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“Don’t be evil” – the pretty used up corporate mantra of Google, that was polished once and for all when they let the world know that they will not tolerate what they had to endure with China. A few days ago, Google posted a blog post on their official company blog about the incidents that took place in China and their reaction to it: they will stop censoring search results within China or if they are not allowed to, will withdraw from doing business there.

Pulling out from one of the world’s largest growth markets due to your beliefs and core values in the face of millions of euros in profits? Not many companies have the guts to do so. Corporations are in place, because they are to provide value to their owners. Fred Wilson describes brave companies with the Founder Factor that other companies run by hired management teams don’t have. Having read his post I realised, some of the most intriguing and interesting companies for me pretty much all have their founders running the game.

By Founder Factor Fred Wilson describes companies that have their founders running the company or taking part in key decisions.

I’m a capitalist in my heart, however – I would like to see the system improve somewhat to the direction of the founder factor where the original company mantra is carried on towards the future generations instead of trying to cash in at all costs. To be honest, many of the companies being lead by their founder(s) are one of the most successful ones financially also and for a reason – consumers relate to the ones that share their values. Money in itself has only intrinsic value.

David Speers of SkyNews Australia interviewed Rupert Murdoch, the Chairman and CEO of News Corp. about a ton of different things. They also touched on the issues of Australian immigration laws and while Murdoch defended the more multicultural and liberal immigration approach, but disapproved of extremists and while doing so, this 78-year old business tycoon gave them the finger!

I strongly suggest you watch the interview, if Rupert Murdoch is previously unknown or unfamiliar to you. It’s less than 40 minutes and gives a very good overview of the man and his ideology towards the world. For example, the thing that keeps on intrigueing me is the fact that he is constantly on the edge of things in the online world and has very strong opinions about it.

I also think that he is partially misunderstood for his views on paid news. I do agree he has a point in there. However, where he goes wrong in my opinion is that he defends the loyalty people have towards newspapers and thinks the world is partially wrong for not supporting loyalty or longer term subscriptions of news, be that in paper or digital format.

The problem is that while we believe paid news in their current format being served online do not work very well, Murdoch defends the future of news in the format of being commercial. I also believe the non-existence of a good digital push channel brings in challenges to the picture. Newspapers have been so successful in the past as they were one of the only “on-demand” ways of consuming news. It was up to you to decide when you wanted to enjoy them, compared to the television for example where you had to be in front of the box at a certain time to enjoy them.

I see that there is some future for paid news in the format that they are “pushed” or made more available to me than in their current format where I have to go and fetch them from a website, be that through a computer browser or its mobile counterpart. I’m thinking of something in the line of digital readers like Kindle and Nook.

However, I strongly suggest you take the time to watch this interview. Even though it does not go into great depth in many of the topics they cover, it does explain a lot of his views on the world and why he does things the way he does.

I’ve been thinking about a couple of issues regarding our economy for quite some time now, but it was only until Marja Heikkinen-Jarnola’s column that I decided to blog about them. Heikkinen-Jarnola is a controller at the Ministry of Transport and Communications. I’ll leave the other issue for a new blog post so I won’t bore everyone to death here.

The column had a very simple point that she is doing a doctoral thesis on as well. She argues that governments’ books should be kept so that they follow the same accounting rules as corporations do. She argues that if Finland would be put to follow the same accounting rules -our country would have to declare for bankruptcy. I’m not surprised.

The thinking behind all this is that you have to balance your expenses to your income, just as companies have to. Well, not every year but if companies decide to neglect this simple rule for long enough – they’re forced out of business. Governments accounting rules are different – there are no bigger organisations that govern the ways their books are kept (roughly put).

The shocking fact is that according to Heikkinen-Jarnola’s study, would Finland have followed corporate accounting rules, Finland would have had only one positive year (in term of profits) between the years 1999 – 2008. These have been very successful years for Finland, not counting the dotcom bubble years 2001 and 2002. These figures exclude the sales of government owned corporations and dividents from government organisations. Looking at our economy from this perspective – we’re constantly running a slight deficit in terms of national income. Not a very positive thing in the end.

The government’s role with regard to the economy is to keep the annual budget balanced. That is at least how I believe many see it. If someone would introduce a CEO to me whose job is to keep the company’s budget balanced, I’d think there’s got to be something wrong with the business – why aren’t they trying to grow or create a profit?

To keep the budget balanced, if there is a possibility of deficit (like there is this year), governments take debt. Who pays the debt? The taxpayers naturally. In a way, each of us is a shareholder in a corporation called Finland and we’re not very active in running our company. This year will accrue each shareholder of Finland a future liability of approximately 2600 euros (Finland takes around 13 billion euros of debt this year to balance its budget).

Update: Just to clarify – I’m totally for Heikkinen-Jarnola’s initiative. I’m a big supporter of running governments more as large corporations.

This is something I talked about in Paris as well. Seems like there is a real market for this as Michael Arrington is also worrying about the perfection of their wifi in next year’s TC50. My point was that since there is always talk on the internet after a conference (pick a place and theme with more than 1000 members) how the internet connectivity sucked, that someone set up a company who would guarantee connectivity for a much above market prices.

This is something we think about a lot at TechCrunch, because so many conferences have bad connectivity, and we need to make it perfect at TechCrunch50 next year. There’s a real business here if a large company can get it right and is willing to put a guarantee in place to conference organizers. They can charge almost anything – I’m sure Loic would have paid €200,000 if that’s what it took to get proper Internet for attendees. If they can build a reputation for reliability, and are willing to back up that reputation with a liquidated damages clause for failure in the range of, say, 5x the fee they charge, then I imagine every conference that could would hire them.

Src: TC

It’s a simple business idea: build a company around guaranteeing internet connectivity in large conferences. You can have your own gear, cables, etc., put a little bit of magic into the connectivity and guarantee that the internet works – I’m sure this future company would become world famous and a trusted brand globally within a year.

Image: Travelin’ Librarian CC:BY-NC

We were talking today about a certain company at a client meeting with a colleague when he said that ultimately their business is customer service – keep the systems working and customers happy. Some how that got rolling around in my head until I got home and realised, all companies – no matter the business – should see theirselves in the customer service business.

All companies who are doing business look to improve the condition of their customer, whether B2C or B2B, in the end. Right?

In the middle, they might be creating a product or a service that might make the lives of the customer better. However, in the end, if you go further – the company is engaging in customer service. If you think of business this way, you really shouldn’t be selling but constantly looking to help new people.

If you think of running a business from this point of view – you really start to see how you should be operating, whether online or offline. Also, some functions of your company are really undervalued, such as customer service. I’d even go as far to say that if you think of any less than this of your business for your customers – you are underestimating them.

(Photo via Flickr: The Department CC-licensed)