The Entrepreneur on Campus

How Three Companies Tweet Without Fear

2011-12-09T06:32:00.000-08:00

I liked the piece in today’s Wall Street Journal by Elizabeth Holmes and on how three different companies deal with Twitter. My old personal favorite was Sea World, where they had Shamu tweeting. It took a while for me to “get” Twitter, but I love the service and along with HootSuite, I find it one of the indispensible tools to keep me up-to-date on the world of business…and other things as well. For example, during football Sunday’s, I keep my iPad next to me as I watch games as I follow the former head of NFL officiating Mike Pereira (@MikePereira) as he tweets about officiating issues regarding the games and gives his followers the correct information on why calls were or were not made.

From today’s article:

This week AMR Corp.'s American Airlines found itself caught in a public spat after actor Alec Baldwin vented on Twitter after being removed from an American flight. "Flight attendant on American reamed me out 4 playing WORDS W FRIENDS," Mr. Baldwin tweeted, referring to a Scrabble-like online game.

American replied via Twitter asking for his contact information. A day later, American tweeted, "UPDATE: Facts about yesterday's removed passenger" along with a link to a statement giving a less-flattering account of the passenger's behavior without mentioning Mr. Baldwin's name. Mr. Baldwin deactivated his Twitter account after the incident and apologized to his fellow passengers.

Companies are adopting a variety of strategies for navigating Twitter's pitfalls. One of the biggest issues is how many people to trust with a company's account, known as its handle. Spread the authority too thin, and the burden can be overwhelming. Authorize too many people, and the risk of mishaps multiplies. Here's how three very different companies—Southwest Airlines Co., Whole Foods Market Inc. and Best Buy Co.—are approaching the task.

From Drucker to Zuckerberg With a Little Page For Good Measure

2011-11-19T08:04:00.000-08:00

Over the past three months, I hadn’t gotten my Fortune magazine. Based on a combination of moving from Syracuse to Boca Raton and that my subscription expired, I hadn’t read the publication for some time. So this morning, sitting outside drinking coffee and eating Cote France’s wonderful almond croissants, I had the chance to renew my longstanding love for this magazine. The magazine (which I now also have on my iPad) gave me a chance to read stories that started with Peter Drucker and ended up with the epic battle between on going between Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page in the Battle for the Future of the Web. My only wish is that the Fortune website would make it easier to find the articles from the print pub so I can make sure that my students and friends can read them.

I particularly liked the short piece on Francis Hesselbein, who reminded me again of one of Drucker’s five questions:

1. What is our mission?
2. Who is our customer?
3. What does the customer value?
4. What are our results?
5. What is our plan?

For Hesselbein, who used to be the CEO for the Girl Scouts of USA, the mission was “short, powerful and compelling: To help each girl reach her own highest potential.” You have to love that mission, and it isn’t something that would be spit out of the Dilbert Mission Statement generating machine.

On Dancing with the Stars, Hiring and Never-Ever Giving Up

2011-10-31T05:43:00.000-07:00

On an overcast and rainy Sunday morning, after reading about Stanford’s amazing win on ESPN.com, some interesting things from the paper over a couple of cups of coffee:
But my first smile of the day came from seeing JR Martinez on the cover of People magazine. While most of you know JR from Dancing with the Stars, he is also a graduate of the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities program…a program that I am proudly associated with...pick up that magazine and try not to smile when you read about this amazing young man. Here is a link to a story on the People magazine piece from JR’s home town Dalton Daily Citizen. Congratulations JR!

From the NY Times…while it’s much easier said than done, In a Big Company, Make Everyone an Entrepreneur. The article, a recurring weekly feature by Adam Bryant, is an interview with Lynn Blodgett. president and chief executive of ACS, an I.T. services subsidiary of Xerox.

From the article:

A. One of the ways that we do it is we drive the P.& L. as deep into the organization as we can. We have a P.& L. at a customer level, that’s mandatory. We have to be able to see how we’re doing with that customer. A lot of companies can’t do that. In our business we drive the P.& L. down to the people who are actually doing the work. So if we can make a P.& L. for a $10 million business, we’ll give that guy the P.& L. and he’ll have profit accountability, revenue accountability and customer satisfaction accountability. And as they grow, they make more money. That results in a higher performance, in my opinion.
So you give people control, hold them accountable, give them control of their resources, and then monitor what they do. And if you do that, you’re going to tap into, in our business, the highest level of drive — entrepreneurial drive. I want ACS to look like a whole bunch of sole proprietorships. Because that way, people are thinking to themselves, “If this was my money, if I was doing this, would I really spend it? Do I have to buy that computer right now or can I get by with my one that’s two years old?”
Q. What else is important to your leadership style?
A. Another is that nobody is above being moved, being touched, being influenced by a small gesture. I’ve experienced it myself. Somebody might call me or send me an e-mail to say, “Hey, I got that bonus and I just want you to know that really means a lot to me.” We have 85,000 employees, and I don’t get 85,000 e-mails. So when I get one it means a lot.
So it’s the little things. Like writing a note that says, “You did a great job,” or: “I’m sorry I got after you. You’re a super performer, and I lost my patience with you, and that’s my error, and forgive me for doing that.” We also set up phone calls when we win a deal, and we’ll get the team together and say: “Hey, tell me about that. What was the hardest thing? How did it come together?”

From the same article on hiring:

How do you hire? What questions do you ask?
A. The very first question is always “Tell me about yourself.” And not the résumé — I don’t want the résumé. Just tell me about yourself. What do you like? What do you enjoy doing? Because I think you can tell a lot from very open-ended questions.
Then I will say, “If you had the perfect job, what would you do?” And then I always ask: “Why do you want to come here? What is it about us?” Then, finally, “What do you think you could do to help us?” In the positions that I’m looking for, when you ask people what they can to do help, you often get some great answers and insights.
Q. What are the qualities you’re looking for?
A. People who are honest. That’s the No. 1 thing. I don’t have a test for that. I think that’s one where you have to go with your gut for a lot of it. And this is my prejudice because I didn’t go to college, but their intellect, their ability to think, is more important to me than any degrees they might have. And are they loyal? Will they take risks? Do they have integrity? Frankly, the technical aspects of it are way, way down on the list.

And in the Opinion section, What Tax Dollars Can’t Buy, Did you Hear the One About the Bankers and Our Unpaid, Extra Shadow Work give somewhat different perspectives on the current economic discussion.

From Dugout Phones to Netflix

2011-10-25T15:25:00.000-07:00

I’ve been enjoying reading newspapers and magazines on my iPad, and in the last couple of days there were more than a few articles that caught my eye.

First, especially after the problems last night in the World Series with the dugout telephones, I went back and re-read the NY Times story in the Sunday paper on the use of that old relic of an instrument of communication in the dugout Ironically, Tony LaRussa was the cover photo for the story. From the article:

While landlines in homes collect dust and serve increasingly decorative functions, the attitude among baseball clubs is a familiar one in a sport tied tightly to old-fashioned ways: why change what works?

“The same old phones, the same old process,” said Derek Lilliquist, the bullpen coach of the St. Louis Cardinals. “I guess they’ve been that way forever.”
In today’s Wall Street Journal, there were a couple of articles about entrepreneurs that caught my eye; one dealing with China and the restaurant industry and the other dealing with entrepreneurial bankers.

A Secret Recipe in China details the story of an entrepreneur in the restaurant industry who did what some of the major chains couldn’t do…succeed in China. From the article:

Shanghai's hygiene bureau objected when Scott Minoie tried to build an open kitchen in his first Element Fresh restaurant nearly a decade ago, saying it would be unsightly: "too foreign."
But the Boston native persuaded officials to let him press ahead, confident that Chinese consumers, concerned with food safety, would appreciate a Western-style bistro that lets diners see their laffa-bread salads and raspberry smoothies while they're being made.
Now he has a chain of 11 restaurants. Sales are on track to hit $30 million this year, up 40% from last year, according to Element Fresh's managing partner, Frank Rasche. The chain's profit margin hovered between 10% and 15% last year, he says. They plan to open about 40 more outlets in China by 2015.

Go West, Investment Banker, tells the tale of one particular gentleman who went to KeyBank from Bank of America. From the article:

In July, though, the 42-year-old Mr. Fowler left the second-largest U.S. bank by assets, where he was a director covering private equity, and moved to Cleveland. He joined KeyCorp, a regional bank with a loan portfolio a tenth the size of Bank of America's, to do a similar job.
The deals at KeyCorp are smaller—and so is the paycheck—but becoming a big fish in the relatively small pond of regional banking has its advantages. In his new role, he can take on a larger role in the bank, while enjoying the benefits of living in the Midwest.

"It's very entrepreneurial," says Mr. Fowler. At Bank of America, he says he was one among legions of bankers focused on "elephant hunting" for billion-dollar deals that have become increasingly scarce. By contrast, at KeyCorp, "there's a real energy and excitement here," he says.

This week, I also sat in on Professor Brian Sommer’s Managing Organization class. Students did presentations on various companies, and one of them was Netflix. It was particularly interesting to hear about the problems of this company, given the press they’ve been getting lately. Today’s paper followed the problems of this company with a piece, Netflix Shares Sink 35%...never the headline you want to see for your company.

Now, back to my iPad.

HP's Interesting Move

2011-09-22T13:51:00.000-07:00

Will HP’s move to hire Meg Whitman cause corporate CEO’s to decide not to keep strong exec’s on their boards? While I haven’t been following the last few months of HP particularly closely, I was surprised to see the way that they handled the firing of Leo Apotheker. What I find interesting now is the question of whether, if you’re a corporate CEO, would you want a strong unemployed or retired executive on your Board? Now I know that any strong CEO shouldn’t be intimidated by having strong exec’s in the boardroom, but I wonder now if many will find that tempts fate a bit too much and decide to take the safe route and have pals on their Board. After all, if you’re a young head football coach, you don’t generally have as offensive or defensive coordinators seasoned coaches who could step in and take your place the minute the owner becomes displeased. In the same manner, unless you’re a Jeff Immelt or Bob Lutz, with the notion of HP in your mind, you might want to not have your successor sitting there tempting the rest of the Board to make a move. And having a weak board is a move that will almost always hurt the company and its stockholders.

2011-09-14T07:05:00.001-07:00

US News yesterday ranked Lynn University number 4 in USA for percentage of international students attending with 17 percent of its student body coming from other nations. By the numbers, Lynn University students come from 87 countries (and 44 states in the US). This also means Lynn is number one for international students among schools who appear in the publication’s listing of “Regional Universities” in the South—this was the list Lynn appeared in for the 2011 rankings. We’re in some very good company here with schools in this ranking including Purdue, Columbia University, Carnie Mellon, Northeastern and Princeton.

Now, as a student or parent…why is this important? The reason this international focus on campus is so important came through loud and clear to me this week when I sat in Professor John Cipolla’s Managing Organizations class. John was leading an outstanding discussion about the intersection of management decisions and ethics. What made that discussion so rich was that students from North America, South America, India and beyond all were able to bring their own unique perspectives to the conversation…so rather than it just being a discussion from the US perspective, we were able to hear directly from students who have grown up and lived elsewhere. This diverse student population will provide our graduate with a distinct advantage as they will see their jobs and responsibilities from a truly global perspective.

The Business of the Gym Business...Gym Jones is Interestingly Different

2011-09-12T07:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday’s NY Times had several interesting articles and retrospectives. On the business front, I particularly enjoyed the piece on the Gym Jones, a unique fitness gym that has nothing that most of the modern gyms have…but is doing very well. The article addressed so many of the topics that we like to talk about in the business school including opportunity recognition, customer retention, growth, customer service and all from the perspective of the fitness industry.

A willingness to take on famous clients has actually been problematic for Gym Jones. The studio cash is nice, and the “300” notoriety was rewarding; a version of a 300-rep workout designed for the cast as a graduation test has gone viral and was even plugged by Men’s Health. But the Twights prefer privacy. They aren’t angling for their own line of protein powders or a reality show, and accept only 30 to 40 clients at a time. If you are hearing about them through their work with stars, a tiny part of the gym, your chances of getting in are pretty much zero.

The Twights generally require an interview or a referral from a current Gym Jones client, the completion of a written application that’s more of a fitness SAT than anything and, if you pass that step, a workout with Mr. MacDonald, a world champion mixed-martial-arts fighter. “If I’m surrounded by substandard people, I’m not going to work that hard myself,” Mr. MacDonald said. Again, it’s right there on that full-of-itself Web site: “We choose clients. Clients don’t choose us.”

Gym Jones has another reason to guard its privacy: its military customers like it that way. Although the Twights refuse to talk much about this side of their business, which occurs inside the gym and in the nearby mountains, it appears to be considerable and to involve people who are supposed to be invisible. Six of Mr. Twight’s former students, for instance, were among the 30 Americans — most of them Navy Seals, including members of the team that killed Osama bin Laden — who died in Afghanistan in August when their helicopter was shot down.

Theater is a big part of Gym Jones, which the Twights founded in 2003 in a garage with no air-conditioning and no heat. (The couple moved to Utah from Colorado in 2001 to operate a climbing-equipment company and later started Gym Jones as a side project. Eventually, the Twights decided to go full time with Gym Jones.)

Everything about the gym’s current configuration screams hard core, from the Web site (“Don’t complain if the work is too hard, or if you pass out, drop a barbell on your head, a kettle bell on your toes”) to cold décor: cinderblock walls, black rubber floor mats, fluorescent lights, no mirrors or windows. Outside magazine described the gym as “part martial-arts dojo, part smash lab, part medieval dungeon.”

Gym Jones calls clients “disciples” and prominently displays a quote from “Fight Club,” the 1999 film starring Brad Pitt. It reads in part: “Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you’re alive.”
But once you’re past all that, the mood at the gym is surprisingly warm. Mr. MacDonald, 33, has a daunting physical presence (at 6-foot-3, he can dead-lift 550 pounds) and blunt speaking style, but he also once taught kindergarten. The pixie-ish Ms. Twight, a 50-year-old jujitsu practitioner, has a quick, infectious laugh. A celebrated mountain climber, Mr. Twight, 50, is direct and aggressive but also quite polite and generous with his time

As an educator and a parent who used to struggle with the kids and homework, I also liked the article The Trouble With Homework.

From the article:

The quantity of students' homework is a lot less important than its quality. And evidence suggests that as of now, homework is not making the grade. Although surveys show that the amount of time our children spend on homework has risen over the last three decades, American students are mired in the middle of international academic rankings: 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math, according to results from the Program for International Student Assessment released last December. A new study, coming in the Economics of Education Review, reports that homework in science, English and history has "little to no impact" on student test scores. (The authors did note a positive effect for math homework.)

A Hero's Story

2011-09-07T13:17:00.000-07:00

Hero is a word today that gets tossed around a lot, but to read about true hero’s…take a look at a piece in the Atlantic, Wounded in Iraq: A Marine's Story. It’s my honor to know the author of the story, Justin Constantine. I met him several years ago through the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities program at Syracuse University. Justin is an outstanding young man, and when I think of the men and women serving our country…I often times think of Justin and the incredible price he and his wife paid so we can live here in the USA. Read it, wipe the tears away from your face as you think about young Justin and Dahlia and say a prayer for them and the other 44,000 wounded warriors from Iraq and Afghanistan…and then think of what Justin says near the end of the article and reflect on how you can help in your home town.

From the article:

As September 11, 2011, approaches, take a few minutes to think of wounded warriors and our families. We are in your community, sprinkled throughout small towns and big cities. Do not let our sacrifices go unknown or forgotten. Think about helping that soldier's caregiver with everyday chores, because he or she now has two full-time jobs instead of one. And don't forget that Marine who has to put on a prosthetic leg first thing every morning. Remind yourself that far too many service members have not made it back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Leadership Stories...Reading on an Airplane

2011-09-07T07:24:00.000-07:00

While waiting on Labor Day while my air plane which was number 1,847 for takeoff, I had the chance to read through most of the current issue of Fortune magazine. A couple of interesting articles caught my attention…the first was Why McDonald’s Wins in Any Economy. Great story about why the Golden Arches is winning and why the CEO, a quiet, unassuming guy is leading the way.

In addition, while the days ahead will find a run of stories about 9/11, the magazine also carried a moving piece about Sandler O’Neill, a company that I’d never heard of that lost 66 employees on that sad day, and it’s resurgence led by a reluctant, yet powerful leader.

Resources for Entrepreneurs

2011-08-29T13:34:00.000-07:00

Talking to today to one of our faculty here at Lynn University about books for entrepreneurship classes, and we agreed that there are a ton of books out there; sort of like the amount of resources that are on the web to help entrepreneurs. While some sites are better than others, here is my listing of some of my favorite’s websites/blogs. I’ll provide some of my favorite books in a coming post.

Entrepreneurs Network
Bikers Guide to Business
Daniel Pink
Ask the VC
Feld Thoughts
Sean Branagan
Sramana Mitra
The Future of Less

Leadership and the Social Entrepreneur

2011-08-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

While drinking coffee and eating apple fritters this morning, I ran across this story about leadership in today’s NY Times. The story, Leadership Doesn’t Rest on Your Title by Adam Bryant, was about Terri Ludwig, president and C.E.O. of Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit housing finance organization.

First, I liked Ms. Ludwig’s comments about being a producing leader. All too often people tend to think leadership is about strategy and goal setting and all that stuff…and forget that leaders have to be out there doing things…or as she puts it…producing.

Secondly, I like the description of her transition to social entrepreneurship. So many of the social entrepreneurs I know could have led a large company or started a successful entrepreneurial one, but instead chose to put their skills to work helping others. Years ago in Orlando, I met a gentleman named Frank who ran the Boys and Girls Clubs. He was one of the absolute best business people I knew, and thank goodness he decided to take that route. By Frank doing what he did in life, he ended up helping out literally hundreds and hundreds of children and set a wonderful example for people who he motivated to start helping others as well.

From the article:

Q. How would you say your management style has evolved over time?

A. I think I’m more self-aware. When you become C.E.O. of a large organization, you become aware that you telegraph things that you may not intentionally telegraph. So you make sure that you’re really telegraphing the information that you want, and it’s important to make sure you’re keeping that energy really positive.

You also really have to think about your audience and how you’re communicating. I grew up on a trading desk, so I’m a bullet girl — give me the high points, let’s make a decision, let’s have action. But when we’re dealing with governmental partners and a lot of other partners, or even within Enterprise, there’s a healthy process. And you have to think about how to get the best result and the best outcome, and go through a process without letting it become an obstacle.

I Like (Finally) Twitter

2011-08-20T18:48:00.000-07:00

OK, I’ll say it. I like Twitter. Finally.

For me, this was a long time in coming. I was an early adopter and got involved with Twitter in its formative days. I tweeted, read posts and followed people… people I really wanted to listen to. And then I started following lots more people…lots and lots more people so many so that I couldn’t seem to follow what anyone was saying anymore. I felt like I was sitting on the bank of the Shoshone River in Wyoming just watching the water rush by…except in my case it was watching a river of tweets run past me and there was no way I could see what anyone really was saying any more and worse yet I was missing out on lots of interesting content. For me, content is the king on Twitter as I love seeing people suggest articles in places that I’d never find. But with so much stuff roaring past me, I knew I was missing out on stuff I really wanted to read.

I talked to folks and they told me to “unfollow” people, but for my Midwestern sensibilities that just seemed plain rude. So I stopped using Twitter. Oh, I’d post things and read a bit here and there, but for me Twitter was a non-factor. And then, right before I left Syracuse to come to Lynn University, I asked social media guru Kelly Lux what she used, and she recommended Hoot Suite.

So I set up Hoot Suite, read some more stuff on the internet about Twitter, and I can say I really “get” it now. I’ve set up multiple streams on Hoot Suite that I’ve divided into things I like to read about. I’ve got an entrepreneurship stream, a politics stream (wish I had a better idea who to follow here), an interesting persons stream, a sports stream and a foodie stream. And I’ve arranged people I’m following into those streams; not everyone ends up there, so I still following the rushing river, but I just do it a couple of times a day. And I use my “streams” a lot like I would a newspaper (or CNBC on the TV in my office)…I go to it in the morning, around lunch and again in the evening to see who is saying what, and more importantly what articles they’re linking to. Which for me, is the best thing about Twitter, it allows me to read more things and be connected to more interesting content than I ever would have previously. So even though I jumped on it early, I can now say that I’m really using Twitter…and yes, I really like it.

And you can follow me at DeanTomKruczek...on my new friend...Twitter!

Technology and the Magic Kingdom

2011-08-10T13:30:00.000-07:00

I spent part of today having a fascinating conversation with Chris Boniforti, the CIO at Lynn University. He was telling me about ways Lynn is using and planning to use technology to make everyone’s time more productive and to make things better for our student’s as well…plus making the educational experience so much richer. He even convinced me to get ready to ditch my beloved Moleskin notebooks and use an iPad instead using Evernote. Chris also told me about Inkling, a new company developing interactive textbooks for the iPad.

On the topic of technology, a friend from the southwest sent over this blog from Jennifer Fickley-Baker. This is a very nice “backstage” look at how the Walt Disney Company is using new technology to renovate their attractions. Taking a look at the video, it’s a wonderful way to use the new tablets while making it easier for your team to work together http://tiny.cc/ddpyd

Morning Reading

2011-08-07T13:36:00.000-07:00

This morning’s New York Times had quite a few interesting articles. The artcle on Danny Meyer by Sean WIlsey was outstanding. Now I do like anything with food in it, but this piece dealt with entrepreneurship, leadership, customer service and quality…all things that companies no matter where they are on the growth scale should be thinking about. He also goes into some of the entrepreneurial demons that Mr. Meyer had to deal with as he grew his company.

The other food piece that I enjoyed dealt with Pret A Manger. The article, Would you Like A Smith With That, by Stephanie Clifford, discussed how the British company is trying to bring better customer service to the fast food industry.

I also liked the interview of Joe Torre that discussed respect in baseball…something that our world, sports or otherwise…is dearly in need of.

Summer Reading- Part 1

2011-08-03T12:38:00.000-07:00

Through the course of the summer I had the chance to catch up on some reading. In particular, I liked two books…Enchantment by Guy Kawasaki and Double Double by Cameron Herold.
First to Mr. Kawasaki. Now I’ve been recommending Kawasaki’s Art of the Start for some time, as well as his company’s Garage Technology for resources for entrepreneurs…especially the pieces about writing an executive summary and making the pitch. Both are outstanding and I make sure to give the executive summary piece to students, entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs who are writing a business plan. Enchantment was a different kind of book than Art, but very interesting. The book addresses what I would call is a higher level of marketing…enchantment. Lots of great examples and stories are included, and no doubt, you’ll be seeing him speaking at a location near to you. If you do, go see him…he is well worth the time and money.

Double Double was a book about growing your business. While I’m never enchanted with books that either have lists (Top 10 Ways…) or wild promises in the title, I nonetheless found D-D interesting. Since finishing the book in June, I’ve recommended this book to a number of student entrepreneurs as a grass-roots approach to developing a focused approach to starting or growing a business. The book starts with an invitation to think about your vision for the company and then moves on to specifics areas of concern to the entrepreneur such as communications, PR, technology and (one of my favorites) how to grow when it's slow. In addition, I liked the chapter, “The Roller Coaster Ride of Entrepreneurship as it brought make many memories and reminded me of other things that I need to talk to both students and entrepreneurs about.

The Millennials and PricewaterhouseCoopers

2011-07-15T07:43:00.000-07:00

Playing a bit of catch up here, but there was an interesting article in the July 11 Wall Street Journal about one of my favorite topics…the millennials! PwC’s CEO Switches Tactics to Keep Millennials is worth reading on a number of fronts, but especially in his comments about the millennials and their interests relative to working. Dennis Nally is the CEO of PricewaterhouseCoopers and the author of the article is Javier Espinoza.

From the article:

Mr. Nally: This millennial generation is not just looking for a job, they're not just looking for salary and financial benefits, they're looking for skill development, they're looking for mobility, they're looking for opportunities to acquire different skills and to move quickly from one part of an organization to another. How you manage that sort of talent and how you deal with their expectations is very different from what's been done in the past.

Mr. Nally: The millennium generation is probably the most technological group of people ever joining the workforce. How they want to work, use social media and team within a company is very different than the prior generation. If your human policies aren't responsive to what they are looking for, they are going to go to a company that is. They want less-hierarchical structures, they want more flexibility, they want to work as hard but they want to define how they do their work. If you can't figure out a way to accommodate that kind of flexibility, you're not going to be able to retain that talent.

WSJ: What [is PwC] doing to attract and retain talent?

Mr. Nally: We have adapted both how we recruit and how we work with people once they join us to suit the millennial generation. For example, in the U.S. we have set up a LinkedIn application that allows students to track the career paths of existing graduate trainees already in the firm so a student can see how a career with PwC develops. In the U.K., we use a Facebook application to connect recruits together before they join so they can begin to build their own PwC community.

We also provide mentors for our people from day one both formally and informally and encourage people to actively use their mentors to build skills and experience. We understand that flexibility and the ability to gather useful experience are key, as a result we actively encourage our people to move both between different business areas and around the world to gain experience. We also provide career breaks, flexible working, cycles of experience outside PwC and we actively encourage volunteering.

Non Profits and the Mission Statement

2011-07-08T13:18:00.000-07:00

Terry Teachout’s column in today’s WSJ, Why Does NY Need Two Opera Companies, should be required reading for non-profit executives. While the focus is on opera, anyone in the nonprofit space can read this and see their own particular organization and consider their own mission statement.. While I think he overstates the case of the very short mission statement, a clear notion of “what do you do” and “why do you do it” needs to be at the core of everything the nonprofit does. Good luck to the Opera company in coming to grips with those questions.

From the article:

Good mission statements grow naturally out of sound strategic thinking. Peter Drucker, the great management consultant, said that a mission statement should be "short and sharply focused. It should fit on a T-shirt. The mission says why you do what you do, not the means by which you do it…. A mission cannot be impersonal; it has to have deep meaning, be something you believe in—something you know is right." That's what made "The People's Opera" so effective: It summed up in three crystal-clear words a mission that made sense.

Apple and Their Retail Stores

2011-06-17T10:27:00.000-07:00

Just ran across the Wall Street Journal article, Secrets from Apple’s Genius Bar by Yukari Kane and Ian Sherr. While I’m not an Apple guy, I love their stores and loved this article. As entrepreneurs, there is much we can learn from this piece. Now, you might be saying to yourself that Apple is a huge company with lots of resources, how can you possibly compare us to them? However, as you read the article, think about their focus on customer service, details, and training…and then think about how you can do this better in your own organization.

From the article:

Apple lays its "steps of service" out in the acronym APPLE, according to a 2007 employee training manual reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that is still in use.
"Approach customers with a personalized warm welcome," "Probe politely to understand all the customer's needs," "Present a solution for the customer to take home today," "Listen for and resolve any issues or concerns," and "End with a fond farewell and an invitation to return."

Apple's control of the customer experience extends down to the minutest details. The store's confidential training manual tells in-store technicians exactly what to say to customers it describes as emotional: "Listen and limit your responses to simple reassurances that you are doing so. 'Uh-huh' 'I understand,' etc."

Babson Conference at Syracuse University

2011-06-10T12:02:00.000-07:00

The Babson College Entrepreneurial Research Conference is in full-swing at the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, and the Post Standard wrote an article on the event. Written by Charles McChesney, the article describes the conference and provides insight into some of the research which is all about entrepreneurship. The Conference, hosted by the Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises Department at the Whitman School of Management, brought together 330 academic researchers from 29 countries around the world.

From the article:

Steven A. Edelson, of Walsh University in Ohio, presented on research regarding what attracts would-be employees to start-up companies. Research has shown that the success of startups can depend on getting the right kind of employees so he and his co-writers, J. Michael Haynie and Alexander McKelvie, both of Syracuse University, wanted to find how entrepreneurs could present their companies so they would appeal to potential workers.

Graduating college seniors were surveyed and said they preferred was a company that perceived to treat workers like family. That, they said, beat out innovation, style, market dominance and clearly defined job duties. “More than all the other factors combined,” Edelson said.

That’s good news for entrepreneurs, Edelman explained, because clearly defined job duties and market dominance are traits more typically found in larger, older companies. Since startups can’t compete for workers for those attributes, they can focus on the trait that research shows is most important.

Workers want “good, wholesome make-you-feel-good-at-work companies,” McKelvie said during the discussion after the presentation.

A Little Disney History

2011-06-07T12:02:00.000-07:00

As someone who really learned business while working for The Walt Disney Company, there was something in the following story from the Associated Press on June 5 that really struck me. Thanks to Robin Dickerson for sharing this story!

Disney legends Betty Taylor, Wally Boag die within a day of each other

ANAHEIM, California — They shared a stage at Disneyland five days a week for nearly three decades and died within a day of each other.Betty Taylor, who played Slue Foot Sue in Disney's long-running Golden Horseshoe Revue, passed away Saturday — one day after the death of Wally Boag, who played her character's sweetheart, Pecos Bill.The 91-year-old Taylor died at her home in Washington state, Disneyland announced on its website. Boag, who was 90, died Friday. He was a resident of Santa Monica, California.The causes of death were not announced and attempts to contact relatives for comment were not immediately successful."Betty's role as leading lady in Disneyland's Golden Horseshoe Revue helped turn it into the longest-running stage show in entertainment history," George Kalogridis, the president of Disneyland Resort, said in a statement. "It is a tragic coincidence that her passing comes just one day after the death of longtime co-star Wally Boag."Boag, a former vaudeville performer, signed a two-week contract with Walt Disney in 1955. He originated the role of Pecos Bill in the revue, taking the stage three times a day and logging nearly 40,000 performances before retiring in 1982.Most of those shows were alongside Taylor, who joined the revue a year after Hoag. Her run on the show — which closed in 1986 — lasted nearly 45,000 performances.The Golden Horseshoe Revue is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest running stage production in show business history."Wally was instrumental in the development of live entertainment during the early years of both Disneyland Park and Walt Disney World Resort," Kalogridis said. "His characters will continue to live in the hearts of our guests, while his larger-than-life personality will forever make him the true Clown Prince of Disneyland."Boag's comedic timing influenced generations of performers, including actor Steve Martin, who called Boag his "hero." Martin tweeted Saturday that Boag was "the first comedian I ever saw live, my influence, a man to whom I aspired."Boag and Taylor both appeared on television in "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color."And before joining Disney, Boag appeared in a number of films during the 1940s, including "Without Love," starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, and "The Thrill of Romance," with Esther Williams.He later appeared in Disney films such as "The Absent-Minded Professor," ''Son of Flubber" and "The Love Bug."Born in Seattle, Taylor began taking dance lessons at age 3. At 14, she sang and danced in nightclubs across the country, and by 18, led her own band called Betty and Her Beaus, which included 16 male musicians and appeared regularly at the Trianon Ballroom in Seattle.In 1956, while living in Los Angeles and performing as a drum player with a musical group, Taylor heard about auditions for a song-and-dance job at Disneyland. She got the gig, which she held for 30 years, leading to appearances on a USO tour of Greenland and Newfoundland and a show for President Richard Nixon and his family at the White House.She performed at the park until 1987, but continued to appear in special events, such as Walt Disney's Wild West, a 1995 retrospective at the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles.

It's Good to Be Back

2011-06-06T13:09:00.000-07:00

After a wild end of the semester and a daughter’s wedding, it’s good to have the chance to blog again. While I have lots to get to, for starters, take a look at Me'Shae Brooks-Rolling’s article in today’s Post Standard, 12 tips for emerging entrepreneurs, which included some great thoughts on resources as well. Of the tips, my favorites were to be sure and do a business plan, seek out mentors and (especially) help others along the way. As I tell students, I've started businesses with business plans and without...and I will never, ever, ever start a business or a department within a business without doing a business plan.

Mark Russell from EMA, sent over a wonderful article... Ten Entrepreneurship Rules for Building Massive Companies from Greylock Partners. While a number of the rules resonated with me, two of my favorites were rules seven and eight.

Rule #7: Aspire, but don’t drink your own Kool-Aid. Rule #8: Having a great product is important but having great product distribution is more important.

It's good to be back!

Up in the Air and On the Way to V-WISE

2011-05-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

Air travel in and out of Syracuse isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but traveling to speak at the V-WISE conference in San Antonio gave me the chance to read through the current issues of Fast Company and Inc Magazine. As usual, both issues carried lots of interesting articles for entrepreneurs. My favorites were in Fast Company, The Cure (by Russ Mitchell) the story of a journey of a new CEO for a hospital in Oakland. The leadership and team issues were particularly interesting.

From the article:

He quickly began building a new management team, including COO Bill Manns, who was hired from Providence Hospital in Southfield, Michigan, near Detroit. At Manns's suggestion, they immediately commenced a grassroots money hunt, which Lassiter now calls "the foundation of our success." The pair gathered the top 85 managers, formed them into a dozen teams, and gave them 16 weeks to find $21 million in cost cuts and new revenue. Lassiter says he told them: "It's up to you. We barely know where the restrooms are, so we're not going to solve this problem. You're going to solve it."

To encourage fresh thinking, Lassiter and Manns devised "odd-couple arrangements," putting together doctors, nurses, techs, and other managers. The teams drilled into vendor contracts and challenged their own habits. Take the kit used to test newborns' umbilical-cord blood, a $96.50 item. A simpler tool does the same job for 29¢. Is the more-expensive device better? How much better does it have to be to be worth the extra $96.21? ACMC had been choosing the premium option, at a cost of $322,000 a year. Now, the teams decided, ACMC could not afford it.

While I’m always a bit leery of articles providing corporate lessons from the playing field, Lessons of LeBron (by Chuck Salter) was nonetheless interesting and a fun read as well. Knowing that I always read articles on the food industry, I enjoyed Inc Magazine’s piece, Toughen Up Cupcake (by Burt Helm) on the Washington DC cupcake wars. I also thought Jason Fried’s piece How to Hire an Assistant, about how he and his partner hired an assistant particularly intriguing. I mention that because in it he mentions that when they were hiring the assistant, rather than drafting the typical boring job description, they instead the things that the assistant would have done over the last day had then been on the job. He said based on the ad, they were flooded with applicants. It still took time to find the right person, but in part that was because they neglected to include a key piece of info in the ad. But despite that misstep, it seems their approach has merit and should be considered. Here is how they described the position:

Instead of a boring list of skills—this software, that many years of experience, "team player," etc.—we wrote a list of 26 things that this person would have done in a week had he or she been working here.

The list included things such as "Booked two hotel rooms and two flights for out-of-towners"; "Packed up and shipped out about five copies of Rework to various people"; "Coordinated with Abt Electronics to schedule installation of four flat-panel TVs"; and "Researched and recommended local floral arrangers for weekly flowers for the office." This way, whoever was applying would know exactly the kind of work he or she would be expected to do. (You can read the job posting here).

What drew me to the piece was that right now in the Entrepreneurship Department we’re in the process of hiring three professors, two of which will spend a considerable amount of time mentoring student businesses. I find myself wondering if rather than drafting the usual ad, we should have said that if they were on campus, in the last day they would have taught a class, mentored a student, talked with an alum, attended a couple of meetings with student startups, and met with the E-Club on a new business idea.

Oh well, maybe next time.

Ozzie, Baseball and the World of Social Media

2011-04-29T07:43:00.000-07:00

Major League Baseball now has to deal with wonderful world of social media. One of their managers, the White Sox’s Ozzie Guillen was tossed out of a recent baseball game for arguing with an umpire, and then went into the clubhouse and tweeted about it. Ozzie, who is no novice when it comes to getting thrown out of games, is cutting new social media ground for the business of baseball.

Baseball is a wonderful lesson for all of us…it was once America’s game, but thanks to incredibly long games, World Series games that start and end way too late at night, and a season that keeps starting earlier and ending later in the year(can you say baseball games in November?)…they’ve lost key fans to football. Of course if I was in charge of any of the four big-time sports in the US (baseball, football, basketball and hockey) I’d be terrified of the future. If you want to have some fun, ask someone who is in the age range of 16-25 how many complete games of any of those four sports have they watched recently. The answer will be very low (maybe zero) and very different from what the response would have been twenty years ago. These sports need to find a way to engage the younger audience, because without it, 20 years from now there will be half filled stadiums ...and the only games being broadcast on TV will be video games.

Party Like It's Well...You Know

2011-04-19T08:28:00.001-07:00

With apologies to Mr. Prince, apparently on the left coast they are getting ready to party like it’s 1999. Again. Or as it was once put, “it’s déjà vu all over again.” Take a look at the article in today’s Wall Street Journal by Monica Langley, In Silicon Valley, Investors Are Jockeying Like It’s 1999.

While the article was right on target, I’m wondering why as a country we seem to be so inclined to go overboard on things. Think the last tech bubble when an investor honestly told me that “the old rules of investment didn’t apply anymore.” Or think of the recent housing bubble when everyone had to own two or three homes and TV shows were all over the “flippers.” Or the derivatives mess a few years previous. Hopefully this incarnation of growth in tech will be something different than the disaster it was the last couple times around and if not, there will be a couple of sock puppets around for people to buy and for those of us in colleges to talk about.

Scott Adams on Getting an Education in Entrepreneurship

2011-04-11T12:28:00.000-07:00

When I saw in the Friday Wall Street Journal that Scott Adams of Dilbert fame was writing about entrepreneurship, I didn’t know whether to cheer or run and hide. Given the treatment he’s given to corporate America, I was wondering if he would turn his talents next on us. But my fears were unfounded, so when you get the chance, take a look at the article, How to Get a Real Education. In the article, he gives some lessons that he’s learned along the way. From the article:

Combine Skills. The first thing you should learn in a course on entrepreneurship is how to make yourself valuable. It's unlikely that any average student can develop a world-class skill in one particular area. But it's easy to learn how to do several different things fairly well. I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The "Dilbert" comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That's how value is created.

Fail Forward. If you're taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you're doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later. I failed at my first career in banking. I failed at my second career with the phone company. But you'd be surprised at how many of the skills I learned in those careers can be applied to almost any field, including cartooning. Students should be taught that failure is a process, not an obstacle.

Find the Action. In my senior year of college I asked my adviser how I should pursue my goal of being a banker. He told me to figure out where the most innovation in banking was happening and to move there. And so I did. Banking didn't work out for me, but the advice still holds: Move to where the action is. Distance is your enemy.

Attract Luck. You can't manage luck directly, but you can manage your career in a way that makes it easier for luck to find you. To succeed, first you must do something. And if that doesn't work, which can be 90% of the time, do something else. Luck finds the doers. Readers of the Journal will find this point obvious. It's not obvious to a teenager.

Conquer Fear. I took classes in public speaking in college and a few more during my corporate days. That training was marginally useful for learning how to mask nervousness in public. Then I took the Dale Carnegie course. It was life-changing. The Dale Carnegie method ignores speaking technique entirely and trains you instead to enjoy the experience of speaking to a crowd. Once you become relaxed in front of people, technique comes automatically. Over the years, I've given speeches to hundreds of audiences and enjoyed every minute on stage. But this isn't a plug for Dale Carnegie. The point is that people can be trained to replace fear and shyness with enthusiasm. Every entrepreneur can use that skill.

Write Simply. I took a two-day class in business writing that taught me how to write direct sentences and to avoid extra words. Simplicity makes ideas powerful. Want examples? Read anything by Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett.

Learn Persuasion. Students of entrepreneurship should learn the art of persuasion in all its forms, including psychology, sales, marketing, negotiating, statistics and even design. Usually those skills are sprinkled across several disciplines. For entrepreneurs, it makes sense to teach them as a package.

Delighting Your Customer

2011-04-04T11:00:00.000-07:00

Alec Stern, one of the founders of Constant Contact, the email marketing company for small businesses, is on campus today and speaking in three different entrepreneurship classes. Having just had lunch with Alec and after sitting in on his first class of the day, I know that our students are having a wonderful experience. Some of the lessons learned that he pointed out: 1. Think of the “why” of your business, rather than just the “what.” He specifically mentioned the Simon Sinek TED talks lecture on that topic. 2. Keep your business within the guardrails. When you’re growing your business, you’ll find people and money sources who are interested in moving your business…think of what’s important to your business and stay focused on it. 3. Delight the customer…Constant Contact’s attrition rate is amazingly small, even though many of their competitors are giving away something that CC charges for. They keep these customers because they are so good on customer service and by helping the entrepreneur learn how to really use their product. Plus, you can actually…and this is just amazing…talk to a real customer service person when you need help. New customers get a phone call from CC within the first 48 hours after signing up to make sure they really know how to take advantage of the full suite of product. 4. Give back. I was particularly pleased to hear Alec talk to our students about the importance of giving back to your school, your community and your country.

A Decline in Startups and Jobs

2011-04-01T11:48:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting post that has been getting some traffic today based on a paper that was written by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. The paper discusses a real decline in start-ups which began right before the economic troubles started, making an argument that the high US unemployment rate is related to this lack of new ventures. The post from the NY Times is called A Decline in American Entrepreneurship by Catherine Rampell. From the post: American workers weren’t the only ones sacrificed by the Great Recession. Start-ups suffered, too. A new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland tracks various measures of entrepreneurship over the last few years. It found that the number of businesses with employees — one indicator of entrepreneurial activity, like self-employment — took a nosedive. The population-adjusted number of businesses began falling even before the recession officially began in December 2007. But once the downturn hit, the number of businesses began falling precipitously. Some of that decline was because of business failures. But it was primarily tied to the lack of new business formation. The report’s author, Scott Shane, writes: 68,490 more businesses closed in 2009 than in 2007, an 11.6 percent increase in the business closure rate. But in 2009, 115,795 fewer employer businesses were founded than in 2007, a 17.3 percent decline in firm formation. The financial crisis held back new business formation in many other countries, too, as documented by this paper presented last fall at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Given these findings, it is perhaps no wonder that the job market is still so poor. Young businesses (not small businesses, despite what politicians may tell you) are the biggest engines of job growth. With so few businesses forming, hiring is staying very depressed. And the main problem in the job market is not layoffs — which are at a record low — but new hiring.

How Many Pro's You Have?

2011-03-18T06:42:00.000-07:00

Driving in to school today, as I do most mornings, I was listening to Mike and Mike in the Morning on ESPN radio. Today they were talking about March Madness and how you pick which teams are going to win, especially in the early round games. And Jimmy Dykes, one of the ESPN game analysts said that to figure out which team has the best chance of winning, you have to answer the question, “How many pro’s you have?” What Dykes meant was when you look at both rosters, you look at which team has the most players who are going to go on to the NBA and play, and especially in tournament crunch time, that’s the team you want to pick.

As I think back to being a part of an angel group in Florida, that’s exactly how I, and the rest of the group decided which companies we wanted to invest in…and it was based on which team had the real “pros.” Our group was getting on an average, around 25 to 30 business plans a month to read. We would narrow this down to just two presentations a month, and since we shut down for the summer, we were looking at around 20 opportunities a year out of the more than 350 business plans that were sent our way. Many people have said this, and when our own money was on the line, most of us deferred back to the notion of “I’d rather in invest in an A team with a B idea, than an A idea with just a B Team.” So even in entrepreneurship, we were using the notion of “How many pro’s you have” to decide which deals to invest in. As you are building your start-up team, remember that and find the best players you can to fill each slot. Friends are good, family is OK, but the best of the best is the best way to get your shot at angel and other institutional funding.

Now, back to the NCAA tourney and Go ‘Cuse!

China and the New Entrepreneur

2011-03-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

Allan Kupetz sent over this very interesting article from the Economist on entrepreneurship in China, titled, Let a Million Flowers Bloom. I used to travel a lot in China, and even a number of years ago, you could see the very early stages of the growth of the entrepreneurial enterprise. I remember walking through an area just outside of Shanghai, called Pudong, which at the time was just a lot of mud, and not much else. Now, as testimony to its growth, over 1.3 million square meters of prime office space was completed in Pudong in last few years.

From the article:

China’s state-controlled entities are not particularly profitable. A study by Qiao Liu, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, concludes that the average return on equity for companies wholly or partly owned by the state is barely 4%, despite the benefit of cheap leverage provided by government-controlled banks. According to a recently published paper by Mr Liu and a colleague, Alan Siu, the returns of unlisted private firms (my note: this is how the article is referring to the Chinese entrepreneurs) are no less than ten percentage points higher.

Angel Financing and the Entrepreneur

2011-03-14T08:15:00.000-07:00

For years, as a partner at one of the major law firms in Orlando, Bill Grimm touched virtually every high tech start-up and growth deal that took place in Central Florida. Bill is now an entrepreneurship professor at Rollins College and a blogger on things related to startups. Take a look at his blog, Thoughts on Advanced Entrepreneurship, for several recent posts related to raising capital from angel investors. Related to his post, one of the best books I've seen on angel financing is by Susan Preston, Angel Financing for Entrepreneurs.

From his blog:

When an entrepreneur comes to me for advice on raising capital from angel investors, I ask him or her "Do you know why angels make investments in early stage companies?" Inevitably, the answer reflects superficial thinking and deserves an "F." Most entrepreneurs do not have the foggiest idea about what it takes to raise capital from angel investors and make little effort to find out. They seem to think that if they have a good business plan and enthusiasm, angel investors will invest.Any entrepreneur who decides to raise capital from angel investors should conduct as much research on why angels invest as they do on why customers buy their products or services. Few entrepreneurs even read a book on how to raise capital from angels when there are many books on the subject through Amazon. It's no wonder that most entrepreneurs who set out to raise capital from angels fail miserably.Every angel investor is different, just like every customer is different. But, there are some characteristics that are common to most angel investors. If an entrepreneur would come to me for advice on raising capital and demonstrated the same degree of ignorance about his or her customers as the entrepreneur usually demonstrates about angel investors,I would tell the entrepreneur to find another occupation.Why is it that entrepreneurs make little effort to find out the same type of information about angel investors, yet will work really hard to find out about the characteristics of potential customers? I attribute this to an underlying sense in most entrepreneurs that an angel investor is not a "buyer or customer" but is a "seller or supplier." An erroneous view is that an angel investor is "selling capital" to the entrepreneur and the price to be paid is an equity interest in the entrepreneur's company. Not true. The seller in this case is the company, selling an equity interest to the angel investor who is buying, not selling. If an entrepreneur would only take this view of angel investors, the entrepreneur would do extensive research into the characteristics of the angel investor market. How many angel investors will the entrepreneur have access to, what is the decision making process for an angel investor, who influences the angel investor to make the investment, what is the competition for the angel investor's funds, what will it take to get an angel investor to seriously consider the entrepreneur's opportunity, etc. These are the types of questions the entrepreneur would seek answers to for his or her customers; why not seek this information about angel investors?Finding out the characteristics of the angel investor market is difficult, but not impossible. It is inexcusable for entrepreneurial companies who set out to raise capital from angel investors not to know as much about the angel investor market as they know about their potential customers.

It’s Time to Build a Better Boss

2011-03-13T09:57:00.000-07:00

Yes, many of us have thought about that a bunch of times, and many organizations have discussed it, but I don’t know any that have gone to the steps that Google has done to actually try and do it. The article in the NY Times, Google’s 8 Point Plan, is interesting on so many different levels. Take a read, and think about what you could do in your own organization, to help defeat the Peter Principle and find ways to create a better boss for everyone. I liked the quarterly reviews, I liked the data gathering, I liked how they were thinking about the reasons people left organizations, but most of all, I liked the fact that Google was trying so hard to do something so wonderfully good for their employees.

A Bit of Bragging and Brainstorming

2011-03-11T11:53:00.000-08:00

I hate to use this space to brag, but I’m so excited that I just had to put in here that the Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship’s South Side Innovation Center has been selected as one of the finalists in the National Business Incubator Association’s Incubator of the Year competition. The NBIA, which has over 1,900 members in 60 countries, annually selects just two incubators to honor; one in the High Tech arena and the other in the General/ Special Focus category. The SSIC has been selected as one of only two finalists in the General/Special Focus category. The winners will be announced at the NBIA annual conference in April.

On the non-bragging front, take a look at this article Seven Steps to Better Brainstorming by Kevin Coyne and Shawn Coyne. Thanks to our friends at McKinsey and Company for including it in their newsletter. As somebody who has been in countless, mindnumbing brainstorming sessions, the approach recommended by the author is clearly the right way to go.

The Hiring Decision

2011-03-02T09:23:00.000-08:00

Yesterday’s blog in the NY Times by Jay Goltz struck home. The Hidden Cost of Bad Hiring brought back some not-so-wonderful memories of hiring decisions I’ve made which were less than memorable. In addition to the costs that Jay mentions, there are also the costs involved in hiring the new worker who didn’t work out as well as the cost for their replacement. Remember those interviews that you and your key team members did? Think of the time you spent doing the interviews, preparing for them, following up, the ads, the time drafting the job description…all costs that impact your bottom line. Plus, keep in mind that most employees take at least six months before they really start producing for you, which means that you have a boatload of costs which will never be recouped every time you hire somebody based on a gut reaction that says that he or she is the right person. Do the work, hire an HR expert, ask the right questions…and good luck!

Rebooting Wal-Mart

2011-02-22T09:46:00.000-08:00

Typically, I like to write about entrepreneurial companies in this space, but today’s Wall Street Journal has a very interesting story about one of the very largest companies in America…Wal-Mart. The story is Wal-Mart Tries to Recapture Mr. Sam’s Winning Formula by Miguel Bustillo. The story is a cautionary tale of what happens when you try to expand by being something you aren't and in the process, forgetting about your core customer. The good news if you are a Wal-Mart shareholder is that it appears that they now "get it' and are back focusing on that customer who they previously were taking for granted. Which of course, is bad news for Target and other competitors.

From the beginning of the article:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is in the midst of its worst U.S. sales slump ever.
When it reports earnings on Tuesday, the retailer is widely expected to post its second straight year of declining domestic same-store sales.

Wal-Mart's struggles are the result of a misstep: To jump-start lethargic growth and counter the rise of competitors such as cheap-chic rival Target Corp., executives veered away from the winning formula of late founder Sam Walton to provide "every day low prices" to the American working class. Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer by sales, instead raised prices on some items while promoting deals on others.

Company executives acknowledge having miscalculated and are adjusting their strategy again. The big question is how quickly the mammoth chain can turn itself around.

And from the end of the article:

"Wal-Mart just went and broke it," said mechanic Mike Craig, 41 years old, lamenting that he could no longer find honey, which is now next to the peanut butter instead of near the salad dressings. "I just don't like what they did at all."

So once again, Wal-Mart is back to cramming wood pallets of $8.97 boxed wine and $8 Justin Bieber CDs into the store's corridors, recreating the messy procession of discount merchandise in the main aisles that the company calls "action alley." Now analysts are concerned that, in changing direction again, Wal-Mart risks alienating whatever higher-scale shoppers it had gained.

Bringing the Change

2011-02-21T06:14:00.000-08:00

Dwain DeVille sent over the blog, Jack Griffin's Ouster: Lessons from a Failed "Change Agent" by Julia Kirby and at first, I wasn’t that sure I even wanted to read it. After all, it’s about a media guru and as the post points out, there is nothing the media world likes to do more than write about itself. But as I read on, I realized how often we’re thrust into situations in new jobs or when we buy a company… that we have to bring change into an organization. As someone who has had to bring change more than a few times, I particularly liked her six lessons when you’re faced with being the person who has to bring about that change. From the blog:

Avoid the term "change agent." The strange thing about Griffin's case is that he appears to have applied this "kick me" sign to himself. In most cases, it's the board that puts the word on the street that a change agent is coming. Try to keep that from happening. It's not as though the organization won't hear the news, and it's insulting. It casts veteran managers as part of the problem, not forces for positive change themselves. As one Time Inc. veteran complained to me, "it's not as though all of us had just been sitting on our thumbs." That is a classic, and predictable, response.

Gauge the internal hunger for change. It's one thing to be the agent of change in an organization that realizes it needs it; it's quite another when you're the only one in the room convinced of that. A big problem at Time, at least as far as Griffin was concerned, was that there was no such sense of a burning platform. People, therefore, would perceive any change as being done to them, not for them. It's not impossible to take a comfortable organization and get it excited about a quest, but it definitely affects how you should frame the mission.

Arrive without a vision. Reportedly, Griffin showed up on day one of his new job with a manifesto in hand. When I heard this, I couldn't help but recall some great advice from leadership gurus Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner. "Somehow, through all the talk over the years about the importance of vision," they observed, "many leaders have reached the unfortunate conclusion that they as individuals must be visionaries." They spell out for less incisive thinkers what the future holds and therefore how the enterprise must be transformed. "Bad idea!" say Kouzes and Posner. "Yes, leaders must ask, "What's new? What's next? What's better?" — but they can't present answers that are only theirs. Constituents want visions of the future that reflect their own aspirations."

Go directly to "us". As leadership expert Steve Reicher and his colleagues convincingly argue, great leadership involves tapping into the psychology of "us" versus "them." This means that job #1 for a leader is to go native, immediately taking the side of the organization, uniting it against a common enemy, and building consensus on what "we" should do. From this perspective, it's clear how the work of anyone fighting the status quo is fraught with the potential to be misread. Ask yourself honestly whose side you are on — and if it's not your organizations, don't blame them for hating you.

Act as catalyst not cattle prod. Chances are, there is change energy to be tapped in the organization at some level. To get at it, think first of what might be holding it back, and address those things. As in chemistry, a catalyst lowers a barrier to effect a transformation — it doesn't apply a shock.

Surround yourself with new friends. Of all the new-manager missteps Griffin is accused of, probably the worst is his decision to surround himself with cronies. It's an understandable temptation, when you don't yet know your new colleagues well enough to say who's brilliant and trustworthy, to just recruit some folks you already know to have those qualities from past experience working with them. But nothing — nothing — is more alienating to your inherited team than to suddenly be on the outside of the inner circle looking in. It doesn't help that, in Griffin's case, the cronies were also perceived to be carbon copies of himself.

Tell Me Another Story

2011-02-18T09:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I heard Mark Russell of Eric Mower and Associates give a wonderful presentation on marketing to the Entrepreneurial Society of Central New York. As a part of Mark’s presentation, he spoke about the power of stories as it relates to your brand and showed the brilliant piece called The Man Who Walked Around the World. Great piece of storytelling that makes you just want to keep watching. If you get the chance to hear Mark talk about marketing and branding, make a point of doing that.

Launch Box Digital

2011-02-17T07:23:00.000-08:00

I ran across this post about Launch Box Digital at the blog of Sramana Mitra, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant who founded 1M/1M.

Written by guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

I am talking to Chris Heivly, executive director of LaunchBox Digital, an accelerator program for entrepreneurs based in Durham, North Carolina. The program structure and workings are similar to Y Combinator and TechStars.

Irina: Hi, Chris. Let’s start with a bit of history.

Chris: LaunchBox Digital started in 2008 in Washington, D.C. We ran an accelerator session in the summer of 2008 and summer in 2009 in Washington, D.C. Last year, we decided to move that to Durham, North Carolina, and ran an accelerator session in the fall of 2010.
We have a full-year physical location now in a really cool restored tobacco warehouse. The address is 334 Blackwell St. in Durham, North Carolina. It’s called the American Tobacco campus. There are about 35 software companies as well as venture capitalists and venture banks. It’s a nice, tight little ecosystem of entrepreneurs, mostly software-oriented entrepreneurs as well as some other businesses.

Irina: Do you still have accelerator sessions?

Chris: We do. It only runs three months of the year. We’ve taken space all year round, and we’re augmenting the three-month accelerator with some mini programs that can also offer value to entrepreneurs in the area. This is the first year we’ve had full year space, where someone like me is committing time all year round. We’re going to do more than the three-month accelerators.

Irina: What kind of organization is LaunchBox Digital?

Chris: It’s definitely a for-profit. It’s set up like a venture fund. We’ve secured funding from a bunch of limited partners around the area. We then invest in up to 10 companies a year, in our accelerator session. We take a piece of equity for that – 6%. It’s set up like a venture fund.
There’s a group of us at LaunchBox Digital that [will] manage that fund over the next four years. We hope that some of those companies provide a nice exit, which provides a return back for our investors, like a standard venture fund.

Irina: Do you invest in all of the companies you incubate?

Chris: Yes. The way the program works – by the way, this is very similar to Y Combinator and Tech Stars. If you’re familiar with those, it’s a similar model.
We have an application process. We accept up to 10 companies. If you’re accepted and you come in to the program, we provide an investment of $20,000 per company. For that, we take a 6% common equity interest in you. That’s the investment part.
Then we offer the program, which is all about mentorship and guidance. That runs for three months. We provide space, $20,000, advisory, and mentorship and for that, we take 6%.

Irina: If entrepreneurs are accepted and they have to come to North Carolina, they pay their own travel expenses, right?

Chris: That’s correct. They have to be here for the three months of the program. We built some arrangements outside of Launch Box with some of our partners to help facilitate their finding short-term leases for three or four months. We try to make that as easy as possible for them.
Irina: Do you have an industry preference?

Chris: Sure. At the highest level, they’re all software . . . there’s got to be a fairly large software component. We’re not doing pharma or life sciences or medical devices or dry cleaners or restaurants. These are all software or Web-based companies. To give you an example, we had seven companies that we went through in our first session here in Durham. There were two healthcare IT companies. There was a social media tool. There was a Web analytics company. There was a Web-based fantasy sports meets gaming, kind of a new gaming craze, a different spin on that. We had a Groupon-like company that came through. They’re pretty broad in scope, but they’re all software oriented.

Irina: At what stage of development do you prefer them to be when they come to you for acceleration?

Chris: It’s funny, that target keeps moving around a bit, but for the most part – well, to give you an example, we had one company that had a concept and had not written one line of code before they applied. At the same time, we had a company that had more than 40 paying customers. Generally, most companies are between alpha and pre-revenue. I just gave you two examples of someone who wasn’t an alpha and someone who was generating revenue. So, concept to less than $500,000 in revenue is the typical target.

Tell A Story

2011-02-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

I learned a lot of things during my time working for the Walt Disney Company. But one of the most important things I learned is the power of stories. For those of us in the nonprofit space, while it’s often easy to quote lots of statistics dealing with numbers of clients helped, students, people helped; there is nothing more powerful than telling a story about the folks we work with. Keep in mind, that whether you work for a nonprofit or a for profit organization, stories are a powerful way to tell others what you're doing and how you're doing it.

Thanks to our friends at McKinsey and Company who forwarded this article along…take a look at The power of storytelling: What nonprofits can teach the private sector about social media.

The Senator Comes to the Falcone Center

2011-02-11T12:04:00.000-08:00

Great day today for the Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship as United States Senator for New York Kirsten Gillibrand was at our South Side Innovation Center this morning. Senator Gillibrand convened a roundtable discussion to hear from veterans and area business leaders about how the government might work to ensure jobs for New York veterans. During the session, the Senator discussed her plans to provide tax credits for businesses who hire vets, provide more job training for veterans, and better facilitate the transition from active duty to the job market.

The Post Standard’s follow-up article provided information about the session. The South Side Innovation Center is a 13,000 square foot community based microenterprise incubator operated by the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University. The SSIC, which was opened in 2006, offers offices with phones, computers and furniture; shared conference rooms; training and resource rooms; a resource library; large equipment use and reception area services at a low cost to local entrepreneurs. The SSIC currently houses 24 resident businesses, serves 300+ non‐tenant clients, and provides training, workshops, classes, networking, and mentoring opportunities to approximately 1,000 other individuals and entrepreneurs.

I Apologize...I Mean I'm Sorry...I Mean Our Company Screwed Up

2011-02-08T10:19:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend I read through the current issue of Inc. Magazine. Several stories caught my eye, but I wanted to call to your attention the one about how to deal with things when you have a real, honest-to-goodness-company-killing problem. The article in the magazine is titled, How to Ride a Storm, (re-titled on-line How to Turn Disaster into Gold) by Jason Fried and it describes a serious problem that the author’s company, 37signal’s had with a key product, named Campfire. If you have an entrepreneurial company…or if you’re planning to launch…read through the article and see what they did because at some point or another, you’re going to have to say to your customers or stakeholders…that you’ve messed up. And you’ll also have some fun reading through the author’s comments about how some companies go about “apologizing” when they screw up.

Here’s a section from the article:

So here's what we did when Campfire went down. First, we posted regular updates on the status page of our company's website. We let people know we were working on the problem. As we figured things out, we shared the results. And if we still didn't understand something, we admitted as much. That's OK with us. What isn't OK is leaving people in the dark. Everyone's afraid of the dark when their data are involved.

We also took to Twitter. My business partner David Heinemeier Hansson responded to more than 100 tweets from customers. "We're battling demons on all fronts and losing. It's pathetic, I know," David tweeted to one customer. "We're spending the goodwill we've built from years of reliable service like it's going out of style." "So sorry for the disruption," he wrote to another. "You can only say duh! so many times before people just think you're annoying. We're way past that," he wrote.

We responded to every complaint and took the blame every time—even when people went overboard and launched into personal attacks. There was no fighting back, no attempt to save face. We messed up, we knew it, and we let every customer know that we knew it.
And our customers responded with enormous goodwill. "37signals has been giving a free lesson in customer service and honesty the past few weeks," one customer tweeted. "Way to go on being awesome and communicative to your customers," said another. Such expressions of support were really heartwarming—and evidence of how honesty, openness, and personal attention to a difficult situation can turn the darkest moment into one of the brightest.
We decided to give every Campfire customer a free month of service. We were down for only a few hours, total, but the downtime was spread out over multiple days. Besides, we didn't earn our customers' trust in December, so we didn't earn their money, either. We have thousands of paying Campfire customers, so this wasn't a cheap or easy decision. But it was the right thing to do.

Finally, once we figured out what went wrong and took steps to make sure it wouldn't happen again, we wrote a full post on our product blog detailing exactly what had happened. We started with a general overview that could be understood by everyone. Being in the software business doesn't give you license to speak in code. Yes, some of our customers are technically gifted. But most of them aren't, so speaking in tech jargon can cause even more confusion. That said, we also delved into the technical details for those who care about those kinds of things. And we added a link to the announcement inside Campfire, so all our customers would see it. You can read the product blog post at productblog.37signals.com/products/2010/12/campfire-outage-explanation-and-service-credits.html.

New Patent Process

2011-02-03T07:28:00.000-08:00

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article that makes you scratch your head. The article, Expediting US Innovation Comes at a Cost by Angus Loten deals with an announcement from the Commerce Department about a new fast track process for patents. According to the article, “Until now, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office largely has processed patents on a first-come, first-serve basis for a base fee of $1,090. Last year, the office granted more than 244,358 patents, up 27% from 2009. The process takes an average of 35 months to complete, and often includes costly legal fees—patent lawyers typically charge more than $25,000, depending on the complexity of the application.” The article then goes on to explain that a new process, which is a part of the White House’s Startup America initiative, “would cut the process to just 12 months for $4,000, along with upfront processing and publication fees of $430.”

While for many of the students and entrepreneurs that we talk with, the notion of speed- to-market is more important that the patent, but for those faculty and students that we deal with that do need patents, I think this new process is well worth the extra dollars.

The reason I mention it’s a head-scratcher is that article seems to feel that it will create an unfair playing field for entrepreneurs, giving those with more money quicker access to the patent process. If a professor or student was sitting in front of me today, I would recommend get the extra three grand from family or friends and get the process rolling. Especially since the patent office is going to fast track only 10,000 applications in the first year of this new process, it makes sense to do it.

Tech Trends

2011-01-31T09:14:00.001-08:00

I’m not a big fan of lists, but here are a couple that you might want to pay attention to from Venture Beat. Five Overhyped Technology Trends and Five Trends You Should Pay Attention to, both for 2011.

Keeping the Start Up Alive Inside

2011-01-24T06:40:00.000-08:00

Take a look at the article from the NY Times, How to Shape the DNA of a Young Company. It is an “interview with Jeremy Allaire, chairman and chief executive of Brightcove, an online video platform for Web sites, and was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.”

From the article:

Q. How has the culture evolved as your company has grown? How do you maintain that original DNA, as you call it?

A. It’s a huge challenge. One point is that you always need to have everyone feel like they’re on some broader mission. In the early stages, the mission is: Are we going to survive? Is there a product? Does it work? Is anyone going to want it? Is there a market? They’re like existential questions for a business, but I think those core mission tenets remain important through that growth stage. It’s something that people can attach themselves to, so people aren’t just coming into a job. So I’ve tried to really provide that narrative over and over, even as the milestones just keep changing.
The other thing is to hold onto that feeling of being a start-up, and it actually relates very deeply to how you go to the next phase of growth. Companies that figure out how to really become significant in scale reinvent themselves and create completely new things. Just as an example, a little over a year ago, we created a start-up inside the company to create new products. That was so galvanizing and so energizing, and it kind of cascaded across the company. People were saying, “This isn’t the kind of same old, same old — we’re reinventing ourselves.”

Good Days Ahead?

2011-01-20T11:29:00.000-08:00

I attended today the Centerstate CEO’s (Corporation for Economic Opportunity) Economic Forecast Luncheon, with the keynote speaker being noted economist Hugh Johnson, Chairman and Chief Investment Officer of Hugh Johnson Advisors. It was a very interesting and entertaining presentation, which included a historical comparison to the banking crisis of 1907. In between a couple of very interesting comments on the Fed, he told the group the following:

· The conditions in the economy that accompany a recovery are all in place
· Leading indicators for the economy are rising. We are early in the economic recovery which should continue through 2012.
· By 2012, the economy should recover 7.0 million of the 8.3 million jobs lost in the recession.
· Short term interest rates will start to rise late in 2011
· Stock prices should rise 7.8 percent annually for the next two years
· While we are in a recovery mode, the recovery will be anemic by post-war standards as a result of the drag caused by real estate and the housing situation

Small Ideas

2011-01-18T10:43:00.000-08:00

Get yourself a cup of coffee, settle back in a comfortable chair, and enjoy 15 minutes with Allen Kupetz. Allen’s outstanding presentation took place at the recent TEDxOrlando conference and it considers things such as purple catsup, the Segway, and the interesting notion of The Small Idea.

Learning from Six Companies That Didn't Make It

2011-01-14T10:55:00.000-08:00

In business schools, we love to talk about the successes. Nothing like talking about Starbucks, Zappos, Five Guys, Amazon and many of the other startups that became the big guys. And while I have no problem discussing these companies, I think it’s important that we also talk about those that didn’t make it. The successes are certainly what we want our students to aspire toward (and perhaps give a nice gift back to the school that made it all possible), but it’s also important to take a look at those businesses that didn’t make it, and learn from them as well. Often times those that failed to make it, if we listen carefully, have more to tell us.
To that end, take a look at the article from the NY Times, How Six Companies Failed to Survive 2010 by Eileen Zimmerman.

Twitter and the NFL

2011-01-13T09:12:00.000-08:00

Ever since we used to live out west, I’ve been a Denver Bronco’s fan. Yes, they were an absolute mess last year(there is a lesson for all us to heed in that mess dealing with hiring), but I thought the article in today’s Denver Post on John Elway, the NFL and Twitter was interesting.

From the article:

"It was important to us to reach our fans directly and in the most personal way, and it was important to restore some of the credibility in our organization that might have been lost in a challenging season. We owe that to our fans."

VC's and the Choices That They Make

2011-01-11T12:57:00.000-08:00

Not the first time I’ve run across an article on how VC’s make their investment decisions, but given the amount of time that we spend talking about institutional investors, it makes sense to take another look at this topic. So here is the SF Chronicle article, How Venture Capitalists Make Investment Choices by Ben McClure.

From the article:

With mature companies, the process of establishing value and investability is fairly straightforward. Established companies produce sales, profits and cash flow that can be used to arrive at a fairly reliable measure of value. With early-stage ventures, however, VCs have to put much more effort into getting inside the business and the opportunity.
Here are some of their key considerations:

1. Management
2. Size of the Market
3. Great Product with Competitive Edge
4. Awareness of Risks

Why Businesses Fail

2011-01-11T08:45:00.000-08:00

Interesting blog in the NY Times by Jay Goltz on what he feels are the top ten reasons businesses fail. The entire article can be found at his blog, but I’ve listed below his top ten:

1. The math just doesn’t work.
2. Owners who cannot get out of their own way.
3. Out-of-control growth.
4. Poor accounting.
5. Lack of a cash cushion.
6. Operational mediocrity.
7. Operational inefficiencies.
8. Dysfunctional management.
9. The lack of a succession plan.
10. A declining market.

While I agree in general with those reasons, I’ve also seen businesses fail because of poor customer service, poor hiring practices, an owner who always had to be the smartest person in the room, owners who wouldn’t listen to their employees, poor (or no) use of technology and finally because of a lousy business model.

Ego Trips Rule!

2011-01-10T11:30:00.000-08:00

Hmmm…not sure I agree, but take a look at this from Saturday’s (January 8, 2011) Wall Street Journal:

College students would rather have their self-esteem stroked than eat their favorite food, have sex or drink beer, a study found. In one scenario, 130 subjects were asked to think of something they knew boosted self-esteem, such as getting a compliment or a good grade.

They were then asked to rate, on a 1-to-5 scale, how much pleasure the experience brought them and how much they "wanted" it (right now, in general, in good times, and in bad). In the same way, they rated the experience of having sex and eating their favorite food.

Overall, the students valued the self-esteem increase more than good food or sex. The ratio of "wanting" to "liking" was used to gauge the addictive qualities of each pleasure: Addicts can want a fix more than they like it. While students said that they liked all of these things more than they wanted them, the gap was narrowest in the case of self-esteem—which hints at the intoxicating effects of ego, the authors said.

From "Sweets, Sex, or Self-Esteem? Comparing the Value of Self-Esteem Boosts with Other Pleasant Rewards," Brad J. Bushman, Scott J. Moeller, and Jennifer Crocker, Journal of Personality (forthcoming)

I'm Not a Horse, I'm a Person

2011-01-07T13:23:00.000-08:00

Ran across this piece from Daniel Pink about what motivates us. I’ve found myself lately thinking a lot about what motivates (and what kills motivation in) people and the research behind this “mini-lecture” is interesting. As entrepreneurs, we’ve got to be the master motivator for our teams, because they are typically small and underfunded. Based on the research, the lack of money for salaries isn’t a killer because it appears to be not that important in the grand scheme of motivation.

Founders Workbench

2011-01-06T06:07:00.000-08:00

Sean Branagan sent over a link to the website, the Founders Workbench. The Founder’s Workbench was created by the Technology Companies Group at Goodwin Procter, LLP. Lots of good, free resources for the entrepreneur.

From the website: As part of our ongoing commitment to start-ups, emerging companies and the entrepreneurial community, we are providing access to critical forms, memoranda, best practices and other resources to enable capital efficient company formation. Our Technology Companies Group is a focused team of 160 lawyers who provide dedicated representation to over 500 technology and life sciences companies and 200 venture capital and private equity firms. We take pride in understanding our clients’ businesses and sharing their entrepreneurial spirit and drive. We counsel emerging companies on formation matters, venture financings, intellectual property transactions, employment matters, M&A transactions and IPOs. We have been recognized as one of the leading venture capital law firms by independent publications such as Chambers and Private Equity Analyst.

Crowd Accelerated Innovation

2011-01-05T07:01:00.000-08:00

While aggregation and syndication are the some of the watchwords of the internet, in an interesting article in Wired magazine, they’ve given me another phrase to think of: Crowd Accelerated Innovation. That article, written by Chris Anderson, made me start thinking of my own Center’s website, and the website’s of so many companies that I’ve visited lately. Here at the Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship, we’re capturing everything we can on video and getting ready to use them in our soon-to-be-updated website. I’ve also passed on the information to two of my daughters who are thinking of launching their own business. No matter what you’re doing…video makes things so much more interesting and exciting for the viewer/reader of your website.

From the article:

I believe that the arrival of free online video may turn out to be just as significant a media development as the arrival of print. It is creating new global communities, granting their members both the means and the motivation to step up their skills and broaden their imaginations. It is unleashing an unprecedented wave of innovation in thousands of different disciplines: some trivial, some niche in the extreme, some central to solving humanity’s problems. In short, it is boosting the net sum of global talent. It is helping the world get smarter.

"How Was Everything?"

2011-01-04T07:57:00.000-08:00

How many times have you heard those words from a company you were doing business with? How many times have you wondered if they really care, or if those are just words that the employees are trained to say?

I thought of this because of an experience my wife and I had the other day. We were on a driving trip, and stopped in for a meal into one of our favorite waitress-service restaurants that you often times see just off major highways. We sat down early in the evening in a moderately crowded dining room, and placed our orders. After doing so, we found out that they were out of both of the items that we ordered. They were also out of the featured item, and were also out of the featured dessert. While it didn’t bother us, what got me was what happened when we were paying the bill at the cash register. The employee manning the register asked me, “How was everything?” In a very polite way, I told her, “Well, not so good. The kitchen was out of what we wanted to eat.” What surprised me was her reaction. She looked absolutely stunned, and then turned to finish the transaction. She didn’t say a word to me about my comment.

Now, I’ve owned a restaurant, I've worked in food industry, and have an enormous amount of appreciation for those who work in this very tough and demanding part of our economy. But what got me was that the chain that runs this restaurant, did just such a poor job of training their people that the girl at the register didn’t know what to say. If you aren’t going to give your employees the tools to deal with a simple statement, if you’re not going to train them about what you say when someone says something other “fantastic,” then all of the team-building exercises, all of the mantra’s of providing exceptional service, is just a bunch of words that mean nothing.

I’ve also been following an interesting blog in the NY Times that is written by a first-time restaurateur, Bruce Buschel. For more inside info on the entrepreneurial journey of someone opening a seafood restaurant, take a look at The Startup Chronicle.

The Reality of Entrepreneurship

2010-12-20T11:47:00.001-08:00

A friend sent over the following article, which he found in the Entrepreneur Corner. Good piece, especially the notion that you won’t probably be right with your first idea out of the box. However, I like to believe that if you have the ability to take your idea, change it, move it in a slightly different direction, then not being right the first time isn’t as negative a notion as it may seem. I would also add a fifth harsh reality...If you're going to fail...fail fast. There is nothing wrong with failing...especially since the experience of launching and failing can often lead to success the second time around. However, if you're going to fail, you have to make sure to learn something about why you failed. Nothing sadder than the entrepreneur who makes the very same mistakes on the second and third ventures. Failing is OK, as long as you learn something from it.

5 harsh realities of being an entrepreneur
December 15, 2010 Jason Baptiste
(Jason L. Baptiste is the CEO and co-founder of PadPressed and co-author of the OnStartups blog. This story originally appeared at that site.)
There’s always talk about a startup’s end game – whether it’s in the form of an acquisition, funding announcement, or eventual flame out. But we rarely hear about the harsh realities that entrepreneurs face. This isn’t meant to be a downbeat and negative article, but actually quite the opposite. By knowing the harsh realities that lie ahead, you can be prepared when they come about. Here are some of the oft unspoken realities I’ve noticed entrepreneurs face regularly.
Your first iteration of an idea will be wrong – Very few people get it right out of the gate – but as it turns out, this is actually a good sign. No idea survives its first interactions with its customers. This sort of failure requires you to synthesize feedback to adapt to the customer. You could be prideful, not listen to what your customers are telling you, and keep things the way they were, but that leaves you with no customers and a product you may not even use yourself. It’s okay if things change up a bit when it comes to your idea and its implementation.

Your friends and family won’t understand what you do – “You’re an entrepreneur, so that means you’re un-employed?” or “Oh that’s nice.” are some of the many reactions you will get from close friends, family members, and others over the course of starting your company. Even if you achieve milestones that are worthy of praise and denote success in the entrepreneurial world (customers, fundraising, new traffic levels, press, etc.), people still won’t get what you do.
Unless you build one of the few consumer success stories that come around every few years, things probably won’t change here. The b2b space is even more difficult to explain as most people aren’t your customer, especially if it’s a niche workflow. But just because they don’t understand it, doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong or unacceptable. I doubt most of Larry Ellison’s family understood Oracle (that database company that stores information), but things turned out pretty well for him at the end of the day.

You will make less than normal wages for a while – If you got into entrepreneurship first and foremost for the money, then you’re in the wrong business. Sure you may sell your company, but that day is probably far far away. Even if you raise a good chunk of cash, the money is better spent on hiring the best talent than paying yourself a higher wage.
There’s nothing wrong wanting to make money, but in the beginning it’s going to be rough. You will make less than most of your friends, especially the ones doing the “normal” paths of things like finance.
It’s a litmus test in its finest form, though. If you truly love what you’re doing, the capacity to have a large bank account takes a back burner to completing your mission. Sure you need some basic creature comforts, but luxury items almost seem silly as you will not have the time to truly enjoy them.

Everything takes twice as long … if it even happens – Multiply everything by two, including the things inside of your control. When things take longer, you sometimes think that you’re doing it wrong or no one really cares. In reality, everyone else has multiple deals and responsibilities on the table. By factoring this into the expectations of your startup, it makes a lot easier to prepare for launching products, closing deals, and more.
Also, be persistent and get the other party what they need as soon as possible. And realize that most deals never work out – from acquisitions down to simple business development agreements. There are always many moving parts and excitement that can fade.
That’s okay though. If you’re building your company upon a single deal, then you need to re-evaluate things. Don’t be depressed when a deal falls through. That’s just the nature of the beast.
Titles mean nothing. You will be a janitor – When you’re the CEO, chairman or co-founder of a <10 person company with a product that doesn’t have customers, titles really don’t mean much. Everyone will be doing a little bit of everything, including cleaning the toilets. Don’t try to mask the grind of being an entrepreneur with some superficial title. Instead, embrace the nitty gritty of those first days.
Business cards are nice to hand out, but they really shouldn’t say more than co-founder or something else. Maybe someone inside the company plays more of the CEO role (speaking and being the face of the company), but that doesn’t really matter in the early days. You have to be humble and you have to be willing to do whatever it takes. You don’t have a staff of 50 to throw the task on to either. If you don’t do it, it won’t get done. Sure you could also try to optimize for efficiency, but that’s almost counter productive as the early days of a startup requiring doing so much, that it’s hard to just cut something out.

Marketing and the Kind Snack Bars

2010-12-13T12:32:00.000-08:00

About a year ago, a friend of mine and I were sitting in a coffee shop and we were both drinking coffee and having a snack. I had purchased an overpriced and stale pastry, while my friend had a snack bar with an interesting wrapper that I had never heard of. He eventually took pity on me and gave me one of his Kind Snack Bar’s, and from that moment on I was hooked. I buy them now by the carton load at Wegman’s and I make sure to have some in my briefcase whenever I’m headed to an airplane. So naturally, when the current issue of Inc. Magazine carried a story about the founder of the company, Daniel Lubetzky, I made sure to read it. Take a look at “The Way I Work” feature, “I’m obsessed with marketing through random acts of kindness.”

Something to Read This Snowy Sunday

2010-12-12T10:21:00.000-08:00

Over coffee this morning, had the chance to read some interesting articles in Inc Magazine. The first three you should read deal with App’s for your company. Also take a look at an article that deals with ideas:

Does Your Business Need an App?
Four Tips for App Planning?
To Charge or Not Charge?
How to Kill a Bad Idea

Oregon Football and Entrepreneurship

2010-12-12T10:08:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a very busy schedule (lots of students talking about ideas and their businesses), I haven’t been able to blog. But with the semester now coming to its conclusion, I’ll be back writing.

First, everyone who knows me knows how much I love the SU football team. All you have to do is spend ten minutes with Coach Marrone, and you’ll see why this team is succeeding. Doug is a great guy and someone who you just know is going to build a great program.

Last week in the NY Times there was an article, not about our Orange, but about another great football program that’s awfully fun to watch. The University of Oregon football team is what I like to call “must see TV.” If you’re flipping through the dial and the Ducks are on, you just can’t help but watch their unique brand of football. The article, Speed Freak Football, is an interesting read. The reason that I call it to your attention here is because the Ducks coach, Chip Kelly, is a guy who is constantly thinking outside the box, something as entrepreneurs, we have to do. Read the article, enjoy it, and think about how you might start thinking like Kelly does, and reinvent your company.

Special Entrepreneurship Section in Wall Street Journal

2010-11-15T09:42:00.000-08:00

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a special section on Small Business. Lots of good things in the section, including information on the Perils of Being the Little Fish, How to Sell on YouTube Without Showing a Video and other things of interest. They also ranked the Best Country to Start a Business (US ranks number three) in the World.

Greyston...Great Brownies...Fantastic Mission

2010-11-09T13:20:00.000-08:00

Bill Mistretta, president of CEO of Greyston Bakery was on campus today talking about the extraordinary mission that defines this outstanding company. As Bill put it, they produce a simple product…brownies…but in the process they help change people’s lives by providing employment and support to people who need it. Greyston had been featured in many news stories (including one on 60 Minutes), and they are now featured in a new book by Michael Russo, “Companies on a Mission: Entrepreneurial Strategies for Growing Sustainably, Responsibly, and Profitably.”

The Dilbert Entrepreneur

2010-11-06T08:14:00.000-07:00

This morning, while at the office working on two different workshops that are going on simultaneously(Syracuse Entrepreneurs Bootcamp and The Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans' Families) I took a break to glance through the Wall Street Journal….and ran across The Perfect Stimulus: Bad Management written by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. So sit back, get a cup of coffee and enjoy entrepreneurship with a Dilbert flavor.

From the article:

I have always assumed there's a correlation between imagination and risk-taking. You wouldn't leave an unpleasant but relatively safe situation unless you could imagine a better outcome. So the people who leave a company first tend to be the visionaries who can best imagine entrepreneurial success. The last wave of people who leave are usually excreted just before the door is chained. They didn't imagine it would happen so soon. Bad management is how imagination gets wings.

Where in the World Do Ideas Come From?

2010-11-04T14:10:00.000-07:00

Students are always walking into my office asking me where ideas come from. Thanks to Scott Nadzan, who sent this piece over to me on innovation, I now have an answer for them. Since I can't draw as well as this fellow, I'll send them to this piece on where good ideas come from. Steven Johnson, who is the author of this piece, has been a speaker at TED talks and provides a very interesting way to think about ideas.

Students and Social Entrepreneurship

2010-10-27T06:47:00.000-07:00

I’m just back from attending the annual Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Center’s Annual Meeting which this year was held at Penn State University. One of the things that I really like about the conference is the conversation that you can have with other directors over coffee. This year, the topic of social entrepreneurship was hotter than ever, which I think is thanks to the “primary customer” that we deal with. Our “primary customer” is the student, and this generation of students wants to do more with their lives than just get a job. They want to make meaning in their lives, and they are starting while they are in college. More students than ever want to start or work for non-profits, more students are creating business plans for non-profits, and many want to start for profit businesses that will spin off money that they can then donate to non-profits. For all of the things that are said in the media about this generation, this is one thing that those articles seem to miss…that this group of students wants to do more than just get a job and make tons of money, they really want to try to make the world a better place. As a result, many of the colleges and universities that I spoke to at GCEC are retooling some of their courses to help these students make meaning, and understand the landscape facing social entrepreneurs today. Stay tuned, there is definitely more coming in the months ahead on this phenomenon.

Students Catching the Entrepreneurship Fever

2010-10-19T09:08:00.000-07:00

Great story in Business Week on student entrepreneurship, under the article, Startup Fever written by Max Raskin. Now, of course I wish they had included our program, as we are one of the top programs in the country...ranked number seven by Princeton Review and Entrepreneur Magazine, was number six last year in US News…and through our Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship, we have a fantastic program in the Couri Hatchery helping students who want to start their own business.

From Dream to Launch

2010-10-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

Very interesting piece by Tim Beyers in Entrepreneur magazine that I ran across through Alltop, titled How to Make Your Business Dream a Reality.

Work with a bias toward action.No doubt accountability is a key feature of the action-oriented startup, but perhaps the most important attribute is a propensity to act. For that to occur, Belsky says entrepreneurs need to unlearn some things."It's important, in the early stages of a creative project, to almost do the opposite of what we're taught growing up, which is to think before we act," Belsky says. "Startups have to recognize that their competitive advantage against the big guys is that they have the space to [experiment]."What they don't have is time. Today's startups build and release products in days rather than months. In that environment, action is a survival skill, Belsky says, especially if the original concept was right all along.Evan Saks, founder of build-to-order mattress maker Create-A-Mattress.com in Needham, Mass., learned this lesson the hard way. He says his team spent two months talking with suppliers about adding options before his design agency pushed him to focus on getting the company's website live. Feedback would dictate changes, the agency's owner said. It was just the wake-up call Saks needed."Following that meeting, I created a roadmap that let the other vendors see there was a place for them in the future. Then, I set the roadmap aside and put all energies into launching the core website the way it was originally conceived," Saks says.

Innovation and the Miners

2010-10-14T09:21:00.000-07:00

If you’re like me, you were following the story of the miners in Chile. Watching their incredible rescue was wonderfully exhilarating as it was a story of faith, perseverance, leadership, determination, and many other things, including innovation. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger writes a column on how Capitalism Saved the Miners. While the article was interesting, what I felt was particularly noteworthy was how some companies jumped in to help out. From the article:

Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill's rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.
Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That's why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.

This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.
A remarkable Sept. 30 story (Innovations Ease the Plight of Trapped Miners) about all this by the Journal's Matt Moffett was a compendium of astonishing things that showed up in the Atacama Desert from the distant corners of capitalism.

Samsung of South Korea supplied a cellphone that has its own projector. Jeffrey Gabbay, the founder of Cupron Inc, Richmond, Va., supplied socks made with copper fiber that consumed foot bacteria, and minimized odor and infection.

Chile's health minister, Jaime Manalich, said, "I never realized that kind of thing actually existed."

Ideas and Innovation

2010-10-09T08:25:00.001-07:00

Yesterday while hanging around the airport waiting for my flight to be ready to leave, I ran across in Wired magazine the short but interesting article on ideas and innovation, Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From. I liked several things in the piece… the notion that ideas are like networks…that to create good stuff you have to create a lot of bad stuff first…and that ideas come through collaboration and standing on the shoulders of other ideas before you. A quick but very interesting read.

Using Geolocation Services to Drive Your Business

2010-10-08T07:31:00.000-07:00

Last night I was speaking to the Syracuse University Alumni Club of New York City, and afterwards, one of our alum’s came up asked me a question about technology and the entrepreneur. He asked how an entrepreneur knows the difference between “real” technology that can truly advance the startup business, and the “pretenders.” I thought it was a particularly interesting question because as entrepreneurs we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can grow our businesses, and unless we happen to be techy’s, we don’t have the time to really consider and examine all the new stuff that’s coming out. But I did refer him to a good story in yesterday’s NY Times by Kermit Pattison, Geolocation Services: Find a Smart Phone; Find a Customer, that showed how real entrepreneurs are using geolocation services such as Four Square, which was started by SU’s own Dennis Crawley. Read the article and then imagine how you might be able to use these services to drive your own business.

Leadership and The Team

2010-10-04T13:51:00.000-07:00

Just spotted the article, Does Your Team Have the Four Essential Types, by Adam Bryant at the New York Times website. While I normally hate any business piece that has a number in the title, I thought the part that described the personality types required on a team was interesting:

From the article:

At the risk of oversimplifying, I think that in any great leadership team, you find at least four personalities, and you never find all four of those personalities in a single person.

You need to have somebody who is a strategist or visionary, who sets the goals for where the organization needs to go.

You need to have somebody who is the classic manager — somebody who takes care of the organization, in terms of making sure that everybody knows what they need to do and making sure that tasks are broken up into manageable actions and how they’re going to be measured.

You need a champion for the customer, because you are trying to translate your product into something that customers are going to pay for. So it’s important to have somebody who empathizes and understands how customers will see it. I’ve seen many endeavors fail because people weren’t able to connect the strategy to the way the customers would see the issue.

Then, lastly, you need the enforcer. You need somebody who says: “We’ve stared at this issue long enough. We’re not going to stare at it anymore. We’re going to do something about it. We’re going to make a decision. We’re going to deal with whatever conflict we have.”

You very rarely find more than two of those personalities in one person. I’ve never seen it. And really great teams are where you have a group of people who provide those functions and who respect each other and, equally importantly, both know who they are and who they are not.

Often, I’ve seen people get into trouble when they think they’re the strategist and they’re not, or they think they’re the decision maker and they’re not. You need a degree of humility and self-awareness. Really great teams have team members who know who they are and who they’re not, and they know when to get out of the way and let the other team members make their contribution.

Bashing and the Millennials

2010-09-28T11:04:00.000-07:00

I work with Millennials, and I have five of my own that I call children, so it thrilled me this weekend when I was reading the article below in Fast Company by Nancy Lublin, the CEO of Do Something, a really neat venture that you should check out. I also liked a couple of her comments on management, which I placed in bold below. Take a read…and then cut them some slack. Here is the link to the article: Why Bashing Millennials is Wrong.

Lazy. Entitled. Fickle. Freighted with their own inscrutable agendas. These are the kinds of things people say about cats -- and millennials. For today's managers, the generation born after 1980 is a favorite punching bag.

It's not hard to see why, given that they're the generation of Lindsay Lohan, Jersey Shore, and flip-flops as appropriate office footwear. While it's obviously silly to stereotype an entire generation, whether you're Tom Brokaw or me, so many people have spent so much time
criticizing the millennials that I think it's time an old lady stuck up for them.

I want to be clear: I'm not doing it because I'm a cougar. I am vouching for them because I see their strengths every day in the Do Something office; all but two of our 21 full-time staff are millennials. The very same characteristics that are frequently maligned are the very qualities that make millennials awesome employees. The trick, of course, is to know how to exploit them.

Let's start with the issue of how millennials multitask. While studies show that they think they're better at it than they actually are, the reality is they do it and they're not going to stop. A recent study found that millennials typically use up to seven devices, apps, and programs at once -- texting, G-chatting, tweeting, and listening to music while working on that memo.

Where I make a list and slowly cross things off one at a time, Aria Finger, Do Something's 27-year-old rock-star COO, will sit in front of three screens (two PC, one iPhone) and plow through three times as many tasks in the same amount of time. I see my role as defining a clear goal, giving her the resources to take the shot, and then getting out of the way while she dunks. Millennials don't have traditional boundaries or an old-fashioned sense of privacy.

They live out loud, sharing details of their lives with thousands of other people. Of course there are the obvious risks to this -- say, that unflattering, reputation-damaging photo that should have been deleted from Facebook -- but while you shake your cane at them for indulging in TMI, I see their openness as a great opportunity. For instance, when our summer intern @jimmyaungchen tweets and Facebooks about something he achieved at work, that's free marketing for Do Something to the 1,500 people in his immediate network. I now ask job applicants how many Facebook friends and Twitter followers they have.

We all know that one of the key traits of millennials is that they feel and act entitled. For their whole lives, they've been told that they're the best, that they can be anything they want to be, whether that's the next Mark Zuckerberg or the next American Idol. You say self-indulgent and self-obsessed, I say optimistic and self-confident. They are hungry for responsibility, and I give it to them. Earlier this year, Melanie Stevenson, who does business development at Do Something and is all of 26, walked up to me and said, "I'd like to expand us to five international markets by the end of this year." Awesome. Bold. Audacious. Every employer should want a dozen Melanies working for them. (We launched in Portugal in June, and expect to add three more countries this month.)

An entitled person tends to be high maintenance -- millennials may well be the poodles of humanity, demanding constant grooming and incessant praise. But celebrating small victories shouldn't be seen as just a way to kowtow to this generation's oversized egos; at a recent conference, Jack Welch said that it's a great -- and underused -- management tactic. We should learn to recognize the contributions of each team member more explicitly. We should give feedback more than once a year in a stilted annual performance review. If your people aren't worthy of praise, get rid of them. If they deserve praise, then be generous with it. Praise is one of the most affordable tools out there: It's free!

Some of you will have read each of the four points above and come up with some quiet (or maybe not-so-quiet) rebuttals. You know what? You're right. Each thing I've said about millennials can be read as a problem. But each one can also be viewed as an opportunity.
Maybe the real problem isn't this generation -- maybe it's that the rest of us don't manage them for greatness, for maximum effect. What we often forget is that this generational clash is a timeworn tale. Whatever side of the divide you're on, it feels new. Yet it happens over and over -- say, once a generation. And in the end, the kids will always win. They're sort of like cats.

Don't Know the First Step...Start Learning

2010-09-28T07:04:00.000-07:00

We have a guest post today from our friends at Teach Street.

As any entrepreneur knows, getting a great idea is easy, it’s execution of that idea that’s really, really hard. You may have a beautiful business concept in your head but how do you make it happen? How do you begin?

Many entrepreneurs can spend months trying to answer this one question. Should you write a business plan? Make contacts in the industry? Look for funding? Start building a prototype of the product? There are so many options and when you’re new to the game none of them seem to be better or more effective than the other. Many entrepreneurs get hung up on all the options and succumb to “Analysis Paralysis.” They spend forever thinking about the best way of doing something without actually doing anything at all.

One of the main causes of this paralysis is lack of knowledge. Entrepreneurs don’t know anything about business plans or what they are good for so they don’t know if they should write one now or in the future when they get more funding. They don’t know anything about pitching venture capitalists and angel investors so they waste time wondering how to approach them. They don’t know this and they don’t know that, and because they don’t know, they wonder...and they waste time.

The obvious solution to this problem is to learn more. If the next step is unclear, spend more time learning about your industry (and entrepreneurship in general) until you have a pretty good idea of the next step to make. It’s true that you might take a step in the wrong direction, but once you take that step you’ll be able to understand exactly where you went wrong and be able to come up with a better approach.

One of the best ways to learn is to ask experts to provide you advice when you hit a wall. If you really want to get ahead of the crowd take some Entrepreneurship Classes and get some valuable one-on-one time with seasoned entrepreneurs who have “been there, done that” and want to help you get there as well.

Lessons in Lots of Things...Especially Humility

2010-09-22T08:48:00.000-07:00

Dave Berg shared this with me today. There is nothing I can add to this wonderful story that was written by Colonel James E Moschgat for the Wharton Leadership Digest.

William “Bill” Crawford certainly was an unimpressive figure, one you could easily overlook during a hectic day at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Mr. Crawford, as most of us referred to him back in the late 1970s, was our squadron
janitor.

While we cadets busied ourselves preparing for academic exams, athletic events, Saturday morning parades and room inspections, or never-ending leadership classes, Bill quietly moved about the squadron mopping and buffing floors, emptying trash cans, cleaning toilets, or just tidying up the mess 100 college-age kids can leave in a dormitory. Sadly, and for many years, few of us gave him much notice, rendering little more than a passing nod or throwing a curt, “G’morning!” in his direction as we hurried off to our daily duties.

Why? Perhaps it was because of the way he did his job-he always kept the
squadron area spotlessly clean, even the toilets and showers gleamed. Frankly,
he did his job so well, none of us had to notice or get involved. After all, cleaning
toilets was his job, not ours. Maybe it was is physical appearance that made him
disappear into the background. Bill didn’t move very quickly and, in fact, you
could say he even shuffled a bit, as if he suffered from some sort of injury. His
gray hair and wrinkled face made him appear ancient to a group of young cadets.
And his crooked smile, well, it looked a little funny. Face it, Bill was an old man
working in a young person’s world. What did he have to offer us on a personal
level?

Finally, maybe it was Mr. Crawford’s personality that rendered him almost
invisible to the young people around him. Bill was shy, almost painfully so. He
seldom spoke to a cadet unless they addressed him first, and that didn’t happen
very often. Our janitor always buried himself in his work, moving about with
stooped shoulders, a quiet gait, and an averted gaze. If he noticed the hustle
and bustle of cadet life around him, it was hard to tell. So, for whatever reason,
Bill blended into the woodwork and became just another fixture around the
squadron. The Academy, one of our nation’s premier leadership laboratories,
kept us busy from dawn till dusk. And Mr. Crawford...well, he was just a janitor.
That changed one fall Saturday afternoon in 1976. I was reading a book about
World War II and the tough Allied ground campaign in Italy, when I stumbled
across an incredible story. On September 13, 1943, a Private William Crawford
from Colorado, assigned to the 36th Infantry Division, had been involved in some
bloody fighting on Hill 424 near Altavilla, Italy. The words on the page leapt out at
me: “in the face of intense and overwhelming hostile fire ... with no regard for
personal safety ... on his own initiative, Private Crawford single-handedly
attacked fortified enemy positions.” It continued, “for conspicuous gallantry and
intrepidity at risk of life above and beyond the call of duty, the President of the
United States ...”

“Holy cow,” I said to my roommate, “you’re not going to believe this, but I think
our janitor is a Medal of Honor winner.” We all knew Mr. Crawford was a WWII
Army vet, but that didn’t keep my friend from looking at me as if I was some sort
of alien being. Nonetheless, we couldn’t wait to ask Bill about the story on
Monday. We met Mr. Crawford bright and early Monday and showed him the
page in question from the book, anticipation and doubt in our faces. He starred
at it for a few silent moments and then quietly uttered something like, “Yep, that’s
me.”

Mouths agape, my roommate and I looked at one another, then at the book, and quickly back at our janitor. Almost at once we both stuttered, “Why didn’t you ever tell us about it?”

He slowly replied after some thought, “That was one day in my life and it happened a long time ago.”

I guess we were all at a loss for words after that. We had to hurry off to class and Bill, well, he had chores to attend to. However, after that brief exchange, things were never again the same around our squadron. Word spread like wildfire among the cadets that we had a hero in our midst-Mr. Crawford, our janitor, had won the Medal! Cadets who had once passed by Bill with hardly a glance, now greeted him with a smile and a respectful, “Good morning, Mr. Crawford.”

Those who had before left a mess for the “janitor” to clean up started taking it
upon themselves to put things in order. Most cadets routinely stopped to talk to
Bill throughout the day and we even began inviting him to our formal squadron
functions. He’d show up dressed in a conservative dark suit and quietly talk to
those who approached him, the only sign of his heroics being a simple blue, starspangled lapel pin.

Almost overnight, Bill went from being a simple fixture in our squadron to one of
our teammates. Mr. Crawford changed too, but you had to look closely to notice
the difference. After that fall day in 1976, he seemed to move with more
purpose, his shoulders didn’t seem to be as stooped, he met our greetings with a
direct gaze and a stronger “good morning” in return, and he flashed his crooked
smile more often. The squadron gleamed as always, but everyone now seemed
to notice it more. Bill even got to know most of us by our first names, something
that didn’t happen often at the Academy. While no one ever formally
acknowledged the change, I think we became Bill’s cadets and his squadron.
As often happens in life, events sweep us away from those in our past. The last time I saw Bill was on graduation day in June 1977. As I walked out of the squadron for the last time, he shook my hand and simply said, “Good luck, young man.”
With that, I embarked on a career that has been truly lucky and blessed. Mr. Crawford continued to work at the Academy and eventually retired in his native Colorado. (Note: William Crawford passed away in 2000. He is the only U.S. Army veteran and
sole Medal of Honor winner to be buried in the cemetery of the U.S. Air Force
Academy.)
A wise person once said, “It’s not life that’s important, but
those you meet along the way that make the difference.” Bill was one who made
a difference for me. While I haven’t seen Mr. Crawford in over twenty years,
he’d probably be surprised to know I think of him often. Bill Crawford, our janitor,
taught me many valuable, unforgettable leadership lessons. Here are ten I’d like
to share with you.

1. Be Cautious of Labels. Labels you place on people may define your
relationship to them and bound their potential. Sadly, and for a long time, we
labeled Bill as just a janitor, but he was so much more. Therefore, be cautious of
a leader who callously says, “Hey, he’s just an Airman.” Likewise, don’t tolerate
the O-1, who says, “I can’t do that, I’m just a lieutenant.”

2. Everyone Deserves Respect. Because we hung the “janitor” label on Mr.
Crawford, we often wrongly treated him with less respect than others around us.
He deserved much more, and not just because he was a Medal of Honor winner.
Bill deserved respect because he was a janitor, walked among us, and was a
part of our team.

3. Courtesy Makes a Difference. Be courteous to all around you, regardless of
rank or position. Military customs, as well as common courtesies, help bond a
team. When our daily words to Mr. Crawford turned from perfunctory “hellos” to
heartfelt greetings, his demeanor and personality outwardly changed. It made a
difference for all of us.

4. Take Time to Know Your People. Life in the military is hectic, but that’s no
excuse for not knowing the people you work for and with. For years a hero
walked among us at the Academy and we never knew it. Who are the heroes
that walk in your midst?

5. Anyone Can Be a Hero. Mr. Crawford certainly didn’t fit anyone’s standard
definition of a hero. Moreover, he was just a private on the day he won his
Medal. Don’t sell your people short, for any one of them may be the hero who
rises to the occasion when duty calls. On the other hand, it’s easy to turn to your
proven performers when the chips are down, but don’t ignore the rest of the
team. Today’s rookie could and should be tomorrow’s superstar.

6. Leaders Should Be Humble. Most modern day heroes and some leaders are
anything but humble, especially if you calibrate your “hero meter” on today’s
athletic fields. End zone celebrations and self-aggrandizement are what we’ve
come to expect from sports greats. Not Mr. Crawford-he was too busy working to
celebrate his past heroics. Leaders would be well-served to do the same.

7. Life Won’t Always Hand You What You Think You Deserve. We in the military
work hard and, dang it, we deserve recognition, right? However, sometimes you
just have to persevere, even when accolades don’t come your way. Perhaps you
weren’t nominated for junior officer or airman of the quarter as you thought you
should - don’t let that stop you.

8. Don’t pursue glory; pursue excellence. Private Bill Crawford didn’t pursue
glory; he did his duty and then swept floors for a living. No job is beneath a
Leader. If Bill Crawford, a Medal of Honor winner, could clean latrines and smile,
is there a job beneath your dignity? Think about it.

9. Pursue Excellence. No matter what task life hands you, do it well. Dr. Martin
Luther King said, “If life makes you a street sweeper, be the best street sweeper
you can be.” Mr. Crawford modeled that philosophy and helped make our
dormitory area a home.

10. Life is a Leadership Laboratory. All too often we look to some school or PME
class to teach us about leadership when, in fact, life is a leadership laboratory.
Those you meet everyday will teach you enduring lessons if you just take time to
stop, look and listen. I spent four years at the Air Force Academy, took dozens
of classes, read hundreds of books, and met thousands of great people. I
gleaned leadership skills from all of them, but one of the people I remember most
is Mr. Bill Crawford and the lessons he unknowingly taught. Don’t miss your
opportunity to learn.

Bill Crawford was a janitor. However, he was also a teacher, friend, role model
and one great American hero. Thanks, Mr. Crawford, for some valuable
leadership lessons.

Entrepreneurship at Syracuse University Improves in the Rankings

2010-09-21T19:12:00.000-07:00

The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur Magazine have released their annual listing of the top 25 undergraduate and 25 graduate programs in entrepreneurship and I’m pleased to announce that the Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises Program at the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University is now ranked as the seventh best program in the United States. This ranking is up from number thirteen last year. Our graduate program in entrepreneurship is now ranked number 21.

From today’s USA Today:

The Princeton Review selected these 50 programs from about 2,000 surveyed, saying they satisfy multiple criteria within three main categories: students and faculty, academics and requirements, and enriching experiences outside the classroom.

The top schools stand out because they have a high number of experienced faculty, students launching businesses after graduation, and experiences outside of the class room, says Princeton Review senior vice president and publisher Rob Franek.

"Students are working with successful entrepreneurs who are working with the primary source and then bringing that experience back down to the classroom for that student," says Franek.
He adds that these schools often offer entrepreneurship competitions and classes to students of any major, creating a "culture of entrepreneurship."

Over the past few years, the number of entrepreneurial programs has grown tremendously, especially as universities recognize the value of interdisciplinary studies, says Franek.

My thanks to all of our students, alumni, faculty, staff and friends of the program who have helped to create this fantastic program at Syracuse University!

Don't Be an Enabler

2010-09-21T12:21:00.000-07:00

Dwain DeVille of the Bikers Guide to Business sent over this which comes from Bob Whipple , the chief executive officer of Leadergrow Inc., a Rochester, N.Y.-based leadership consultancy. As entrepreneurs, the subject of leadership is always on our minds. Take a look at this post on being an “enabler.”

Confrontation is part of being a manager. However, too often a manager’s aversion to confronting a problem employee results in accommodation of bad behaviors. In a typical scenario, the problem festers for months, even years—until escalation of the issue reaches a tipping point. By this time, the problem is horrendous and more difficult to tackle.
I once worked with an employee who suffered from acute alcoholism. His abusive behavior was enabled because his supervisor did not dare confront him. Finally, the situation became intolerable. When the behavior was finally addressed, the employee had been out of control for 15 years. His reaction to the manager was, "What took you guys so long?" Following months of treatment, he became sober and went on to be a positive contributor.

Every manager deals with situations such as this one. While they may not be as blatantly offensive as the behavior in this example, behaviors such as tardiness, taking excessive smoke breaks or bullying are destructive nonetheless.

A common example: When workers stretch break times from the standard 20 minutes to more than 30 minutes actually sitting in the break room. The total duration is more like 45 minutes from the time work stops until it resumes. The supervisor does not want to appear to be a "by the book" manager, so ignores the problem every day. When the situation gets too far out of control, the unfortunate supervisor is forced to play the bad guy, and everyone suffers a loss in morale.

Taking action requires courage that many leaders do not have. They rationalize their inaction with logic like:
Maybe the problem will correct itself if I just leave it alone.
Perhaps I will be relocated or promoted soon, and the next person can deal with this.
Confronting the issue would be so traumatic that it would do more harm than good.
We have found viable workaround measures.
We have bigger problems. Exposing this situation would be a distraction from critical work.
Managing these dilemmas requires knowing the exact moment to intervene and doing so in a way that preserves trust with the individual and the group. Once you let an employee get away with bad behavior, it becomes harder to address the next time, and so on.
For that reason, intervene when the issue first arises. As a supervisor, you need to make the rules known and follow them yourself with few and well-justified exceptions. It is not possible to treat everyone the same at all times, but you must enforce the rules consistently in a way that people recognize as appropriate and disciplined.

Are You Enabling?

You may be enabling a problem employee if:
You are working around a "problem."
Employees accuse you of "playing favorites."
Employees comment that they do not understand documented policies.
You have discussions on how to handle an out-of-control person.
A well-known issue is denied or downplayed.
You fear retaliation or sabotage will result if you enforce rules.
Cliques form to protect certain individuals.
Some individuals are victims of pranks or horseplay.
Dis-Enabling

If you recognize one or more of the above situations happening in your department, you can get back on track. In addition to dealing with the problem employee one on one, address all employees in a meeting to signal that the enabling will stop. In this meeting, review policies, ascertain understanding and solicit questions for clarification of the rules.
Ask the group how policies could be misunderstood or abused and for suggestions to close those loopholes for consistency. When people have a hand in creating the rules, they tend to remember and follow them better.

As a leader, taking responsible action can help you regain control, credibility and respect.
You will handle problems early when they are easier to correct, and employees will no longer constantly push the boundaries of acceptable business behavior.

The Triumphs, Trip-Ups and Future Trajectory of Online Education

2010-09-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

Over the past few years, I’ve been following the state of for-profit and online colleges and universities. It’s been interesting to note the wide range of schooling that is available today…with some of it being very high quality and others not so. While I was living in Florida, one of my friends was the co-CEO of an outstanding for-profit school that I would have been proud to have one of my kids graduate from. In addition, there has been a significant amount written in recent weeks on loan repayment percentages from the for-profit schools. As a result, I thought it would be interesting to have a post contributed by someone who follows the world of online colleges and universities very closely. So today, we have a guest post provided by Tim Handorf, who writes on the topics of online colleges and universities. He welcomes your comments at his email: tim.handorf.20@googlemail.com .

Over the past few years, online education programs have grown dramatically. Online, for-profit schools showed a modest enrollment during its initial stages--365,000 students according to a recent article published in The Hill--but now boasts a massive student body of nearly two million. These figures represent a five hundred percent growth.

What, then, is the reason behind these staggering numbers? For one, online schooling is seen as a viable alternative to traditional universities in that they offer what "brick-and-mortar" institutions do not--convenience, ease of access, and a lessened time commitment.

During tough economic times, for many people, a traditional four-year university is a luxury. While one could argue that there is inherent value in pursuing an education with a more intellectual bent, those who are keen on working while they pursue a degree are looking for a more basic education that's specifically focused on career outcomes.

Another advantage of online schooling is implied in its name--online. Now, virtually every aspect of our lives finds its appropriate counterpart online, and an education shouldn't be any different. Traditional universities have been slow on the uptake of leveraging the power of the Internet to enhance the learning experience, while online schools have picked up the slack. Although traditional universities have come a long way in terms of online technological innovation, online schools still have the upper hand in this arena.

Recently, however, online, for-profit schools have come under fire from the government. The situation is complicated, but essentially many online schools have been accused of engaging in illegal recruitment practices, embezzling government funds, and making false claims about the value of their degrees. These recent scandals have caused stock in for-profit education to drop pretty dramatically, and even though many predict that these instabilities are only temporary, and investors would do well to pick up these stocks now that they are cheap and could bounce back relatively soon, investors remain wary.

Still, these recent scandals are perhaps only a tiny hiccup in the recent business success of online education. While reform is certainly needed, as pointed out in a recent Washington Times op-ed, there remains pretty clear room for growth.

Why? This is because online schools serve a population that simply does not benefit as much from traditional higher education. Some on the online school bandwagon decry traditional education and prophecy its eventual demise. This, to me, is an extreme opinion. It's not that either traditional schools are "bad" or online schools are "worthless". They simply serve to educate two different types of people.

And the group of people that online schooling targets and seeks to educate is a growing population. Not everyone wants to or is cut out for strictly academic teaching and learning. Health professionals are desperately needed in this country, and online schools are more compatible to these careers, which require certified employees with very specific training. As such, if online schools can fix their internal problems, then they represent an entrepreneurial force that will take both the Internet and the education sector as a whole by storm.

Congress and the Entrepreneur

2010-09-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

If you’re like me and wondering what the impact on entrepreneurs will be of the new legislation that just cleared Congress, here is a perspective from Jeff Cornwall at Belmont University. Jeff’s blog, The Entrepreneurial Mind is always good reading, as is yesterday’s post, Small Business Bill Won’t Help What Ails Small Business. I’m still trying to catch up on my reading on this bill, so my mind isn’t made up yet…what do you think?

Someone is Listening

2010-09-14T09:27:00.000-07:00

As we continue to move further into the brave new world of social media, an interesting and a bit disturbing article on how one company is handling the effort. Take a look at Gatorade’s Mission: Sell More Drinks in today’s Wall Street Journal. As you can see from the article, be careful what you say…Gatorade is listening!

Mistakes that Startups Make

2010-09-01T12:11:00.000-07:00

If you want to engage an entrepreneur in conversation, just ask them if about the mistakes they made. For most of us, mistakes are the currency of the trade; we make mistakes…we learn from them…we go back and make more, different mistakes. So, I found the article by Rosalind Resnick in today’s Wall Street Journal Ten Mistakes That Startup Entrepreneurs Make interesting reading. While I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, certainly numbers 1,2,4 and 9 are in my top listing of mistakes that startups make. The other two that should definitely be on the list…not having a clear understanding of who is your customer and not doing some(enough) primary research.
Here is Rosalind’s top ten…definitely worth considering
Here, in my experience, are the top 10 mistakes that entrepreneurs make when starting a company:
1. Going it alone. It's difficult to build a scalable business if you're the only person involved. True, a solo public relations, web design or consulting firm may require little capital to start, and the price of hiring even one administrative assistant, sales representative or entry-level employee can eat up a big chunk of your profits. The solution: Make sure there's enough margin in your pricing to enable you to bring in other people. Clients generally don't mind outsourcing as long as they can still get face time with you, the skilled professional who's managing the project.
2. Asking too many people for advice. It's always good to get input from experts, especially experienced entrepreneurs who've built and sold successful companies in your industry. But getting too many people's opinions can delay your decision so long that your company never gets out of the starting gate. The answer: Assemble a solid advisory board that you can tap on a regular basis but run the day-to-day yourself. Says Elyissia Wassung, chief executive of 2 Chicks With Chocolate Inc., a Matawan, N.J., chocolate company, "Pull in your [advisory] team for bi-weekly or, at the very least, monthly conference calls. You'll wish you did it sooner!"
3. Spending too much time on product development, not enough on sales. While it's hard to build a great company without a great product, entrepreneurs who spend too much time tinkering may lose customers to a competitor with a stronger sales organization. "I call [this misstep] the 'Field of Dreams' of entrepreneurship. If you build it, they will buy it," says Sanjyot Dunung, CEO of Atma Global, Inc., a New York software publisher, who has made this mistake in her own business. "If you don't keep one eye firmly focused on sales, you'll likely run out of money and energy before you can successfully get your product to market."
4. Targeting too small a market. It's tempting to try to corner a niche, but your company's growth will quickly hit a wall if the market you're targeting is too tiny. Think about all the high school basketball stars who dream of playing in the NBA. Because there are only 30 teams and each team employs only a handful of players, the chances that your son will become the next Michael Jordan are pretty slim. The solution: Pick a bigger market that gives you the chance to grab a slice of the pie even if your company remains a smaller player.
5. Entering a market with no distribution partner. It's easier to break into a market if there's already a network of agents, brokers, manufacturers' reps and other third-party resellers ready, willing and able to sell your product into existing distribution channels. Fashion, food, media and other major industries work this way; others are not so lucky. That's why service businesses like public relations firms, yoga studios and pet-grooming companies often struggle to survive, alternating between feast and famine. The solution: Make a list of potential referral sources before you start your business and ask them if they'd be willing to send business your way.
6. Overpaying for customers. Spending big on advertising may bring in lots of customers, but it's a money-losing strategy if your company can't turn those dollars into life-time customer value. A magazine or web site that spends $500 worth of advertising to acquire a customer who pays $20 a month and cancels his or her subscription at the end of the year is simply pouring money down the drain. The solution: Test, measure, then test again. Once you've done enough testing to figure out how to make more money selling products and services to your customers than you spend acquiring those customers in the first place, roll out a major marketing campaign. (See related article, "On a Tight Budget? How to Land a Client.")
7. Raising too little capital. Many start-ups assume that all they need is enough money to rent space, buy equipment, stock inventory and drive customers through the door. What they often forget is that they also need capital to pay for salaries, utilities, insurance and other overhead expenses until their company starts turning a profit. Unless you're running the kind of business where everybody's working for sweat equity and deferring compensation, you'll need to raise enough money to tide you over until your revenues can cover your expenses and generate positive cash flow. The solution: Calculate your start-up costs before you open your doors, not afterwards.
8. Raising too much capital. Believe it or not, raising too much money can be a problem, too. Over-funded companies tend to get big and bloated, hiring too many people too soon and wasting valuable resources on trade show booths, parties, image ads and other frills. When the money runs out and investors lose patience (which is what happened 10 years ago when the dot-com market melted down), start-ups that frittered away their cash will have to close their doors. No matter how much money you raise at the outset, remember to bank some for a rainy day.
9. Not having a business plan. While not every company needs a formal business plan, a start-up that requires significant capital to grow and more than a year to turn a profit should map out how much time and money it's going to take to get to its destination. This means thinking through the key metrics that make your business tick and building a model to spin off three years of sales, profits and cash-flow projections. "I wasted 10 years [fooling around] thinking like an artist and not a business person," says Louis Piscione, president of Avanti Media Group, a New Jersey company that produces videos for corporate and private events. "I learned that you have to put some of your creative genius toward a business plan that forecasts and sets goals for growth and success." (See related article, "Are Business Plans a Waste of Time?")
10. Over-thinking your business plan. While many entrepreneurs I've met engage in seat-of-the-pants decision-making and fail to do their homework, other entrepreneurs are afraid to pull the trigger until they're 100% certain that their plan will succeed. One lawyer I worked with several years ago was so skittish about leaving his six-figure job to launch his business that he never met with a single bank or investor who might have funded his company. The truth is that a business plan is not a crystal ball that can predict the future. At a certain point, you have to close your eyes and take the leap of faith.
Despite the many books and articles that have been written about entrepreneurship, it's just not possible to start a company without making a few mistakes along the way. Just try to avoid making any mistake so large that your company can't get back on its feet to fight another day.

Boosting Creativity

2010-08-19T11:31:00.000-07:00

How many times have you heard someone…usually a boss say, “We have to be more creative!” (of course the other thing we hear now is that “we have to be entrepreneurial” but we’ll ignore that for now)? In a conversation with Mike Duda this morning, he pointed me to a great article in Newsweek The Creativity Crisis. In reading that piece, I also ran across Forget Brainstorming. Here are some suggestions by the authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman on some techniques that boost the creative process:

Don’t tell someone to ‘be creative.’
Such an instruction may just cause people to freeze up. However, according to the University of Georgia’s Mark Runco, there is a suggestion that works: “Do something only you would come up with—that none of your friends or family would think of.” When Runco gives this advice in experiments, he sees the number of creative responses double.
Get moving.
Almost every dimension of cognition improves from 30 minutes of aerobic exercise, and creativity is no exception. The type of exercise doesn’t matter, and the boost lasts for at least two hours afterward. However, there’s a catch: this is the case only for the physically fit. For those who rarely exercise, the fatigue from aerobic activity counteracts the short-term benefits.
Take a break.
Those who study multi-tasking report that you can’t work on two projects simultaneously, but the dynamic is different when you have more than one creative project to complete. In that situation, more projects get completed on time when you allow yourself to switch between them if solutions don’t come immediately. This corroborates surveys showing that professors who set papers aside to incubate ultimately publish more papers. Similarly, preeminent mathematicians usually work on more than one proof at a time.
Reduce screen time.
According to University of Texas professor Elizabeth Vandewater, for every hour a kid regularly watches television, his overall time in creative activities—from fantasy play to arts projects—drops as much as 11 percent. With kids spending about three hours in front of televisions each day, that could be a one-third reduction in creative time—less time to develop a sense of creative self-efficacy through play.
Explore other cultures.
Five experiments by Northwestern’s Adam Galinsky showed that those who have lived abroad outperform others on creativity tasks. Creativity is also higher on average for first- or second-generation immigrants and bilinguals. The theory is that cross-cultural experiences force people to adapt and be more flexible. Just studying another culture can help. In Galinsky’s lab, people were more creative after watching a slide show about China: a 45-minute session increased creativity scores for a week.
Follow a passion.
Rena Subotnik, a researcher with the American Psychological Association, has studied children’s progression into adult creative careers. Kids do best when they are allowed to develop deep passions and pursue them wholeheartedly—at the expense of well-roundedness. “Kids who have deep identification with a field have better discipline and handle setbacks better,” she noted. By contrast, kids given superficial exposure to many activities don’t have the same centeredness to overcome periods of difficulty.
Ditch the suggestion box.
If you want to increase innovation within an organization, one of the first things to do is tear out the suggestion box, advises Isaac Getz, professor at ESCP Europe Business School in Paris. Formalized suggestion protocols, whether a box on the wall, an e-mailed form, or an internal Web site, actually stifle innovation because employees feel that their ideas go into a black hole of bureaucracy. Instead, employees need to be able to put their own ideas into practice. One of the reasons that Toyota’s manufacturing plant in Georgetown, Ky., is so successful is that it implements up to 99 percent of employees’ ideas.

The Bully in the Workplace

2010-08-19T10:42:00.000-07:00

As entrepreneurs, we have to be aware of what’s going on in our organization. As we caught up in the day to day of running the business, it’s easy to sometimes miss cues of bullying in the workplace. I had not been following this story, but the article Did Depression or an Alleged Bully Boss Prompt Editor's Suicide? by Ray Sanchez certainly tells this story in vivid detail. Most of us, as we grow our companies, don’t have the luxury of a full-time HR staff, so we have to be particularly aware of what’s going on around us and do all that we can to stop bullying in our workplace. Unfortunately, I’ve seen too many cases where the entrepreneurial owner is the bully. If that’s the case, it’s up to the Board’s or top executives of the venture to rein the offending boss in. This is one of those things that just can’t be a part of the entrepreneurial experience.

Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us

2010-08-17T08:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, flying back from Washington DC on US Airways, I read in the in-flight magazine the story by Emily Yellin, Your Call is (Not That) Important to Us. Take the time to read this…great story and a fun read that should remind all of us entrepreneurs that providing great customer service is one of the keys to beating the big guys!

From the story:

Trouble for the nation’s largest cable television and broadband provider started in earnest with the story of LaChania Govan, a mother of two in her mid-twenties who inadvertently became a public symbol of mistreated customers everywhere. Govan lives in suburban Chicago. She goes to work all week and attends church every Sunday. She has a pleasant and welcoming voice. She also has a strong sense of fairness.
In July 2005, Govan’s digital video recorder wouldn’t work. She called Comcast’s customer service line in Chicago but couldn’t get through. During the course of four weeks, she called more than forty times. She was repeatedly disconnected, put on hold, or transferred to inept or inert representatives and technicians. One customer service representative transferred her to the Spanish-speaking line. Govan knows only English. She just wanted someone to resolve her seemingly simple case.
She says she never raised her voice, but she was resolute. “Calling Comcast became my second job,” Govan said. “I had to ensure the cordless phone was fully charged and the kids were content. And I sat and called. I cooked and called. I cleaned and called, and just called.” Almost every day, Govan prodded the big company’s customer service department as best she could. Finally, she found a rep who heard her out and took her case in hand. A technician was sent to replace her cable box at no charge, and she was credited with a free month of service. Govan’s perseverance paid off. Her headaches seemed to be over.
Then Govan’s August cable bill arrived. Her name did not appear on the bill. Instead it was addressed to “Bitch Dog.” Someone at Comcast had changed her account name. Govan said, “I was so mad I couldn’t even cuss.”
Instead of becoming just another unnoticed casualty in the adversarial relationship between many companies and their customers, Govan went public. The Chicago Tribune ran her story. Within days, the mainstream news media, bloggers, and consumer advocates from everywhere were spreading her tale of woe. She appeared as the number-one story on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann. A Comcast executive left an apology on Govan’s home voice mail. The company claimed it identified and fired two employees responsible for changing the name on Govan’s bill. She was offered all sorts of free service, which she refused. She wanted nothing more to do with Comcast.
Govan, who also happens to be a customer service representative for a major credit card company, is studying criminal justice with plans to go to law school one day. Eventually, she says, she hopes to become a judge. Her inherent sense of justice is what drove her to persevere. So she was speaking with conviction when she told the Washington Post that she believes customer service means “being friendly, helpful, and respectful. I know how it feels to be a customer service rep and a consumer on the other end. You do not have to settle for less, and you do not have to be mistreated.”
In 2006, Comcast was dealing with another public display of customer service missteps. A subscriber in the Washington, D.C., area found the technician that Comcast sent to fix his cable system had fallen asleep on his couch. The worker was kept on hold for so long by his own company when he called for help that he dozed off. The customer shot video of the napping technician and posted it on the Internet, where it went viral. Comcast issued another apology and again said the worker in question had been fired.
Then in August 2007, Comcast suffered what was perhaps its worst embarrassment to date when seventy-six-year-old Mona Shaw took her outrage with its customer service a few steps further than any disgruntled customer had done before. As she has told the story, it started when a technician scheduled to come out to her suburban Washington, D.C., home on a Monday didn’t show up. Comcast was supposed to install what it calls its triple-play service, which included the company’s new telephone service, along with its traditional Internet and cable television connection, all for under $100 per month. Shaw, a retired military nurse and secretary of her local AARP, as well as a square dancer who fosters stray dogs until they can be adopted, waited all day Monday. When Comcast finally arrived two days later, the technician left the job half done and never came back. On Friday, the company cut off what service Mona and her husband, Don, still had.
Without phone service, the Shaws couldn’t call to get help, so they drove over to their local Comcast office in Manassas, Virginia. They asked for a manager and were told to wait outside in the August heat.
They say they sat on a bench for two hours, until the same woman who had asked them to wait leaned out the door, told them the manager had gone home for the day, and thanked them for coming. Shaw told the Washington Post, “They thought just because we’re old enough to get Social Security that we lack both brains and backbone.”
By Monday, after a weekend with no phone, TV, or Internet, Shaw was so angry that she took matters into her own hands, literally. She got her husband’s hammer, and they went back to the local Comcast office. This is how Washington Post reporter Neely Tucker described Shaw’s account of what happened next:Hammer time: Shaw storms into the company’s office. BAM! She whacks the keyboard of the customer service rep. BAM! Down goes the monitor. BAM! She totals the telephone. People scatter, scream, cops show up and what does she do? POW! A parting shot to the phone!

Keep an Eye on Consigliere

2010-08-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

Take a look at a story that brings together sports and entrepreneurship…can there be anything better? The story is called Steve Nash Drives in Venture Capital…but focus in on the mention of Consigliere, a New York-based group that plans to “invest in seed-stage, consumer-oriented companies with scalable, large-growth brand potential. It also will do select Series A and Series B deals, and occasionally sign on as a strategic partner (i.e., the consulting piece) for larger transactions. Those latter deals are designed, in part, to help forge partnerships with large brands that can help out Consigliere’s younger investments.” Mike Duda formerly one of the top folks at Deutsche, Inc. is the driving force behind this very interesting company.

EBV on CNN

2010-08-12T08:04:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to a wonderful story today on our Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities program that has appeared on CNN and HLN(Headline News): http://money.cnn.com/video/news/2010/08/12/n_veterans_ebv.cnnmoney/

The Cost of Starting Up

2010-08-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

One more item...On August 1 I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal. During the week previous I had the chance to have a very nice conversation with Sarah Needleman from the WSJ on the topic of start-up costs. Here is the link to the entire story: Becoming the Boss Can Cost Plenty.

Trademarks and the Entrepreneur

2010-08-11T10:28:00.000-07:00

Students and entrepreneurs usually have questions on trademarks, IP, etc. as it relates to their start-up venture. Because this area is a place where a specialist is required, I always refer those questions to an attorney. However, two days ago one of my favorite blogs had a great piece on the proper use of trademarks, so I thought it would made sense to mention it here. IP Law for Startups by Jill Hubbard Bowman is a great blog post for entrepreneurs to read…here is the post on trademarks Protect Your Brand: The Proper Use of Trademarks:

I know that proper use of trademarks and service marks gets confusing for many entrepreneurs. The following is a simple and handy guide on the proper use of the marks in your business. It’s important to review your website and marketing material and make sure that you are preserving potential legal protection for your marks.
Trademarks and service marks are essentially brand names. A mark identifies and distinguishes products or services of one company from the products or services of others.
Trademarks identify goods. Service marks identify services. In contrast, a trade name is a name that identifies a business.
Confusingly, sometimes the same name may be a trade name, a trademark and a service mark. GOOGLE is a trade name, a registered trademark for mugs, bags and t-shirts, and a registered service mark for search engine services.
A critical issue is that improper use of a mark may cause the loss of legal protection.
A federal registration may be denied because the owner used the mark in a generic way to describe its goods or services. Moreover, a court or the PTO may determine that even a registered mark has become generic and therefore free for all to use. Once upon a time, aspirin, escalator, and cellophane were all trademarks. Eventually, the names began to represent the goods rather than the source of the goods and trademark protection was lost.
Improper descriptive use by the trademark owner in advertising or other materials is a factor in deciding whether the name will get legal protection. Widespread use of the mark as the common name for similar goods or services may ultimately allow free use of the mark, even by competitors.
A key issue is whether the public understands whether the name is a common name or a brand name.
If the public thinks the name is the common name—like aspirin—then the law will not protect the mark from competitive use. But if the public thinks the name is a brand name, trademark status may be preserved.
Proper Use of a Trademark or Service Mark
1. Use the mark with a generic term
To preserve legal protection for a brand name, the mark should be used in conjunction with a generic term, like using the mark Kleenex with tissue. Kimberly-Clark Worldwide, Inc. is very careful to write: Kleenex tissue or Kleenex brand tissue. If you use the common name in conjunction with your brand name it is far less likely that your brand will become the common name. Your brand will be seen as separate and distinct from the common name.
Remember, generic or descriptive names do not have trademark protection upon initial use. Generic names may never be a trademark. Descriptive names may only receive trademark protection after they become famous for identifying the goods as coming from a single source.
2. Use the mark as an Adjective NOT a noun or verb
Use the mark to modify the generic term for the goods instead of describing the goods. This point is similar to the previous one. An example is Google search services. Google needs to be careful that google doesn’t cross the line into becoming the common noun and verb for using any search engine.
Also, don’t use the mark as a possessive or plural.
3. Make the mark look distinctive
To preserve protection, it is good practice to make the mark look distinctive.
Good ways to distinguish a mark include:
Capitalizing the mark;
using color; or
using stylized lettering or a special font.
4. Use the TM or SM symbols
When you initially claim use of a mark as a brand name, after the mark you can use the TM symbol for goods and SM for services. You don’t need to wait until you have filed a registration.
After receiving a federal registration, you can use the ® symbol.
With a little bit of care, you can preserve the value of your trademarks and service marks.
For related posts on Trademark Law:
How to Avoid Trademark Infringement When Selecting Business or Product Names
Consider Whether You Can or Want to File a Federal Trademark Registration

Restitching a Firm

2010-08-03T12:36:00.000-07:00

I was talking last week with Neale Godfrey, the chairman of the Children’s Financial Network at our Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities program. Neale was a guest speaker, and she asked me a great question right before she went into the classroom to talk to the vet’s. She asked, “Do you tell the vet’s the whole story about entrepreneurship”…meaning are we sharing with them stories of success, as well as failure. As it turns out, we do tell the vet’s as well as our undergrad and graduate students the whole story, but an article in the Wall Street Journal today Restitching a Firm That Nearly Unraveled, brings home Neale’s point…that entrepreneurship is more than just success, but it can also be filled with road bumps(and more) along the way. Read the article by Julie Jargon about, J.W. Hulme Co., a Minnesota luggage maker that almost went bankrupt but is now on the way back.

Tesla and Digital Media...Two Entrepreneurship Stories from the NY Times

2010-07-25T11:23:00.000-07:00

Today’s business section in the NY Times carried several interesting articles on entrepreneurship. Two in particular that caught my eye were All Revved Up, but So Far to Go written by Claire Cain Miller about Elon Musk and his efforts at Tesla Motors. I also liked the article by Brooks Barnes, In Hollywood, Everyone’s a Digital Revolutionary. While the article was focused on the digital entertainment space, it was clear that the lessons learned in digital entertainment really can be applicable to other areas of entrepreneurship as well. For example, take this sentence: “But an awful lot of the companies angling for a piece of the action are long on goals and short on specifics.” That could certainly apply to any start-up business. Or how about this: “Remember SulSet.com, the behind-the-scenes subscription movie site? Oops: it quickly ran into problems with the Screen Actors Guild, which objected that the cast was not getting a cut of the proceeds. To resolve that, it had to start giving free access to the site, upending its business plan.” Business plan’s upended? Can happen anywhere. Or take the last sentence in the article: “Where the market stands today there are more digital opportunities than ever,” he (Brent Weinstein, head of digital media for United Talent Agency) said. “Those that will be successful are the ones who understand the unique aspects of the platform and the audience.” That could be re-written (with apologies to Mr. Weinstein for borrowing his quote) to say that based on where the business world is today, there will be more opportunities than ever. Those entrepreneurs that will be successful are the ones who see the need in the marketplace and can create a unique product/service to fill that need, mindful that it is all about serving the eventual customer.

Four Trends in Social Entrepreneurship

2010-07-25T08:35:00.000-07:00

Because I work in the academic world but because I came out of the business one, I like to think in terms of customers....or who is my primary customer? For me, our students are the primary customers for the Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship…and currently our students are thinking about social entrepreneurship in a big way. We see that in the business plans that get submitted for our Capstone Business Plan Class and Competition, and in the ideas that students come into my office to talk about. So it is with great interest that I read on Just Means, Marcia Stepanek’s summary of the report. Echoing Green is a New York-based social enterprise investment nonprofit.

* Many social entrepreneurs want to tackle the world's most difficult problems early in their career. About 55 percent, or slightly more than half, of some 1,200 semifinalists for Echoing Green fellowships in social entrepreneurship since 2007 have identified themselves as being younger than 35.

* Social entrepreneurs are blurring the lines between the nonprofit and for-profit experience and are often "serial entrepreneurs." There was a 15 percent decrease over 2008 in the number of Echoing Green semifinalists who have worked in the nonprofit and government sectors. Thirty-seven percent of the 300 semifinalists this year have founded another organization and 71 percent of those organizations are still in existence.

* Social entrepreneurs are on the forefront of the trend to build for-profit/nonprofit social enterprises. This year, more than 37 percent of the 300 Echoing Green semifinalists structured their new ventures as hybrid organizations -- nonprofit/for-profit enterprises aimed at simultaneously fulfilling public duties and developing commercial markets for their activities. That's up 20 percent over 2007. Meanwhile, also since 2007, the total number of semifinalists structuring their organizations as nonprofits decreased by nearly 20 percent.

* Many social entrepreneurs are compelled to create social enterprises because of their personal experiences. Almost 40 percent of Echoing Green semifinalists since 2007 identify themselves as members of the communities they plan to serve.

Business Schools Reach Out to Military Veterans

2010-07-21T13:29:00.001-07:00

As we get ready to kick-off the Syracuse University Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities program this Saturday, it was great to see Geoff Gloeckler’s article in Business Week, B-Schools Reach Out to Veterans. I particularly liked the paragraph that wrapped up the article because it was absolutely right on target:

The business schools say they benefit from the programs as much as the veterans. “It’s a privilege to work with disabled American veterans for the third year,” says Judy Olian, dean of UCLA Anderson, according to a press release from the Anderson School. “UCLA Anderson’s expertise in entrepreneurship is a way for us to provide resources to veterans who have sacrificed so much on behalf of the nation and who want to realize their own business dreams and desires to support their families and communities.

As Dean Olian said…it is our privilege to work with these fantastic vets in this outstanding program.

Sports and Entrepreneurship

2010-07-21T12:35:00.000-07:00

The Orlando Sentinel yesterday ran a very nice story on a neat entrepreneurial company…XOS Digital. If you’re not familiar with the company, that’s probably OK but rest assured that all of your favorite college and NFL football teams, along with teams in the NBA and NHL know this organization very well. For those teams, XOS can be the difference between winning and losing. XOS was founded by Dan Aton in 1999 after he did some work for the Orlando Magic. Today, XOS is the dominant player in the digital sports space serving “more than 480 partners representing more than 900 teams in the NCAA, NFL, NBA, and NHL.” Dan is a great entrepreneur who took an interest and passion, and matched it up with a problem in the marketplace and in the process created a successful enterprise. For entrepreneurs and sports fans, the article is an interesting one to read: Lake Mary Company XOS Digital provides data for many college, pro sports teams.

Entrepreneurship in Fortune Magazine

2010-07-18T11:42:00.000-07:00

While I understand that Fortune magazine is a (the?) magazine of corporate America, it’s nice to see that they are now starting to give a bit more notice to entrepreneurship. While I enjoy reading the publication, in recent years I was getting disgusted with their lack of coverage of non-tech entrepreneurship. In the current issue, there is a nice corporate entrepreneurship piece on one of my favorite companies, Williams-Sonoma. The article, Secret Sauce, discusses its growth from a struggling catalogue retailer to the position they now occupy in both the on-line as well as brick and mortar space.

There is also a short but fun piece showcasing three small entrepreneurial companies that are going head-to-head with some of the big guys in the publishing, hospitality and food space. The article by Jessica Shambora , is called, David and Goliath.

Entrepreneurship as a Road Forward for the Disabled

2010-07-15T14:07:00.000-07:00

Wonderful story in today’s Wall Street Journal about the role that entrepreneurship can play for disabled individuals. The story, written by Sarah Needleman is entitled For Disabled, a Job Hunt Alternative and it highlights our Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities program. Thorugh our Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship, we also work with disabled entrepreneurs through our StartUp New York program and we seen amazing results. As our faculty like to say, entrepreneurship truly is a road forward for those who are disabled.

From the article:

Founded by the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, the boot camp starts with a 40-day distance-learning course, followed by 10 days of on-campus classes. Participants are also paired with mentors and have access to free resources such as legal and accounting services from corporate partners and the schools' alumni.

After graduating from the program in 2008, former Marine Brian Iglesias co-launched New York film-production company Veterans Inc. with a fellow veteran. Mr. Iglesias's neck and shoulder were injured during combat, causing permanent nerve damage to his right arm and requiring a metal plate in his neck. He says he previously spent five months searching unsuccessfully for a job in the entertainment industry—even failing to land unpaid internships. "I was begging people to work for free," he says.

The 33-year-old Mr. Iglesias, who has a bachelor's degree in film production from Temple University, suspects that some employers were uncomfortable hiring him because of his war experience. "Out of all the people who are candidates, they think, a year ago this guy was being shot at," he says.

With the poor economy further restricting employment options for the disabled, some organizations are seeing increased interest in programs designed to assist this group in starting businesses.

Comments from a Speech by Karen Mills of the SBA

2010-07-14T10:51:00.000-07:00

From the Biz Box by Steve Viuker

On July 12, a forum called “Strengthening the Lending Environmentfor America’s Small Businesses”, was held in Washington, D.C.

It was sponsored by the Federal Reserve Board and featured comments by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. The Chairman urged banks and regulators to help the nation’s small businesses get the loans they needed to create jobs. Federal data indicate that lending to such companies fell to below $670 billion in the first quarter of this year from more than $710 billion in the second quarter of 2008.

Also speaking was SBA Administrator Karen Mills. Below are her comments to BizBox about small business issues and a link to her speech in Washington.

http://www.sba.gov/idc/groups/public/documents/sba_homepage/mills-fedspeech-7-12-10.pdf

Overview
Small business is at the heart of the economy; so it needs to be at the heart of the recovery. They were most affected by the credit freeze. Big businesses have other options. The SBA has been able to make a difference at the end of the credit spectrum. The Recovery Act has allowed us to provide $30 billion worth of credit access.
Initiatives
SBLF- The mainstay of the Recovery Act program was to increase our guarantees to 90% and to reduce and/or eliminate our fees. One aspect of the Small Business Jobs bill is the Small Business Lending Fund. Why aren't banks lending? There are two reasons. One is that they don't want to take the risk. That is why the 90% guarantee is important. The other reason is lack of capital. The SBLF is $30 billion into hands of Main Street community banks. The access to this capital to these institutions will be as low as one percent. That is providing they increase lending to small businesses. And it won't cost $30 billion because the banks will pay the money back and also invest these funds and have multiples returns.

Regulation
The job of the SBA's Office of Advocacy is to point out when the needs of small businesses have to be taken into account in terms of the cost that regulations would impose on them. We look at Sarbanes/Oxley and all other compliance regulations.
Green jobs
The SBA looks at small business from traditional dry cleaners and restaurants to the high-growth entrepreneurs. One aspect that has picked up momentum is the green sector. There are innovations and opportunities that are creating new jobs. We want to make sure that these businesses have access to capital and to programs such as the SBIR program. (innovation research grants)

BP Oil
We have 28 disaster assistance locations in the affected states. We offer advice and economic injury loans to businesses that have been affected by the spill and the ban on fishing. In addition, if a business has an SBA loan from a Katrina-related loss, that business can defer payments on that loan.

Political SupportSupport for Small Business jobs bill in front of Congress is coming from both sides of the aisle. Small business creates the jobs in this country; government is there to see they are aided in that process.

Lending Crisis or Not?

2010-07-12T18:06:00.000-07:00

In preparing for a recent speech on entrepreneurship and the media, I started reading the Huffington Post. While it isn’t the first source I look to for news, it’s still a great place to see what’s going on around the world. Take a look at their current headline story written by Shahien Nasiripour on banking and small business credit. While the story is interesting, I would have liked to see a quote or two from a bank who isn't lending. As I talk to bankers, I keep hearing that government regulations are the primary thing that's keeping them from lending more to small companies.

After more than 40 summits held across the country to figure out why the nation's small businesses aren't getting the loans they need -- and qualify for -- America's central banker was no closer to a solution Monday than he was a year ago, when the Federal Reserve first identified a crippling small-business credit crunch.

With that in mind, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke implored banks to free up credit, telling a conference in Washington that "lenders should do all they can to meet the needs of creditworthy borrowers."

The bankers aren't listening.

Bank loans to small businesses are down about $30 billion, or 4 percent, since last year, according to the latest figures from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
New loans guaranteed by the federal Small Business Administration fell off a cliff in June, dropping 66 percent to their lowest level in at least two years, according to agency data. The value of new loans in June -- $647 million -- is less than the total in February 2009, the month before the Obama administration's stimulus plan eliminated some fees on the taxpayer-backed loans and increased the federal guarantee on some of them to 90 percent, an incentive which has since expired. June's total loan figure was also less than half the total lent in September 2008, the flashpoint of the financial crisis.

The lack of credit is stifling the nation's ability to emerge from that crisis.

"Making credit accessible to sound small businesses is crucial to our economic recovery and so should be front and center among our current policy challenges," Bernanke said in prepared remarks. "Small businesses are central to creating jobs in our economy; they employ roughly one-half of all Americans and account for about 60 percent of gross job creation. Newer small businesses, those less than two years old, are especially important: Over the past 20 years, these start-up enterprises accounted for roughly one-quarter of gross job creation even though they employed less than 10 percent of the workforce."

But nearly a year after the Fed's main policy-making body, the Federal Open Market Committee, first identified the difficulties small businesses face in securing financing, the Fed appears no closer to solving the problem than they did during that two-day meeting in August of last year.

In Monday's speech, Bernanke addressed the lack of available credit, the lower demand for it, lenders' tighter underwriting standards and the frustration banks are feeling when dealing with regulators who are keen to tighten the reins after years of loose supervision.

"The insights we obtained from small business owners, lenders and others in this series of meetings have given us a more nuanced understanding of the problem and will help us identify areas where we might be able to do more," Bernanke said of the summits that began in February.

Bernanke has delivered at least seven speeches since November in which he referenced the lack of available credit, including one in each month since April.

The subject's importance cannot be overstated. Small businesses can't grow without credit, and because small businesses are the nation's primary job creators it's critically important for them to secure the financing they need, experts say. "The formation and growth of small businesses depends critically on access to credit," Bernanke said.

It's hard to understand, though, what new information the Fed has learned over the past few months that hadn't been known by experts for some time. Industry consultant Bob Coleman of Coleman Publishing said there hasn't been much in the way of new information on the credit crunch.

But Coleman said he hoped the summits have helped attract attention to the issue, and could prod Congress to pass a much-needed small business lending bill.

"We need to get this done. Businesses are dying on the vine," he said.

Some banks, sensing opportunity, have taken advantage of others' retrenchment.

Nara Bank, a $3-billion community bank founded in 1989 to serve Korean-Americans in Southern California, has increased its lending to small businesses by $250 million, or 37 percent, since last year, FDIC figures show.

"It's been a focal point for us," said Paul Choi, a bank spokesman. "A lot of the mindset here was to switch towards a more marketing-oriented mindset as opposed to a more conservative approach," Choi said. "We really wanted to push our lending volume up," he said, so the lender's district managers focused on finding good loan prospects.

More than 99 percent of the bank's loans go to businesses, according to a May investor presentation. Supermarkets are the bank's biggest borrowers of commercial and industrial loans. Hotels, motels and gas stations are among its biggest borrowers of commercial real estate loans.

"It's always been a philosophy to grow," said Choi, and the SBA's stimulus-funded efforts to increase lending provided new incentives to push in that direction. Given those incentives, the bank "made a conscious effort to really improve" its small business lending, Choi said. "We are actively and aggressively seeking qualified candidates."

Nara hopes to reduce its commercial real estate lending this year and instead focus on increasing its commercial and industrial loans.

But the nation's biggest banks continue to reduce their lending to small businesses. Coleman blames the economy for the lack of available loans, pointing to near-double-digit unemployment and the lack of demand for goods that's causing businesses and banks to hold back. Coleman also said uncertainty over new regulations -- like those businesses will face as part of the recently-enacted health care law -- has made some think twice about borrowing.
"A lot of people are saying, 'Hey, I don't know what's going on here.' I want to know how much health care is going to cost me,' for example," Coleman said.

The National Federation of Independent Business, an advocacy group, reports that its members say financing continues to be difficult to acquire, yet it's far from their biggest concern. About 92 percent of small business owners reported that "all their credit needs [were] met, or they did not want to borrow," according to the group's most recent monthly report.

What, then, caused the most angst?

Poor sales, taxes, and government red tape.

Let's Raise Kids to be Entrepreneurs

2010-07-12T12:37:00.001-07:00

Matt Gartner sent this over to me…a really neat speech by Cameron Herold talking about Let’s Raise Kids to be Entrepreneurs. It lasts about 19 minutes, but grab a cup of coffee, settle back and listen. You’ll love it!

Women and Growing Companies

2010-07-08T06:53:00.000-07:00

As an entrepreneur, you can never have enough resources to help you out. In the New York Times, Adriana Gardella writes a short piece, Women and Growing Companies that provides a variety of resources to help out women entrepreneurs who are interested in growing their businesses. Besides the resources listed in the article, continue down through the reader comments and you’ll find other resources of interest.

Being an entrepreneur is a very lonely journey, and getting help, contacts or support from organizations like those mentioned in the article can make the difference between success…and well, that other thing.

Is The Internet Melting Our Brains?

2010-07-06T09:58:00.000-07:00

I was all set to blog today about the article in Wired magazine dealing with the internet and how it affects how we think. The article from the new book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, and it is a very interesting look at how the internet impacts the move from short term to long term memory. But because the magazine’s website has such a clunky search function, after a few minutes of trying and being unable to find the article, I gave up. Now perhaps that is the exact point the article was making…that the web has caused us to be scanners rather than readers, which impacts our ability to truly learn. Maybe you’ll be better at it than me, or perhaps you’ll just help the media industry out and buy the magazine and the book, but the question I am left with is how could a magazine that deals with the brave new world of innovation have such a clunky search function.

Entrepreneurs Can Change the World

2010-07-05T16:02:00.000-07:00

Last week we had the chance to celebrate both Canada Day on July 1 and Independence Day on the 4th of July, so it was a relaxing and fun week. Now that it’s time to get back to work, and for those of us who are entrepreneurs, it’s a good time to get juiced up again on what we do…and what better way to do it than with the Grasshopper video: Entrepreneurs Can Change the World.

I love the Grasshopper video and I use it in almost all of my speeches on entrepreneurship. It’s such a great piece that I also like to plug the company(no, I'm not getting paid to do so), which according to their website is “a virtual phone system for entrepreneurs.” And since they’ve been good enough to keep this video around on the web, take a look at what they can do for your business and then click and watch the video again. In fact, keep it handy, because whenever you need a little shot-in-the-arm to give you the energy to keep doing what you do to grow your business, watch the video and you’ll be ready to get back to work.

Foursquare Lands $20 Million Series B Round

2010-06-30T04:56:00.000-07:00

Last week at the MOB Conference in New York city, I met with Syracuse University grad Dennis Crowley of Foursquare. Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last three months, you have most certainly seen Dennis’s picture in a business magazine or publication. Foursquare, which really had its coming-out party at SXSW, is a fascinating company which was birthed by Crowley and his team, who also was responsible for Dodgeball, which was purchased by Google.

Here is something his most recent blog post:

Hey all - It’s been quite the year for foursquare. Last year at this time, Naveen and I - tired of working around my kitchen table - borrowed a desk from our friends at Curbed.com and Hard Candy Shell. Two months later we brought on our first hire (Harry!) and a few weeks after closed on our first round of financing: $1.35m from Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and a handful of angels. Back then, our office looked like this.Fast forward a year: We’re now 27 people strong. We can’t fit any more desks or chairs in our office so we’re borrowing cubes from our neighbors downstairs. We’re about to hit 1.8 million users and we’re seeing Super Swarms happen all over the world (Indonesia, you crazy!). In short, it’s been an amazing year for foursquare. A huge thank you to anyone that’s ever unlocked a Newbie badge!And with that, we’re excited to announce that we’ve raised another round of capital. Today we closed on a $20m Series B round with Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and our newest partner, Andreessen Horowitz. We’re thrilled to have the continued support of our original investors and additional support and expertise from the team at Andreessen Horowitz. The two big names behind Andreessen Horowitz - Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz - are each legends in Silicon Valley. They know better than anyone how to transform startups into successful organizations. As we continue to rapidly expand to take advantage of the opportunities in front of us, Ben and Marc’s expertise in growing companies will be invaluable. With this new round of financing, our main priority will be to expand our organization to supplement the amazing core team we’ve assembled already (know any great engineers? send them our way!). We’re hoping to build a world-class engineering organization, based primarily in our headquarters in the New York City to help us develop the next generation of mobile + social + local products that will excite our users and provide unique value for local merchants. The new investment capital will also help fund the infrastructure needed to house our team (we’re finally getting a new office!) and support our growing audience of nearly 2m users.It’s been a crazy year for us and we’re expecting the next 12 months to be even more of an adventure. Look forward to more great product from us soon… we’re really just getting started.- @dens and the rest of team foursquar

Congratulations to Dennis and the rest of the team!

Restarting America's Innovation Engine

2010-06-28T06:56:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Amy Schmitz for passing on this interesting article, How to Restart America’s Innovation Engine, from Daily Finance.

William Sahlman a professor at Harvard is interviewed on entrepreneurship and capital in the article by Peter Cohan. While Sahlman is one of the guru’s of entrepreneurship education, I’m not sure I would agree with him that most talented management teams have no trouble getting capital. I've seen too many great teams with outstanding ideas go no where with VC's because they weren't in that particular hot space.

However, I do agree with him that VC’s provide a very important source of capital to the entrepreneurial marketplace, and that they “spearhead innovation” throughout the economy. I also enjoyed the praises that Professor Sahlman heaped on the angel investors, one of the least recognized and yet most important pieces of the financing continuum for entrepreneurs.