It’s been a crazy month for me and mine as we try to plan a wedding across the continent. Now that summer is officially over it’s time to hunker down and relieve everyone’s curiosity. and catch up. So, to make for a post-free month here are two short posts sandwiched into one. The newspaper business is demonstrating that you can’t cut your way to growth. Newspapers and media companies spent most of the 1990’s cutting costs as a way to grow margins and revenues.

It’s incredibly difficult to create a product that both delights customers and generates revenue. As a result, the usual way to build a digital media business is to first create something that users love and then, months or years later, find a way to really monetize it. Youtube followed this model for years. It now looks like Google is serious about making money from Youtube. And just in time. As audience and time spent continues to shift from TV to the web advertisers are looking for scalable but innovative channels through which to reach consumers.

The dog days of summer continue. I’d like to say that this gives me lots of time for careful reflection and reading but that hasn’t been the case. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of good material this week. First, the Wall Street Journal talked to Henry “Managers not MBAs” Mintzberg to find out What Managers Really Do. Mintzberg looks at how managers handle interruptions, and discusses three ways that managers can create results.

Today’s Wall Street Journal includes a great article on the cold war between Google and Microsoft (subscription required). The author looks at why Microsoft is launching a free, online-only version of Office, and why Google is responding in part by launching its own OS. He believes that “neither Google nor Microsoft really have an interest in challenging each other’s core franchises if it means risk to their own. Their posturing is primarily defensive—fear of loss is greater than hope of gain.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the kinds of businesses that will start and thrive in this economy. The bulk of web 2.0 companies were built (and bought) based on the thought that they would aggregate and re-sell people’s attention. As we moved through the business cycle, some companies developed exotic ways of targeting their users (Facebook), others used AdSense to generate a trickle of revenue, others based their businesses on driving search revenue (AVG, w3i, Conduit, Dynamic Toolbar, Freecause) and still others just left the problem for their future owners to solve.

When I took on my current job I was given an established product team and a mostly-new engineering team. We also had a brand new engineering manager, QA manager, and program manager working with us. Our job was to launch an all-new version of Toolbar while we maintained our existing versions and continued to support new corporate partners. Engineering and QA had just been moved overseas. We didn’t have any well-defined processes in place to build and maintain software.

This month’s Fast Company features a cover story about Amazon’s Kindle. It describes how Amazon could use the Kindle to squeeze publishers out of the book value chain. It also talks about how Apple might respond, and what the ensuing battle might look like. Over the past few years I’ve been impressed by Amazon’s willingness to create products and services in markets where there still is really no business - like Kindle.

I’m a big fan of managing by objective. Wherever possible, I believe that PMs, engineers, testers and designers should begin their work by first agreeing to (or at least accepting) a list of user and business objectives that a feature or product should fulfill. This will be useful in framing the many discussions that will follow. This week in Why Microsoft Had to Destroy Word Peter Merholz discusses how Microsoft made some tough decisions in the design of Word 2007.

As a product manager it is tempting to blame failures on the action - or inaction - of others. This is dangerous because it allows one to avoid responsibility for the commtiments they make. To be a great product manager you have to be a good leader. That means holding yourself accountable. The best definition of accountability I’ve seen describes accountability as “a personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results (Connors, Smith and Hickman, ‘The Oz Principle’).

For all my time at Yahoo I’ve had the good fortune of working under Tapan Bhat. I worked for him directly for the first year as we tried to sort out My Yahoo!. “My” was and is a pretty geeky product, with a lot of power user features. Our job was to figure out how to turn it into a mass market product. Having it for several years before abandoning it I felt that I had a great sense of what users wanted in a “personalized home page,” and what we needed to do to make the product grow again.