[ted id=20 lang=en]

Malcolm Gladwell: Choice, Happiness, and Spaghetti Sauce

"Tipping Point" author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry's pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce -- and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.

Wise words from Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

 

Washington Post has reported on a study completed by American Express.  After surveying 684 small business owners, they issued their report findings indicating that it’s getting more expensive to bid on a contract, and that a drop in government contracting dollars has contributed to a decline in the number of bids that small businesses make.

Some other interesting facts:

• "The largest companies in the survey, those with 50 or more employees, spent $257,098 seeking contracting opportunities in 2012, well above the $37,172 that businesses with fewer than 10 employees spent"
• "The number of bids that contractors have submitted has fallen sharply since 2007. The survey found that between 2010 and 2012, companies made an average 5.5 bids on contracts on which they would be the primary contractor, and 3.6 bids where they would be the subcontractor"
• A factual error indicated that "First-time contractors are winning that initial contract faster than their counterparts did in the past. In 2012, it took companies two years and 4.7 unsuccessful bids to score that first contract. Just a year earlier, contractors said it took them 16 months and 4.4 unsuccessful bids."  However, as a savvy commenter noticed, that indicates that first-time contractors actually took longer.

A recent post at Black Enterprise about NASA's successful shift from a failing score to an A on the SBA Small Business Procurement Scorecard prompted this post.

The SBA explains their system thusly:

The annual Scorecard is an assessment tool to (1) measure how well federal agencies reach their small business and socio-economic prime contracting and subcontracting goals, (2) provide accurate and transparent contracting data and (3) report agency-specific progress. The prime and subcontracting component goals include goals for small businesses, small businesses owned by women, small disadvantaged businesses, service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses, and small businesses located in Historically Underutilized Business Zones (HUBZones).

The most recent government-wide scorecard grade can be found here.  Individual agency rates can be pulled for the past seven years.