Marketing Thought

“The smartest and richest people in the world have turned off their TV.”
- Seth Godin

Friday Inspiration

I used to share Friday Funnies on this site but today I want to share some Friday inspiration. You may or may not have heard about TED before (in the past I’ve shared some inspirational speeches) – it is focused on presenting inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers.

This morning I spent 18 minutes and learnt more about who I am and how my brain works than any other piece of learning that I’ve done (and I’ve done quite a bit in my 20 year interest in brain function).

I highly recommend that you take 18 minutes out of your day and have a look at the presentation by Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained brain scientist, to the recent TED2008. It drew a huge standing ovation in the first session of the conference and, by general consensus, counts as one of the most memorable TED talks of all time.

Self-Employment Words of Wisdom

Make something worth making.
Sell something worth talking about.
Believe in what you do because you may have to do it for a long time before it catches on.
Don’t listen to the first people who give you feedback.
Don’t give up.
Not for a while, anyway.

Seth Godin

Outstanding Example of Online Community-Focused Learning

According to a study by the Team at Intel’s People-Centred Research facility :

A key driver of worldwide adoption of technology for the past two decades has been the human desire to connect with other human beings. The most rapidly scaling services — email, instant messaging, cell phone adoption, and text messaging on cell phones have all been about people connecting with people.

Not suprising really.

I have also found that one of the secondary drivers in the adoption of technology has been for the purposes of learning – parents providing online access for their kids, seniors doing research on family history and areas of interest, business owners using online sources to stay up to date or learn new skills.

Many times this will happen in isolation – a single reader learning from a single source – but sometimes the benefits of the learning are amplified when a single source provides multiple voices and perspectives.  That is what is currently happening at the Joyful Jubilant Learning Forum hosted by Rosa Say at her Talking Story blog.

Rosa is hosting a forum on Learning during September and has gathered together 27 guest writers to talk about learning.  There are perspectives from around the globe and I am pleased to say that I am the current guest author.  Even though there were many aspects of learning I could have share I decided to stick with my passion for demystifying technology and wrote a piece called "10 Ways to Become Fluent in Technology".

Even if technology is not what you most enjoy learning about you will find many other articles that will engage you in a learning conversation.

Why not head on over there now ….

Carnival of Capitalists – Downunder Edition

Role up! Role Up! to this week’s Carnival of the Capitalists  (being hosted from Sydney, Australia).  I am your host, Leah Maclean, and I hope that you enjoy the 42 submissions to this week’s carnival. Take a moment to not just read from your favourite category but take a browse around some not so familiar names and topics.

For those of you not familiar with Working Solo, its mission is to help small business women demystify technology and use it for their business growth (and not hide from it).  Officially the title I use is Online Business Manager; clients though often refer to me as their tech-chick. This blog provides tips, techniques and commentary on small business technology and life as an entrepreneur (sans jargon).

Women of the Carnival

As a specialist in working with women business owners I wanted to kick this week’s carnival off with a spotlight on the female bloggers who make up the carnival.  They are only a small percentage in terms of numbers but  are more than able to hold their ground in terms of experience and wisdom.

Rosa Say, chief thought provocateur at Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching, is leading a discussion on reinvention this month and her contribution is a challenge to HR professionals.  Rosa believes "In their fervent wishes to be a service department they’ve
unfortunately become doormats, far too complacent about asserting their
ideas and assuming their responsibility for leadership."

Káren Wallace at The Clearing Space challenges employees that want an opportunity to excel to "give the employer an offer to ‘watch me take this job and run with it – I’ll dazzle you!’."  You will find it a far better opportunity than witing for your employer to make that offer to you.

Evelyn Rodriguez at Crossroad Dispatches has been noticing that there is an abundant and fertile renaissance emerging.  She predicts that beauty, abundance, mystery, presence, play, laughter, and imagination will be just some of the burgeoning trends of successful ventures of the future.  She points to Apple as a new renaissance company that’s been lauded as a "corporate work of art."

Nina Smith sounds like she is speaking to me in her post for the carnival this week.  On her Queercents blog she encourages us to touch things only once and get things done in order to "refresh" our productivity.  My take away from the post – "if you touch it, move it to the next step".

Becky McCray presents some tips on How to grow word of mouth referrals over at Small Biz Survival. The key? focus on the people as individuals.

Entrepreneurship and SOHO Issues

David Maister asks Can You Say No? in order to support the strategies of your business.  David challenges all businesses to consider how they will make money …
"there’s a difference between "Let’s make money by
delivering on our strategy" and "let’s make money any way we can."

Scott Allen at About.com’s Entrepreneur Guide says that it’s not the end of the road when you do some research
you find that someone else has already created a business around the
idea for your new business. Scott’s advice "Don’t be discouraged by competition – just use it to your advantage."

Jim Logan pondered this week if there was a cure for poor vision.  "The problem with visions and vision planning is people have a tendency
to seek the way things look-n-fell in the future – the size of the
organization, the amount of money made, the products and services
offered". Definte food for thought.

Andrew Trinh is asking us this week to not worry if our initial business products are utter failures. The reason : with failure, comes understanding. The best businesses we see today had
early product failures; but instead of shutting down, they used
failures as opportunities to build future–and eventually,
successful–products.

Wayne Hurlbert has been doing some gardening at Blog Business World this week.  As his post suggests "Vegetable gardens are not likely
the first thing that springs to mind when you think of planning your independent business".

Over at FiveCentNickel, a "30 something family-man" shares the result of his investigations into his taking a home office deduction on his federal taxes.

Branding

The crew at Wordlab get a special mention this week – instead of just submitting their post with remarks that focused on their post they took the time to consider whether the post would fit with my approach as a femal entrepreneur.  Congratulations Wordlab on demonstrating the very successful business building technique of focusing on your reader/customer!  In fact I do appreciate their post "33 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" as an example of great storytelling and its impact in creating brand loyalists.

William A. Trent at Stock Market Beat  offers his thoughts on the release of the new Microsoft operating system Vista. According to Trent
"To ship or not to ship? For Microsoft it’s more than metaphysics."

Customer Service

Will Crawford at The Integrative Stream talks about  A Lost Customer Service Opportunity
and how some unpleasant news (and a bit of theft) leads to some
thoughts on the value of customers and how to best hold on to them.
Will offers a great message not just to T-Mobile and other telcos but
to every business – "Customers in that  kind of situation represent an
opportunity, and not just to bill for calls to Pakistan!"

Career Management

David Lorenzo at Career Intensity asks a challenging question in his post on Reinvention – "What do your business partners and customers think of you?  What do you think they would say about you if you weren’t listening?"  Whatever the answer is David says "the solution is simple".

David Foster at Photon Courier shares that there is a strong demand right now for people – both sales and
"creative" – at web-based advertising firms. But asks, "how sustainable will this
demand be?"

It seems that Bill at Ask Uncle Bill is like most uncles – in that you can get some great wisdom even when it is wrapped in humor.  Bill provides us this week with a list of 10 career strategies for getting ahead (including sucking down).

FMF (the author’s nom de plume) at Free Money Finance offers 2 simple pieces of advice to  Maximize Your Career Earnings – Go to college and maximse your career.

Leading Yourself, Others and Your Business

David Daniels at Business & Technolog Reinvention has been finding leadership and business lessons in movies (and golf) this week.  He points out that "we need to create an environment where everyone pushes to deliver to their peak potential. Anything less is a Leadership Lay Up".

Michael Wade at Execupundit all too clearly reminds us of the employee you will never forget and offers 7 management ground rules on what you were missing in the first place when you hired them.

For the Big Picture Guy, D-Day, a day of reckoning and dreaded resolve, arrived at The Small
Office. There were a few unfortunate glitches but, overall, the
lay-offs went like clockwork. Careers ended "at short, precisely-timed
intervals".

Jack Yoest, in his usual stylish manner, reminds us that 85% of communication is non-verbal
and provides some very high profile examples of sartorial statements
that speak louder than words. (And I would keep your hat on Jack – for you a
little less Capone and Abramoff and a little more Yoest).

Now who would have thought that a cat would have so much insight into process improvement?  K T Cat over at The Scratching Post encourages those engaged in process improvement to actually follow through on the improvement rather than just moving from one improvement technique to another.

Yet another ghost author (we can see the writing but can’t identify the person) is over at  Personal Development for Brains and this weeks offers us a way to throw away the calculator by learning vedic mathematics.

Retail Strategies

Greg Manter at the Retail Store Blog provides a lesson on how to draw people to your store by looking at the many promotional methods and new business ventures of Hooters.  A very clear lesson is that they apply "a simple strategy well carried out".

Technology

Leon Gettler at Sox First tells us that it’s not just the telcos who are handing over customer data to security
agencies. Other companies that
possess large amounts of data on their customers are now being
approached by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. All this has implications for businesses that are supposed to protect not
only their interests but those of ther customers as well.

Torabisu at The Cernos Blog provides a brief summary of how O’Reilly is
attempting to claim the generic term Web 2.0 as their own, the
backlash it has caused, and how lawyers might be for business.

Economics and Markets

Josh Cohen at Multiple Mentality shares an interesting perspective on price capping in his post "About capping gas prices, and capping in general".  He suggests that "when prices are capped, retailers tend to charge the full amount
because they can, and because they’re not free to run their businesses
the way they feel is best" versus letting market forces determine the price.

The editor of Blawg Review pointed this week’s carnival in the direction of
Donald J. Boudreaux,
George Mason University’s Chairman Department of Economics, guest blogging at Overlawyered, and the letter sent to the Wall Street Journal, exposing (or so he fancies) an especially egregious instance of  misunderstanding the U.S. trade deficit.

RJH Adams at Capital Chronicle presents on Global liquidity and the rise of non-US influence and offers several pieces of data to support his comment that "Today’s context remains such that the weight and volatility of foreign official assets continues to demand investor attention".

Scott Peterson at Red Cloud Research believes the international system for handling derivatives trades is weak in
comparison to systems used to handle stock and other securities trades. This is not well known and anyone interested in understanding
what might happen with derivatives in the event of a market crisis
ought to be aware of this.

Frank at InvestorGeeks asks the question "Is Vonage an attractive buy?"  Like all good InvestorGeeks he downloaded the prospectus and did a bit of poking around, a bit of
thinking, and discovered some very interesting things in only a short
amount of time.

The Canadian Capitalist (another unidentified ghost author) highlights the fact that regardless of the debate amoungst Canadian economists as to whether income taxes were actually cut, most Canadians have
more money in their pockets.

Jim at a Blueprint for Financial Prosperity takes a look at American Express’ Car Rental Insurance plan in detail (because they never have enough information on their website).

In Wedges and Widgets, James Hamilton at Econbrowser
notes that the phenomenal boom of Canada’s oil sands industry
continues, despite the complete absence of any government crash program
to cope with peak oil.

Mike Pechar at Interest Particpant look at the world’s largest retailer has decided to sell its interest in South
Korea to the country’s leading discount chain, Shinsegae Co. Wal-Mart
Korea will receive about $882 million for 16 stores when approval is
obtained from government regulators.

Personal Finance

Henry asks a curios question "What if a stranger owned a life insurance policy on you? It’s real, but is it dangerous?".  In his post "Playing SOLItaire"
he raised an issue that I was not even aware of – life insurance on
stangers.  It begs the question for me which of the parties is the
stranger?

David A. Porter from Pacesetter Mortgage both asks and answers the question "Do I have to sign form 4506 at my mortgage closing?".
According to Dave "The 4506 is the great equalizer.  If a borrower lies
about their income on the mortgage application then that is mortgage
fraud."

Dan Melson at Searchlight Crusade takes a look at the available real estate loan types and says that it doesn’t aways have to only be "thirty year fixed" option.

JLP at the AllThingsFinancial blog has put together a online calculator for estimating college tutition.

Starling David Hunter provides an analysis of Wal-Mart Watch’s "A Handshake with Sam" ad that ran in the NY Times this week at high blog, The Business of America is Business.

Mark over at SportsBiz thinkgs that sometimes a little government intervention can be a good thing, as the
phenomenal rise in television rights to the English Premier League
games demonstrates.

More Carnival Action

Blawg Review, the carnival of law
bloggers, is hosting a special Memorial Day issue that business blog
carnival lovers might want to visit this holiday weekend. www.blawgreview.com

Carnival of Entrepreneurship is being hosted by Pamela Slim at Escape from Cubicle Nation.

Carnival of Business ventures this week to Debt Hater http://debthater.typepad.com/

The next edition of CotC is being hosted by the intellectual properties lawyers at Rethink(IP)
www.rethinkip.com

Borrowed Wisdom – David St. Lawrence (author of Danger Quicksand Have a Nice Day)

Welcome to our inaugural Borrowed Wisdom interview.  On a regular basis I will be interviewing people who have a interesting perspective on the world of self-employment and who share their own tips on being (or becoming a solo professional).

Over the past 3 days I have had the enormous pleasure to conducted a written interview with David. St. Lawrence, author of “Danger Quicksand Have a Nice Day – an unconventional guide to surviving corporate employment”.  David is a solo professional following his passion and fellow champion of blogging.

Leah: Your new book “Danger Quicksand
Have a Nice Day” is subtitled “an unconventional guide to corporate
employment”.  If you were to write an unconventional guide to self employment
what would be your top 5 or 10 tips?

David: I have written these down in detail in
my essays on Micro-Businesses, but I will try to hit some areas I have not
covered extensively.

A. If you are viewed as a good employee, you may not
be ready for self-employment. Self-employment requires making decisions in the
absence of complete data. Employees who do that are usually in trouble with
management.

B. Do not consider self-employment unless you understand that
you are totally responsible for what life throws at you. If you can accept that
responsibility and the freedom it gives you, you will probably succeed as a
self-employed person.

C. Be realistic about your capabilities and use
others to do tasks you are not able to perform to professional standards. There
is no problem being a small company as long as your products and services are of
high quality.

D. Small companies have an unfair advantage, if they
realize that and take advantage of it. Every customer gets to deal with the man
in charge. If you care for your customers and keep them informed and make them
part of the decision-making process, you will earn their undying
loyalty.

E. Most important of all: Promise only what you can deliver and
deliver what you promise.

F. Finally, here are some things to
consider:

You will become one of “them”, the people whose insanity
you have been complaining
about for years – an employer.

Your
past experience may help you more than you think

Right answers are
the ones that work

Leah:  In
Danger Quicksand …. you talk about outsourcing becoming part of the corporate
landscape in the future.  How do you see self-employed solo professionals in the
USA, Australia and other western countries fitting into that
landscape?

David: I see solo
professionals as on-call contractors becoming increasingly visible as
corporations develop outsourcing strategies similar to JIT supply chains.
Corporations are under tremendous financial pressure. If they can develop
resources who can come in periodically and get them through design crunches and
product release crunches and then move off until needed again, these
corporations will be able to operate more profitably.

I envision solo
professionals working out relationships with selected companies to provide
services at agreed-upon rates for pre-specified periods.

I expect the
landscape to be quite fluid and forsee blogs becoming an important factor in
keeping the playing field level, exposing abuses, and highlighting
opportunities.

[Read more]