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Upside vs. downside
"Here's a rule that's so inevitable that it's almost a law: As an organization grows and succeeds, it sows the seeds of its own demise by getting boring. With more to lose and more people to lose it, meetings and policies become more about avoiding risk than providing joy."
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Here's a rule that's so inevitable that it's almost a law: As an organization grows and succeeds, it sows the seeds of its own demise by getting boring. With more to lose and more people to lose it, meetings and policies become more about avoiding risk than providing joy.
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With more to lose and more people to lose it, meetings and policies become more about avoiding risk than providing joy.
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The Complete Newbie’s Guide to Marketing
Think the secret to successful marketing and running a profitable online business is some piece of Jedi mastery that you would need to study for years to learn?
Not even close.
Most businesses (online and off) just get the basics wrong.
So here’s what works. Get these right and you’ll be ahead of 98% of your competition. -
Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions? | Video on TED.com
Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we're not as rational as we think when we make decisions.
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Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation | Video on TED.com
Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think.
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Two ways to hire (and a wrong way)
The wrong way first: interview someone for an hour. If you like them, have them interview three or four other people in your organization for an hour each.
You've invested five hours of your team's time, but really you only were looking for approval, because you'd already decided you liked the person enough to work with them for years.
All the evidence we've seen shows that this is a lousy predictor of future performance. And, let's tell the truth... if the first three people love the guy, are you really going to let the fourth, junior person veto him? Or is it just an annoying courtesy? -
The scientific method
In most interactions, we take a defensive posture. We try to defend the brand, or our turf or our job. The problem with defense is that it's static. The best way to get smarter, to embrace and to cause change and to triumph in times of market turmoil is to adopt the scientific method.
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If you enter a conversation looking for something to test, measure and ultimately change, it's likely you'll find it. That change makes you more competitive, and you continue to cycle past your competitors. On the other hand, if you enter a conversation concerned about maintaining the status quo, it's likely that this is exactly what you're going to do.
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Make the Most of Your Resources
Legislation requires publicly traded companies establish a Board of Directors to set medium and long term business objectives. A Board is the formal representation of a company’s governing body and Board members have a legal obligation to contribute to the company’s operations. But if you are not a public company, or just starting out, you should still consider setting up an Advisory Board to reap benefits that can contribute to the long term growth of your business.
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An Advisory Board cannot operate properly without including advisors who are external to and independent of the management and ownership of the business.
External talents
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What Really Generates Referrals
So much of the literature on the subject of referrals focuses on the proper ways to network, ask for referrals, and create incentive programs for referral sources. While some of these more tactical things do indeed produce referrals for the organizations and salespeople that employ them, they are often little more than window dressing when it comes to the big picture.
Building a foundation that automatically generates referral momentum is not done through external actions – like some many things in life, you do it from the inside out. Plain and simple the most widely referred business are purely more referable.
I’ve studied a lot of businesses that easily generate referrals and they share some common internal tendencies as part of their brand and culture.-
Trust impacts how fast things are done and how much they cost. It is so much easier and less expensive to refer a business that keeps its promises.
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Nobody likes to refer a friend to a sales pitch, right? But, exposing a friend to information that might help them get more of what they want out of life, now that’s a different story.
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Death spiral!
As Tom Peters says, "You can't shrink your way to greatness," and yet that's what so many dying businesses try to do. They hunker down and wait for things to get better, but they don't.
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Right this minute, you still have some cash, some customers, some momentum... Instead of squandering it in a long, slow, death spiral, do something else. Buy a new platform. Move. Find new products for the customers that still trust you.
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Change is a bear, but it's better than death.
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Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed
Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble.
Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them. -
How To Build Trust
With the current market condition of tight credit, the escalating cost of doing business and the ubiquitous Internet, global competition is hot and crowded. And one of the issues that keeps surfacing? Trust.
That’s what this entry is all about: Why trust matters and how to get, keep and maintain it. It’s the one thing we need and want, yet it’s so hard to get and keep.-
The companies that are most trusted are those that truly engage with their customers. They listen to them, act on suggestions, look for opportunities to support causes that matter to them, and focus on continual improvement. Trustworthiness can’t be faked. It isn’t something you do - it’s what you are. Trust must be earned every day and yet it can be destroyed in a single day.
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Attempting to talk around an issue or give less than accurate information will quickly diminish any trust that you have built.
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All above board
In 2008, the AICD invited 600 member directors of listed companies to participate in a Federal Treasury survey on director perceptions, and the negative effect of personal liability on board decision-making was clear from results.
According to the AICD's Gabrielle Upton, 78 per cent of respondents considered that there was a medium to high risk of being held personally liable for decisions made in good faith.
Similarly, 78 per cent believed that the risk of personal liability had caused them - or their board - to occasionally or frequently take an overly cautious approach to business decision-making.
Furthermore, 64 per cent suggested that such an approach had inhibited an optimal business decision to a medium to high degree. -
Google Wave: A Complete Guide
Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.
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6 Tips for Running Your Business: Lessons From 2 Failed Restaurateurs
Why do restaurants often struggle to succeed? Why are they the first businesses to fold, and often in the shortest amount of time? I believe the answer to these questions goes beyond the adage of "location, location, location".\n\nToo many people open restaurants or eateries on the heels of a great dinner party where somebody said "people would pay money for that". They enter the business with little more than cash and a love of food and drink. And they exit the business with much less than they started with.\n\nIs it possible that one of the reasons the restaurant business is so hard to succeed in, is because some new restaurant owners lack business sense?
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It helps to know enough to understand what you don’t know. What you know – you do. What you don’t know – you get help with.
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Once you have figured out what you aren’t proficient at (or what you choose not to be proficient at), then it is time to delegate. Hire the right people, to employ their own areas of expertise in your business. It is an investment, and a crucial expenditure.
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Why The Job-ification of Your Passion Can be the Ticket to Hating Your Life
There is this insane myth in our culture that if you do what you love, the money will naturally follow. It's one of those deceptive half truths that often leads to humiliation.\n\nThe reality, however, is much more like this: if you're dedicated, disciplined, and smart, and willing to make short-term sacrifices for long term gains, AND you fundamentally understand how money is made (i.e. and the ins and outs of successful business models and the business models of your competitors), then there's a good probability that, if you're selective about what you do, you can turn your passion into a money making venture.
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But here’s what you need to know: if your business doesn’t run without you, then you don’t own a business. You own a job. And believe me, very few people like their job.
When you business-ify your passion instead of job-ifying it (i.e. when you create a business that runs without you), then you free up the time, energy, and creative resources necessary to actually be passionate about the heart and soul of your business (see here for more about how to do this).
This is why, with few exceptions, the people I know who have funded their freedom, who are making it on their own doing what they love, actually geek out on business and business processes. So if you’re trying to fund your freedom, you’ll need to learn to geek out on the processes by which money is made. You need to learn to enjoy business and marketing on some level.
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Blogging isn’t a business model. Selling things isn’t a business model. Neither is making music, painting, giving massages, or creating information products.
So the first thing you need to do if you want to successfully business-ify your passion is to find the best possible business model and then find out how much money others are making using that business model.
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An Advisory Board - Best Source of Guidance for Your Business
A small business needs help dealing with issues as the business grows.
One of the best sources of help is an Advisory Board. This is not a financial oversight board. It gives advice. The owner can take the advice or ignore it; use part, some or all of it.
But how do you form an Advisory Board? What’s involved? Who should be on it and why? Do they get paid, and how much? How often do they meet, for how long? And will this make more work than it’s worth? -
The Difference Between a Freelancer and an Entrepreneur
Which are you? Are you sure?
A freelancer is someone who gets paid for her work. She charges by the hour or perhaps by the project. Freelancers write, design, consult, advise, do taxes and hang wallpaper. Freelancing is the single easiest way to start a new business.
Entrepreneurs use money (preferably someone else’s money) to build a business bigger than themselves. Entrepreneurs make money when they sleep. Entrepreneurs focus on growth and on scaling the systems that they build. The more, the better.
The goal of a freelancer is to have a steady job with no boss, to do great work, to gradually increase demand so that the hourly wage goes up and the quality of gigs goes up too.
The goal of the entrepreneur is to sell out for a lot of money, or to build a long-term profit machine that is steady, stable and not particularly risky to run. -
Top Twelve Ways to Grow Your Business in a Down Market
1. Call every customer and thank them for the business. Ask if they’re happy with the work you’ve done. Ask if there’s anything you can do to improve. Don’t do the all in one day. Do five a day, with enough energy and time to show that you really mean it.
2. Show up. Show up when you make an appointment, show up at the right conferences. Show up in the local paper, issue press releases. -
10 lessons from a failed startup » VentureBeat
A year and a half ago, my co-founder Dev Nag and I started an internet TV network for games called PlayCafe. Our ambitious plan was to run highly interactive game shows in which everyone was a contestant. Players could watch our hosts, answer questions, win prizes, form teams, call our studio, live chat, and run their own games. It was a huge undertaking, but despite great engagement — users watched for 87 minutes per session and 40 percent returned within a week — we didn’t reach enough users. We may revive it in the future, but for now, we’ve placed the site in hibernation and returned remaining funds to our investors.
What follows is a post-mortem of what we did right and wrong and how we will improve next time. I feel too many entrepreneurs are afraid to discuss their failures, locking up important lessons. I hope you find some of this useful. -
What San Francisco/Silicon Valley can learn from the Twittering company: Zappos
I thought I was going to Zappos to study how Zappos uses social media and get an interview about that for Building43, the community Rocky and I are building for people who are fanatical about the Internet.
But within 10 minutes of walking in the front door I realized that there’s a lot more to Zappos than that they get Twitter.
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