The first email I read in the day is Chris Brogan’s and it’s usually before breakfast. He’s very revealing in a business sense and within that honesty you’ll often find gems of practical advice. His advice can be a little left field as he expounds about far more than just marketing per se by getting into some life and well-being thoughts, but it’s all very well received.

He wrote recently, Doing the Work is Sexy. From it, “I was an owner long before I was the boss. I owned my desk at my telephone company job, and that got me better opportunities, because I owned everything I could and make it my responsibility to do even more than the role required on paper. When I moved to my wireless telecom roles, I owned every one of them. I worked harder on projects that weren’t my assigned work while completing the job they paid me for as well.” This hit me squarely between the eyes.

I’ve been trying to articulate ‘ownership’ to my teams for over a decade with varying success. It’s surely the perennial problem of having others take responsibility for their world at work.

Owning and being responsible for projects, tasks, duties, etc means digging in and not pushing things back onto others. It’s seeing things through rather than dreaming up reasons and excuses why they didn’t float. It’s a buck-stops-here mentality, even though you may be well down the pecking order of the organisation chart.

Saying, “this is above my pay grade,” isn’t taking ownership. Neither are, “I don’t know why I didn’t complete X,” or, “sorry, I simply forgot,” or, “I never seem to find the time.”

The noun manager implies even more ownership. So synonymous is the relationship that you could actually switch job titles from Manager of X to Owner of X, but that would invoke a HR heart attack.

From what I’ve observed I’d say ownership is a mindset, albeit a difficult one to sustain. It comes at a personal cost as you invest more of yourself than your raw job description prescribes. Too few are willing to shoulder the commitment and resilience that owning your role demands. Yet, without blind luck and stumbling on good fortune, only through ownership can you ever become the boss. They go hand in hand, with ownership the first to be outstretched.

Side note:
Heston Blumenthal worked 120+ hours a week for 5 years. He took himself and his one employee to a huge team of chefs and three Michelin stars. He went from self-taught nobody to being mentioned in more or less every good restaurant guide in the world. That’s an awful lot of ownership.

The biggest news in tech this week is that Yahoo! finally appointed a replacement for their known-to-swear-a-lot and former top-dog, Carol Bartz. They’ve appointed little-known Scott Thompson from PayPal.

But the much more fun/entertaining/frightening tech news is Rupert Murdoch joined Twitter. Really joined. No spoof account (that was his wife’s). No digital sidekick thumbing his tweets. No pseudonyms, social media gurus or ghost writers, just 100% unfettered, real-time access to our Rupes.

Love him or loath him (okay, I can probably guess which), this had to make the news wires. He started up on New Year’s eve and quickly courted controversy with (now deleted) quips like, “Maybe Brits have too many holidays for broke country!”

John Prescott must’ve found a dose of irony in a belated Christmas cracker and tweeted, “Welcome to Twitter…@rupertmurdoch. I’ve left you a Happy New Year message on my voicemail!”

It’s oh so easy to mock from the sidelines. Social media invented the term snark – and then used it in abundance. But this has got the hallmarks of a Charlie Sheenesque car crash all over it.

He’s obviously got every right to join the Twitterati but what’s his motivation here? I’ll show them all I’m not an evil bugger? I’ll prove to the world I’ve still got all my marbles? He’s not exactly in need of headlines, or a wider network.

Some are indicating he’s promoting his own products by saying “Great oped inWSJ today,” and “Very proud of fox team who made this great film,” and “Got to watch Foxnews at 5 EST.” Sure they’re all in his portfolio but his marketing teams would have to be pretty desperate to script that!

No, I think his top execs will all be frantically dreaming up ‘seriously pressing business emergencies’ that need his urgent and full attention. And his PR and comms teams will be praying Twitter falls over every 20 minutes like it used to in the early days.

In their shoes, I’d be tempted to sneak one of those Hollywood-style, CIA speced wi-fi blockers into his briefcase… or break his thumbs.

Given his opening salvo, it’s more than difficult to see this going well. I think it’ll end in either:
a) a fizzle, as Mr M gets bored of trying to be fab in 140 characters and lets the account doze off, or
b) in the furore of a NoTW closure but without the job losses.

Amazon in America is offering $5 off a purchase if the user orders via their mobile app. As of Saturday, if you go to Macy’s or Toys R Us and physically scan an item’s barcode with the Amazon App, Amazon will give you up to $5 off that item if you add it to your (mobile) cart and leave Macy’s empty handed.

This is about as aggressive as business gets: if you walk into a competing retailer, scan the very item they’ve spent money on to put in store, we’ll do you a better deal today. Does pricing get any more predatory? Amazon don’t want to be a major retail player online, they want to be the retail player, period. eBay and Google can play around with physical pop up shops, but not Amazon. They know where their expertise lie: online. And they aren’t shy about getting you there either.

It’s yet another stunning lesson from Bezos of using market-leader advantage to further leverage your position. The banks are claiming “Caveat emptor,” or buyers beware, as a retort to the mis-selling and exploitation critique. I can’t help but think Amazon will be saying, ‘sellers beware,’ in the coming years as they turn retailers’ own guns back on them having mined the data to within an inch of its life.

I came across an old post by Fred Wilson (via Ben Parr) who was saying that a CEO had three roles:
1) sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders;
2) recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company;
3) makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank.

I’d argue all three of these require great communication to succeed. They also take more than a smidge of team spirit if the leader is to claim glory. After all, success or failure is always down to the leader, right? They’re the heroes or villains based on the performance of others in their charge.

That’s why Martin Johnson’s resigned from his England rugby coaching role. The team’s performance wasn’t strong enough in New Zealand and he’s had to fall on the proverbial sword. The pressure to go must’ve been tremendous, as Johnson is about as much a quitter as Ryan Giggs is maritally faithful.

But what of Johnson’s French counterpart, Marc Lievremont. Lievremont is known to have huge disagreements with his team. His players would say he couldn’t manage the bean bags in a crèche. They were wholly disobedient, mutinous and counter productive to pretty much everything he said. After winning their semi-final match against Wales (we was robbed, ref!), Lievremont asked his players to not party. They saw that as their queue to go out on the town. He should’ve offered them a free bar in a strip club; perhaps they’d have disappointed him by staying in their rooms and getting an early night.

My question is, what if France had won their final in the World Cup? Would success still have come from great leadership? Would Lievremont be able to claim that he’d made decisions in the build up to the tournament that laid foundations for a great performance? That his tactics were what counted, not his personal appeal by the players?

If an organisation is winning, is it really thanks to its leader? Well, Johnson knows losing certainly is.

The modern business model from Silicon Valley is build. Don’t just make a computer, make digital products (as Steve Jobs said by launching a music player, then a music store, then a phone). Build and build again is what the dominant players are showing us to be the winning formula.

Google was just a search engine, Apple was just about consumer electronics, Amazon was just a bookstore and Facebook was just a social network. No more.

These four colossal companies all appear to want to channel us down their particular funnels and have you ride their own track as you consume all things digital. To paraphrase the eloquent John Battelle, Google used to equal search, now they equal Chrome, YouTube, Android, Docs, Gmail, Maps, Places, Voices, self-driving cars, energy research, Adwords, Google+ and Motorola. And let’s not forget possibly their biggest opportunity for a true golden goose: Google TV.

This Fab Four will make the scale of Murdoch’s empire look about as impressive as a Lego village. Their dominance of technology, media and data over our lives will be insurmountable. Google is expected to bring in more than $30 billion this year. Analysts expect Amazon to reach $100 billion in revenue by 2015, faster than any other company. You need to stand up when you hear Apple’s annual growth numbers: net profit up 85% to $25.9 billion (£16.5 billion). In just Q3 of this year (obviously not their largest without Christmas sales), Apple turned over $28,571,000,000*. Read that number again – it’s genuinely staggering. They sold over 17 million iPhones in their financial Q4!

Such is the significance of the Fab Four, that we barely even think of Microsoft in the same vein. Arguably the largest of them all and the business choice of the world, Microsoft simply isn’t in the running for our hearts and minds like these guys are. They’re in their own cold war with each other, leveraging the juxtaposition of the web in that the low barrier of entry shouldn’t allow such monopolistic companies to exist. Yet again, what shouldn’t be possible, actually proves true online.

Each of the Fab Four want to build an ecosystem. Think about smartphones, tablets, apps, cloud storage, social networking, gaming, music, TV, or movies and all fit into their strategic map of web’s future – their own corner of the web.

I can’t help but think this is taking the open web and making silos for the user. Amazons new tablet, the Fire, doesn’t like you to browse around the web too easily, but if you want to download a movie from Amazon or buy shoes from their marketplace, then that’ll be a piece of cake.

There’s an element of lock in. I don’t necessarily mind that it’ll be a bit stifling, but the decision you make with your hardware may well dictate how easily you can consume software and content in the future.

It’s a bit like choosing to buy a car having the knowledge of exactly where and how you’ll drive it in the future. Suddenly what you buy becomes far more than we’ve traditionally dealt with when buying a laptop or a PC i.e. size, speed and storage.

It’s like buying a new BMW. Not happy just with selling you the metal, plastic and rubber, BMW build a bunch of roads and would very much prefer it if you drove only on them. And they’d like you to use their fuel stations as they’ll hook up with your car far easier than any other (perhaps auto payments through number plate recognition). And BMW have plans afoot to offer you destinations too that will stop you going to the beach or Center Parcs or the shopping centre – the BMW equivalent will be better, more secure and more ‘holistic’ to your vehicle.

It’s hugely exciting to see these guys slug it out on the global scale and change our lives through innovation. It’s a shame none of them are British. Who are you backing to be the winner or can they coexist?

*The numbers and much of the facts came from an excellent post by Farhad Manjoo.

Seth wrote recently about ceding one’s responsibility via other people’s agendas. He said ‘Setting an agenda is often as important as checking the boxes,’ and I completely agree.

Setting an agenda for a meeting gives you the initial power. Obviously, it allows you to frame the context of the discussions. You might not win every position but you certainly get to discuss them if you’ve put them on the agenda.

Also, if a structured agenda’s gone out beforehand and no one had any amendments prior to sitting down, then you’d be in your rights to say, ‘Sorry, I don’t believe that’s on the agenda. We can schedule it in for next time, though,’ if something new comes up. This can be a great tactic to avoid a tricky area or just simply to keep the stupid stuff off the table.

Definitely avoid the ‘any other business’ pitfall, too. It’s the catchall that lets any number of elephants into the room.

When staff, especially service staff, say that customers where okay, it’s often not the case. “But they didn’t stay, they didn’t buy, they didn’t engage,” you reply.

Disgruntled, dissatisfied, unhappy customers don’t scream and shout or spill blood. They leave. Simple as that. They might moan to their partner in the car or once the phone is put down, but they’ll very rarely feedback constructively to your team and offer suggestions (unless they’re from New York!).

I’m never happy to receive a complaint from a customer because we’ve obviously caused a problem, but I welcome the chance to rectify the situation. Personally, I’d vote my with feet rather than write you an email, so I’m chuffed that people can try and help us improve and win them back as a customer.

But given that we know the majority simply walk, what are we doing to spot those signals and what comes next?

It’s easy to gush more wonderful adulation to Steve Jobs, but there’s a far better tribute to be made: start something.

A friend said tonight that it’d been a moving day. But he was also inspired when he thought of Jobs and the founding of Apple and Pixar. So inspired in fact that he registered two companies that he and his team had been talking about for months. These companies will move from mothballed thoughts to job-creating realism.

This is what our dire economy needs: innovation, inspiration and action (and perhaps that £75 billion in Q.E.).

Thanks for the virtuoso performance, Steve.

Amazon has shown itself as the first true competitor to Apple in the tablet war. The launch of the Kindle Fire this week is an audacious move to out-price the iPad with a dumbed-down system costing just $199.

Tablets are a future cornerstone for the world’s data consumption. As ever, Jobs lifted the curtain on that future and then he charged us a fortune to let us walk behind it. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has had the hindsight of not being the first mover – he’s seen others throw pebbles at the armour of Apple with their tablet efforts (HP’s TouchPad was surely the most ham-fisted go at it).

I agree with Jason Calacanis that price is the key here, as you need to flood the market to gain traction and lock out competitors. Of course the product needs to be sellable in the first instance. Free may convert latent demand but it doesn’t create demand. No price reduction is enough if the product is tat – you could stand on every street corner in the country selling Betamax recorders for 1p. If you’d raised a whole £1 after a year I’d be stunned.

Amazon also had the gumption to go big. To double down as the yanks would say. And it needs to be so audacious because the scale of winning in this tech war is simply stratospheric. It’s not just about a few million bucks on the hardware, that’s just the entry fee to the club. The real win is at the bar. Consumers are paying for data that the world thought would be free for all time until the App Store showed us otherwise.

And nowhere is content more available than Amazon. Books, music, movies and TV shows are there. And of course, physical products from the deepest marketplace imaginable. Regardless of whether Amazon want to outgun the iPad, they are undoubtedly set to sell a whole tonne of content.

This is a killer strategy that doesn’t work in a cash strapped start-up with very little runway money and time. It’s the epitome of a loss leader, but it comes with the double whammy of providing a huge content channel as well as seeing off hardware competitors. Advantage Amazon.

This is a great move and a business test case for millions of students in years to come. What can Microsoft come back with?

Marks & Spencer sent me an email this week announcing their new TV advert that was about to launch. I barely watch TV ads so this would surely have passed me by but did they really need to tell me?

Well, I’m an existing customer so this wasn’t about acquisition but it may inspire repeat business as they bang the “as seen on TV” drum. I don’t particularly care what the ad shows but it’ll be the ultimate video content for many consumers as they like the clothes on characters and try to emulate that.

Pepsi created great interest when they first advertised their new advert was coming. Not sure this is quite as innovative, or interesting, but it is duplicating your message across all platforms and that’s to be commended.