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We blog about honesty in small business a lot.  When you boil everything away, a small business is all about the team bringing a product or service to market.  If integrity is an issue for any reason, the business will not survive.  That’s not speculation.  I’ve been involved in a number of startups and assisted countless others.   When the company’s integrity — with employees, with vendors, with customers, with anyone — was gone, word spread like wildfire and the company was either soon gone or sold for a fraction of its previous worth.

Individuals have the same issues.   Individual integrity is what transfers to the organization.

Baseball writer and guru Peter Gammons covered this year’s Hall of Fame vote at MLB.com.  Gammons joined all MLB.com writers eligible to vote in releasing ballot details.

McGwire hit more home runs than all but 7 other men in baseball history. He is currently tied with A-Rod, the infamous Alex Rodridguez, with 583 career home runs. Look at the home run chart on Baseball-Reference.com, and you’ll see McGwire’s name ahead of names like Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle and very, very close to names like Babe Ruth.

But when Congress was investigating performance-enhancing drugs, Mark McGwire gave this testimony.

His non-answer might have been legally smart, but it was professional suicide.  For four straight years, the Baseball Writers of America have denied McGwire, once considered a shoo-in during his first year of eligibility a place in baseball’s Hall of Fame.  Gammons voted for him and wrote an impassioned defense of the case.  But only one other of Gammons’ 12 colleagues at MLB.com joined him in voting for Mark McGwire.  Indeed, Mark McGwire has yet to receive 30% of the votes necessary for Hall of Fame enshrinement.   And with a total of 5 of the top 15 home run hitters of all time linked at least indirectly to performance-enhancing drug use, the trend is likely to continue.

Former Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon is another example of integrity.  This middle-aged women scrapped and fought her way to run one of America’s largest cities.   Late last year she was indicted on twelve criminal charges, including perjury, theft and misappropriation of funds.

  • The charge that stuck and eventually resulted in a conviction: misappropriation.
  • The amount: about five hundred dollars in gift cards.
  • The intended recipients: poor people via charitable organizations.

Dixon has resigned.  Her last day as Mayor of Baltimore is next month.    Baltimore’s citizens are not pleased. She is a pariah in her hometown, a place she has lived for over 50 years, where she taught school, where she served on the City Council, where she was the mayor.

These are celebrity examples, but they underscore a critical point.  The minute you start losing your integrity is when your entire life’s work can be diminished.    Honesty is the only successful long run policy.   Anything less than that invites disaster.

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phone booth
Not a smartphone.

This is a long time coming, and boy, is it big.  Yes, this is Google news related to telephones, but we won’t talk about Nexus One (still).

Google is launching pay-per-call advertising.  Now.

There have always been variants of pay-per-call available, but this shows how serious Google is about invading the local search advertising space.  The program, announced today via email before Google’s other announcement, is arguably more important and profitable in the long run.  Here’s how it works:

  • A business will get a 5th line in a Google advertisement that shows a local phone number on smartphones (or as Google calls them, “high end mobile devices”)
  • Google says they’ll check the phone’s location and show the phone number for a nearby business.
  • The searcher simply has to scroll to your number and click.
  • Advertisers get the full range of analytics and metrics associated with keywords, this time with a telephone call as the conversion.

The best part for advertisers is the cost.  Pay-Per-Call has traditionally cost a much higher rate than a click to a website.  For now, anyway, Google is keeping the rate the same.  That’s quite a bargain for advertisers.

Meanwhile, the infighting with Microsoft continues.  Google described the covered phones as “iPhone, Android, Palm WebOS”, but didn’t mention Windows Mobile.  I asked Brandon Miniman, the CEO of leading smartphone site pocketnow.com, about the omission and the future of Windows Mobile in an Android and iPhone world.

“Windows Mobile is becoming less relevant because version 6.5 offers no big innovations and is mostly unchanged from a decade ago. That said, Microsoft has been working on Windows Mobile 7 for many years. When released in 2010, it could finally bring Microsoft back into the smartphone arena,” said Miniman.

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Welcome to a Nexus-free, Android-free, Google-free blog.  You’ll read nothing here today (okay, maybe later) about that big search engine, fancy phones, tablet computers or other stuff causing geekdom to explode with glee. Let’s talk about Avatar math and why you may present numbers to your boss, bank, partner or other important folks that aren’t 100% accurate.  First things first:  Avatar has indeed reached $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales.  That’s a big chunk o’change.

Gone With The Wind
Don’t tell these two that a robot movie made more money.

And the movie pundits are correct.  After another $150 million or so, which ought to be a cakewalk, James Cameron will have directed the two highest grossing films in movie history. Box Office Mojo is one of my favorite sites on the web.  I’ve written about them before.  They combine my love of movies and my love of numbers.  And if you love movies and numbers, you should pop for a premium subscription or at least bookmark the place and trust them rather than some rip-and-read announcer. Because ultimately when you adjust ticket prices for inflation, Titanic is NOT the biggest grossing film of all time.  That little shipwreck tale clocks in at #6.

According to the inflation calculations, the top grossing movie of all time is Gone With The Wind.  The race isn’t close.  The number crunchers tell us GWTW sold 37% more tickets.  One-third more.   And they didn’t even have Celine Dion on the soundtrack. The usual suspects are all in the top 10:   Jaws, Star Wars, The Sound of Music.    That’s what made The Dark Knight such a story beyond Heath Ledger’s untimely death and gritty performance.  The movie is in the top 30 and passed The Jungle Book and Sleeping Beauty. Batman and The Joker almost caught Grease!   And last year’s Transformers sequel caught West Side Story.  Unless you’ve done a dive into film and theater history, you can’t imagine the impact of West Side Story on early 1960s America. Optimus Prime beat the Jets, the Sharks and Lenny Bernstein. Even adjusted for inflation.

So why all this talk about movies and adjusting for inflation?   Two reasons: 1)  The newscasters are technically correct, but gross dollars is the wrong way to measure success in this area. 2)  You probably do the same thing at work with a half-dozen calculations that are permanently etched in your spreadsheet.

Take ARPU — good old average revenue per user.   ARPU is going to swing like crazy depending on the industry, inflation and how many assumptions are made.   Think ARPU for anything connected with financial services was pretty last year?  But if I plotted the revenue from 1987 to 2009 while adjusting each new year, the comparison is finally meaningful. In 1987, when we last saw economic horror stories on the front page every day, a gallon of gasoline was 87 cents, a postage stamp was 24 cents a new car was just over $10,000. (hat tip: thepeoplehistory.com)  Does that sound like our world’s pricing today?  And if gas has quadrupled and postage almost doubled, shouldn’t we be making similar adjustments either looking back or looking forward? Your CFO will hate this idea.   Money is money no matter the year.  But make sure that time value of money is always in your calculations, even on a second worksheet if only for a legitimate comparison.   Because money during the last year of President Reagan’s presidency is worth a different amount than money during the first year of President Obama’s. Not doing this may mean that you’ll credit Avatar’s blue people with generating more revenue than the little green guy in E.T. The data is technically true, but the logic is specious. And when it’s your money, you need to make sure the logic is flawless.