Archive for May, 2009
Reverse income statement
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 | commentary | No Comments
Here’s an interesting idea for doing a reality check on the business plan component of a product vision. It’s called a reverse income statement.
Typically, what happens when somebody designs a conventional plan is they start off with the revenues they hope to get. They estimate what the costs are. They subtract the costs from the revenues and that tells them what the profits are going to be. A reverse income statement starts with the profits I must earn to make it worthwhile. I can then calculate what the maximum cost can be in order for me to make those profits, and then what the revenue should be in order for me to make the profits.
So, you start with the income statement at the bottom and you work up instead of starting at the top and working down. That’s what we mean by the reverse financials. Very rapidly, you may find that in order for you to be able to make the numbers that you plan to make in terms of profits, all you need is 5000% market share — at which stage you say, “Oops, let’s go and do something else.” You really don’t know, but it gives you a sense of what the scope is.
[By Rita Gunther McGrath, courtesy knowledge@wharton]
Paleofuturism
Monday, May 4th, 2009 | commentary | 1 Comment
It’s interesting to look back at old visions for the future and compare them against how things really turned out.
Like these 1993 “You Will” commercials from AT&T that includes a glance at something resembling an EO.
I was at GO Corp at the time and it was exciting to see something like what we were doing be exposed to the mainstream.
The field is called w PS: They were wrong in their prognostication about me sending a fax from the beach.
Wikipedia calls it retro-futurism. Matt Novak has a whole blog devoted to the cause he calls Paleo-Future. This site is a great resource for those of us interested in the nature of envisioning future products. What did our predecessors get right and wrong? What are the patterns of failure that we can apply to our predictions today?
PS: AT&T was wrong in their prognostication about me sending a fax from the beach.
New Twitter ID
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments
My Twitter ID is now @dphaine. Please make a note of it! 
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