NOW maybe they can focus on improving their FOAF, supporting the
FOAFnet and helping us form OpenReviews, OpenEvents, OpenMedia,
OpenListings, OpenResume and (I hope Meg's favorite form of
micro-content) - OpenRecipe.
I guess the only standard we won't have will be OpenSesame.
I have known Barak since 1980. I was a young nerd looking for a
card for my Apple II (pre IIe era) and he was standing behind the
counter at Macy's computer section.
I'd often go and just hang out, trying out software and kibbitzing.
I ran into Barak several times while he was at Apple and when he and
Joi approached me - right before Neoteny laucnhed their fund - I whole
heartidly supported their idea of helping SixApart - grow up.
SuccessFactors Scores Record Time with Workforce Performance Management Implementation at MasterCard International. Software Up and Running in Two Weeks; Employees Experience Seamless Transition
SuccessFactors Scores Record Time with Workforce Performance Management Implementation at MasterCard International. Software Up and Running in Two Weeks; Employees Experience Seamless Transition03/17/2005 03:45 AM SuccessFactors today announced via a news release over US BusinessWire
that the company successfully completed a software implementation at
MasterCard International in a record-setting, two weeks time. In
addition, SuccessFactors also provided MasterCard's 4000 worldwide
employees with a seamless shift to our software while simultaneously
reducing performance review-related help desk calls by approximately
25%. - Prior to SuccessFactors, MasterCard was using a workforce
performance management technology that was severely limited in
functionality. Specifically, there was limited reporting
functionality, minimal visibility into each employees' performance
history and multiple forms used across their worldwide organization
that were unable to be tracked within one system.SuccessFactors was
selected to unify the multiple HRMS systems in use at MasterCard,
streamline the peformance management process and begin shifting HR's
role away from a transactional agent to a more strategic partner
driving business at the executive level. The decision to implement
SuccessFactors technology was weighted heavily on the company's ASP
business model, expansive reporting tools and ability to function as a
business partner. [PRWEB Mar 15, 2005]
Transition Game: sports, technology, innovation, equipment: Transition Game
Entrepreneurial Success via the Internet08/21/2004 06:49 PM It took the death of his business partner at 21 for Josh Mohrer to get
serious about trying to make their fledgling internet business a
success.
An entrepreneurial market-state viewpoint
An entrepreneurial market-state viewpoint05/23/2004 09:22 PM I am a consumer of defense/security services, so are
you, but you may not see it that way yet. As a consumer of these
services, are you pleased with what you are getting (particularly in
Iraq)? Create a list of those services you thought
you paid for. Create a list of those services your are
getting. How do these lists compare?
The Idea: The New
Economy will have an explosive need for critical entrepreneurial
skills. Universities are not equipped or inclined to provide them. You
can't learn them just by reading a book. We need to create a whole new
'channel' for entrepreneurial education. Here's how it might
work.
When I wrote Natural
Enterprise
my principal goal was to 'reinvent' entrepreneurship as a venture that
would allow people to make a living, easily, joyously, without
significant cost, risk or stress, with people they love. We can feel
it
in our bones, and in our three million year old DNA, that that is how
making a living should be. My
secondary purpose was to fill a gap in both high school and university
commerce/MBA programs -- teaching students how to start and run their
own business effectively. The professors and students I have spoken to
have confirmed the views of the readers of How to Save the World that there is an acute need for
this. Yet publishers tell me, and I respect their judgement, that
Natural Enterprise
is not sufficiently different from other books on entrepreneurship
already out there. I have concluded therefore that the problem isn't
in
the books on entrepreneurship, but rather on the way in which entrepreneurship is (and is not)
taught.
That's what I was getting at when I asked the question last week "How
could we effectively teach online
the critical skills that take a lot of practice and one-on-one
coaching?" Your answers suggest the issue of teaching online is just the tip of the
iceberg -- teaching these skills period is an enormous challenge, and good books and
software and online resources only get us part of the way there.
Almost all the successful entrepreneurs I know learned the essential
skills on the job. What are the essential entrepreneurial skills? In
my
experience they are the ones depicted on the mindmap above. So what
would be an effective process to impart those skills to the millions
of
people around the world who would be happier and more effective as
entrepreneurs than as cogs in a large corporate machine?
Here's the process I have suggested to several universities.
Each 'session' would have as its theme one of the
critical entrepreneurial skills in the mindmap above.
Students would be given a set of pre-reading
consisting of
both theory and stories about great entrepreneurial successes and
failures in applying this critical skill.
Each session would
be held, live, at the premises of a
different entrepreneurial business, one with exemplary success at
applying this critical skill.
There would be no lecture.
The session would consist of (a) a tour of the premises, (b) a brief
story told by the CEO of the history of the company and how they'd
learned to apply the critical skill, and (c) a Q&A session where
the students would ask questions of the CEO. The course facilitator
would jump in with answers and clarifications based on what other
entrepreneurs had done. No 'large corporation' examples would be
used.
There would be no examination. At 'mid-term', the
entrepreneurs who host the sessions would collectively grade the
Business Plans prepared and presented by the students in one long
Saturday session. The 'final' pass or fail would be based solely on
whether the businesses proposed in the students' Business Plans had
been successfully launched or not.
Students would have access
to 'coaches' on an ongoing
basis. These could include existing entrepreneurs, course
facilitators,
legitimate entrepreneurial consultants
It's at once a radical and a pragmatic approach, one that mimics as
much as possible the learning that entrepreneurs get on the job. While
the professors I have spoken to love it, the university executives
higher up shudder at the thought of a curriculum with no classroom, no
instructor and no lecturing. They find the concept threatening, and
say
it would be impossible to 'sell' to curriculum committees, which are,
they confess, in the business of filling seats in their expensive real
estate and defending the process of tenured experts lecturing as
somehow a better way of imparting knowledge than letting students find
things out for themselves. Rather than trying to change their minds, I
have concluded that, since they have nothing to offer those who need
entrepreneurial skills other than the 'brand' of the university, we're
better off finding a way to provide entrepreneurial education without
them.
So here's where you come in. Help me create a 'business model' for
entrepreneurial education that meets these very difficult
challenges:
We cannot expect much government money or support, since
we
are setting up an economy that will compete with and threaten the
large
corporations that currently have politicians in their back
pockets.
Our 'customers', students and those disenchanted with
wage
slavery, don't have a lot of time or money to invest in such
education.
Those who have tried to offer such education in
past,
including various 'get a better job institutes' and many of the
consultants who 'serve' the entrepreneurial community, are
incompetent,
exploitative, or worse, and have made many people cynical about
entrepreneurial education.
Although the process I describe
above is an improvement, we
need some way for students to practice what they've learned, before
they launch their own business. We need a modern equivalent of the
'apprenticeship' program under which many craftsmen honed their skills
until they were ready to go out on their own. Ideally we'd like such
'practice' opportunities to be focused in the industries with the
greatest entrepreneurial opportunity, like health
care, education, recreation, community energy, food and biologicals
production, and the 'connections' industry (personal networking
and communications) -- industries driven more than anything else by
information and innovation.
We need a way to credentialize
entrepreneurial consultants
and coaches. None of the traditional credentializations for work with
large corporations -- MBA, CPA/CA, CFA, CMC etc -- are adequate or
appropriate for working with entrepreneurs. Legitimate consultants and
coaches to entrepreneurs need to have the critical skills above and
experience in an entrepreneurial environment.
We need a new type of network or channel that will
allow
all the 'players' in entrepreneurial education -- existing
entrepreneurs, students and aspiring entrepreneurs, facilitators,
legitimate consultants and coaches, to contract with and help each
other. It should be a robust, commercial network -- people's time is
valuable, and it is reasonable that they be compensated for
it.
We need to engage students early -- junior high is not too
early -- and start getting them acclimatized to the new economy and
the
entrepreneurial landscape, so that they have longer to acquire the
critical skills and don't get diverted into more traditional
educational paths that are now largely dead ends.
The business model needs to show (ideally graphically) how students
would enroll, how facilitators, consultants, coaches, and
entrepreneurs
would be brought together and compensated for their time, how the
educational curriculum and standards for programs, consultants and
coaches would be established and upheld, how we would promote the
programs and keep them affordable, how the outreach to high schools
would work, how we could establish facilities or programs where
students could 'practice' etc. Any ideas you have on any of these
issues would be very welcome. Another critical area where I could use
your advice is Where to
Start? We need to walk before we run. What would a pilot
program look like and who might sponsor it?
Entrepreneurs face a deck stacked against them by large corporations
with huge budgets, (in some industries) massive government subsidies,
and politicians in their debt and at their beck and call. Large
corporations buy cheap because they're considered low-risk and buy in
volume. They are often organized into oligopolies designed to raise
entrance barriers to their industries. They are patenting everything
in
sight, thanks to government collusion in broadening intellectual
property laws, and they have the resources to destroy entrepreneurs
who
even come close to patent infringement. The 'service' industries are
largely disinterested in them: Banks find them expensive accounts to
manage for the amounts involved, good consultants (not quite an
oxymoron) are far more interested in the big corporations that can
give
them 7-figure contracts than mean-and-lean entrepreneurs. Most of the
valuable help entrepreneurial CEOs get today comes from other
entrepreneurs. Most entrepreneurs need to improve their critical
entrepreneurial skills too, and would benefit as much from the
curriculum I describe above as students aspiring to entrepreneurship.
And, just to make matters worse, the global economy is teetering,
wildly overextended by reckless spending and debt at all levels of the
economy, with price bubbles everywhere, dependent on cheap foreign
sources of resource supply (natural and human), and utterly
unsustainable.
But while this may be enough to discourage most of us from becoming
entrepreneurs, and accepting a life of wage slavery instead, the truth
is that for almost everyone in the generations up and coming there will be no other choice.
Large corporations are shedding jobs, not adding them, even as their
profits grow. Governments are shedding jobs too. All of the net
private
sector employment growth of the past decade in North America has been
entrepreneurial. The alternative to biting the entrepreneurial bullet
-- facing the obstacles in the previous paragraph, acquiring the
critical entrepreneurial skills and making your own living -- is
unemployment.
As a result I think there will be a rapidly growing appetite for
quality, practical entrepreneurial education. There's a need here. Do
we have what it takes to fill it?
Wireless 2004: Entrepreneurial spirit alive and well
Texas Whiz-Kid Matures Into Entrepreneurial Computer Geek
Texas Whiz-Kid Matures Into Entrepreneurial Computer Geek05/31/2004 02:00 PM Finally, Rus Bel is proud to be known as a computer geek, for he has
just become a high-tech entrepreneur courtesy of Geeks On Call® -- the
nation’s premier provider of on-site computer support. As the owner
of a new Geeks' franchise, Bel provides a bevy of mobile computer
services to the small businesses and residents of The Woodlands,
Conroe, and other neighboring communities in the Houston suburbs.
[PRWEB May 28, 2004]
Master Entrepreneur Frank Casagrande, BusinessEdge Solutions Inc. Chairman Wins E&Y Award for Entrepreneurial Vision, Business Acumen and Contributions to Society
Today, the average North
American entrepreneurial business lasts just four years, the average
sole proprietorship even less. Yet entrepreneurship is not rocket
science; it's nothing more (or less) than making a living for yourself
with your business partners, instead of depending on some indifferent
corporation to provide you with a living wage. Running a business is
certainly no more difficult than raising a family, or landing a job
and
building a career with a big company. The essentials of
entrepreneurship could easily be taught in every school, and there'd
still be plenty of time left for the rest of the school curriculum.
But, perhaps because big corporations and the governments they control
want the 'labour force' to be meek, subservient, fearful and insecure,
most people have come to perceive entrepreneurship as a complex and
difficult art, fraught with danger, unprofitable, emotionally
scarring,
and demanding of enormous courage and energy. "It's certainly not for
everyone", I keep hearing.
Entrepreneurship requires self-knowledge of what you're happy doing,
what
you're especially good at,
how much you're willing to put into your enterprise and what you
expect
to get out of it. Without this self-knowledge, you're likely to be as
miserable in your own business as working for some unappreciative
boss,
and that unhappiness will bear directly on its success. Beyond that,
all you need are common sense, self-confidence, and a modicum of four
key, learnable skills:
creativity (the ability to discover and apply new
ideas),
communication (written and oral),
information processing (the ability to distil,
analyze and interpret it), and
Then it's simply a matter of learning and following the process that
every entrepreneur has learned by trial and error, to set up and
operate your own business successfully, on your own terms, and
actually
have fun doing it.
One of the 15 steps in the process of establishing and running an
enterprise is avoiding the
landmines.
In MBA school they now call this Risk Management. This article
identifies ten of the major landmines for entrepreneurs, using some
real-life examples. I don't believe any of the enterprises described
below is still in business (though some of the entrepreneurs have
moved
on, learned their lesson, and succeeded in other businesses):
Copycat businesses: Thirty years ago I did some
financial consulting for a small start-up cruise
ship operation. They acquired and
completely renovated a ship, which was lovely, got the licenses,
hired the appropriate staff, set up the business systems, and then
waited for the customers to roll in. After all, the competing
operations on the same run were all fully booked. But this operation
was an unknown quantity, and before they realized that just being
similar to a successful and busy business wasn't enough to succeed,
they sailed off into the sunset, empty. Franchisees beware.
Over-estimating the market:
Consultants love to sell you spreadsheets that will 'forecast' your
income and cash flow. An inventor friend of mine used one of these to
persuade himself to produce and sell a new organic nutritional
supplement he had developed. His research showed that the annual sales
of this type of product North America-wide was $X billion. The
spreadsheet encouraged him to plug this number in, along with his
estimate of what share of this market he could capture over three
years. Needless to say, he never sold anywhere close to this amount of
product, because that's not how you go about forecasting sales.
Being too far ahead of or behind the market: A
client of mine bought the North American rights to a new technology
that would extrude a rugged, colour-fast plastic that could be used in
decking, fencing, and other outdoor applications. He spent a fortune
setting up the manufacturing plant. Problem is, he did this in the
1980s, when plastics were distrusted as 'cheap', wood was
cheap, and creosote in pressure-treated lumber was not yet known to be
a carcinogen. Being 10-15 years ahead of the market cost him his life
savings.
Biting off too much:
A company that I was brought in to help liquidate had been doubling
its
sales and employee headcount every nine months. They were providing
turnkey computer networking equipment and installations to mid-size
companies, and had recently moved upscale to large corporations,
school
boards and government departments. As its receivables and inventories
soared, it started paying more money for qualified talent, and its
suppliers and bank both put it on short leash. Finally, despite record
monthly sales, it simply ran out of cash. The owner turned down two
very opportunistic 'investors', who wanted control of the business in
return for working capital, and the bank pulled the plug.
Not listening to the customer, or offering a solution in search
of a problem:
A lot of entrepreneurs are inventors, scientists, artists, artisans,
administrators, teachers or managers. Sales is not their forte, and
they're more comfortable working with ideas, materials, plans or
systems than with those pesky people called customers.
If you're not at home spending a lot of face time with customers,
better partner with someone who is. If you want to see what happens if
you don't, just browse any of the free software sites on the Web and
see how many downloads most of them have. Some of them are quite
intriguing, but because they don't meet a customer need, they'll never
be more than that. Great prescription for a hobby, deadly for a
business.
Not consulting with or listening to the right advisors:
A client of our firm in the early 1990s, a company which had been in
the commercial printing business for 80 years, brought us in for some
technology and corporate finance consulting. As we learned about the
business it became obvious, first, that they could not afford the new
equipment they proposed to buy, and secondly, that their profit
margins
were going through the floor. They had built their reputation on high
quality printing work, but the market was no longer willing to pay for
it. The new equipment would allow them to automate and eliminate some
labour costs (and keep up with newer competitors with no sunk costs),
but the cost of the new equipment would exceed the savings. We advised
the company they needed to find some new markets, new higher-margin
products, and new customers who would pay more for their quality work,
or else drastically cut costs. They were convinced their customers
would stay loyal, and the market for quality printing would rebound.
They didn't, and the company shut its doors two years later.
Blowing the budget:
As most women will tell you (but many men seem unable to fathom),
budgeting is simply a matter of ensuring that the cash going out
doesn't exceed the cash coming in. The problem is, every start up
costs
more -- sometimes two or three times more -- than initially expected.
It takes enormous self-discipline, patience, pacing, and sometimes
financial creativity, to mete out dollars at a rate that will ensure
there is enough cash to launch the business under the worst case scenario. I
know of a dozen businesses that closed before they opened because they
failed to do so, and others that lost control of their business
unwillingly because that was the price for a late cash infusion. 'Risk
Capital' might be more accurately called 'Heartbreak Capital' -- it is
obscenely expensive.
Groupthink:
Back in the 1970s I was appointed Deputy Receiver for a computer and
peripherals distributor. They had been put on 'close watch' by the
bank, and I had to get authorization for, and sign, every cheque.
While
I was there I attended and took notes at management meetings. I was
assailed at each meeting when I presented my factual reports on profit
and cash flow. I was nicknamed The Undertaker for my 'relentless
pessimism', and almost physically ejected when I questioned the
validity of some unsupported fees that had been paid by the much-loved
CFO, who was on leave of absence looking after a very sick relative.
The six-man management team, intact since the start of the company and
each heavily personally invested in the company, used to come out of
their meetings with cheers and high fives, confident, contrary to all
logic, that the company was poised for turnaround and sales 'in the
pipeline' would soon bring a return to happy days. They would feed off each others' boundless
optimism. They just needed to work
harder. Happier
days never came, and the CFO, it turns out, had defrauded the company
to pay for his relative's substantial medical bills.
Litigation:
A small biotech company whose CEO I met at a conference a few years
ago
was bemoaning the huge cost of registering and defending patents. He
said they had been forced to sell off one promising product to a
competitor in order to pay their legal bills to defend their other
intellectual capital. That had slowed them down to the point they now
feared that another competitor would beat them to market, rendering
the
results of the litigation largely moot. Big companies can afford
armies
of expensive lawyers. For small companies, significant litigation can
spell disaster. The competitive advantage of the entrepreneur is
agility -- when products get mired in legal wrangles, it may be better
to cut bait and move on to other ventures than to fight adversaries
with much deeper pockets in court.
Buying the MBA hype:
Graduates of business school are taught how to be middle managers of
large enterprises. Unfortunately, that knowledge often don't translate
well to entrepreneurial businesses. A client of mine brought in a
young, very successful MBA grad (he had his own daily spot on one of
the local radio stations), who had, it appeared, no experience at all
with entrepreneurial business. The company, which was modestly
profitable, bought the young man's well-delivered 'grow or die'
message
and decided to 'go upscale'. They spent a small fortune on
advertising,
and set up a sales office and warehouse in another country.
Unfortunately, the media in which the ads appeared were not the ones
used by the company's customers, and there was not enough money to
properly penetrate the foreign market. The expenses produced almost no
growth and almost sank the company. They salvaged the situation, and
their business, by finding an enterprising competitor in the foreign
country who took over the hemorrhaging 'branch plant', and then
striking a reciprocal marketing alliance with them.
Many entrepreneurs I know feel very lonely, exposed, and helpless. The
big consulting firms aren't interested in them until they grow bigger
or go public. The smaller firms are selling one or two specific
products, and rarely have entrepreneurial skills to share. And these
suppliers are expensive. The government is cheaper, but with a few
notable exceptions they aren't very helpful either. As a result, many
entrepreneurs have formed their own 'support groups', helping each other
to avoid the landmines, and learning from each other's experiences and
failures. Retired entrepreneurs are another good source of advice, and
a quarterly business breakfast with a trusted entrepreneur or advisor
with some experience in the trenches can be an excellent investment.
These breakfasts don't need an agenda -- they're run as an informal
'interview', with the advisor asking pertinent, open-ended questions
and listening and offering counsel and options and ideas. They are a
critical element of what my new business, The Caring Enterprise Coach,
offers.
Another technique entrepreneurs can employ to alert themselves to
potential landmines is establishing an Advisory Board made up of
people
who have well-rounded business experience, knowledge of markets, and
skills the entrepreneur and his partners lack. Such Advisory Boards
are
often reciprocal, offering mutual support and advice in lieu of fees.
I
am constantly surprised how few entrepreneurs use such 'support
groups', relying instead on their own instincts, the counsel of
inexperienced and costly 'professional advisors', and others (bankers,
customers, franchisors, and various 'agencies') who have only a
nominal, and purely financial, interest in the entrepreneur's success.
Some 'support groups' and networks have been set up as money-making
ventures, but these tend to be unwieldy and their members terribly
needy -- ten people looking for advice and new customers for every one
capable of offering useful information or counsel in return. It's best
to create your own.
The problem, of course, is that most entrepreneurs are paradoxically
too busy fighting fires and avoiding landmines, to be able to invest
time finding and networking with support groups and other valuable
advisors who can help them avoid the next round of fires and landmines. But, despite the
failings of the first generation Social Networking tools, such
tools hold enormous promise. Although Shoshana Zuboff coined the term
The Support Economy
to refer to federations of businesses working together to support
their
shared customers, the first true Support Economy may well be
entrepreneurs supporting each other.
(The final*
instalment of
excerpts from the
upcoming book Natural
Enterprise.
)
The
hardest part of entrepreneurship is getting the business up and
running. Perhaps the second hardest is deciding when to let it go.
Consultants will tell you every business has four stages in its
life-cycle: Start-up, Early growth, Maturity, and Decline. They'll
draw
you a sigmoid (S-shaped) curve to illustrate it -- a long slow start,
then a surge as it catches on, then levelling off, and finally
dropping. That curve represents revenues and profitability, but it
often tracks closely with the passion of management and public markets
for the business as well.
How does this apply to a Natural Enterprise which, almost by
definition, is not focused on growth, but rather on well-being of its
member partners, and on sustainability? The experts suggest that a
company that is continually innovating can pile one of these 'S'
curves
on top of another, and theoretically grow at a reasonably fast pace
forever. Innovation is equally critical, as we have seen, in
entrepreneurial businesses, but its purpose in these businesses is
somewhat different: to (a) discover new unmet needs that replace
products and services that are no longer needed (or have been obviated
by other companies' disruptive
innovations),
(b) discover new applications and markets for the products and
services
you already offer, and (c) continuously improve your products and
services as you understand more deeply both the customer's needs and
the solution alternatives. This is a process that offers entrepreneurs
a tremendous competitive edge over large corporations, which get very
attached to, and defensive of, existing products and services (in
which
they are heavily invested), and hence are loath to change. The
pressures of meeting public shareholder expectations also makes large
corporations short-term focused and less willing and able to
incorporate radical innovations that can 'cannibalize' existing
offerings and cut into short-term profits.
So while the large corporation uses a mix of innovation, massive
marketing, acquisitions and globalization to try to sustain growth as
long as it can, and eventually and inevitably goes into a phase of
permanent decline, divestiture or absorption into a newer, growing
organization, more agile entrepreneurial businesses can stay healthy
indefinitely, provided they
don't grow too large, cease to be innovative or succumb to the lure of
low-cost capital through public ownership. If the large corporation is
the 'dinosaur' of the business world (big, rapacious, hugely
successful
but doomed to die), the entrepreneur is more analogous to a community of small animals,
sustaining itself indefinitely as long as it doesn't succumb to an
'ecological' catastrophe. While competent entrepreneurs need not, therefore, worry
about either the problems of rapid growth or the problems of
inevitable
decline, it doesn't necessarily follow that the enterprise should
aspire to live forever. Here's where the elegance of self-managing
systems shows itself to best advantage: The members of a Natural
Enterprise vote with their feet if and when the organization no longer
meets their needs. There's no need to plan for the sunset of the
enterprise because it will happen organically if and when its members
choose to dissociate from each other, naturally.
Most entrepreneurs strive, usually without success, to put in place a
succession plan, to encourage either family members or key employees
to
'buy them out' when they're ready to retire. Why don't these plans
work? Two reasons: (1) to some extent the entrepreneur is
the enterprise, he or she represents it to its customers, and has so
much of the wisdom, the intellectual capital of the enterprise caught
up in his/her head that its value to someone else, even a child of the
entrepreneur, is often negligible, and (2) it's hard to transfer the
passion of the enterprise to someone who wasn't part of its inception
and life-long realization -- most entrepreneurs, unless the price is
very low, would sooner start
their own business than take on someone else's with all its 'baggage'.
Natural enterprises don't have to worry about succession -- they add
and lose members organically as the needs of the business and the
competencies and needs of the members evolve. Natural enterprises have
no shares and no hierarchy to worry about transitioning, and the
concept of 'retirement' doesn't apply -- if a member's needs change
such that he wants to spend less time on enterprise activities, he
simply declares this to his partners and they will, using the
self-management techniques outlined earlier in this book, re-jig the
mix of members and roles (and if necessary identify and invite someone
new to join) organically to compensate. If you're in an organization
with people you love, doing work that you love, why would you ever
abruptly and completely 'retire' anyway? Just as an old goose never
'retires' from the flock, but just transfers responsibilities to
others
in the flock as needed, the concepts of retirement and succession just
don't apply.
The global business community, setting aside the somewhat artificial
constructs of large multinational corporations -- hierarchy,
oligopoly,
unequal distribution of resources, propensity to bribery and
corruption, lack of responsibility for others' well-being etc. --
meets
the definition of a complex adaptive
system. It's complex, rather than complicated, because it's
impossible for anyone who
know everything
about it, or even everything needed to make a significant business
decision. Like an ecosystem, the global business community (again,
ignoring the corporate dinosaurs) is non-hierarchical and
self-organizing, and despite the fact no one is 'in charge', certain
decisions and behaviours that work
very well tend, in an evolutionary fashion, to emerge
over time (which is why complex adaptive systems are sometimes called
'emergent' systems). Using a combination of self-adjustment (in
self-interest) and instinct, like flocks of birds that swirl in the
air
like a single organism, and stay in perfect formation during
migrations
of thousands of miles that, thanks to the 'collective intelligence' of
the flock, take them precisely
to their nesting grounds each year, entrepreneurs and their customers
comprise an adaptive commercial 'ecosystem'. More than any other
factor
it is this attribute, this elegant capability to do the right thing
almost perfectly, collectively, every time, that makes Natural
Enterprise -- natural.
And that brings us to the end of our journey.
[I'll be putting a brief re-cap of the entire book, and the key things
to remember, here, when it goes to press]
It is my hope that the purchasers of this book and other entrepreneurs
will take advantage of the Internet, and particularly the new and
evolving social networking tools, to learn much more about Natural
Enterprise and about entrepreneurship in general from each other, than
I could ever hope to teach in this one volume. To that end, I have
created (I'll do this soon, and blog
about it)
the Natural Enterprise Forum. Readers are welcome to use it to pose
questions or comment on this book, or to tell their personal
entrepreneurial stories (to give other readers all-important context)
that capture your learnings, good and bad, about entrepreneurial
business. I'll be active on this site.
In addition, through my business Meeting of Minds(website for this also going up shortly), I
can offer entrepreneurs, Natural or otherwise, guidance, advice and
coaching on a wide variety of business-related matters, especially
business innovation. Pricing and contact information may be found in
Appendix Two.
* Table of Contents for Natural Enterprise: Making a Joyful Living with People You Love
(each chapter will be edited for book form, additional material will
be
added to some chapters, a bibliography will be appended, and about 50
'mini-case studies' of entrepreneurial best -- and worst -- practices
will be included throughout the book.):
PART
THREE:
Chapter Sixteen
Appendix One
Appendix Two
SUSTAINING
MOMENTUM Entrepreneurial Business Evolution (today's post,
above)
The Natural Enterprise Online
Forum
The Natural
Enterprise Coaching Service
(Tenth installment of the upcoming
book Natural Enterprise. List
of previous installments here.)
Two of the fundamental
principles of business are: Relationships trump credentials in buying
(and many other business decisions), and It's not what you know, it's
who
you know that counts. These truisms show just how important business
networking is, especially in an enterprise that doesn't have a lot of
people or spare time to invest in relationship-building.
Let's start with some definitions:
Networking is the process of building and nurturing business
relationships. Alliances are
contractual arrangements between two or more businesses to achieve
shared objectives, usually with a limited life.
There are many good business reasons to network:
Improve knowledge
about customer needs
Increase
customer trust, and hence sales and penetration
Find new customers
Increase knowledge about markets and good
business practices
Get answers to questions and business
problems inexpensively
Market test or virally market new
product or service ideas
Get your best customers to spread the word about your
credentials and expertise (much more effective than
self-promotion)
Find new suppliers, contractors, employees, advisors,
or coaches
Conduct informal surveys to tap into the Wisdom of
Crowds
Collaborate informally on open-source or other
projects
Although there is a variety of Social Networking
tools available to help you network online, the first generation of
such tools is not very effective or easy to use. The best networking
still entails face-to-face contact, ideally one-on-one, and the only
tool needed is a rolodex.
Do your research (who you want to meet, and when/how
best to meet them)
Develop 'elevator speeches' (rehearse what
you want to say to make powerful first impressions)
Don't
underestimate the 'strength of weak links' (the
people who know the people you know, who can expand your connections
and lead to important new relationships whose value you cannot
anticipate)
Listen and help (show you care, and that you can
offer something, before you try to sell anything)
Never lie,
and don't tolerate bullshit from others
Understand that every
conversation is an implicit contract
(know what the other person wants from a conversation, and be clear
about what you want)
Follow through and follow up (never break
a promise or procrastinate)
Learn to tell stories
well
Prune your networks
Manage your networks (move
relationships with the most important contacts forward first)
In contrast to networks, business alliances are usually formed for
more formal, ambitious business purposes:
Collaborate on major sales proposals and projects:
Creating a proposal or project team to bid jointly or to make a pitch
that requires more capability than your business alone can offer, or
where the customer wants bundled products or services. In this sense
an
alliance is a bit like a subcontracting arrangement, but with a more
equal partnership.
Joint purchasing: Forming a buying group with
competitors or others buying the same supplies, to increase purchasing
power and lower costs.
R&D / new product development:
Share the cost and risk of leading edge research. Bring more skills,
ideas, piloting capability and funding to the NPD process than any
single company can garner.
Joint marketing:
Marketing alliances can include competitors in an industry (as with
multi-dealer auto showrooms), companies at different points in a
supply
chain (as when a wholesaler and retailer collaborate), or even
companies in unrelated industries (such as house builders who promote
a
furniture company's products in their model homes).
Licensing:
Innovative companies can recognize opportunities to license an idea
from one industry and apply it to a completely different industry,
with
the developer and the licensor of the idea sharing the revenues from
its application.
Leveraging business school skills:
Entrepreneurs can ally with educational institutions to obtain
inexpensive knowledge, consulting advice, and knowledgeable employees
or interns.
Project alliances: A consortia of companies can achieve
scale and other economies by working together on a major project.
Enter new markets:
Alliances with companies already established in another country can
often succeed better and faster than trying to penetrate a new market
alone.
New ventures and spinoffs:
Joint ventures between companies with a variety of competencies can be
a very effective way of launching or spinning off a new venture.
Outsourcing is often best accomplished by an alliance between a
company
and a group of its former employees.
Most of the ten keys to effective networking described above will also
ensure effective relationships with alliance partners. In addition,
there are three critical success factors to a good business
alliance:
Communication:
Because alliances are between organizations that each have their own
structures and communication protocols, there is a tendency for
alliance partners to each focus on their role in the partnership and
under-communicate (and under-collaborate) with their partners. This
can
result in misunderstandings, unmet or unreasonable expectations, and
important tasks falling between the cracks.
Goal and role clarity:
Each partner in the alliance needs to understand the others' goals
(objectives for participating in the alliance) and roles, to ensure
conflicts and gaps are minimized and expectations are met.
Measures and motivation:
Each partner in the alliance needs to have some skin in the game, or
their participation in alliance activities will be subordinated to its
own internal activities. And there needs to be agreed-upon, objective
measures, targets and deadlines so that each partner's performance can
be assessed and if necessary improved.
The value that your business gets out of networking and alliances will
be a function of three things: The up-front work you spend in
preparing
for, researching and planning for network and alliance activities, the
amount of quality time you invest in the networking and alliance
activities themselves, and the depth of your communication skills.
Good
networking requires tact, rehearsal & practice, articulateness,
brevity, excellent listening skills, and careful documentation and
confirmation of agreements and action plans. But it can also be fun,
and one of the most financially and socially rewarding aspects of
business.
(Eleventh instalment of the
upcoming book Natural
Enterprise.
List of previous instalments here.)
A lot of readers of How to Save the World will probably
be disappointed with this chapter in my upcoming book Natural Enterprise
for two reasons: I'm not going to plug any specific vendors of
technology for small business (although I've identified quite a few,
including some regular readers), because by the time the book comes
out
this information could well be obsolete. (When the book comes out
there
will be a companion website with a list
of recommended vendors of technology, though, so don't despair). And
although buying technology is one of the most fun parts of new
enterprise formation, my advice is to buy as little as you can get by
on. Most entrepreneurs, in my experience, go overboard.
There is no blueprint 'best answer' for what technology a new
entrepreneurial business needs. It depends on the industry in which
you
operate, the number and location of your customers and products,
whether your product or service can or should be effectively offered
online, and a host of other factors.
So the first thing to do is develop a Technology Plan. Although you can hire a consultant to
do this with you (don't let
them do it for
you), you can also develop the draft plan yourself and then run it by
tech-savvy people you know, and (more importantly) other, established
entrepreneurs you know with businesses of a similar type and style to
yours. The entrepreneurs who've already gone through this process can
tell you what you really need, and how to avoid the missteps they
made,
and this can really save you money and grief. You also need to talk to
some prospective customers about your Technology Plan, because if it's
inadequate to meet their expectations you'll need to re-think it. And
if they shrug and say it doesn't matter much to them, that probably
means your technologies are mostly internal, back-office tools: Avoid
spending too much on toys your customers (who ultimately pay for them)
don't see or benefit from.
The Technology Plan need not be long, but it does need to be carefully
thought through. Here's a checklist of the types of technology it
should address. For each type, you'll need to assess whether you need
it at all (some manual alternatives work just fine, and will do so
even
when your business scales up), identify and evaluate the alternative
tools available (including an increasing number of free alternatives),
and budget when to buy and how and how much to pay for each.
Telephony:
Most telephone companies offer packages designed for entrepreneurial
businesses. It's essential that your telephone system, often the first
point of contact with new customers, be reliable and professional.
Consider voice messaging, call waiting and call routing needs. Look at
them from the customer's viewpoint. Consider VoIP alternatives
including free (but not yet ubiquitous) solutions like Skype.
Fax: I keep thinking fax is dead. It isn't, yet. Avoid
the hokey systems that require customers to call twice to send you a
fax.
E-mail:
If you want to be taken seriously, you need your own e-mail/web
domain,
even if you don't have a website. Make sure it's short and easy to
spell. Shop carefully -- prices are all over the map. Cardinal rule of
e-mail: If you give your e-mail address to customers, check your
e-mail
very frequently (route it to someone else in the business if you
can't)
and respond to customers immediately.
Public
Website:
Depending on your business, this may be the most critical technology
you buy, or you may not need one at all. Talk to as many others as you
can before deciding what you need and who to buy from. You will
probably need someone to host your website, and the package the host
provides will probably include software to build and maintain your web
pages, and limit the size of the site and the volume of traffic
(beyond
which you pay extra). Most hosts also offer scalable additions for
e-commerce at an additional price: Product catalogue, shopping cart,
order management and credit-card handling etc. Beyond that, the sky's
the limit: You can add functionality to do online surveys, offer
multimedia presentations, provide help-desk support for your products,
and many other business applications. As with telephony, think this
through from the customer viewpoint: What do they want, what do they
need, what might they actually not want to see on your site. Keep it as simple as
possible, easy to use, clean-looking, and professional in appearance.
If you're not
taking orders for your products over the Internet, it's unlikely that
putting marketing information on your website will produce much
benefit: Focus your site content instead on educating your site's readers. If you give people
useful information 'free', they're more likely to want to buy from
you. Exception:
Put a few, enthusiastic, signed customer testimonials at the top of
your site (but get the customers' permission first). And make sure
your
contact information is up there with it, and that you're there to take
the calls when they come in. And give your customers a simple way to
give you feedback, good and bad, on your site. The good feedback can
be
the basis for testimonials and viral marketing. If you don't give them
a simple way to vent bad feedback to you directly, they'll vent to
others (including potential customers) instead.
Financial Information System:
Depending on the nature of your business, you will have certain
statutory reporting and filing requirements for your business.
Technology can automate these somewhat, but unless you have a lot of
small transactions (purchases, payments, sales and cash receipts), or
a
lot of different products and services that you need to track and
inventory separately, technology isn't going to reduce your paperwork
burden that much or tell you anything you don't already know. Find a
financial system that meets your needs, not the government's. That probably means
a system that will allow you to budget, forecast and monitor cash flow
day-to-day, easily. Don't buy a huge, complex accounting package with
thousands of General Ledger accounts and reports you don't use to
manage your business. Again, thinking of the customer first, you want
invoices and other financial paperwork that is visible to the customer
to look professional. If you have a lot of employees, consider
outsourcing payroll and HR records management -- it's usually the most
cost-effective application for small enterprises to farm out.
Customer
Information System:
If you have (or hope to have) a lot of customers your first database
application will probably be a customer information system, listing
contact information, sales calls (held and scheduled) and successes. A
simple spreadsheet application (free over the Internet) will probably
suffice until you get more than, say, 100 customers.
Order
and Inventory Management System:
Depending on volume and nature of your business, you may need
Point-of-Sale (POS) and Inventory Management software to keep track of
what and how much you've sold. Most entrepreneurs don't have enough
distinct products or enough individual transactions to require this,
and some accounting packages include rudimentary invoicing and
inventory management capability.
Intranet:
Once you reach a certain size, or if your organization is virtual
(i.e.
your people are physically scattered), you'll probably need some kind
of internal website, a space behind a firewall where your people can
communicate and collaborate. Don't design it in a laboratory -- get
the
people who will use it to design it with you. Possible applications
are: Scheduling and calendaring, Document- and file-sharing, Internal
e-mail and instant messaging, Internal newsletters, Housing databases
purchased from outsiders used by all employees, Hosting collaboration
and project 'spaces' and tools. Your work colleagues will tell you
what
they need, what makes sense to share, and to what extent (e.g. setting
up meetings automatically for other colleagues) they're willing to
allow technology to impose on and make some decisions for them.
Desktop
Publishing and Marketing tools:
Unless others have told you that you have a real flair for this, or
it's your business, this is best left to professionals. If you're
relying on viral marketing you need very, very little marketing
material. A business card, a brochure, a simple website -- that's
probably it. Get some one-time professional input on these, and then
leave them alone. I know, designing these things yourself is fun. But
it's not the best use of your time. And the results can be truly
ugly.
Computers, Mobile Devices and Local Area Networks for the Front
Line:
Let the users specify what they need, hardware, network and software.
Consider free alternatives to the major business software packages.
Stress connectivity applications over processing power, memory and
multimedia applications -- they're the ones with payback. For
applications essential to your business, make sure you have backups
for
everything -- the data, the hardware, the customer connectivity. Even
the smallest business needs some redundancy and security systems.
Customers just won't tolerate 'down time' anymore. But the more
sophisticated your systems, the more costly the redundancy and
security
systems become -- think about this before you go for wireless
networking.
Weblogs
& Social Networking Applications:
I am of course biased about these technologies, but I'm the first to
admit that they aren't the easiest to use, they aren't for everyone,
and they aren't yet ready for prime time business application. If your
colleagues are weblog-savvy, consider them for specific business
purposes: Capturing valuable business lessons, Archiving subject
matter
expertise, and as a Substitute for internal newsletters. And consider
running a weblog as an adjunct to your public website -- they can be
informative and engaging for customers and prospective customers, at
minimal cost. And keep a close eye on the burgeoning world of social
software: There is a burning need for better tools and databases that
can help entrepreneurs find partners, colleagues, advice, information
in context, and even customers. Someone's going to figure out how to
meet this need.
Once you have your Technology Plan completed and vetted by users,
customers and other entrepreneurs, you have one more critical decision
to make: Lease vs. Buy. This
decision is getting more difficult as the number of creative financing
alternatives increases. There is a new phenomenon called "pay as you
go
computing" that looks at most or all of the above technologies as a
single computing 'utility'. There are companies that now offer
'utility' computing packages, where you outsource all of the
purchasing
and maintenance of the technology of your business to a third party,
in
return for a single monthly payment that varies with your usage. The
big computer companies are likely to offer 'utility' computing by the
end of this year, though probably on a less extensive and less
flexible
basis. Unless you're a whiz with numbers it may be hard to figure out
whether to go for such a plan or not. My advice: Gather up all the
costs and the leasing, financing and 'utility' computing quotes, buy
your friendly accountant lunch and have him compute what's the best
deal. That goes as well for any lease vs. buy decision in your
business: Cars, premises, and machinery. The calculations are
complicated but straightforward -- if you're an expert in Present Value computations and
discounting variable cash flow streams.
Not only is the array of technology choices dizzying, it's changing
daily. That's why the key is to leverage the Wisdom of Crowds: Talk to
a lot of people, especially other entrepreneurs, who are usually all
too willing to tell you their technology success stories and horror
stories. It's all part of the homework for building a Natural
Enterprise.
OK, dear readers, this
is the chapter of Natural Enterprise that I feel least confident, and
competent, writing. So please tell me: What's missing, and what have I
got wrong? Remember that this book is for the novice, so I've tried to
keep it simple and jargon-free. This chapter will get the last
re-write
just before the book goes to press, but I'm still worried it will be
obsolete by the time the book hits the stores. What do you
think?
(Twelfth instalment of the
upcoming book Natural
Enterprise.
List of previous instalments here.)
Enterprises today have a
dizzying selection of performance measurements to choose from. While
at
one time measuring financial profitability, growth and asset
management
effectiveness were considered enough, businesses are now told that
they
need broader metrics to avoid the landmines that may not show up in a
simple financial report card.
How does an entrepreneur decide which measures to use? The decision
ultimately comes down to which measures best reflect and assess the
achievement of the enterprise's objectives. As we explained in an
earlier chapter, in a Natural Enterprise these objectives are more
personal and less restricted than in a traditional company beholden to
absentee shareholders and creditors, whose needs usually (and
tragically) trump those of the people who actually operate the
enterprise. In fact, Natural Enterprise recognizes that each
member/partner will have different personal objectives, and attempts
to
accommodate those objectives, unlike traditional companies that merely
contract for services of employees and make no attempt to assess those
employees' individual needs (often at the cost of their best people).
Some individuals may want or need to earn a significant income to meet
personal financial obligations, while others may be prepared to trade
off income for more time for non-business activities, and still others
may not care about either financial reward or time demands, as long as
they're having fun working with people they love.
Just as the selection of members for a Natural Enterprise is a
self-brokered juggling act (ensuring members' skills are mutually
exclusive yet collectively sufficient), so too is the measurement of
Natural Enterprise success a balancing act -- choosing measures that
assess each member's achievement of his or her personal objectives and
needs, yet still ensuring that the enterprise as a whole remains
viable
and sustainable. For that reason the selection of measurements needs
to
be a collective decision, one
that optimizes everyone's desires and needs in a fair and objective
manner. If one member has a huge mortgage that can probably only be
serviced if everyone in the enterprise works longer hours than they
want to, for example, this needs to be hammered out early, to avoid
inevitable conflicts (and resignations) later.
While the measurement process described in this article is designed
for
Natural Enterprise, it can also work in any entrepreneurial business
with a democratic spirit. Just be forewarned it takes a bit more work
than the traditional business success measures, and requires a lot
more
accommodation of individual employees' needs and aspirations than most
entrepreneurial managers are accustomed to!
Although there are many accepted sets of measures that attempt to look
at enterprise success holistically, in my opinion none of the
widely-used templates is flexible enough to meet the needs of
entrepreneurs who are not fixated on maximizing profitability and
growth. My recommendation, then, is that you start by having each
member of the enterprise articulate his or her own personal objectives
for being part of the enterprise, and then as a group reconcile and
optimize them to create a set of enterprise-wide measurements. I've
developed two tools to do this, the Personal Enterprise Success
Scorecard and the Enterprise Success Scorecard. Those who have worked
in large organizations that use Norton & Kaplan's Balanced
Scorecard will recognize this as similar to the process used to
reconcile personal goals to enterprise goals, but with an important
difference: While in traditional companies this reconciliation is a
top-down process ("describe how your personal goals and improvement
objectives for the next year will contribute to each of the
organization's Balanced Scorecard goals"), in Natural Enterprise the
process is bottom-up. Here's how it works:
Have each member of the organization complete a Personal
Enterprise Success Scorecard (see Fig.1), honestly and
independently.
Circulate these Personal Scorecards among all
members of
the enterprise, and allow time for one-on-one discussions and exchange
of suggestions to ensure all Scorecards are fair, reasonable and
consistently filled out.
Get the group together to develop a plan that will
achieve
everyone's Minimum Need Targets, and get as close as possible to
achieving everyone's Ideal Targets. This will require considerable consens
us-building
skills -- it has to be a highly respectful and accommodating process
with no bullying, intimidation or reluctant compromise. You might even
have to rethink your membership if you realize that no matter what you
do, someone's going to be unhappy enough to leave.
PERSONAL
OBJECTIVE
MEASURE
TARGET (MINIMUM
NEED)
TARGET (IDEAL)
Meet personal
financial objectives
Personal monthly
cash flow (income)
$X/month
$Y/month
Time for important
non-work activities
Average weekly
work hours
max. X
hours/week
max. Y
hours/week
Work hours
flexibility
Ability to choose
which hours to work
avoid working
X-Yam and X-Ypm
unlimited
flexibility
Work autonomy,
authority, responsibility
Ability to make
decisions affecting my role
$X spending
authority
unlimited
autonomy
Personal
learning
Time allotted for
learning activities
X hours/week
unlimited at my
discretion
Creative
outlet
Time & $
allotted for innovation activities
X hours/week +
$X/month
Y hours/week +
$Y/month
etc.
Fig. 1 Sample
Personal Enterprise Success Scorecard
Drawing on the Personal Enterprise Success
Scorecards, and
adding other holistic objectives of the enterprise, compile an
Enterprise Success Scorecard (Fig. 2).
Put in place processes
to capture the data (qualitative --
surveys etc., and quantitative) needed to assess the achievement or
non-achievement of the collective targets.
When a minimum-need
target is not achieved, convene the
group to discuss implications for individual members and remedial
actions to achieve the target in future, or changes to the target.
ENTERPRISE
OBJECTIVE
MEASURE
TARGET (MINIMUM
NEED)
TARGET (IDEAL OR
BENCHMARK)
ACHIEVEMENT/
REMEDIATION INITIATIVES
Meet members'
financial targets
Cash flow
distributed/month
Meet members' work
hour targets
Total hours
worked/month
High
product/service quality
Score per customer
survey
High business
process quality
Down time &
wasted time
High
member/employee satisfaction
Score per employee
survey
High customer
satisfaction
Score per customer
survey
Strong
relationships
Face time with
members of networks
High
connectivity
Number of contacts
with networks
High enterprise
value
Computed
valuation
High
sustainability & agility
Meet above targets
even in weak economy
Social &
environmental responsibility
Buy local, employ
local, no waste/pollution
Community
responsibility
Outreach to
schools & charities
High
market/customer share
% of total market
in areas served
High
innovation
% of sales from
new offerings
etc.
Fig. 2 Sample
Enterprise Success Scorecard (column headings based on Norton &
Kaplan's Balanced Scorecard)
Most of these measures are contingent on others. For example, a member
may be willing to work more hours if he or she has greater flexibility
over when those hours are worked. So optimizing the needs and
objectives of all members is not only a balancing act, it's an
iterative process. And over time the demand for and costs of the
enterprise's products and services may change for reasons outside your
control, which will require a re-optimization of members' and the
enterprise's scorecards again.
Some of the objectives in the sample Enterprise Success Scorecard
above
are quite grandiose and abstract, and sometimes you need to employ
some
more readily measurable intermediary
metrics to get a clear idea of whether you are achieving, and will
likely continue to be able to achieve, some of the higher-level
objectives. For example, achieving a cash flow target means achieving
certain revenues and/or cost minimization targets. So there is still a
place in this measurement process for the traditional financial and
operating measures like margin and turnover, and like 'eyeballs' and
'stickiness' measures of e-commerce sites. You can find information on
some of these traditional measures at About.com, at NetMBA, or
at the UK Small
Business Service
site. While these ratios aren't terribly useful to most entrepreneurs
as raw data, they can be very useful in identifying trends that may
indicate problems or opportunities, in diagnosing the cause of
problems, and in comparing your enterprise to companies in a similar
business that are outperforming the market. Trends in intermediary
metrics can also have great predictive value: I know of several
businesses who noticed modest drops in gross margin or inventory
turnover, and discovered that they signalled important (negative)
shifts in customer perception of their products, early enough to take
vital remedial action.
If you are interested in knowing how much your business is 'worth' (at
least on paper), I published a Primer on
Business Valuation last year on my weblog.
Norton & Kaplan's famous Balanced Scorecard, which you can learn
more about on their
site,
breaks the measurable enterprises objectives into four major
categories: Financial, Customer, Internal Processes and Learning,
Growth & Innovation. Many variations of these classifications have
since been published, adding Knowledge (Intellectual Capital),
'People'
(Human Capital) and Technology categories, among others.
No matter what objectives you choose or how you categorize them, it is
essential that they meet three criteria:
Measurability -- If you can't measure attainment of the
objectives, or even come up with compelling intermediary metrics that
can serve as credible surrogates for what you're trying to measure,
there isn't much point in listing it as an objective, because you'll
never know if you've achieved it.
Actionability -- You need to
be able to identify remedial
actions you can take if you fail to meet your targets. If your
measures
aren't actionable, there's limited value in taking
them.
Analyzability -- You need to be able to understand why you are, or are not, meeting
your targets, in order to be able to act on them.
My book, Natural Enterprise,
will include some real-life examples of entrepreneurial measurement
systems, and some success stories and horror stories about business
measurement.
I've spent much of my career being paid to measure enterprise success,
and in my experience most entrepreneurs know instinctively how well
their business is doing, and many rely on one overarching measure --
daily cash flow -- to confirm or challenge their business instinct.
I'll be describing how to manage cash flow in the next article in this
series. In the meantime, some final thoughts about measurements:
Don't get obsessed with them -- they're a means to an
end,
namely the achievement of your business objectives (not your
accountant's!), not an end in themselves.
Make sure that the measures you use are timely, and
that
you take them continuously; I've seen businesses fail because they
made
decisions based on obsolete, misleading data.
Make sure the
measures are meaningful and the process used
to collect them ensures accurate data. Before you make major decisions
based on your interpretation of a surprising or disappointing measure,
get some others to provide their interpretation.
Choose a few, meaningful measures over a mass of
numbers that are hard to digest.
Don't focus solely on short-term measures -- they can
make you too impatient, and cause you to over-react.
It's been said that "what gets measured, gets done", and there is some
truth to that. But nowhere in business is the 'conventional wisdom' so
likely to lead you astray than in business measurement. Measure your
success on your own terms. It's all that counts.
IBM: We've 'weathered' transition from 130 to 90 nm
IBM: We've 'weathered' transition from 130 to 90 nm06/27/2004 05:42 PM IBM claims that it has weathered the transition from 130-nm to 90-nm
microprocessor chips as well as its competitors, reports eWeek in a
story noted at MacSurfer...
MSJVM Transition FAQ
MSJVM Transition FAQ12/15/2003 11:40 PM A list of programs and websites that are known to depend on the MSJVM
will be made available from Microsoft in early 2004. Moving forward,
Microsoft is working with the publishers of these programs and
websites to remove the requirements for the MSJVM.
Businesses may also have custom programs which may have been developed
internally or by a software vendor or consultant that may have
dependencies on the MSJVM. If your business relies on such programs,
you should check with your developer, consultant, or software vendor
to understand if there are any dependencies on the MSJVM, and to learn
what steps you should take to minimize these dependencies and the
potential impact on your business.
Moments of transition
Moments of transition07/19/2004 04:56 PM Had my last riding lesson today. I'm going to Iceland in three weeks,
so I'm taking a short break before that. Darn, one gets really
attached to those horses. Even though I only was there for six weeks,
I strangely enough already miss them
. Especially thesetwo. *sigh*
The syrupy moment of the day: When Outi was last week, a friend of
mine brought us lollipops - heart-shaped, of course - but they were
forgotten in the bags. So, today, we chatted on IRC and enjoyed those
lollipops, knowing that the other person was doing the same thing far
away.
I'm degenerating rapidly, and decomposing into sugar and honey. Whee
:)
NBC Wants Smooth Transition for New Anchor (AP)05/09/2004 01:02 PM AP - Every week or so, a handful of NBC News executives meet to plot
the schedule of a man who usually isn't in the room. They're planning
for an epochal event in the world of television news, when Brian
Williams takes over for Tom Brokaw on Dec. 2 as the anchor of NBC's
"Nightly News." If only it were as simple as switching a nameplate
over a door.
New iMovie transition plug-ins from BKMS
New iMovie transition plug-ins from BKMS01/22/2004 02:04 PM BKMS Software Development
announced on Thursday that it has four new plug-ins that will help
you jazz up your iMovie transitions: Fancy Wipes, Melt In, Pixel Fade,
and Pixel Wash. They join the company's other four plug-ins already
available.
IPv6 Transition Crucial to Military12/09/2003 07:28 PM A top Pentagon official says 9/11 convinced the military to accelerate
the transition to the next-generation IPv6 protocol.
Iraq In Transition: Vortex or Catalyst?09/02/2004 11:38 AM Iraq In Transition: Vortex or
Catalyst? (PDF) A key message of the report is that
should Iraq fragment, a sectarian struggle between the Shi’a
majority and Sunni minority is more likely to flare up in the context
of a political breakdown. Al Qaeda and other militant Sunni groups
will contribute to the polarisation between Sunnis, Shi’a and other
religious groups in Iraq. A fragmented Iraq could provide a breeding
ground for new militant factions, both Islamist and
non-Islamist. Press
release
Using the Tween and Transition Classes in Flash
Using the Tween and Transition Classes in Flash01/03/2005 03:00 PM Add eye-catching transitions and animations to your SWF files with
these classes—even if you're not an ActionScript expert.
ABC: U.S. Wants Iraqi Transition Government by Summer
As a Season Ends, a Transition Begins05/21/2004 08:32 AM Thursday night's denouement may have marked a beginning, as the Nets
and the Pistons have laid the foundation for a serious rivalry.
The transition from logical to physical data model
The transition from logical to physical data model08/23/2002 08:00 AM CNET Aug 22 2002 10:24PM ET Grok Description matches for Transition from Entrepreneurial to Professional management GrokA matches for Transition from Entrepreneurial to Professional management
Transition from Entrepreneurial to Professional management
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
The
hardest part of entrepreneurship is getting the business up and
running. Perhaps the second hardest is deciding when to let it go.
Consultants will tell you every business has four stages in its
life-cycle: Start-up, Early growth, Maturity, and Decline. They'll
draw
you a sigmoid (S-shaped) curve to illustrate it -- a long slow start,
then a surge as it catches on, then levelling off, and finally
dropping. That curve represents revenues and profitability, but it
often tracks closely with the passion of management and public markets
for the business as well.