At that point, all useful discussion screeches to a halt, because someone has invoked one of the shibboleths of the business world, the primacy of the customer.

You see what has happened, but you're not sure how to respond. After all, the point is unarguable. The customer does come first. But in this case, the customer doesn't seem particular relevant. After all, the issue is the relative merits of various signs around corporate HQ and how many customers will ever see them anyway?

But you don't want to be the one who puts his hand up and says, "No, I don't think we should put the customer first," because that will curse you forever in the eyes of the Assistant Vice President of Marketing, who's chairing the meeting, and who just smiled and nodded at the genius who made the comment. The AVP loves talking about customers and putting them first, and you don't want to get on her bad side.

A surprising number of potentially productive meetings are derailed by comments like this in the corporate world. Cross-functional teams are particularly prone to them, because a shibboleth that's relevant in, say, marketing, may not be in legal, or accounting. They have their own sacred cows, mantras, and buzzwords.

What's the danger, besides waste and inefficiency, of discussion-killing corporate buzz talk?

Corporate shibboleths are like trump cards in the old game of bridge. The normal hierarchy of the cards is suspended, and a weak trump card can carry the trick. Thus, the danger is that bad decisions will be made because ideas that are weak in the particular context will dominate.

It's not that the customer isn't primary, it's just that in this particular case, that's not the most important idea in the room.

The communication confusion here is understandable, because you're in the difficult terrain of 'competing goods'. In other words, there are several good ideas floating around, ideas that are different in nature, and therefore hard to compare.

It's a good thing to have adequate signage so that people can find their way around, and it's also a good thing to put the customer first. How do you decide between the two?

The answer is that you have to get clear about two ways in which ideas can interact, and be prepared to point out violations when necessary.

Ideas exist in a hierarchy - some are more important than others to an organization, a group, a culture - and they have varying degrees of relevance. That is, in any particular situation, their strength is affected by how important they are to the situation.

So you are entitled to raise your hand in the current example and say, "Bob is absolutely right that the customer comes first. We here at GlobalBiz do put the customer first whenever we're thinking about customer-facing activities. But the fact is that some of our work involves behind-the-scenes stuff which the customers never see and that is of little relevance to them. So Bob can rest easy, and we can wrap this up, without further worry about how this decision will affect the customer."

Ultimately, it's the job of leadership to keep investigating both the hierarchy and the relevance of the important ideas that guide organizational policy and thinking. External events, changing markets, and strategic shifts all can affect corporate truisms, and it's important to check their current status regularly. As a leader, you can make it easier for your people to get things done - and help avoid bad decision-making - if you refresh your corporate thinking often in open and vigorous communication.

Nick Morgan is one of America's top communications theorists and coaches . His new book on authentic communications, Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, is due out in December 2008.

In this week's Harvard Business IdeaCast (see audio player below), Harvard Business School Professor Rohit Deshpande discusses one airline that's not just surviving the current downturn, but thriving: Singapore Airlines. Why is Singapore offering complimentary espresso on flights when others are charging for luggage and taking away in-flight movies? How has the company avoided the doom and gloom that so many other carriers face?

By staying out of what Deshpande says is a loser's game of competing for customers on price, of treating them like commodities.

Singapore Airlines is a throwback, by design, to the days when flying was glamorous and customer service was king. "They've created a luxury travel experience and retained the glamour of long-distance travel. It's almost retro," says Deshpande, who authored and teaches a Harvard Business School case on the airline.

Of course customers have to pay more for this experience, but Deshpande says most don't mind. Flying has become so stressful, they're willing to pay a little more for a better experience.

My first reaction to Deshpande's analysis was, "What about coach?" I wondered if the focus on first- and business class was anti-democratic. If Singapore Airlines was bringing back the glory days of aviation, was it also bringing back the exclusive nature of '50s air travel, when only large businesses and the upper classes could afford the experience. In turn, wouldn't this affect global business and commerce if it became difficult for entrepreneurs, small business owners and others to afford to fly?

But Deshpande says that Singapore brings its customer service focus to all cabins, even if it's making its money off of the front of the plane. "They give more frills to economy than any airline," he says. "They were the first in-seat TVs and offered more channels than any airline. They have, even in economy, more flight attendants per passenger."

Singapore also goes against conventional wisdom by using the downturn as a time to make capital investments, not shun them.

The net result is an airline that's built customer loyalty and a solid business. Listen to the IdeaCast for more from Professor Deshpande on Singapore Airlines' winning strategy.

First, Olympics sponsors are the most visibly commercial aspect of the Games to the huge television audiences. The "five rings" is one of the most readily and widely recognized organizational symbols in the world. The dozen corporate members of the Olympic Partner Program each pay an estimated $70+ million for the four-year exclusive rights in their category to be a global sponsor and use the rings. They spend many millions more to implement ("activate") their sponsorship via merchandising and other promotional means. Coca-Cola has been an Olympic sponsor since 1928. Lenovo is the only one headquartered in China, and made its Olympic debut in Turin in 2006. And Visa heavily promotes both itself and the Olympics with advertising that reminds us it is the only credit card accepted at the Games.

Second, these sponsors are co-branding with the Olympics brand itself. The power of the Olympics brand derives from three distinct strong elements of differentiation. The Olympics are infrequent--one every four years by events competed and every two years by calendar. They are always about top-level athletes--the excellence of " citius, altius, fortius " (faster, higher, stronger). And they provide vehicles to express national pride, via tears and smiles from athletes and in hearts and minds of viewers. Not only top sponsors, but broadcasters, pay very large sums (almost $900 million by NBC for U.S. rights for the 2008 Games) to be the focal point of 24-hour (available) viewing via multiple networks plus digital coverage.

Finally, the biggest brand of Beijing 2008 is China itself. Indeed, to many, China has effectively co-branded with the Olympics to elevate the country's visibility and the salience of its marketplace on the world stage. This is not the first time the Olympics have been a vehicle for country branding; 1936 (Berlin) and 1964 (Tokyo) are examples. But China's "coming out party" reflects and signals its significance in sports, its magnitude as an economy, and its power in global politics.

We won't know until after the closing ceremonies, perhaps well after, how satisfied the sponsors (and advertisers) were, how successful the competition was for the reputation of the Olympics, and whether China's image was enhanced. These judgments, like the events themselves, await us.

Read more on the Olympics:

• 8 Simple Steps to Winning Eyeballs in Beijing
• How Olympics Branding is Shaping China

Stephen A. Greyser is Richard P. Chapman Professor (Marketing/Communications) Emeritus, Harvard Business School, where he specializes in brand marketing, advertising, corporate communications, the business of sports, and nonprofit management. He created and teaches Harvard's Business of Sports course, has served on the Selection Committee for the Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame, and has authored numerous Business of Sports cases and articles, including "Winners and Losers in the Olympics" (2006).

The question for those of us who study leadership is more than simply who is in the pipeline. We wonder: upon what criteria have Steve Jobs and the Apple board built a leadership pipeline that continues beyond his tenure? Everyone talks about the need for the leader of Apple to be innovative, but the board should consider not just what has made Steve Jobs successful but also the business conditions and organizational requirements for Apple's future.

Yes, Apple still needs a technologist with vision and passion. After all, that is a hallmark for all the major technology firms -- think Bill Gates of Microsoft, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Andy Grove of Intel. Each of these CEOs was a visionary who significantly controls or controlled development spend, and their succession plans are playing out now as well. But despite the fact that leaders who were business people first and technologists second succeeded only in the shorter term -- here think of Carly Fiorina and John Sculley -- we suspect that vision and passion alone will not be enough for Apple going forward. As Apple broadens its offerings from computers to communications, the CEO job will become more complex.

Let's look at what Apple is doing. First, as Mac moves into the mainstream, Apple can no longer rely on rabid fans eager to buy bleeding edge products and applications despite the high risk of bugs and other flaws. Instead, Apple will have to deliver on more mundane execution plays like support, scalability, and compatibility. That requires a level of execution and organization that will be new to Apple. Second, as the iPhone 3G moves from product to platform (users can buy games, business applications, GPS application and the like), Apple will go to market more through partnership than solo which implies management responsibilities of complexity and partnership builder.

Whether it happens next month, next year, or several years down the road whoever takes Jobs' place will have to lead more than innovation. He or she will also have to get the organization to button up on execution, create talent to meet new business opportunities, and peer into the future to ensure that the workforce and workplace of tomorrow meets the business needs of tomorrow. It is a rare talent who can lead in all of these ways. The reality is that whoever that new leader is will have to depend on leaders around him or her and throughout the organization who collectively are capable of delivering on the many promises of Apple's brand. The most effective leadership will not be around one leader, in other words, but about many, a bushel of apples.

Norm Smallwood, Kate Sweetman, and Dave Ulrich are with The RBL Group. They are co-authors of Leadership Code: Five Rules to Lead By due out in January.

But established entertainment companies have been slow to make their vast libraries of movies and TV shows available on these new platforms. Amazingly, you can't buy or rent classic movies like Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Annie Hall, or Titanic from iTunes or Movielink, two of the leading online marketplaces for movies and TV shows.

Media companies been even slower to experiment with producing original content geared to digital platforms. Why? Because such content would require real change. It must be produced at much lower budgets. It ought to involve the audience in new ways, and encourage viral sharing. It should take advantage of new viewing behaviors -- a three-minute window during a subway ride, for instance, rather than a two-hour commitment on a Saturday night.

So, instead of developing digital content that connects with audiences in new ways, Hollywood's reaction has been to revert to its preservationist tendencies. The movie industry (like every big and successful business) has a deep motivation to preserve what has made it successful in the past, keeping existing business models intact and maintaining individuals' status in the entertainment ecosystem. What glamour is there for a director in creating a three-minute movie intended for mobile phones, compared with a $100 million epic that will premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater?

That's what makes Joss Whedon's experiment earlier this month so interesting. He isn't the first to try to produce high-quality original content for the Web. (Coincidentally, ex-Disney chief executive Michael Eisner has also been funding experiments in online video.) Rather, with Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, he's playing with a totally new creative form -- a humorous musical about superheroes, told in fifteen-minute installments. Whedon made three installments -- half of a full-length feature film or made-for-TV movie -- for a budget in the low six figures. And he's eschewing traditional TV or theatrical distribution entirely.

Instead, Whedon made the series available for free online but for just one week. Whedon's fans flocked to the Dr. Horrible site in such hordes that it crashed temporarily, not unlike the way people lined up around the block to see The Jazz Singer in 1927. Now, the series is available on iTunes for $1.99 an episode, or on Hulu.com, with ads interspersed. A DVD with bonus features comes next. (One of the features will be a musical commentary track by the creators, a totally inspired idea.)

It's the sort of experimentation Walt Disney was famous for in his lifetime and the sort of experimentation Hollywood needs to do more of, if the industry hopes to maintain its connection with an audience faced with a growing number of other entertainment options.

Scott Kirsner writes the weekly "Innovation Economy" in the Boston Globe, covers tech issues for Variety, edits the blog CinemaTech, and is the author of "Inventing the Movies" and "The Future of Web Video." He's also one of the founders of a new gathering to be held this fall in the San Francisco Bay Area, "The Conversation: The Future of Cinema, Games, and Online Video."

On several fronts I feel like I'm being encouraged to give up on the idea that I can live two distinct existences -- one focused on home and the other focused on work. No, it's by no means a new trend, but I do think that it's accelerating.

The integration of work "friends" and friend "friends" on Facebook is just one tiny example. That BlackBerry I'm about to check is another. Just as importantly, several management thought leaders I deeply respect have been weighing in with their support for letting traditional barriers fall.

My friend Stew Friedman, for example, wrote a terrifically successful book this year based on the premise that compartmentalizing our lives between home and work creates false barriers that detract from our ability to lead happy and productive lives. Stew believes we need to embrace a much more integrated view of our existence. His aim is for us to actually spend more time focusing on non-work aspects of our lives. An admirable goal and one I embrace wholeheartedly.

Stew's philosophy has clearly proven effective for a great many people. So what's my hesitation? Well, it's the coming down of the walls. There's a part of me that remains stuck in the belief that clear and absolute dividers can serve a useful purpose. That's why I find Tammy Erickson's recent column questioning the need for weekends to be so discomforting.

Tammy's notion is that the M-F, 9-5, three-weeks-of-carefully-planned-vacation work-a-day life is an anachronism in today's information economy. Most of our work, she notes, can be done anywhere, anytime. Why force people to toil within meaningless barriers of time and space? Tammy presents this idea in the name of freedom -- we should have more flexibility in how we get our work done and how we choose to live our lives.

It's an excellent point based on a smart, rational view of today's world, but I'm not sure I could handle it. I need a little artifice, a definition of what is "their time" and what is mine. I rely on it for my sanity, and I expect many others do too.

Why am I clinging to such a backward view of work and life? Frankly, I'm getting burned out. I work seven days a week. Not all day, every day; most Saturdays and Sundays it's only an hour or two. No one forces me to do this, but somehow it just sort of happened. It began when we launched this website and started collaborating with contributors and readers in every time zone on earth, many of whom had also decided that the game was on for work whenever they wanted it to be.

Would the sky fall if I left some things unattended until Monday? No. But who I am to stop while the rest of the business world goes on? More to the point, when you combine an obsessive compulsive personality like mine with constant access to work, you get, well, my situation.

So what am I going to do about it? Clearly, reorganizing my Facebook page isn't going to quite cut it. Indeed, Facebook now seems to be little more than an unfortunate whipping boy for my real problem: I no longer know how to silo myself from work.

So, gang, has anyone cracked this nut? How do you draw firm lines to give yourself true time off when, no matter what you do, the world keeps spinning, the conversation keeps going, and the work keeps piling up?

Needless to say, I'll be checking this discussion 24/7.

All the talk about pain at the pump misses an important point: High gas prices can work to a company’s benefit, if the company uses them as an opportunity to initiate or expand flexible work arrangements such as a compressed work week or telecommuting.

Several states have done so. Oklahoma and Kentucky have state-sponsored or -supported telework and flextime programs specifically designed to help workers save on fuel costs. Michigan, Arkansas, and California are considering implementing similar programs. And Utah has mandated a 4-day workweek for 17,000 state employees, about 80% of the state workforce. Hawaii is considering a similar policy.

Even school districts are getting into the act. One in Marietta, Ga., near Atlanta, has started a 4-day workweek in the summer, when mainly just administrative staff works.

The payoff for employees is fewer trips to the pump. But what do flexible work arrangements offer organizations?

A lot:

Greater productivity
My research has shown that employers that offer flexible work options see higher workforce productivity as a result. Employees actually work longer hours when they telework because they work during some of the time they would have spent commuting.

Such hard data should counter management fears that offsite employees aren’t pulling their fair share of the load. They are, and then some.

Higher job satisfaction and retention
Another thing employees do with the time they no longer spend commuting is rest and recharge. This quality downtime contributes to the higher levels of job satisfaction reported by those who work a flexible schedule of their own devising, which in turn drives greater retention rates.

Also, employees with long commutes who might have thought to look for a job closer to home will be more inclined to stay with their current employer if they can cut their gas bill.

A boost to recruitment
Flexible work schedules boost recruitment as well as retention. An employee considering two similar job offers is likely to opt for the one with flextime built in. This is especially true today given how slumping home values make relocation more risky.

Reduced overhead
Compressed work weeks and increased telecommuting save on utilities. For years now, many private sector consulting and high tech firms, such as IBM, Deloitte, and Accenture, have moved to a “mobile workforce,” in which a large portion of core employees work primarily from home or at the customer as a way to save on office space and costs.

Benefits beyond the organization
Increasing the portion of the labor force that pays less for gas, and works longer by saving on commuting time, gives the sluggish U.S. economy a productivity boost, without spending an additional stimulus dollar.

Oh, there’s one more thing: By encouraging compressed workweeks and telecommuting, companies are encouraging eco-friendly behaviors.

Have the surging gas prices affected support for flexible work arrangements in your company? Are people at the top of the organization taking advantage of this policy or is it just lower-level employees?

I used to share this opinion. When I launched my Facebook page the better part of a year ago, I envisioned it as the great nexus of all things work and home: my one hub. But the actual experience hasn't lived up to my expectations -- at all. Sure, I've found Facebook to be a worthwhile personal amusement. I've managed to reconnect with long-lost college pals and my day is not complete without the latest breathless updates about my friends’ kids -- but as for professional value? Forget it.

Mind you, I do have plenty of work-related connections on Facebook, many of which I've initiated. I'm linked to Harvard Business Publishing co-workers, both present and former; I'm connected to writers who contribute to our website, and to a variety outside business colleagues. But to what end? Nothing that I can see.

And it's not for lack of trying. I change my status regularly with a mix of personal and professional messages. I write on people's "walls." I've joined -- or "become a fan of" -- a number of groups and associations that seemed to hold promise. I've attempted to use my Facebook presence to promote cool new features on HarvardBusiness.org, to recruit bloggers, to solicit new ideas, to drive traffic to columns I've written, even to connect to my now semi-dormant Twitter account. The result? Nada.

In the hope of drumming up some activity, I even mentioned that I had a Facebook page on the Harvard Business IdeaCast, our popular weekly podcast (shameless plug). Result? A few people dropped me notes to say they enjoyed the program. That was nice. But did they suggest topics or potential guests? Did they provide useful critiques? No, they offered to be "friends." Am I better for this? Depends on how you gauge the value of knowing what Fannie the Ferret (name and species changed to protect the innocent) had for breakfast this morning.

Sure, a few other prospective business associates have popped out of the woodwork along the way, but they've offered the most flimsy of platforms for a relationship -- she once taught a business course in Grenada or some other dubious spot, he’s "in the media," they are -- God help me -- independent management consultants. What does a connection with them offer me? Nothing. What do I offer them? The same. We're each just another number, another utterly useless "connection."

So I'm ready to sever my "business" ties and limit my Facebook use to exclusively personal correspondence. Not only will it keep out a lot of noise, but it will solve another pressing problem: keeping my inappropriate friends, and the even more inappropriate friends of friends, at a safer distance from my professional associates. But what about transparency, you ask? Sometime, I prefer opaqueness, thank you very much. I mean, who doesn't dread the day that the still-beer-soaked high school buddy crosses paths with the boss? If it's true that we can be judged by the company we keep, there are times I'd prefer not be judged.

If the professional ROI was sufficient, I might continue to risk having my inner ne'er-do-well exposed to my publishing colleagues. But I've given Facebook long enough to demonstrate any kind of tangible professional value for me. And, together, we have failed. So if you get a note that I've "defriended" you, don't take it personally. It's just business.

Our initial approach was typical -- we talked to everyone we knew. That turned up a little, but nothing that panned out. We began conversations with a couple of executive recruiters, and found ourselves having difficulty swallowing their fees.

As part of our personal outreach, our COO, Bryan Mason, had a fateful conversation with Ross Mayfield. Ross hosts a popular personal blog, and had been CEO of Socialtext, a company he co-founded that offers wiki services for enterprises. Ross told Bryan of his experience using his blog to look for a CEO, and how successful it was. Yes, most of the responses were worthless, but 20 were legitimate, and 5 were stellar.

We had considered such an approach, and Ross's comment pushed us over the edge. We figured we were only a couple of degrees separated from great CEO candidates in our social network, so we wrote our own blog post, and I wrote a more personal take on my site. Additionally, we ponied up the $200 or so for posting the job to LinkedIn, which I then blasted at my connections there.

Which is when the deluge began. When we turned off the firehose (i.e., remove the posting from LinkedIn), we had received 170 inquiries about the role. Our numbers were similar to Ross's -- 20 people warranted following up, and we had serious conversations with five or six. Two candidates separated themselves from the rest of the pack, and either would have been great. On July 9, exactly three months after our initial blog post, we announced the selection of Michael Meyer, a Harvard MBA whose direct experience at frog design and IDEO best suited our specific needs.

Before we publicly announced, one of our biggest concerns was that people might think the search suggested problems or instability at Adaptive Path. Happily, that never panned out, and it was important that our initial communication demonstrated concrete success that we’re having, and articulated our honest reasons for the search.

Such an approach did require a lot of our own time. Instead of relying on an executive search firm to bring in just the few candidates who were worthy, Bryan spent numerous hours on the phone with folks. However, those conversations proved valuable in that through them we honed our criteria, and we also felt confident about the candidates who made it through, because we had cast such a wide net.

In order for this to succeed, you already need to an audience. Adaptive Path’s blog had over 7,000 subscribers, and my personal blog had more than 2,000. Also, I’ve spent the last couple of years bolstering my LinkedIn network, such that I have 70,000 people who two degrees away. It’s important that you cultivate your LinkedIn network intelligently. Though mine is large, I make a point of having a meaningful connection with everyone on it. This means I often decline requests from people I have only met once, briefly. Quality is as, if not more, important than quantity.

Obviously, this approach is not for everyone. But it’s costs are so low, that there’s no reason that anyone recruiting an executive should not give it a try.

Peter Merholz is President of Adaptive Path, which he also co-founded. For the last seven years, he's helped grow Adaptive Path from a web design consultancy into a company that helps organizations address experience design challenges of all kinds. He's perhaps most (in)famous for having coined the word "blog."

In his response, “Debating the Long Tail,” Chris Anderson certainly makes a valid point about the need to look at the long-tail phenomenon both in a relative and an absolute sense. Astute readers will have noticed that this is exactly the position I advocate in my discussion of the customer transactions data for Rhapsody, when I state:

The top 10% of titles accounted for 78% of all plays, and the top 1% of titles for 32% of all plays. Pause for a moment, though, to reflect on those numbers. One percent of a million is still 10,000 – far more than the number of titles a U.S. radio station plays in a given year, and when translated into album terms, equal to the entire music inventory of a typical Wal-Mart store.

Based on the Rhapsody and Quickflix data, Anderson again makes the argument that online markets exhibit a long tail. I agree with that assessment, and have not claimed the opposite. However, I argue the data reveal two other important patterns. First, the tail is long but extremely flat—and, as online retailers expand their assortments, increasingly so. Second, compared with heavy users, light users have a disproportionately strong preference for the more popular offerings, while both groups appreciate hit products more than they like those in the tail.

I illustrate the second point using the Quickflix and Rhapsody data, and the first using the Nielsen VideoScan and SoundScan data. In his response, Anderson devotes all his attention to the Rhapsody and Quickflix results, thereby ignoring the bigger-picture findings on the changing sales distributions in the video (VideoScan) and music (SoundScan) markets as a whole. As I note in my article, looking at snapshots is not enough—strategists need to understand how markets are changing. The Nielsen data cover multiple retailers, multiple channels, and multiple years, offering a wealth of material to test aspects of Anderson’s long-tail theory. What emerges is not a rosy picture of the fate of long-tail products: the tail increasingly consists of titles that rarely sell and that are produced by smaller-scale players.

In his response, Anderson suggests that our divergent conclusions may stem from different definitions of the “head” and “tail.” That seems odd, as I have tried to steer away from drawing a sharp line between “head” and “tail”—those are Anderson’s interpretations in his review of my Rhapsody and Quickflix results, not mine—and instead focus on describing the distribution of transactions. I do so not only because I believe studying distributions is ultimately more insightful and relevant to managers faced with product portfolio decisions; any line one draws between the “head” and “tail” is also unavoidably arbitrary.

This is evident even from Anderson’s own writing on the long tail: he sometimes implies the “head” to be the assortment offered by all bricks-and-mortar stores (and, on his blog, points to the demise of a retailer like Tower Records as evidence of the growing power of the “tail”), and at other times, as in his response to my article, suggests the “head” to consist of all products offered by the largest bricks-and-mortar retailer. The latter, incidentally, strikes me as a rather peculiar definition—if one executive at Walmart decides to cut the company’s assortment of DVDs, then all of a sudden the “tail” can grow by leaps and bounds?

Arbitrary notions of the “head” and “tail” lead to other puzzling conclusions. For instance, Anderson argues that the transactions for Quickflix are more “concentrated on the head” than those for Rhapsody. I don’t quite understand what he means by this term, but I do know that the graphs clearly show that the distribution of Quickflix’s rentals across titles is in fact less concentrated than Rhapsody’s plays.

One final comment on Anderson’s response: Why would I assume that the Quickflix finding of lower ratings for more obscure content “extrapolate[s]… to all Internet commerce,” as he puts it? The “double jeopardy” phenomenon is one of the strongest empirical generalizations in the field of marketing. It has been demonstrated in a variety of offline settings, and in a number of markets for creative goods. Having now seen the pattern in the Quickflix data, I think it is safe to bet it holds for many other online retailers, too.

I applaud Anderson for his ground-breaking work on the long-tail theory. His efforts have led to a surge in academic research on how digital technology might be changing markets and, by extension, business principles. I believe it is crucial that managerial decisions are grounded not in romantic notions of the impact of technology, but are based on empirical evidence of what is actually taking place. That is what I set out to uncover in my research, and I hope readers of the Harvard Business Review have found it useful.

"Although no one disputes the lengthening of the tail (clearly more obscure products are being made available for purchase every day), the tail is likely to be extremely flat and populated by titles that are mostly a diversion for consumers whose appetite for true blockbusters continues to grow."

That's surprising (not least to me), and now that I've had a chance to give the paper a quick read, let me jot down some quick thoughts on why Elberse (who I collaborated with on some of my research and respect highly) would come to such different conclusions than I do.

Let me start by saying that the paper looks rock solid and I'm sure her analysis is accurate. But there is a subtle difference in the way we define the Long Tail, especially in the definitions of "head" and "tail", that leads to very different results.

The best example of this is in what she describes as a growing "concentration" of sales around a relatively small number of blockbuster titles. In the Rhapsody data, she finds, the top 10% of titles (out of more than a million in that data sample) accounted for 78% of all plays, and the top 1% account for 32% of all plays. That sounds pretty concentrated around the head, until you reflect, as she notes, that "one percent of a million is still 10,000--[...]equal to the entire music inventory of a typical Wal-Mart store."

This is a good moment to remind everyone of the normal definition of "head" and "tail" in entertainment markets such as music. "Head" is the selection available in the largest bricks-and-mortar retailer in the market (that would be Wal-Mart in this case). "Tail" is everything else, most of which is only available online, where there is unlimited shelf space.

So in the data she cites, the head of the online music market represents 32% of the all plays, and the tail represents 68%. That's certainly no challenge to the Long Tail theory; indeed, it's even more tail-heavy than the data I cited in my book (probably because I used a more generous estimate of 50,000 tracks for Wal-Mart's inventory).

She then looks at Quickflix data. Here the top 10% of DVDs accounts for 48% of all rentals, and the top 1% accounts for 18%. "The concentration [of sales around the blockbusters] is not as strong as Rhapsody, but it's still substantial," she writes.

But here, too, the use of percentages misleads. Quickflix had 18,000 titles at the time of the research, compared to the average Blockbuster's 3,000 titles--there's only a factor of six between their inventories, as opposed to a factor of 100 in the Wal-Mart/Rhapsody comparison. If you look at her chart, you'll see that the top 3,000 titles (ie, the amount equal to Blockbuster's inventory, or the "head") accounts for 70% of rentals and the "tail" accounts for just 30%, making it more concentrated on the head than Rhapsody, not less. (BTW, I calculated almost exactly the same split for Netflix in the book.)

My point is not to suggest that Elberse is wrong and that I'm right, it's only to point out that different definitions of what the Long Tail is, from "head" to "tail", will generate wildly different results.

Anyway, it's getting late and I just wanted to highlight a few other interesting data points and conclusions from her article:

• Much of the paper is about consumer satisfaction in the head vs tail. In the Quickflix data, she says, "customers give lower ratings to obscure titles...it is a myth that obscure books, films and songs are treasured. What consumers buy in Internet channels is much the same as what they have always bought." That may be true for the specific example of the Australian DVD data, but it is not clear from the paper why she feels able to extrapolate that to all Internet commerce.


• The heaviest DVD renters were the most likely to venture into the tail; light consumers largely concentrated on the hits.


• In music, of the 2.4 million digital tracks sold in 2007 in the US (most of them through iTunes) 24% sold only one copy and 91% sold fewer than 100 copies.

And there are pages and pages of other nuggets like this. It's an excellent article, and although I don't agree with all the conclusions, I'm delighted to see research of this rigor on the topic.

Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. He wrote The Long Tail which first appeared in Wired in October 2004 and then became a book, published by Hyperion, in 2006. He writes The Long Tail blog.

This isn't surprising. Anheuser-Busch has shown little enthusiasm for an acquisition (or takeover). But why? From a business perspective, this deal is the proverbial no-brainer. It wasn’t taxing for me to come up with five reasons for both sides to make the deal.

1. The weak dollar. If you told an economist to conjure a global financial situation perfect for buying large American companies, he couldn’t make a fictional situation much better than today’s reality. Economically, the timing is perfect.
2. Economies of scale and scope. Because it’s a fixed-cost business, scale in the beer industry is tremendously important, and matching the largest U.S. manufacturer to one of the largest European manufacturers makes sense. But equally important is geographic scope. The two companies only overlap geographically in minor brands. Their major brands are complimentary.
3. Consolidation Zeitgeist. Consolidation is the trend in beverages, whether it’s the beer business, or wine and spirits (e.g. Diageo) or a company like Constellation Brands on the distribution side. Right now, consolidation is considered good and appropriate business.
4. Brand portfolio depth. Without getting too beverage-wonky, the beer business is divided into three or four subcategories, with premium imports at the top and popular domestics at the bottom. Pairing the largest mass market beer in the world (Bud) with some of InBev’s higher-end brands (Becks, Stella Artois) would give the company substantial clout to negotiate shelf space. And more and better shelf space means more market share.
5. Fiduciary responsibility. Both companies are duty-bound to maximize shareholder value. As I’ve shown, it’s easy to argue the many ways this deal does that.

It was somewhat harder to come up with reasons against the deal, but I managed to think of three.

1. Increased unemployment. Typically the acquired company suffers severe headcount cuts in mergers.
2. Anti-trust implications. It’s possible that a single large player rather two large players means that prices will go up
3. Nationalism. Indeed, the negative reaction to the proposed acquisition here in the United States was swift.

You’ll notice that the reasons for the deal all relate to business, and the reasons against all relate to politics. You can the call the anti-deal arguments a nationalism defense of Anheuser-Busch: Keep Bud American. But really they are old anti-globalization arguments made new: "Foreign people” are going to take over American interests.

Online, anti-global sentiment was strong. News of the proposed acquisition spawned sites like SaveBudweiser appeared overnight. More than 54,000 people have “signed” an online petition at that site (Note: not all signees use real names and a few leave comments which indicate they are not against the sale, though the vast majority are):

• Petition signer #3738. Johnson Smith: “BOYCOTT INBEV PRODUCTS NOW!! - Becks and Stella Artois!”
• Petition signer #50700. Anthony Basile: “If you sell, I have purchased my last Bud”
• Petition signer #50768. Doug Mikkelsen: “Why not sell the Statue of Liberty too !”

(Aside: Lady Liberty is not for sale, but the Chrysler Building is.)

InBev can ignore the petition as insignificant, just a visceral reaction that will wane over time. After all, Miller beer is owned by a foreign conglomerate and few seem upset about that.

But businesses, even iconic ones, that don’t plan for a nationalist backlash make stupid mistakes. Coca-Cola suffered a nationalist backlash in Euroope that led to plummeting sales and was part why then-CEO Doug Ivester was later forced to step down. On the other hand, when nationalist protests broke out in France over Mittal's $42 billion acquisition of Arcelor, Indian-born CEO Lakshmi Mittal made nice with the finance minister in France and others. The deal went through.

Nationalism's intersection with business is hardly new. In 1992, Benjamin Barber was tackling the conflict between globalism and cultural identity in the article-turned-book Jihad v. McWorld. But what is new is that currently there’s much more apprehension about the security of American assets in general.

Right now, a notion exists that if the last century was America’s century, the current one belongs to Asia, and to a lesser degree Europe. A new generation is building global brands and they have different models of governance, technology and innovation. Different ways of going to market. Dell and General Electric are giving way to Lenovo and Haier. GM and Ford to Toyota and Tata.

And now, Anheuser-Busch to InBev. Anheuser-Busch's rejection of InBev was shrewd. Saying that the company was worth more than what InBev offered communicates three divergent messages at once. One, "Hell, no." Two, "We are meeting our shareholder responsibility." And three, "We're open to negotiate." It's unclear how this will play out, but it has the potential to get quite nasty.

Petition signer #52173, Charles Kruse, wrote, “This wakeup call should get Management to do what it takes to improve stock value, Pronto!”

Unfortunately for Kruse, the best way for management to improve stock value pronto might be to do exactly what the petition he signed is arguing against: Sell out.

Dr. Rohit Deshpande is Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing and Henry B. Arthur Fellow for Business Ethics at Harvard Business School, where he has been teaching first year marketing, international marketing, leadership and corporate accountability, and in executive education programs.