Planning, Startups, Stories

The Blue Sail

We were in one of those tourist markets. You know the type: handicrafts, souvenirs, blankets, and small-scale art. They have them everywhere, or at least wherever tourists gather.

We were browsing, killing time, when a man came up to us, interrupting nothing, and offered us a card with an address to a restaurant.

"It's better than the Blue Sail," he said. We took the card, and he disappeared. We had never heard of the Blue Sail.

Twenty minutes later, another guy came up to us, plugging a different restaurant, but, according to what he said, this one too was "better than the Blue Sail."

That happened one more time over the course of the afternoon. Another restaurant better than the Blue Sail.

Conclusion: you guessed it. Although we had never heard of it before, we went for dinner that night at the Blue Sail.

Written On An Elevator Wall

I suppose wisdom is where you find it. Take this for example:

• Breathe Slowly and Deeply - to calm the natural tendency to over-react and become agitated.

I realize we talk about the elevator speech, and elevator speeches, but this is written on the elevator wall, for all to see. It comes right under the headline "should your exit be delayed due to a power outage or mechanical malfunction."

Wow, a Zen elevator. Who would have guessed. Zen and the art of up and down.

Insight: Software Alone Won't Do It

Consider this:

In my experience, it's not the lack of software that causes frustration for small business owners, rather the frustration stems from the over-abundance of software and features available.

That's Bill Brelsford over at Small Business Marketing Tips & Strategies in his post last week, Software Alone Won't Cure Your Marketing Blues. Bill looks at a list of marketing frustrations cited by small business in a survey published at Inside CRM.

1. Too difficult to follow up with cold, warm and lukewarm leads consistently and efficiently 
2. Can’t properly track and manage prospects and customers 
3. Need to integrate online and offline marketing efforts 
4. Poor email deliverability 
5. Too much manual grunt work in the sales and marketing process, no automation 
6. Can’t track sales activity 
7. Lack of centralization, too many different programs and systems 
8. Too costly to maintain servers and IT staff 
9. Too difficult to manually manage multichannel campaigns 
10. One-dimensional marketing

Reviewing that list, Bill points out that process and strategy should come first, before the software. Items 1,2 and 6 on that list are issues of procedure, and discipline, not tools.

They can easily be handled with a Big Chief Tablet, a #2 pencil, and a consistently executed process.

Then there are the items that a software vendor would add to the list, and finally, Bill concludes:

I don't want to sound like I'm anti-software, far from it. I have just found that a great source of frustration comes from purchasing marketing automation tools before there is a marketing plan or processes to automate. As I mentioned in this previous post, I think the right approach is to have a process first, and then pick the right tools to help you automate that processes.

Well said. And I think that same logic applies to other tools in business, not just marketing automation.

Is Facebook The Most Powerful Thing Ever Invented?

Fast Company titled the interview Why Facebook is Even Bigger than You Think. It starts with this subtitle:

Stanford University professor BJ Fogg explains why the social networking site is the most powerful thing ever invented.

Strong words. In the actual text, Fogg is only slightly less majestic:

Facebook is the precursor of something I'm calling mass interpersonal persuasion. That is a new phenomenon and the most important thing to happen in the world of persuasion since the advent of the radio over 100 years ago. Radio changed the game for persuasion because it allowed a message to be broadcast to thousands and millions of people, which was previously not possible. TV was an extension of that, but I don't think it was the big leap that radio was. 

Facebook takes very strong interpersonal influence dynamics -- the way people persuade each other face-to-face in small groups with peer pressure, reciprocity, flattery -- and allows those to be used on a mass scale because your social networks are built in. Friends influence friends, who influence friends, and that keeps rippling out. They can reach people very quickly for very little cost and ordinary people can set these in motion. It doesn't require a big broadcasting company or a big PR campaign. If you get the right message in the right way, you'll effect millions of people. Facebook has been the best platform for that, but I think in the future it will be commonplace.

Writing about the same interview, Steve King at Small Biz Labs holds back only a bit --

While I think things like the wheel, printing press, steam engine, antibiotics and few other inventions might place just slightly ahead of Facebook on the all time list, online social networking is clearly important.

Steve adds:

The Society for New Communications Research recently released a study showing that consumers are increasingly using social media as described by Fogg.  And while I believe online social media usage is not yet fully mainstream, the era of mass interpersonal persuasion has clearly begun.

Sure, all of this may be a bit exaggerated. But as Bob Dylan said in Ballad of a Thin Man: "Something is happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"

Memorial Day, Draft Lottery, Reality TV, Flags

I woke up yesterday in Portland (OR), in a condo near the top of W. Burnside. The area has a series of cemeteries, dark green rolling hills, breaking up the otherwise thick forested landscape. It had rained all night, so there was a thick mist cushioning the quiet hills. It was early Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, not a lot of cars around, very quiet. Through the mist I could see the U.S. flags dotting the graves on the hills. Random patterns. A lot of the graves have flags today.

Later in the day we drove by, commented on the flags. How many from this century, Afghanistan, Iraq? Hard to tell. They'd be so young, somebody said.

Whether they died in 1943, or 1969, or 2007, they were all so young.

Switch to reality television. 1969. The draft lottery. They put the 366 possible days of the year in transparent plastic eggs, one each for each possible birthday. The put them all into a giant transparent barrel like we see in lotteries these days. They spun the wheel. They drew a date. Those of us born on that date got a number.

My number was 243. I didn't get drafted. I didn't go to Vietnam.

By 1969, most of us opposed the Vietnam war. We talked about what we'd do if drafted. Al became a conscientious objector, emptied bedpans for two years. I was engaged to be married, but that was not going to get me out of the war. But a January birth date did.

It turned out later that somebody did a statistical analysis on the draft lottery and the dates. They started on January 1 and threw them in from there day-by-day to December 31. The later birthdays tended to be on top. Or so I read later.

But we didn't oppose the people, our peers, who fought. Whether it was their choice, or not.

Few in my generation chose to go to war. One who did, who graduated with me from Notre Dame, chose ROTC. Traveling around Europe, he collected military paraphernalia. His father was in the army. His grandfather had been in the army. He volunteered to be a helicopter pilot, and he died in Vietnam. In his helicopter. We weren't that close, I heard about it later. My memories of him are of a 20-year-old kid having a wonderful time during a year in college abroad, laughing, drinking Austrian beer, learning; as alive as any memory could be. What a terrible loss.

Memorial Day, patriotism, flags, wars. Protests, anti-war, opposition. Memorial Day isn't about war, or politics, or patriotism, or whatever might be the opposite of patriotism. It's definitely not about flags. It's about young people who died, and the people left behind who loved them. And all the people who endured it, risked their lives, went through the hell of it, for whatever reasons.

I lucked out. I won the reality TV of the last half century, the 1969 draft lottery. And I thank God for that. And honor and respect the ones who went, for whatever reasons. And hope that we can end the present war without causing chaos, and more death and suffering; and that we never fight another war again.

Reflections of an Early Riser

I've come to love the early mornings, especially when it's still dark, but getting light. The streets are empty, and the office is empty. The coffee tastes so good at that time that I should pronounce the "so" in this sentence using three syllables. Today I was in at 6:45, which gives me almost two hours before the office really opens up. My music is loud. My thoughts are clear.

What's particularly soothing this morning is that yesterday I finished the last of my touches on my plan-as-you-go book. I really enjoyed the process, but now I enjoy being done. I'm remembering how good it used to feel the day after school ended for the year, when I was still in school but too young for summer jobs. That was a good feeling.  And this is a good feeling too, this morning.

What Would You Do, If it Happened to You

I believe that the title of this post is the last line in The Cat in the Hat, the Dr. Seuss book, one of my favorites. That's just an aside.

This morning (which would be yesterday morning by the time you read this) I gave a 90-minute presentation on plan-as-you-go business planning for a room full of business people here in Eugene (OR), where I live.

No big deal, I've just finished the book on it (due out in August), I know the stuff very well, I enjoy doing that presentation. And no traveling, because it was right here where I live. I got to my office early, did email, drank my coffee, put some fine touches on the presentation (in PowerPoint, on a thumb drive) and took off for the place at 10 after 8. Looking forward to doing the presentation. I like the topic, and I like the slides.

As I was being introduced, I stuck my thumb drive into the computer connected to the projector. No dice. Nothing.

Which brings me to the title of my post: what would you do, if it happened to you?

I thought I'd learned my lesson in this context, back in the 1980s, when I went all the way to Caracas Venezuela for a presentation to an audience of about 3,000 people. The distributor was to provide the projector. For three days I asked to test it, and was assured it was working, no need. But please, let's just test it. Back then a projector weighed like 300 pounds, it took a pickup truck or something like it to cart it around. No need. And on the day, sorry, doesn't work.

By the way, there was no Internet connection available to me today. 

Entrepreneurship Epidemic

Watch out. Entrepreneurship might be contagious. I see it a lot these days. A lot of my family members are involved in it. Then I go over to the University of Oregon a few blocks from my office, where I teach Starting a Business one quarter every year; they are not business majors, but they do want their own businesses. It's an epidemic.

I've seen a lot of it in different research outlets, different blogs. This was in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, an opinion piece by Michael Malone, called The Next American Frontier:

The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of today's high schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup poll.

An upcoming wave of new workers in our society will never work for an established company if they can help it. To them, having a traditional job is one of the biggest career failures they can imagine.

Much of childhood today is spent, not in organized sports or organizations, but in ad hoc teams playing online games such as Half Life, or competing in robotics tournaments, or in constructing and decorating MySpace pages. Without knowing it, we have been training a whole generation of young entrepreneurs.

And who is going to dissuade them? Mom, who is a self-employed consultant working out of the spare bedroom? Or Dad, who is at Starbucks working on the spreadsheet of his new business plan?

In the past there have been trading states like Venice, commercial regions like the Hanseatic League, and even so-called nations of shopkeepers. But there has never been a nation in which the dominant paradigm is entrepreneurship. Not just self-employment or sole proprietorship, but serial company-building, entire careers built on perpetual change, independence and the endless pursuit of the next opportunity.

Without noticing it, we have once again discovered, and then raced off to settle, a new frontier. Not land, not innovation, but ourselves and a growing control over our own lives and careers.

So that's a very powerful set of numbers and facts.

Meanwhile, on the very same day, I get an email for a webinar on how to manage Generation Y employees. Is this related? Different sides of the same coin? Big companies find them hard to manage, but they're out starting their own little companies instead.

Maybe that's just coincidence.

Politics, Advertising, Magic

As I start my rainy Western Oregon day today, cup of coffee in hand, I checked Facebook -- not my normal behavior, but one of my daughters mentioned she'd commented on a picture I posted -- and there was Barack Obama on the front page.

Today is our deadline, in Oregon, for voting. We all vote by mail. Today at 8 pm is our deadline. Most of us have already dropped the ballot in the mail. I tossed my ballot into the downtown drop box yesterday evening.

To me that's another reminder of how cool the Web is, how much we can target our ads if we're really doing it right. For those of you who grew up with the Internet, you have to realize that just a couple decades ago advertising was like fishing. We had to choose the medium, make the ad, and then hope. Like throwing a line in the water. And we rarely got to know. The waters were murky.

Contrast that with this ad. First, it knows I'm in Oregon. Second, it knows today is our deadline. Third, it knows I'm likely to vote for Barack because I've identified my politics (part of the Facebook profile).

Living in the times we do, we suffer the down side of it all, the war, global warming, tough times. At least we should occasionally step back and enjoy the magic of it too. And this, the ability to tailor an ad that exactly to the audience, is magic.

What's Wrong with This List of Painful Professions

Pop quiz: what do these 10 various occupations have in common with each other?

1. Police
2. Firefighter
3. Long-distance truck driver
4. Pilot
5. Musician
6. Blogging
7. Motorcycle racing
8. Construction worker
9. Nurses aide
10. Dancing

I see some of them as the five-year-old's dream -- police, firefighter, pilot, dancer. Some as the 15-year-old's dream -- musician, motorcycle racing. And then there's blogging. 

According to 10 Painful Professions on abcnews.com today, what they have in common is chronic pain.

Police, firefighter, truck driver or pilot, dancer of course, and motorcycle racer, absolutely. But wait a minute. Blogging? Does that say blogging? Who writes this stuff? Just last month the New York Times said blogging can kill, and now it's blogging on a list of the top 10 most painful jobs.

Here's the expert quote:

Sean Conroy, director of pain management services at Beaumont Hospitals, said bloggers are the extreme version of any administrative work that requires using a computer because bloggers spend more time locked in one place.

"Many people who read computer screens lean forward and tilt their head up, causing back, neck and jaw strain," Conroy said. "Typically we don't think of bloggers and jaw pain."

See, you always have to have an expert quote for one of these. And then there's the up-close-and-personal example:

Kim Stagliano, managing editor of the blog Age of Autism, describes the blog world like a game of cat and mouse. Everything is faster on the Internet -- and bloggers feel the need to catch up.

"I always feel like I'm behind," Stagliano said. "I always think, 'Is this story old now, did I grab it fast enough … OK, now what's next.'"

Stagliano handles all the physical work required to keep the blog active. She monitors the interactive components of the site, answers comments and now enhances the blog's appearance.

"I'm constantly clicking, going through stories, writing, posting content, clicking," Stagliano said. "Some days I'm on from 6 a.m. until 9 p.m."

That too, is required; somebody who can be the example.

Here's a true confession. Dear reader: don't worry, I'm doing fine, thanks. Blogging is much better for my health than running the whole company was. I'm not "constantly clicking" from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. myself -- (should I be?) -- but I appreciate the thought. Makes me feel brave. Damn the carpal tunnel, full speed ahead.

Whew, having said all that, tongue back out of cheek, here is a very interesting quote from that same story:

"The instance of chronic pain goes up with job dissatisfaction, a feeling of helplessness about your job," Freedman said.

That's Mitchell Freedman, director of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. All kidding aside, I'll bet that's true.