6th Wirtschaftstreff 2009 at Radisson Blu Leipzig
Coming Tursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 07.30 p.m. the local JCI "Wirtschaftsjunioren"-Group here in Leipzig invite to their social gathering "Wirtschaftstreff" at the Radisson Blu Hotel’s "Spagos" Bar/Lounge.
The event will also feature a lively discussion with the German Federal Ministry of Finance’s Dr. Christian Kastrop who will beforehand give an introduction (in German) to Financial Politic’s Instruments in Times of Financial and Economic Crisis. Furthermore members who travelled to JCI’s European Conference in Hungary will report on their experience and also bring some photoraphs to show.
If you will like to join us, you’re welcome. As free seats are limited, please apply via e-mail in advance. In case you are not from here or don’t know the Radisson, this map will assist you finding us. The facility exists right opposite from the well-known Augustusplatz.
See you on Thursday ! 
An Opposable Mind: Business Week interview with Roger Martin on "Integrated Thinking™ " as an approach to solving complex problems
This week in an approach to broaden my problem-solving skills and just after having subscribed to ROTMAN Magazine, I came across this highly interesting Business Week Feedroom interview with Roger Martin, the dean of Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto (thus more often than not named “Dean Martin” by the incident… 
), who coined and trademarked the term of Integrated Thinking, promoting a "Design" approach towards solving of complex problems.
This essentially is based on the assumption, that it may be hard to solve new and complex problems by simply applying already existing "models" derived from challenges successfully managed in the past without having to face significant trade-offs caused by the obvious contradictory nature of these pre-existing solutions.
What to do, if you are in a highly competitive market (and who isn’t these days…) ? Cut costs or drive innovation by further increasing them ?
In his ROTMAN magazine article 
Choices, Conflict and the Creative Spark [PDF, 385 KB] Roger Martin discusses how a more holistic way of addressing an issue can lead out of the dilemma of having first to choose between and then to act upon one of seemingly contradictory models by instead drawing from all of them to create a completely new approach.
So integrated thinking people are those, who…
…the capacity to hold two diametrically-opposed ideas in their heads. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they are able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.
The advantage:
Integrative Thinking shows us a way past the binary limits of ‘either/or.’ It shows us that there is a way to integrate the advantages of one solution without canceling out the advantages of an alternative solution, affording us, in the words of the poet Wallace Stevens, “the choice not between, but of.”
And despite the common believe, that this integrated way of working on complex issues likely was unique to people mostly considered "geniuses" of their time, Martin argues, that the capability of creating new successful and elegant
ideas from (at least by "proven" measures…) opposable concepts indeed may possibly be trained and learned by many of us. This would lead to the de-facto conclusion, that Integrative Thinking is largely a tacit skill in the heads of people who have cultivated their opposable mind.
And at this very point of time Dean Roger Martin and his students are working on a proof of the assumption…
Checkout Re-Visited: Step 3 — Entering Your Shipping Information
Does any online vendor need to know where you live and when you move and who you would like to send a present to ?
Isn’t that you having to pay the shipping anyway !??
Furthermore with every new online shop one buys from, a new transmission risk is brought up; even less in terms of loosing or unwillingly leaking the data, as much more in the forms of typos and misspellings going to prevent successful execution of the order itself.
Well, admittedly, as of this writing, in most parts of the world the seller needs to know where to ship the items you ordered alongside with the obligatory invoice — and he likes it that way.
Especially, as this will also make sure that all his colorful prospectuses will reach you reliably as well.
Nevertheless: From all orders made over the web, most deliveries are likely to be executed by no more than a fistful of forwarding agencies.
So why shouldn’t you simply tell them the shipping details ? This would both protect your privacy and likely reduce errors in address transmission (a common cause of failed delivery) to a minimum. If they get your address right once, it is secured they have it until you decide to move for the next time or ask for deletion.
Or you may even make shipping providers subscribe to a machine-readable address profile of you on the web (as you probably may already have one with online social networks such as LinkedIN or XING) to make sure their information is always up to date. Want to send a present for a colleague ? Just drag in you buddy’s address card from Facebook.
Reliable information exchange has never been easier and more secure.
The outcome concerning the shipping process now could be, just to stick an RFID tag or old-fashioned barcode label (as both are already quite common today) to the parcel and let you forward its identifier to the corresponding delivery service from right inside the checkout process. Approved transmission of your shipping information as being required by either the shop owner or the shipping provider can then be securely handled browser-based via a traditional web form (for instance, using the mentioned OpenID approach).
Too complex an idea to hope for a commercially reasonable adoption rate and timeframe ?
Then please take a look at Mumbai’s Dabbawala Association for instance. For more than a century now, this cooperative has delivered home-cooked food; first to the British colonial rulers and from mid-twentieth century then to Mumbai’s business people, building right from the beginning on exactly the before mentioned cooperative distribution model, where you tell the shipping provider instead of the producer, which destination you want the final product to be delivered.
Dabbawalas may use colors and symbols instead of fashionable barcode or RFID tags, but the delivery concept has been the same for more than a hundred years now — so it can indeed be considered a ‘proven’ business model. As every single of the peer-to-peer deliverer knows his or her local district like the back of his hand, the cooperative delivers at a so sensationally low error rate, that any western parcel service may quite well take a leaf out of their book. Continuously rating at a full “Six Sigma” reliability with renowned consultancies, the association lately began to take online orders via their website or even via SMS from mobile phones. They also started opening their P2P delivery network e.g. to grocery businesses, so you can now get your daily dose of fresh veggies shipped directly to your cubicle as well.To the customers’ delight,
Ordering via Dabbawalas also comes with a very transparent pricing model: The daily services are traditionally being provided at a monthly flat rate of around 300 rupees, locally perceived as something like € 6 (a de-facto even cheaper real price of around € 5 at current exchange rates). Newly additional services like delivering banking receipts or address confirmation of contract partners are being added to the traditional offerings as well — at reasonable surcharges.
An example for how deploying these concepts of ‘cooperative logistics’ (if you come up with a more suitable term for it, please let me know…) for short range to-your-door distribution in other parts of the world may spur entirely new business concepts (probably riding on the current growing demand for customized goods with its often numerous ‘long tail’-biz actors) while empowering the more traditional models with better service at their endpoints.
Too bad, we just paid a whopping € 2.60 handling fee on our two pizzas ordered to the office today…
Checkout Re-Visited: Step 2 — Registration or Log-In
This is a tougher, though nevertheless more annoying subject. If a web-store requires you to ‘register’ (the most horrible word to be chosen for the procedure; do you smell the bureaucracy and finality coming with it ?) or not: A vendor always needs a way to keep track of your particular order to make sure it is processed accurately right until it reaches your door.
The easiest and most secure way to do this, is to assign it a unique identifier — and by definition your e-mail address just is one.
So the question to register (let’s stick with the word, for understandability’s sake…) or not, actually is not about if you are to create an account at all, but if a new account is being created with one and the same shop for every single order you place. May the latter be appreciated by the more privacy aware shopper, the advantages in information protection will likely shrink somewhere close to zero by the time you are to enter the shipping address; at least if you forgot to repeatedly relocate between two orders.
On the other hand registration usually comes with the added benefits of being notified when your order is shipped or if an ordered item probably went out of stock unexpectedly. Concepts for more privacy-saving delivery options are being discussed further down into this article series.
So if registration is basically about identification:
What the heck makes us register freshly with each and every website we use ? Do you carry a different passport with you for every country you go to ? Or a different credit card for every shop you buy from ?
The issue here obviously is less a lack of unique identifiers (remember that e-mail account…), but the absence of standardization and trustability.
Also the increasing number of available password wallets, from the simple ones built into most any webbrowser, enhanced by more advanced add-ons like Sxipper tell us that the customary concept of creating new accounts with secure user-and-password combinations for every single website has quite well exceeded its peak level.
Battling the growing number of phishing attempts, alternates just started to emerge within recent years, as industry giants like Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google announced their support for a new, now becoming even more popular and widespread, browser-based authentication system named OpenID. Its core idea is based on third party credential-verifying and goes pretty much like: “I don’t necessarily trust you to be able to drive a car, but I will trust the local administration if they give you a driver’s license.”
Online for instance, a web-shop owner may not trust the billing address his prospective customer provides. But if the 
client’s bank confirms, that this is the address they had successfully sent him his new credit card to, the vendor may trust them that they have verified it.
With OpenID you may only own one account with an organisation
you trust, and which in return is willing to provide third parties credentials they trust to confirm your identity as required by their business processes.
This doesn’t come without added benefits: By accepting their customers to log-in using OpenID, vendors get beautiful and trust-sparking co-branding opportunities with household names on the internet. Just take this button as anexample.
So logging in to an e-commerce site is likely to become a push-of-a-button experience quite soon.
A Checkout Re-Visited: The Basket (Step 1)
The term checkout has been known for decades as the point-of-sale from within a variety of industries; no matter if on- or offline. In e-commerce, however, the checkout is mostly referred to as the process from the point a prospective customer has chosen the products from the virtual shelves (almost inevitably using a virtual ‘basket’ or ‘cart’ as he likely would have done in a traditional retail store), via entering delivery and payment details to the point where the order is completed and the deal is done.
The early e-commerce sites in the mid-nineties have provided as many allusions to the buying process in a conventional store as they could, to create the necessary peace of mind with their customers to make them feel comfortable to buy through a medium they, at the time, often just began to explore. And they were successful pursuing this approach.
However today we are more than ten years older and we interact with online stores in still much the same way as if this was our first dial-in with a 28.8k modem in 1995. And on the vendors’ side there are millions of folks willing to sell their own mass customized or even tailor made creations without being willing to take the hassle of administering their own webshops.
As Harward Business Review, WIRED Magazine, as well as lately BusinessWeek announced 2008 to be the year of the P2P-Economy’s lift-off, it seems quite ridiculous to do business over the web not very different from how we already did an entire decade ago.
So let’s have a rush through the common webshop checkout here, with its typical 5 to 6 webpages, standing between a customer considering to buy and the actual purchase being made. And let’s see where we might be able to use modern days’ infrastructure to improve and smooth the buying experience for the customer while providing the seller with all the necessary information needed to successfully deliver his customers a pleasant puchasing experience.
Step 1 — the Basket (or Cart)
Even though it actually doesn’t make a lot of physical sense to put 
premium site-memberships, downloadable MP3 music, games or software files into a real shopping basket (as these are likely to remain intangible for their time being), humans obviously continue to love the evolution-proven collecting experience they get when adding their very own choice of items, probably tracked down on some remote website, into an equally non-material basket or cart. But if not even this cart is to stick with physical constraints, why does it still carry around all the disadvantages of its real-life counterpart with it ?
As these are:
- If you leave it alone, it may be gone soon.
- You are not allowed to carry it with you outside the borders of the shop.
- To buy from or simply to compare different vendors, you need to take one separate basket at each of the various shops offering these goods for sale and invest additional time in review and purchase. Just that in the web’s virtual world there is no real benefit from carrying around loads of brand-named shopping bags — not even for women.
- Once you take the cart to the cashier’s desk you are not welcome to postpone of selectively buying only some of the basket contents.
- After the purchase you are left alone with information needs like the "best before"-date or relevance of the purchased items to your own plannings (like ingredients to a certain recipe or availability of a pre-booked restaurant table at your travel destination.
Wishlists like those from Amazon indeed do help here, however they only solve the time issue, but still leave you alone with the two other ones.
So what about turning things around here:
What if YOU as a customer could bring YOUR OWN shopping cart ?
What if you could go on a shopping tour through a multitude of online shops, just adding to YOUR personal cart whatever you like, without the need to care where it comes from ?
You could do your deal comparison in a relaxed manner, similarly to browsing through your e-mail inbox: considering which mail to work on immediately, which to postpone and which one to forward to friends. You could also do re-purchases of products you liked with ease and one-click-order style (hopefully Amazon won’t sue me for that expression).
There is no trouble whatsoever with the technical part of this. Mostly any item sold on the web can be uniquely identified at least by the URL of the page it is presented on. Furthermore telling a vendor what you would like to buy from him, shall be easier than sending a TrackBack ping from your weblog:
Using more elaborate technology like semantic XML descriptions or web services instead, buying with your own virtual basket is going to be much more pleasant than anything you have ever experienced in an online shop by now. This is especially true for the purchase of services, where availability and conditions use to literally change within minutes, rather than days or weeks.
PLUS: You know where it’s going. No strange screens or misunderstandable options to choose from. It is going to be always the very same standardized process — no matter which shop you are actually buying from at the time.
