The Economics of Channel
Distribution is purchased access to demand. Its full cost includes both visible fees and the bargaining power created by dependency.
The arithmetic department.
Office notice
Short field notes on business survival, eCommerce, platforms, pricing, strategy and whatever has to be reduced to the thing actually causing it.
Diversification and the Price of Optionality
Diversification is insurance against dependency, not a moral requirement to operate in every available channel.
The Evolutionary Firm
Markets select among organizational forms over multiple generations; equilibrium is temporary and competitive advantage decays as the environment and population adapt.
Jerk, Snap and Business Trajectory
Higher-order changes can be useful descriptions of instability, but a descriptive framework becomes predictive only when it survives out-of-sample tests.
Marketing Is Capital Allocation
Advertising should expand and contract against contribution and realized customer value, not against a calendar budget or platform-reported ROAS.
Measurement Theatre
Metrics become political when the person being measured can choose the definition of success.
Platforms Are Markets, Not Partners
Large digital platforms are self-optimizing markets with their own economics. A vendor relationship should be modeled as asymmetric exchange, not shared destiny.
Price Architecture
Pricing is an upstream economic constraint, not a markup applied after the product exists.
The Sacred Local Optimum
Organizations can become trapped by the very processes that once made them successful.
Strategy as Constraint
Strategy begins by identifying what the system can sustain, not by writing down what management would like to happen.
Unit Economics Before Growth
Growth is useful only when the incremental transaction creates enough economic value to justify the capital and risk required to produce it.
Working Capital Is Strategy
A profitable growth curve can still be a cash drain when inventory and receivables absorb capital faster than the business generates it.