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Wireless 2004: Entrepreneurial spirit alive and wellWireless 2004: Entrepreneurial spirit
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 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.
So here's where you come in. Help me create a 'business model' for entrepreneurial education that meets these very difficult challenges:
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? |
Barak Berkowitz is now the CEO is SixApart.
Andrew Anker is also part of the team. They just formed SixApart EMEA.
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.
Well they did.
Congrats to all involved.....
Coverage
of the WIRELESS JAPAN 2004 convention continues over at TechJapan.
Highlights from day 2 include a compact wireless optical connection
module (capable of 1.25Gbps throughput, no less), Panasonic's sick and
twisted vision of the future of cellular phones, and the new "MOPASS
card," combining removable media and IC card into one. Also covered in
the article is NEC's "internet for people who drive too fast," a high
speed IP handover system allowing for vehicles moving at up to 300km
per hour to sustain 100kbps transfer rates, Renesas' "SH-Mobile3" 3D
accelerator for phones, and the Mobile Content Awards 2004. Read - WIRELESS
JAPAN 2004, Day 2 [TechJapan via K-Tai
Watch]
And speaking of WIRELESS JAPAN 2004, the high-technology product
show that is going on in (surprise!) Japan, Gizmodo buddy
Gonzague-Alexandre Gay took a stroll through the conference and came
back with some fantastic pictures (and commentary, too, if you can
read French). There's just too much to describe, really, with swoopy,
transparent cellphone concepts, new PDAs, and tiny LCD displays
galore.
Read - Wireless Watch 2004 Pictures (French) [SorobanGeeks]
Related
WIRELESS JAPAN 2004 Day 2 Coverage [Gizmodo]
 Diagram ©2004 The Caring Enterprise
Coach
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:
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):
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. |
 (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:
In a previous article I identified ten keys to effective networking. To recap, they are:
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| (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.):
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| (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:
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:
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:
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|
(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? |
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