Planning, Startups, Stories

A Definition of Entrepreneurship

This is Kavita Ramdas, President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women.

True Story: Forecasting a New Market

In 1979 Creative Strategies International, a high-tech market research company, assigned me the job of forecasting the market for automated teller machines in the U.S.

There were a very few of them already in place at the time. Maybe a few hundred.

I got the numbers as best I could. I found out how many banks there were, and how many branches. I got data for growth in banking customers and growth in branches. I got data for employees in banks.

I talked to dozens of experts. Product managers in companies making ATMs, or companies that could possibly be making them. Lots of bankers, lots of consultants to bankers, several journalists involved in bank-specific trade magazines.

Not all of them wanted to talk to me, but an older and more experienced vice president in the same firm (Tom Arnett was his name) had some good advice (and I'm paraphrasing here, it's been 30 years):

They have to be interested in what they do, the market they're in, or they couldn't get up in the morning.

So hook them in fast. Tell them you're forecasting the market for Creative Strategies. Tell them you're thinking the market is going to grow at some percent -- it doesn't matter -- but most experts disagree. Make it clear as quickly as possible that you're going to offer opinions and information as part of the conversation, if they have time to talk to you.

Most of them will. They want to feel like experts. They want to be asked. And they want to know what you're thinking too.

I used Tom's advice a lot, and talked to a few dozen experts.

In the end, though, there was not technical or mathematical way to forecast ATMs. At least I was able to relate the projection to numbers of branches to give me some sense of error check, but it wasn't clear that ATMs would all be in bank branches.

What made the biggest difference to that forecast was the placement of two ATMs at Stanford Shopping Center on the side of the Bank of America branch there. We lived in grad student family housing at the time, and we would ride our bikes over to the shopping center. The ATM was very convenient. It gave me cash fast. It gave me cash after banking hours. I used it a lot.

Most of the bankers told me people would never accept doing business with a machine. They'll never warm up to that.

Happily, I believed what I saw instead of what the bankers told me. I projected a very fast growth rate for ATMs. As the years ticked off, it turned out I was very close. The forecast I made in 1979 gave a relatively accurate view of the future, given how much uncertainty was there in the system.

Take note, however: it was a human educated guess. The math helped me to compare my projection to the numbers of bank branches, but that was just a reality check. I was guessing.

Nonprofits with Legs and Teeth

Maybe it's about baby boomers not retiring, and maybe it's about ex-hippies in positions to do something they've always wanted, or maybe it is just about the world getting more crowded. Could there be a long tail of entrepreneurship, opportunities for people with motivation other than pure profit?  If all was ever fair in love and war, it was always just business for business. Until business became personal. And green. And socially motivated.

I just finished reading the Sunday New York Times piece called "A Capitalist Jolt for Charity".

Today, the once-struggling venture has morphed into a primarily for-profit enterprise. And the striking transformation of In2Books is emblematic of a larger trend: charities are changing their spots and making use of some of capitalism’s virtues. 

The process is being pushed forward by a new breed of social entrepreneurs who are administering increasing doses of bottom-line thinking to traditional philanthropy in order to make charity more effective.

In the old days there were nonprofits. They were foundations and the like, the alleged "do-gooders" that were conceived on missions like fighting poverty and racism, broadening the meaning of art, spreading education. You know them. You've lived with them forever. United Way. Toys for Tots. Meals on Wheels.

It occurs to me that the magic of the social enterprise has to do with control and power. If I build a nonprofit foundation to solve a social problem, I depend on being able to raise money through donations. But if I build a social enterprise instead, and figure out how to make my own money, at least enough to power the enterprise, then I'm in charge. I focus on the business model and the social benefit and the underlying purpose, instead of the fundraising.

So social enterprises are doing things like creating channels for developing country handicrafts, or PlayPumps distributing low-power-consumption technologies for poor countries. Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka, talks about a new generation of people thinking they could "do better."

I'm wondering now whether the tradeoffs between social enterprise vs. straight nonprofit isn't a lot like the tradeoffs of bootstrapping instead of raising money through venture capital. With one course, you own what you build, you get to grow it and steer it and make it work as well as you can. You're in charge. That's bootstrapping and, I think, the social enterprise. With the other course, you get more resources but because of that you're also not in charge, you might be the captain of the ship but you can't change destinations without permission, and if you change course in mid-journey you'd better be able to defend your decision very well when the board asks about it later.

Of course I can't make the straight parallel between these two ideas, because where they come apart is the matter of choice. Some bootstrapped business chose that option, but many other never really had the choice of investment. Does the social venture have the option of going straight nonprofit?  That's hard to generalize. At the very least, these are interesting questions

True Story: At the Dead Sea

Although it was tame compared to recent years, Israel was very tense in 1974. It was just a few months after the Yom Kippur war. Still, tourism went on. I was a temporary tour guide, in charge of a group of about three dozen people going around the world from Mexico City.

The group was a Mexican group, mostly from Mexico City with some couples from other parts of Mexico. It was an expensive tour so they were economically well-to-do, which in Mexico usually correlates with speaking pretty good English.

Julio Sanchez and his wife Carmen were exceptions. They were from El Salvador and they didn't speak English. At least they hadn't spoken English at the beginning of the trip, but during the trip they picked up a lot. Waiters and hotel clerks and people along the day were much more likely to speak English than Spanish. So Julio and Carmen learned how to order meals, and find restrooms, and give taxi directions back to the hotel.

Despite the tension in Israel, it was also Jerusalem, an amazing city to visit, a place people in the group had wanted to visit all their lives. They'd visited the Taj Mahal, Hong Kong, and other splendid places, but Jerusalem was, to most of the group, the highlight. The organized tour went through as many of the main places in Jerusalem as possible -- Bethlehem, the Wailing Wall, the stations of the cross -- but not the Dead Sea. It was left out on purpose, because of the recent war, meaning tightened security, and more danger.

So it turned out that on the one free afternoon of the stay in Jerusalem, six of my group set out on their own to see the Dead Sea. Normal tours weren't going there, but they found a taxi driver who, for a fat fee, was willing to take them. I didn't know until later, but it wouldn't have been up to me anyhow. They were all consenting adults. I was in charge of tours, logistics, meals, baggage, but not discipline.

They started late. They arrived at an abandoned Dead Sea bathing area late in the afternoon. They had to walk several hundred yards from the parking area and normal beach spot -- which was pretty much abandoned -- to the water. The taxi waited.

Night fell. They weren't sure of which direction to walk back to the taxi. They argued. Then suddenly, spotlights, a loudspeaker in a language they didn't understand. There were military vehicles, people in uniforms pointing guns at them. Angry men, shouting at them and pointing guns, loaded them into a military vehicle. They were driven through the night to a military outpost with a lot of searchlights, and led into a closed room with no windows.

They stood in front of an officer, surrounded by men with guns. There was not a lot of light in the room. The officer asked them questions, angrily, but it was a language they didn't understand. They could only shrug and shake their heads. What had they done? They couldn't even ask each other, because the men were angry if they tried to speak to each other at all, and more so because it was Spanish, a language they -- the guards, the officer -- didn't understand.

It was at this point -- I heard the story a few hours later, in the hotel -- that Julio's newfound English, learned just during the recent weeks of the trip, saved the day.

"Jews," the officer shouted, demanding to know. "Jews?"

Julio's face brightened. At last, something he recognized.

"Yes, thank you," he answered. "Tomato please."

They said it took a couple of seconds before the group realized, and started laughing. The tension was broken. The captured tourists, suspected of being terrorists, and the guards, and the officer, laughed together. Both sides switched to English, and understood each other (Julio and Carmen needed help, but they were there with four fellow tourists who did speak English, and the Israeli army personnel all spoke English.)

The taxi was long gone, presumably hoping not to get disciplined for taking tourists to the deserted Dead Sea area at night. The Israeli solders took the tourists back to the hotel. Check points were passed, the story was told, there was a lot of laughter along the way.

So that's the end of the story. It's as true as it was when they told it to me that same night, in the hotel bar, where they found me waiting for their return and pretty worried.

This happened in 1974, when I lived in Mexico City and worked with United Press International. We worked six-day weeks at UPI, so we got six weeks of vacation.

And I took the picture here from our hotel, looking across the street, that same day:

Future of Small Business

It's a wealth of ideas, a thorough analysis, really good brainstorming, and a valuable resource. Intuit has published part three of Small Biz Labs' excellent series on the future of small business, titled "The Emerging Artisan Economy. " The report and related materials are available at:  www.intuit.com/futureofsmallbusiness.

And dear reader, I apologize to you. Steve King of Small Biz Labs sent me advance notice of the study being released, so I have no excuse for not posting on it sooner. The truth is that I wanted to read it again, and give you more of its substance summarized. But then there was a weekend in Bend, guest teaching an MBA class, and getting ready to take off again, to New York tomorrow.

Steve's summary mentions 3 broad trends that will impact small business for the next decade:

1. Brain Meets Brawn to Create Opportunities for Small Business:  The first trend is based on the concept of "barbell economics", a term we credit McKinsey as coining.  It envisions a barbell structure for most industries, with a few giant corporations on one end, a relatively small number of mid-sized firms in the middle, and a large group of small businesses balancing the other end.  This structure will result in new opportunities for small businesses to flourish in niches left untouched by large corporations, and lead to more cooperation between large and small companies - particularly in the areas of sales, marketing and innovation. 
2. Lightweight Infrastructure will lead to greatly lowered barriers to starting and operating a small business.  Not only will infrastructure costs (IT, manufacturing, distribution, etc.) continue to fall, increasing numbers of platform companies will provide small business access to world class business infrastructure on a "plug and play" basis, allowing small businesses to compete in almost all industries. 

   The shift to lightweight infrastructure and plug and play access will reduce small business capital requirements, shift many small business costs from fixed to variable and reduce overall risk for small businesses. 

3. Borderless business:  small business will drive the next wave of globalization.  The next decade will see small business involvement in cross border trade expand substantially due to lower hard and soft barriers, strong economic growth outside of the U.S. and the growing impact of the global Internet and related communications technologies.

The report series is a collaborative effort between Emergent Research (that's Steve's group, and Small Biz Labs is that group's blog), Intuit and the Institute for the Future.

Steve followed up this week with an additional note about the importance of artisans, quoting the report:

"Like their medieval predecessors in pre-industrial Europe and Asia, these next-generation artisans will ply their trade outside the walls of big business, making a living with their craftsmanship and knowledge. But there also will be marked differences. In many cases, brains will replace brawn; software and technology will replace hard labor and raw materials. Yet in many respects, the result will be the same as it was centuries ago: artisans will craft not only their goods, but shape the economy with an effect reaching far beyond their neighborhoods, even their nations."

And, perhaps most interesting to me personally, the idea of value-based business:

One piece that may not have come out as clearly in the report as we would have liked is the trend towards values-based work.  One message that we consistently hear in our research is that people want to work in a manner that reflects their life values.  The values mentioned the most are work/life balance, sustainable business practices, social responsibility and giving back to the broader community.  We also hear people talking about "meaningful work", "working independently", and the pride of using their knowledge and skills to accomplish something.

I'm still learning blogging, and I guess I'm a slow learner; I am promising myself not to do this again, holding up something interesting because I want to make more of it.  You should have had this on Feb. 13.

Tip: Use a Slide Show Instead of an Outline

Some people who write books do it like I do. I keep thinking about the order of things, the structure, even as I write up the draft. This might seem disorganized, but it's worked for me through a number of books and a lot of years. I adjust continually.

With the book I'm working on now, it's even worse. My plan-as-you-go book is due early next month so I'm pretty deep into it, as you might imagine. I'm posting part of it on this blog, I've done interviews on it (links are on the sidebar), and I do presentations on it. And as I do, it changes. I reshuffle the cards. I can't help it. I think rewriting and reshuffling is part of the interest in writing.

So today I realized how much I'm using the slide show as card deck as book reshuffler, so much so that I decided to pause briefly to make it a practical tip for you. This can help you with a book, a white paper, a long memo, or whatever. It's really very simple: a card deck instead of an outline. In my case, much as I'm loving my new iMac, I'm still mainly on Windows with PowerPoint. Here's the view:

Of course, I realize as I write this that you can't make much out of that postage-stamp view of a book in process, but what's happening is that I have almost all of the different segments of the book tied to pictures, which are slides. Each picture you see means a topic to me. A topic is usually like a significant piece of one of the 30 (or so) chapters.

My discussion about the elevator speech, for example. It's pretty much written, so much so that I posted most of it as a 5-part series here on Planning Startups Stories, but I keep changing where I want to put it in my book. Yesterday it was in the heart of the plan section, where I talk about core strategy of positioning and differentiation. Today I moved it -- that's what prompted this post -- down to the "dress it as needed" section, later in the book, where I'm trying to make the point that the plan is a core thing that you can then use to create an elevator speech, a pitch presentation, or a formal plan document, or none of the above, just use it to manage your company.   

I doubt I'm the only one who reshuffles content as the book gets closer to completion. Some writers would say that's crazy, you should set the outline and follow it through until the complete first draft is done. I don't. If you share that behavior, then you'll probably like the way this works.

Why this instead of the standard outline? First, because it's easier, for me anyway. I drag a piece from one place to another using the slide sorter view in PowerPoint. I can drag it back if I want, and I can drag a collection of pieces too, if I want. Second, because I'm working on my presentation at the same time. I'm off to New York tomorrow, and I give a workshop for SCORE in Eugene, Oregon next week, so I will use this presentation and I keep it conceptually linked to the book.

The one thing I miss is the ability to hang slides into an outline view by title, with a hierarchy built in. Aldus Persuasion, which was king of slideshow software before PowerPoint took over,  used to let me indent some slides underneath a section title holder, giving me a visual something like a standard outline, as an alternative to the slide view. PowerPoint's outline view, however, (the illustration here) keeps them flat, all at the same level, and indenting a group of slides turns them into bullet points. For example, in the outline view at right, I'd like to make slides 14-16 subsets of slide 13 by indenting them. But I can't. PowerPoint turns them into bullets on slide 13, essentially deleting them (at least it gives me a warning before it does, so I can reconsider).

I miss the combined power of the card deck (called slide sorter view) for some things, and a more powerful outline view for others. If you know a PowerPoint product manager, please send her or him the link to this post. Let's get that into the software.

I keep thinking maybe Keynote on the iMac will do that, but I haven't had the time to go explore yet.  My latest iMac is still barely a month old.

In the meantime, this is still so useful that I wanted to share it. And if it's absurdly obvious, sorry.

A Personal Fidel Castro Story

Today's New York Times reports Fidel Castro Resigns as Cuba's President. So today I'm regretting the aging process, his loss, and Cuba's loss (more for what might have been than what is or was) and remembering my brief encounter with Castro and Cuba 30 years ago.

I wasn't alone with Fidel. But it was just me and about 100 other people with Fidel. He gave a three-hour meeting with 75 or so executives of international companies, as the highlight of what Business International called an Executive Roundtable. Sugar prices had skyrocketed that year, so suddenly Cuba had hard currency to spend. I was there as staff, listening. I was 29 years old. I'd been in Cuba about six weeks, preparing the advance economic study for the international execs. I'd arrived there from Mexico City, where I lived, expecting to find mecca. Or maybe paradise. I was a product of the 1960s. I was also fluent in Spanish.

Fidel Castro was a showman, a performer, extremely charismatic. He held his audience of  mostly high-powered executives of major international companies spellbound. He was side-splitting funny  -- I mean stand-up comedian level funny -- at times, always warm, always sincere, but also quick to rise up in anger and become dramatic, but then he would spin back again to funny, and warm again, and back and forth and up and down while I and the rest of the group rose and fell with his every word.

Talk about charm: he had us all at hello and kept us until goodbye, literally three hours later, followed by a cocktail and handshaking and photo event. The photo here is one I took of that event .

This was in 1977. I was living in Mexico City, working on salary with Business International, and writing as well for McGraw-Hill World News, meaning Business Week and other magazines. Business International sent me to Cuba for a month to work on the documentation for the international business roundtable, which they eventually published as a book.

That visit refined my somewhat naive political views. I went to Cuba expecting to love it. I'd been a hippy and a leftist and got into journalism at least in part because of the idea that I'd (see, I said naive) change the world. Of course I learned that all I was really doing was filling space between the ads, but that's a different story.

For a long-haired liberal in his late twenties, there were a few things to love about Cuba in the 1970s. For example, if you were going to be poor and living in Latin America, you wanted to live in Cuba. You'd get decent housing, medical care, and schooling for kids like nowhere else in the region. And there was also the music, the beaches, and for me, then, the fact that I was a 29-year-old American journalist getting paid to study business in Cuba for about six weeks.

However, by the time I left, I couldn't wait to get out. That was a big surprise to me, and a big lesson in the difference between ideals and actual living in the place. I left Havana on a night flight. Waiting to get on that plane was like waiting to escape something as dark and quietly worrisome as the night.

Does that sound too dramatic? Maybe it comes out that way because I was shocked. I had expected to love Cuba. Instead, I ended up with a newfound appreciation for freedom and free enterprise and the possibility of entrepreneurship.

The allure left slowly but steadily, like air coming out of a tire with a small puncture, over a period of several weeks. It was great in the beginning. I was put up in a very nice hotel and set up to work with two other Americans and three Cubans. Of the Cubans, one was an economist, one a tour guide, and one a general assistant. We got to know them. We worked with them everyday. We had coffee with them in the morning, and lunch with them at midday, and the occasional beer with them after dinner.

But I developed a claustrophobia of the mind. I liked these people we worked with. And with time I realized that they were spouting slogans and phrases to each other -- for example the ubiquitous "companero," meaning "comrade" -- because that was important. Of course they were watching us, and that was off-putting but expected, but when I realized they were also watching each other, and spouting slogans as a protection, that gave me that special intellectual claustrophobia. It made me think how much it meant that I could be on salary with Business International and work on my own time with other publications, without a government interfering. That I could quit and open a travel agency if I wanted. My companeros, on the other hand, were assigned a career. One was the economist, and one was the tour guide, and neither could choose to change. And the worst part of it was that success was clearly related to spouting slogans, not necessarily to competence and performance, and major life changes were not easy options -- not that starting a business is easy in the U.S. or Mexico, but at least it's a possibility, while in Cuba, when I was there in 1977, it wasn't.

I remembered a detail I'd forgotten. In 1971 I covered Salvador Allende of Chile during a state visit to Mexico. Allende was another great man, a poet in statesman's garb. In one of those sideline in-the-hotel-bar off moments, sitting on bar stools, one of Allende's advisors told me, off the record, "Castro's people told him he had to kill about 500 guys to stay in power, but he won't, he's too good." That was six months before Allende was overthrown and killed by a right-wing CIA-sponsored coup, ending what had been Latin America's longest constitutional democracy.

Fidel, however, was like a human magnet. Everybody hung on his every word, not because we had to, not because it was good business, but because he was the kind of leader that attracted attention and admiration. His warmth, his sense of humor, his dedication to ideals, all of that made his personal power obvious. In his presence, it seemed only reasonable that an entire nation could depend on his one-man rule. Even though it was easy to see that Cuba wasn't working, it was also easy to believe it wasn't because it didn't have a great leader. To this day I'm convinced that Fidel would have risen to power almost anywhere. His ideals weren't working, and Cuba wasn't working, but Fidel Castro was.

I talked about this later with General (that was his given name, not his title or position) Fatjo, head of the Latin America group of Business International, a Cuban, and at one point assistant director of economic studies under the Castro government.

General once told me of his time as a college student believing in the Cuban revolution because the previous government was so corrupt, and then his year inside the Castro government, and his eventual realization "that Castro had been a communist from the beginning." When General told the story, it was fun. But it wasn't fun for him getting to the United States, and he died a few years later, still wishing he could have his country back. He was a Miami Cuban.

I said above that Cuba was the best place in Latin America to be poor. It was also the worst place to be not poor, or educated, or entrepreneurial. That's why General, and most of the educated people in Cuba, left quickly for Miami. And Cuba missed them.

By the time I left on that night flight back to Mexico, I was pretty mixed up. Castro is clearly a great man, but perhaps he was not in the right place at the right time. During the 1960s we used to think U.S. policy had pushed him to the extreme left because it left him nowhere else to go. But my friend General was right in the middle of economic studies for his government, and he insisted until he died that Castro had fooled him and all of his college liberal friends, because Castro had always been hard-core communist, not just freedom fighter.

Thirty years later, I'm grateful to have seen him live and in person. And I'm not that surprised that he lasted so long. I'm still mixed up on this. So many different views are believable.

(Note: this is now a changed version from what I posted here about three hours ago. That first one had an apology for needing more structure. This one is the version I posted about half an hour ago on the Huffington Post. If this looks weird in the RSS feed, I'm sorry. I couldn't help it.  Tim)

Does Tech Support Generate Jerks?

Speaking of jerks, by any other name (that's a reference to the previous post and the thread here about Bob Sutton's book and its title), hats off to Stanley Bing for his post Why Jerks Run the World, which sums things up pretty darn well. And doesn't have a title that irritates spam filters.

The post starts with a tale of woe in a restaurant. You can follow the link for the details, but I'll move on to the point at which Stanley, exasperated, leaves (because I want to relate this to tech support, not food services):

At that point I uttered a short observation of no particular import, put on my hat and coat, and left the establishment. I was, in fact, simply too angry to stand there anymore. So I went outside and stood in the cold. It was nice out there. We’re all equal under that big black sky.

About two minutes later, the door to the restaurant opened and Dworkin popped his head out. “They’re seating us now,” he said. I went in, said nothing to the maitre d’, and took off my coat. We were then hustled in to a very fine table, right next to General Pinochet’s. Perhaps it was not him. I heard he died. So maybe it was somebody else.

“What happened?” I asked Dworkin. “The maitre d’ was very upset,” he said. “He said, ‘Is there a problem with the gentleman?” and I said, ‘Yeah, he’s not used to waiting for anything.’ And he said ‘Oh’ and told me to go get you.” Our other pal showed up a few minutes later and we had a very lovely dinner.

What was clear to me was that 1) If I had not thrown a tantrum, we would not have have been seated until early March and 2) If I had not distinguished myself as an angry, over-sensitive, egotistical wheezebag, we would not have gotten such a good table, either. It was by demonstrating all the pushy, aggressive, ill-tempered and self-aggrandizing portions of my personality that I showed my qualification for proper treatment in that establishment.

And that’s why jerks run the world.

So that's a restaurant story, but I relate it to tech support because I'm a software person.

Jake Weatherly saw it coming. Jake is in his early 30s now. He runs the Palo Alto Software sales and tech support and customer service teams as director of client services. He's been with us for 12 years. He's a truly gifted customer advocate.

Jake says the airlines train people (passengers) to be jerks. They give apologies and coupons and upgrades and free drinks to the loudest and most obnoxious people in the check-in counter line. They give attitude and abrasiveness to the more polite people in line. A generalization, perhaps, but you know what he means. You probably agree.

Jake tries to reverse the trend. Give the polite and reasonable people the the 'most favored customer' treatment, meaning that they get better service, not worse, than the rude and unreasonable people. That's what he tells his team. But it's the rude and unreasonable people who test the borders. And seek revenge.

Last week I looked at Web reviews for appliances. I discovered a pattern: three or four happy reviews and then a seething, raging rant. The positive reviews liked the product, talked about features and such. The negative reviews were made at people, not things -- bad service, unfulfilled promises, and more bad service. Most of the time they wanted revenge. "Don't buy this from these guys, their service sucks."

I'm guessing those rants aren't always accurate. Anger changes the truth. Think of reviews as revenge.

I wonder whether Jake would have followed Stanley out to the street and brought him back. We're on a long weekend right now, so I can't ask him (and besides, that's too easy). I'm guessing he'd say that his job is heading these confrontations off long before it gets to that point. Don't square off against the customers.

Jake wouldn't agree that jerks rule the world. But then Jake is an unusually patient man. And, from what I can tell, his attitude is rare.

And finally, speaking of titles, "jerk" gets the point across, right? And lets the spam filters go off somewhere else and do something useful?

Book Titles, Irony, Mirror on Mirror

She's right. It is ironic. I got an email over the weekend from Kelly Erikson of Maximum Customer Experience.

Did you get my comment in your "potential spam" filter a couple of days ago regarding the No A--holes Rule? Of course once you've hit submit it's gone into the ether, and when it gave me an automated message that it had marked it I laughed and sent a follow-up saying how funny that in a discussion about spam filters a totally innocent comment on your article should get marked, but since it hasn't been cleared by you, two days later, I was wondering if you'd checked for it.

No, I hadn't seen it. I had seen her very brief comment about spam filters -- that's still there -- but that's all. She responded:

There was a real comment (you know, well-thought-out, adds to the conversation, etc....), which the auto-responder said it was "marking as spam" to have you look at later for moderation. So I assumed you have a spam box that you have to go through to find my comment. No?

No. I went back to check. The comments filter had cleaned it all out, left a record showing the name and time, but the comment text was empty. Disappointing. I was curious. Happily, Kelly filled in the blanks:

If not then it's lost. The little comment was posted two seconds afterward, to giggle about the first comment having to wait to show up. I never thought the first one would get deleted without you getting a chance to check it, but if it says marked as spam for the author when what it means is deleted without consideration, then that's ridiculous.

The funny thing about it, which I alluded to in my short comment, is that I never use rough language in business or in the Internet where everything lasts forever, so I used -- for portions of the two words I did reference, obviously the title of the book you were discussing, which I had already looked through at the bookstore, decided I liked, but not enough to support the author's use of the "look at me" title, and the title of Mark Stevens' Your Marketing S--ks, which I own but keep in a paper cover on my bookshelf, so I won't have to explain to my daughter why I own a book with language I don't allow in the house on its cover (it's essential, that's why).

I used no rough language in my comment but it got "filtered" anyway. Too ironic.

So there we have it. I'm still very much in favor of a provocative title to go with a good book, which is the case here, but I also continue to have my doubts about a title that will get held back in programmed filters.

The silver lining is Kelly's blog has some good stuff. For example, in Pain Points in Experience Design, subtitled Just Tell Me Where It Hurts..., she has a very practical list of starting-point questions to start the brainstorming for a pub looking to increase its business.

Technorati Tags: book title, spam filter

Dude, Where's My Vocabulary?

Browsing on alltop.com over the weekend I ran into a YouTube video in which an incredibly full-of-himself policeman rails at a 14-year-old kid for, among other offenses, calling him "Dude." He gets really mad. It seems like the "dude" business is a real problem, although I can't help wondering whether it's really that he -- police guy, not the teenager -- has to wear some pretty dude-like biker shorts.

Interesting how news travels. Yesterday I caught the same video on one of the mainstream news channels. Probably CNN, I didn't catch which one. They didn't mention YouTube. So instead of people recording commercial television and putting it on YouTube, we have commercial television picking up its feeds from YouTube. Obvious, you say? It's just that there was no mention of the source.

And that "dude business" reminds me of this paragraph from Stanley Bing (Fortune columnist) on The Bing Blog:

"I have noticed that, far from fading away, the use of surfer lingo in middle-aged business executives is flourishing. You haven’t really lived until you’ve seen a guy in a $2000 pinstripe, $500 wing tips and one hair artfully arranged on his shiny head say, ‘Dude, awesome weekend.’"