from the previous Online Coordinator was incredibly straightforward and hassle-free.

E-Commerce and Information Management

As you would imagine, stuff learnt in Pat Auger's E-Commerce and Information Management courses is coming in really handy in my new job. Here are two lessons I'm finding most useful at this time.

1. Making a business case: My boss understands how important both the intranet and public website are to the business; she is, after all, Linfox's Group Communications Manager. People in top management, however, are more focused (as they should be) on running a logistics company, a couple of airports, and a few other Linfox Group businesses. My boss and I therefore need to demonstrate -- in almost everything that we do -- the business benefits of maintaining these two sites (which I am in charge of and she is the champion for).

This is where something like Google Analytics comes in. My boss can now tell her boss that, just last week, over 1,000 unique visitors got to Linfox.com via a search engine (we also know the keywords they used to get there) and that, by far, the most popular section on the site is the 'Working at Linfox' one. Now the site's only been up for ten days so there's more data to collect before we take things to the next level (like further developing the recruitment section) but already it's clear what one of the major benefits of having a good website is: you can communicate directly with potential employees in order to get the best and most suitable candidates to apply for jobs that you advertise.

2. Internal communications: Having spent years in IT -- which in many companies is the one of the least communicative, least understood, and possibly least-liked departments -- I know how important it is to communicate internally the benefits of the work you're doing. Things are a little different in the Communications department but internal communications is still an important task for me.

For example, two phrases that I've found to be really useful are "it's on the Lintranet" and "search for it". These are important because the last iteration of Linfox's intranet took the usual route to uselessness: it had too much stuff on it (it had become a bloated file archival dump) most of which was irrelevant (no versioning, lots of replication) and hard to find (limited search functionality). This new iteration is lean, well-organized, and has versioning, no duplication, and excellent search functionality. However, not everyone knows this.

My job, then, is to (a) keep the intranet in great shape and (b) to tell everyone how great the intranet is. My aim is to make this a virtuous cycle: if people expect it to be great, they'll make sure it stays great -- with a little poking, prodding, and policing from me, of course! So when someone asks me for something, I usually say "it's on the Lintranet" (since it usually is) and, most of the time, they're able to find what they're looking for quickly and easily. If not, a simple search does the trick.

One thing that really helps me here is the direct support I get from my team. This mostly comes in the form of a line in every bit of internal communication that we do that goes something like "you can find (more information about this) on the Lintranet".

More in Part 2

There's much more I want to write so I'm going to split this into two, or maybe three, posts. I have yet to talk about:

  • Applying people skills learnt in the Managing People for High Performance, Negotiations, and Leadership courses.
  • Applying marketing skills learnt in the Brand Management and Consumer Behaviour courses.
  • General skills learnt while doing the MBA; such as how to handle multiple projects, deadlines, and priorities without breaking a sweat.
  • Observing how things are working at a more strategic level within the company; such how business and corporate strategy are playing-out, what leadership is being exhibited by senior management, what the company's environmental strategy is, and how intellectual property is being managed.

But more about all this next time.

Mark Ritson: Prolific Blogger!

I've mentioned earlier on this blog that Mark Ritson, my Brand Management professor at Melbourne Business School, contributes to the Branding Strategy Insider blog. Of course, "contributing" is a mild word considering the number of blog posts he writes!

Here are some of my favourites:

Impressive, isn't he?

Three Signs of a Marketing Agency's Ineptitude

One of my favourite professors at Melbourne Business School was Mark Ritson with whom I took the Brand Management course. One of the reasons I liked him so much was because of the wealth of real-world knowledge that he brought to the class. In fact, that was one of the reasons quoted when he was voted our (i.e. the full-time MBA students') favourite teacher at this year's MBS Valedictory Dinner.

One of those bits of real-world knowledge was his advice on how to pick the right marketing or branding agency for your company. Actually, it was more about which agency not to pick. Should an agency talk to you or show you a PowerPoint slide about any of these three things, he said, they will have instantly demonstrated the ineptitude:

  1. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
  2. A SWOT Analysis
  3. Brand concepts other than brand positioning, brand equity, and brand architecture

I was actually going to write about these three things in more detail some time over the next couple of months but, fortunately, Ritson has written about them himself in a post called 'Three Telltale Signs of an Agency's Ineptitude' on The Branding Blog. It's a great read that I highly recommend you check out.

[Via Trevor Cook]

Deconstructing Advertisements

Ian Ayres wrote a really interesting blog post on deconstructing advertisements on the Freakonomics blog yesterday. Having taken a course on Consumer Behaviour (with Brian Gibbs) at Melbourne Business School last term, reading Ayres' post was a lot of fun because, as we learnt in quite a bit of detail in that course, marketing tactics do play a significant role in influencing consumer behaviour.

Danger = Cool

The kind of influence being used in the Silk Cut ad, as Ayres rightly points out, is of this kind:
[...] Silk Cut may even intend for viewers to think (subconsciously) that it is cool to smoke because you do it knowing its risk; smokers are courageous, risk takers who are willing to try to cheat death.

The ad agency may be trying to take the biggest product defect and re-spin it as a positive attribute. Sun-screen is for wimps, smoking is for the intrepid.

Which is pretty much standard operating procedure for advertising stuff that has the potential to be harmful to you, particularly if used in excess; such as alcohol, carbonated beverages, or energy drinks.

The rest of the blog post, which is about an earlier Silk Cut ad, goes into the fascinating area of semiotics and talks about the difference between metaphors and metonymies.

Style = Cool

All of this is, of course, a shift from the old "come for the style, stay for the taste" type of ads that tobacco companies used to run in developed countries and still do run in developing ones [1]. That particular line, for example, is from a campaign that Red & White ran in Pakistan for a number of years [2]. Pakistan has done quite a bit to limit tobacco advertising since then but, as always, it's more an issue of enforcement than of simply formulating legislation [3]. Still, it's a big step in the right direction.

Freakonomics, The Book

By the way, if you haven't already read Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, you must. It is quite awesome. And once you do, make sure you subscribe to the Freakonomics blog as well.

Postscript

Funnily enough, I have a long history with Silk Cut since both my parents smoked that brand for about fifteen years. Apparently, it is 'smoother' than most cigarettes though, of course, not any less deadly: both of my parents stopped smoking it thanks to health scares and strong recommendations from doctors. My mother switched to a 'lighter' brand before dying of cancer in 2005 (she'd been smoking since she was in college) while my father now smokes the Dunhill brand despite an incident of heart failure in 2004.

- - - - - - - - - -

[1] Though one can argue that, thanks to Hollywood, developing countries still strongly associate smoking with style, the successful completion of a difficult task, and stress relief.

[2] For more on tobacco advertising in Pakistan, read 'Why Tobacco Promotion Should be Banned in Pakistan' by the Tobacco Free Initiative's Ehsan Latif.

[3] See the Dawn.com article on 'New Restrictions on Tobacco Ads'.

The Story of Stuff: Raising Awareness About Sustainability

As you might know, I recently took a course in Business & Sustainable Development with Jeremy Baskin at Melbourne Business School. In it we learnt that two of the biggest themes in sustainability these days are the concept of limits and the idea of sustainable consumption.

217x188_SoS_Banner008 Thanks to a reference from a friend, I came across this website called The Story of Stuff that talks about both of these issues in a very approachable and easily digestible way (i.e. in plain English).

In a brilliantly-produced 20-minute video, Annie Leonard (who is behind the whole concept) tells us about the consumption-based system we currently live in: where it came from, why it's wrong, and what we should be doing instead. The video (which you can download from this page) is a little oversimplified, of course, but if you go to the Resources section you'll find a lot more information on limits and sustainable consumption. Leonard also writes a blog on the site, which is another really good information resource.

Anyway, since the point of the video is awareness raising, please tell as many people as you can about both the site and the video. The topics that are being discussed there are among the most important issues facing the world today and the video is definitely worth a watch.

And I'm Done!

And I'm done with my MBA. Actually, I was done on Friday but I took it easy over the weekend :)

This now concludes 20 months of hard work, late nights, early mornings, essays, individual assignments, syndicate assignments, case studies, class discussions, research, and exams. During this period I met a lot of great people who taught me a lot of different things. I also formally learnt a heck of a lot about many different subjects. Specifically, I took these courses during my four study terms:

  1. World of Management

  2. Data & Decisions

  3. Managing Processes

  4. Accounting for Managers

  5. Financial Management

  6. Corporate Finance

  7. Managerial Economics

  8. Economics and Public Policy

  9. Business Strategy

  10. Corporate Strategy

  11. Implementation of Strategy

  12. Managing People for High Performance *

  13. Leadership & Change

  14. Negotiations *

  15. Marketing

  16. Brand Management

  17. Consumer Behaviour

  18. E-Commerce *

  19. Information Strategy

  20. Business & Sustainable Development (half subject)

  21. Strategic Management of Intellectual Property (half subject)


Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Actually, it really was.

And now it winds to a close. All that's left is my graduation on the 17th and then I can officially say that, yes, I am an MBA from Melbourne Business School, thank you very much :)

Now to find a job so I can start my next adventure...

Speaking of jobs, by the way, I received the nicest job application rejection phone call today. It was from the job I mentioned a few weeks earlier (the one I was most excited about) and, though I'm terribly disappointed that I didn't get it, I understand that the company needed to choose the best person for the role who, in this case, was unfortunately not me. Still, out of the 200 applications they received I was one of the four people they interviewed and that's a really good feeling. Oh well. Next time, then.

- - - - - - - - - -

* I received commendations from the Dean for my participation and academic achievement in these subjects. Woo hoo! :)

About Corporate Blogging

Earlier today, in our Strategic Management of Intellectual Property class at Melbourne Business School, we talked about Rick Frenkel of the Patent Troll Tracker blog fame. We were discussing non-practicing IP-holding entities (or, less politely, patent trolls) in reference to the case we were doing on Rambus (on which our professor Duncan Bucknell maintains an IP scorecard) which is why the issue came up.

CNET's Anne Broache recently covered the Frenkel story as well, but from the point of view of corporate blogging -- which, of course, is also my primary point of view. It's a good article that talks about corporate blogging policies which, as expected, most companies don't have (see also Jason Harris' open thread on Web Worker Daily: Does Your Company Have a Blogging Policy?).

I particularly like this bit in the Broache's article:

Any company that decides to adopt blogging policies should keep them short, clear, and to-the-point, said Howell, the online communications lawyer.

That point is sometimes so obvious that people forget it (which is why I've repeated it here).

Corporate Social Media

This discussion on the lack of blogging policies is a good follow up to my earlier post on marketers not 'getting' social media. It's a good follow up because corporations are having an even harder time with social media which is still in its very early adoption stage in the enterprise. That might seem like a generalization but compare the use of social media in the enterprise to the use of electronic communication tools like e-mail and instant messaging, which are now stock standard, and collaboration tools like intranet portals and document management systems, which are still relatively new.

Like marketers, corporations don't have a good handle on social media -- though both understand it's importance, particularly in the near future. Corporations, for example, know that social media will revolutionize things the way e-mail did so many years ago...they just don't quite know how (and they're really hoping it's not soon!).

The issue for them is of control. E-mails you can run through a corporate server, block, delete, monitor, save, use as legally binding, and, ultimately, make sense of very quickly. Social media is much less controllable, is scarily empowering for employees, and is very hard to get a handle on. 

Some of them are trying to get and/or embrace, though, and having a blogging policy -- or explicitly not having one -- is a good start.

[For completeness' sake: For marketers the issue is partly about control -- they're no longer the only ones talking -- and partly about the inability or the un-preparedness on their part to listen to consumers on the consumers' terms. More on that in a later blog post. For now, though, let me just say that marketers have a much better handle on social media than corporations do. That said, marketers' proficiency with social media is still low when compared to their proficiency in using the other marketing tools in their bag.]

Mark Ritson Talks Luxury Brands

Mark Ritson, who taught us Brand Management at the Melbourne Business School this term, is featured in the latest University of Melbourne Up Close Podcast in which he talks about marketing luxury brands. He touches on what we learnt about luxury brands in the BM course which is really fascinating (well, at least to me) so make sure you take a listen.

Also, I don't think I wrote about this back then but a few months ago Amanda Sinclair, another one of our MBS professors, was featured in an Up Close Podcast as well. She talks about mindful leadership, which is something we learnt about in her Leadership & Change course last term and now, hopefully, practice! That's also a really good podcast so check that out as well.

I like this whole podcast business. Of the non-IT elective I've taken at MBS, Leadership, Brand Management, and Negotiations were my three favourite (though Consumer Behaviour comes very close) and now, instead of just waxing lyrical about them to everyone I meet, I can give people a slight taste of them as well.

Taking Notes

[Note: Cross-posted from my personal blog]

I take a lot of notes. And I mean a lot of notes. I take notes for things like:

  • Planning out a report, paper, or essay
  • Brainstorming a website, business strategy problem, or a computer program/algorithm
  • Taking notes during a class lecture or conference
  • Even making a shopping list or a list of things to do

I like to think I take good notes and, since I'm a bit of a perfectionist (some would say I'm obsessive), over the years I have actively refined my note-taking technique. Here's how I take notes these days.

Note-Taking Tools

I start by making sure that I have good note-taking tools. These days I take notes with a mechanical pencil with 0.5 or 0.7mm 2B lead (i.e. softer but darker than the typical HB or #2 pencil; see Wikipedia entry on the pencil for details on gradation) on white, good quality, narrow-lined file paper. I also use a good quality eraser.

I use a pencil and eraser because I like clear and neat notes and diagrams (i.e. dark lines and no cross-outs). I use file paper because that gives me more flexibility in terms of storing, organizing, moving, and re-writing notes within subject-indexed, tab-separated file folders ('binders' for Americans).

May I geek out a bit? These days I'm using a Faber Castel Grip Matic pencil, the 2B lead that came with it, and a Staedtler Rasoplast eraser. The pencil's pretty old now so I need to buy a new one. I generally prefer Staedtler over Faber Castel -- I've been using the former's pens, pencils, lead, and erasers for about 16 years now -- but I haven't been able to find the right products in Australia so far. I guess I need to look harder. Oh, and Pilot and Uni products are good too; particularly the Uni SA-S fine ballpoint pen which I have been using exclusively for about 3 years now.

Note Organization

I organize my notes rather thoroughly: listing on each page the date, subject, page number, and, if in a meeting, the names of the participants in that meeting. To organize the notes themselves I use a series of headings and nested bullet points. Here's an example:

Note Taking 1

 

More recently I've started to take notes on my laptop. For that I use Microsoft Word with 12pt Georgia font and the same sets of headings and series of nested bulleted lists as I do on paper (except that those are now defined as MS Word Styles so they look a little different). This is what my electronic notes look like:

image

 

The Actual Notes

Then come the actual notes themselves. Since I write a lot, I've had to develop my own, mostly intuitive, shorthand to write things down quickly. For example: "this func. says nothing abt. price lvl.; dep. only on tech, labour & capital." Since I type quickly, I write full-ish sentences when typing notes, though. They may not be entirely grammatically correct, but I don't usually abbreviate words.

In the actual note-taking I try to write down as much as I can while still listening to the lecture/discussion, not missing anything going on (even at a deeper level), and participating in the discussion as well. It's not easy but I've been doing it for years so I'm used to it by now. Taking notes this way gives me a pretty accurate recording of what went on during the class (since that's what I developed my note-taking for) and, even if something isn't quite clear to me at that time, I can usually follow the logic and work it out later.

At the end of every note-taking session (e.g. at the end of every class) I try to review the notes to make sure I haven't missed anything. Then, usually while preparing for an assignment or just before an exam, I do one of two things. I either extract what is important from my notes (and in parallel from lecture slides and assigned readings) by re-writing them on a new sheet of paper or on my laptop. That is, I take notes of my notes. If not that, I make an index in which I identify what I've written and on which page that topic is located. The former helps me prepare for closed book exams and assignments. The latter helps me get ready for open book exams and meetings during which I might need to refer to my notes.

I don't follow any specific note-taking system like the Cornell system that the good folk at Student Tablet PC use [1], though that sounds like a really good methodology. Nor is my system as elaborate as Tim Ferriss' (via Kevin C. Tofel). I am interested in getting into mind maps like James Kendrick, but my note-taking style has always worked well for me so I haven't yet found a reason to change.

I do, however, use a mind map-type construction for breaking down complex problems. But, since I'm a stickler for writing things neatly, I use lists instead of diagrams. For example:

Board Notes 1

 

And that's about it. Oh, one last thing: storage. Since I have craploads on notes, I generally have a crapload of file folders to store all my notes in as well. And since I've been using, for the most part, the same system for about ten years now, my old notes still come in handy every now and then. The only problem is: I can't take all my old notes with me.

All of that,
I gue
ss, goes some way to demonstrate why the obsessive note-taker in me wants so desperately to get a tablet PC. I mean, seriously, how could I not want to get the ultimate note-taking tool? But, since I can't afford one now, I am so looking forward to getting one later and then scanning all my MBA notes into it so that they're ready for use any where, any time. In fact, I'm getting all excited just thinking about it now! Yes. I am a geek. I wrote a whole blog post on note-taking (with pictures and all), didn't I? :)

[1] The Student Tablet PC website has a whole category on note-taking. 

Netflix Moves into Online Television

A few weeks ago I talked about how Netflix is planning to move into the online video space. Well, it launched its first big foray into that this week by signing up with NBC Universal (press release here). Netflix subscribers will now be able to watch NBC's shows (like "Heroes" and "The Office") on Netflix the day after they're aired. All this is only for the US, of course.

Meanwhile, this now becomes the third distribution channel that NBC has signed up with (post iTunes) in order to distribute its content. The fourth is still in private beta. Last 100's Daniel Langendorf is keeping score.

E-Books to Finally Take Off?

Much as I would love to get the Sony Reader (I can't, I don't have enough spare cash lying around) because I think it would be incredibly useful to me, it hasn't done all that well in the market. In fact, the whole e-book concept hasn't gone down well with consumers. At least not as well as, say, Sony would have hoped. (Or as I would have hoped, because that might have considerably reduced the retail price of the Reader, thereby making it affordable to me!)

All that might change, though, with the introduction of Amazon's long-awaited, much rumoured-about, Kindle e-book reader. At least I hope things change. Kindle hasn't yet been launched by the way -- it's supposed to be launched later today in the US -- but it's already being talked about. Notably, in Newsweek's interview with Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, though both CNET and Engadget have talked about it as well.

We learn in strategy that, in many ways, the holy grail of strategic competition is to change the industry (presumably in your favour!). Amazon's already done that a number of times and, through to the Kindle, they're hoping to do that yet again. Being a fan of both e-books and tablet PCs, I hope they succeed.

Expect more coverage (on this blog) of this device and of this strategic move as more details emerge.

Predicting Voting Behaviour

With the Australian federal election a few days away, all eyes seem to be on (among other things) daily opinion polls.

To generate data for those polls, people are asked "Who would you be most likely to vote for if an election were held this Saturday?". Chris Lloyd, one of our professors at MBS, argues that there is a lost opportunity in asking this question because "binary data gives much less information than continuous data – roughly 5-10 times less information." As a result, he argues, these opinion polls don't capture the swing vote, even though that's where all the action is. I agree with him completely and wish they would get all that extra data for us. However, I have three theories as to why they don't do a more comprehensive survey.

The first is the obvious one (though a guess on my part): the economics aren't worth it. That is, the comprehensive poll will cost too much because it'll both take longer and will be more complicated to execute.

The second is the less obvious one: it'll add too much uncertainty into our lives (or, put another way, it'll give us too much information). Because these votes are swing votes, they'd change much too often for the general public's liking. If the numbers jumped up or down by, say, 5% every other day, the polls would be perceived as being overly sensitive and voters as being overly fickle. Eventually, because the polls would seem almost erratic, the public would lose interest in them (they would seem less relevant as accurate gauges of solid public opinion), the media would stop buying them from polling agencies, and everyone would lose money. Yes, this reason comes down to money as well.

The third is the least obvious one: people would prefer not to know (or, put another way, too little uncertainty isn't fun, either). Because, if they did know (with a reasonable amount of accuracy) who was going to win beforehand, it would make the actual voting on the election day much less exciting. And, in the same way that no one wants a boring, predictable sports tournament final, no one seems to want a boring election day either.

At the end of the day, though, people have to vote with their feet and not with their survey responses. And that little bit of uncertainty -- that "anything can still happen" feeling -- keeps people interested and much, much more motivated. Both of which, ultimately, lead to a better election process and a better execution of a democracy because everyone will have been interested in it and everyone will have participated in it.

The Home Stretch

I've had a brutal couple of weeks, with classes six days a week (for which there's plenty of reading to be done), at least one assignment due every week, and many syndicate meetings to plan, prepare for, and attend. Now, fortunately, (to borrow a phrase from the baseball lexicon) we're on the home stretch, with only two more weeks of classes and then one week of exams to go.

I'm also down to two assignments that are still due: a Leadership & Change assignment due this Friday (23rd) and an Implementation of Strategy assignment due next Wednesday (28th). Both are excellent assignments but both require quite a bit of work.

The L&C assignment, for example, is to write an essay about our personal leadership challenge: the one that we all identified in the first week of the course and have since been working on. That may sound simple but, if you've been through the course, you'll know that it isn't. It's also supposed to be 3,000 words long (not including the bibliography and appendices) so it's to a really comprehensive essay as well.

The IoS assignment, meanwhile, is to write a case (complete with teaching note) about a real strategy implementation that, preferably, at least one member of our syndicate is closely connected with (e.g. this happened/is happening in a company that this person worked/is working for). That, as you might imaging, is again quite challenging. It's one thing to read a case and learn from it, it's quite another to write a case and then write what should be learnt from it! It is quite a lot of fun, though.

Still, with only two assignments, three weeks, and four final exams [1] to go before the start of the summer break, I can't help but feel a little exhilarated. The home stretch is, after all, exciting. No less brutal, of course, but still exciting. In the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel kind of way.

[1] L&C doesn't have a final exam. The leadership challenge essay is our final exam. And it should be: it's worth 40% of our grade!

More on the WAG Strike

Marc Andreessen recently wrote a post on the strike called by the Writer's Guild of America (WGA) in which he takes media moguls to task over their "[crawling] into a hole of protecting the status quo".

And, if that's not enough, Suicide Girls posted an article that explains, from a writer's perspective, why exactly they've gone on strike. That article tells us a bit about the producer-writer negotiation history and why the current strike is so important to writers today:

This dispute is not just about writers. We are the first union that is fighting for our rights and equal pay when it comes to the Internet. What we do now will affect every union in Hollywood

If you want some solid insight on what's going on -- i.e. the backdrop of the once-in-a-lifetime industry shift that is currently happening and how the WGA strikes fits into that -- read both of those.

Writer's Guild of America Goes on Strike

It's fun when subject matter from two courses converges. In this case, it's my E-Commerce and Negotiations course materials that are converging because the Writer's Guide of America (WGA) has gone on strike, partly over how much they get paid when the shows they write on get downloaded. Nate Anderson over at Ars Technica explains it really well:

No one is Hollywood is quite sure how this whole "Internet thing" will affect the TV and movie businesses, but the writers and producers both know one thing: they don't want to give an inch of ground when it comes to pricing residuals for Internet distribution of shows. After months of fruitless negotiations on a new contract, the Writers Guild of America announced publicly today that it would be going on strike, in large part over "new media" concerns. If you thought late-night television wasn't funny now, wait until the writers quit.

Writers get paid "residuals" whenever a show they've worked on or a movie they've helped write gets sold on DVD or aired in syndication, and these residuals can make up a healthy part of a working scriptwriter's income. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) insists that the residual rate for new media uses be fixed at the current DVD rate. The writers want the DVD formula—and the new media rate along with it—to be increased.

Our Negotiation's professor, John Onto, has taken great pains to warn us about the dangers of boiling the negotiation down to a single, contentious, value-claiming issue. When that happens, the negotiation becomes a bargain in which one side will always "win" and one side will always "lose" [1]. Unfortunately, that is exactly what seems to have happened here. Oh well. At least it's a good learning opportunity for us Negotiations students!

Footnotes

[1] Unless, of course, a creative, possibly value-creating solution to the deadlock can be found.