If you’ve been following the posts on the IPO market here, you’ll know that things got much better during the third quarter of this year. Well, the story has stayed happy during October and the early days of November, too.

You can get full details on the IPO Performance pages (October, November) of Hoover’s IPO Central.

Also worth a read: this short article from Matt Krantz of USA Today:

Hyatt, Ancestry.com successes show IPO market mending

The story quotes me as saying, “We’re seeing a healthy IPO market but not an overheated market.”

That’s what I think. Now, what about you? Where do you see the IPO market headed over the next several months?

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Related posts:

• More of my IPO opinions, in long and short form.
• News from the IPO front, complete with gratuitous self-promotion.
• Increased volume and average value of IPO filings in Q3.

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Photo by Infrogmation of New Orleans.

Cast your mind back to the July 1 release date of The Day-Glo Brothers, the debut effort from longtime Hooverite Chris Barton, when this blog celebrated the arrival of the book.

Well, Chris’s hard work has paid off in the form of having The Day-Glo Brothers listed as one of Publisher’s Weekly’s 30 Best Children’s Books of 2009! Check out the whole list here:

Best Children’s Books of 2009

Congratulations to Chris — we couldn’t be prouder!

(Oh, and look for his follow-up book, Shark vs. Train, in April 2010!)

I admit I have a soft spot for Ford Motor Company. My friend Scott Monty has been leading their social-media efforts for a while — and was nice enough to let me interview him on that subject late last year. Through a connection of Scott’s, I was able to attend an impressive presentation by one of Ford’s sustainability leaders, John Viera, last year. And in the broader picture, it was clear even long before the bankruptcies and bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler that Detroit was no longer home of the “Big Three,” but rather of “Ford and the Other Two.”

Now CEO Alan Mulally’s turnaround plan — which emphasized “dealing with reality” from the start — is bearing fruit:

Ford Reports Nearly $1 Billion Profit
The latest and strongest sign of the automaker’s comeback comes as it pays down debt and adds to U.S. market share

Mind you, Ford isn’t out of the woods. Even with this big quarterly profit, it’s running a multi-billion loss for 2009. It has more than $20 billion in debt, though conversely it has a similarly large stockpile of cash. It’s also highly reliant for profits on its financing arm, rather on vehicle manufacturing itself. Beyond all that, Ford is reliant on a consumer economy that’s still quite shaky, and that may be facing a long jobless recovery.

Still, credit where it’s due: Ford took more hard business medicine, and did it earlier, than either of its Detroit peers — and now it is reaping the rewards.

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Related posts:

• What does the future hold for the Detroit car makers?
• Ford’s Sustainability Focus.
• Ford’s approach to social media: an interview with Scott Monty.
• What next for Detroit?

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During his panel presentation this morning at the Innotech conference here in Austin, Hoover’s EVP Peter Poulin fielded questions about Web site testing platforms. He promised the crowd a follow-up with a longer list of testing/optimization providers.

Here’s a starter set for that list, drawn from our own experience and from audience feedback at Peter’s event:

• 7 Billion People
• Autonomy Optimost
• Google Website Optimizer
• Omniture Test & Target
• SiteCore Online Marketing Suite

No endorsements implied — just providing a handy reference.

Now, over to you: What platforms would YOU add to this list?

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Photo by Luca Volpi, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

And why wouldn’t they? Folks in the Twin Cities know quality when they see it.

Researching Companies
The Internet is a marvelous resource for digging out facts about prospective employers. Just make sure to choose the right tools.

. . .

[C]onsider the results from a recent survey of senior human resources, finance and marketing leaders at some of the nation’s largest companies. In that report, leaders said the biggest single mistake job applicants made was a lack of demonstrated knowledge about their companies. That single miscue outpaced the second-place answer – a lack of preparedness to discuss skills and experience – by a ratio of nearly 3-to-1.

. . .

While information provider Hoovers (www.hoovers.com) has a comprehensive listing of public companies, it also provides good data about leaders, markets, financials and competitors of large and midsized private firms. . . .

Give it a read — plenty of good tips in there for job-searchers.

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Related:

• Using Hoover’s in your job search — for free.
• JoblessJoe: when the going gets tough, the tough MAKE something.
• Hoover’s Jobseeker Reports

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This post is prompted by a headline that’s innocuous enough in itself:

US new housing figures disappoint

I’ll spare you another rant about how little we should rely on economists’ projections at this point. My point here is to encourage you not to use — and not to feel — words like “disappointed” when you think about the current state of the economy.

I wish the economy were better. I wish more new jobs were being created. I’m just as ready as you are — and as the BBC headline writers are — for the financial picture to get rosier.

Meanwhile, though, I’ve got a job to do. I can do it better if I have an accurate clinical understanding of what’s going on in the economy. Words have meaning, though, and words like “disappoint” don’t help the cause of clinical understanding.

Think of a scientist working in her lab: She WANTS the experiment to work. She would LOVE for the findings to verify her potentially groundbreaking hypothesis. She HOPES for a good outcome.

But then when the results don’t match her expectation, she doesn’t let herself get disappointed — or, at the very least, she doesn’t allow herself to stay disappointed. Because now she’s got work to do to determine what happened, and to figure out what she might try next. She moves forward based on the data, not her feelings.

We’re human. Feelings are an inescapable part of business, and they are often a beneficial part of business. But please, don’t let your feelings about the economy — be they ever so grim — cloud your scientific judgment about what your business needs next.

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Photo by Arwen Abendstern.

Among the many truisms about dealing with failure in business, my favorite might be the advice that Tom Watson, the architect of IBM’s rise to greatness, gave to young entrepreneurs: “Double your failure rate.”

Yet in our daily working lives, how many of us really embrace failure? How often do we look upon our failures as useful laboratory results telling us what doesn’t work?

More practically, how many of us (or our companies) reward instructive failures — with informal kudos, formal rewards, cash bonuses? From what I’ve observed and heard, most organizations, no matter how entrepreneurial they try to be, stigmatize failure either overtly or covertly, to the point that people fear trying out bold new ideas. (A nice contrast: my department gives a quarterly award for the most instructive or interesting failure.)

How do you handle failure? How can we take it in stride in our working lives? And how can we benefit from the failures that will inevitably crop up during our careers?

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Related posts:

• “You’re constantly on the brink of crashing, because that’s the fastest.”
• The benefits of failure.

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Photo of the 1926 Fremantle bridge collapse via Donna Barber.

“Apple’s not THAT much better in terms of functionality, no matter how slick the outer design may be.”

“Apple’s biggest cash cow isn’t impressive for a technology company — it’s more about a business model than actually inventing new things.”

“Apple is a closed system. They insist that you play their game for both hardware and software.”

[Apparently I didn't make it clear enough in the first go-round of this that these things are what Apple's detractors say.]

Oh-by-the-way, Apple just posted terrific quarterly returns. If you had had the foresight to buy $1,000 of Apple stock at the start of 2005, it would be worth $6,184 as I write this. (Over the same period, $1,000 invested in the S&P 500 would have turned into $901.)

The best quote from that Dow Jones story (just linked) on Apple’s great quarter:

“What it confirms to us is Apple’s proprietary competitive advantages and that customers value Apple products greatly and believe its premium is more than justified,” [Kaufman Brothers analyst Shaw] Wu said.

As a result, analysts are hesitant to transfer Apple’s strong numbers to other electronic makers.

Durn tootin’. Apple’s not a bellwether for other companies; it’s a company that makes its own weather.

Consider that this is true even in the face of an economy that has stymied many consumer brands.

[The detractors can cry about Apple's prices etc. all they like. I'm sure Apple doesn't mind.]

Now, what if we all set aside our complaints about how bad the economy is, about how we can’t be expected to compete toe-to-toe with Company X, about how our industries are different from Apple’s (or Amazon’s, or Cisco’s, et al.) . . . and then we set about the task of making our companies into businesses for which an Apple-like premium is justified?

What would happen then?

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ADDENDUM: Here’s a story on the same theme from a different industry:

• 22 Magazines Are Actually Kicking Butt In 2009

The money quote:

What’s Meredith’s secret to surviving and thriving in such a tough environment?

Patrick Taylor, also of Meredith Corporation, says these titles “do a good job of building their brand” — especially on the Internet.

He says that by creating and maintaining easy-to-use websites, magazines create more exposure to their title. At the same time, they open up another avenue for ads and ways to sign up subscribers.

Simple, right?

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UPDATE, an hour later: Early comments made it clear that the first version of this was overly subtle, so I added the sentences within brackets, plus quotation marks around the title and opening lines.

Are we in a recovery? Is the recession over? Maybe. But in line with what I’ve said before, it pays to be cautious — and to run your business as though things won’t be back to what we think of as “normal” for a long time to come.

That’s been my view for a long time, but my trawl through the business front page of Google News this morning reinforced that idea. That page contains headlines on 20 topics. Here, in order, are the 20 top headlines from this morning. Everything that speaks to the economy is bolded, with positive news in green and negative news in red:

• US Stocks Drop on GE, Bank of America Results, Consumer Data (Bloomberg)
• US EARNINGS WRAP: GE Profit Down 42%; Bank Of America In Red (WSJ)
• Rising Loan Losses Pull Bank of America To Q3 Loss (WSJ)
• Consumer sentiment pulls back in Oct. (MarketWatch)
• Industrial output grows the most in four years (MarketWatch)
• Florida unemployment rate highest in 24 years (Bizjournals.com)
• IBM Drops After Bookings Show Clients Slow to Spend (Bloomberg)
• Google ready to open wallet again after stellar 3Q (AP)
• European Exports Decline 5.8%, Most in Seven Months (Bloomberg)
• Halliburton’s Profit Falls 61% (WSJ)
• Sony Ericsson Sees Improving Markets – CEO (WSJ)
• Estee Lauder sees 1Q results higher than expected (Forbes)
• Mattel 3Q Earnings Fall 3.5% On Sales Decline (WSJ)
• Goldman Sachs sets aside $16.8 billion for bonuses (BloggingStocks)
• Walmart.com cuts prices on yet-to-be-released books (Reuters)
• Nokia Says Finance Chief Rick Simonson to Head Low-End Mobiles After Loss (Bloomberg)
• GE, bofa Weigh on Stocks (WSJ)
• Dollar gains against most rivals, but slips versus pound (MarketWatch)
• MGIC Posts Ninth Straight Loss as Defaults Hit Record (Bloomberg)
• UPDATE 1-First Horizon posts narrower-than-expected Q3 loss (Reuters)

The point isn’t that bad news outweighs good — this is hardly a scientific sample, and anyway GE’s and Bank of America’s lackluster results show up under four different headings.

No, the point is that we’re living in an economic world in which U.S. industrial output can grow the most in four years . . . AND Florida has its worst unemployment rate since the mid-1980s. It’s a world in which companies as different as Halliburton and Mattel decline . . . AND Sony Ericsson and Goldman rise.

This economy is not just one thing, and it doesn’t make sense to boil it down to one word, whether the word is “recession” or “recovery.”

This economy is many things, and for many of us it is going to be what we make of it.

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Related posts:

• How worked up should I get over financial headlines?
• Innumeracy in financial reporting?
• “I want you to have expected it.”
• What if the economic world has changed?

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It’s this:

Dow surpasses 10,000 mark for 26th time

Sure, having the Dow at 10,000 is better than having it below 8,000, like it was in April.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, eh?