Is “entrepreneur” a bad word?

African Proverb about Life

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.

No is an answer too!

“Yes” in an answer. “No” is an answer too. Even ” I don’t know” is an answer.

To not respond at all is the worst response ever… It’s plain rude & ignorant! How many times I’ve seen this in business scenarios.

“Let’s just play ostrich and let it all blow by. It’s not my problem!”

Startup Lessons from Hubspot

Source : Startup Culture Lessons From Mad Men

Interesting post, yet some things don’t work out in environments which require attendance (conform low attendance helpdesk) :

Vacation Policy = No Policy : Nice one, where I would only add one exception “until minimum attendance is reached.

“We don’t care which 80 hours you work” : Agree completely! An happy employee will work more. A time registration system will only do the opposite of which should be the objective of the system.

Extreme Transparency : This gets rid of all the rumour flows and so on which paralyse the performance of any organization.

Seat rotation : Sounds like a cool concept. In (even not so) big coorporations, one may find that (s)he only knows their “cubicle”.

HubSpot Fellows : A coaching concept which is needed in ALL companies. Don’t hire people, push them in the pool and say it’s a good guy/girl if (s)he doesn’t drown.

All other points : … focus on the social side of the human being. Where creativity is needed (and trust me, you need it to let your company grow!), you need a social environment where people feel comfortable, appreciated/respected & nourished.

Drive!

After “What drives motivation?“, check “Drive” from Dan Pink!

Why IT shouldn’t be run as a business…

Need an out-of-the-box opinion on running it? Check “Infoworld’s Run IT as a business — why that’s a train wreck waiting to happen”…

Intro

“If you board the wrong train, it’s no use running along the corridor in the other direction,” said famed World War II German resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We in IT boarded the wrong train a long time ago. It’s the “standard model” of information technology organizations — the familiar litany that says CIOs should run IT as a business [1], meeting the requirements of its internal customers. This refrain has been endorsed by our holy trinity, too: analyst firms, most consultancies, and ITIL.

Some strong quotes

• There are no IT projects : He likens IT’s proper role to that of an engineer designing a car. “It doesn’t matter if the ‘customer’ asks for the horn on the backseat. Placing it there would meet the specs and ‘satisfy requirements.’ It would also defeat the usability of the horn, render driving the car dangerous, and could lead to a crash that ruins the whole effort.
• Chargebacks? No! Governance… : Chargebacks are an attempt to use market forces to regulate the supply and demand for IT services. If that’s the best a business can do, it means the business has no strategy, no plans, and no intentional way to turn ideas into action.
• So what should we do? : Nobody in IT should ever say, “You’re my customer and my job is to make sure you’re satisfied,” or ask, “What do you want me to do?” Instead, they should say, “My job is to help you and the company succeed,” followed by “Show me how you do things now,” and “Let’s figure out a better way of getting this done.”

Wage cut or wage freeze?

Source : Sticky Wages

Check out the above story… It refers to the term “sticky wage” where companies didn’t cut wages in recessions. They just made them “grow slower”… Yet lately there have been actions where wages were cut and it’s an odd move when thinking of the following statements (which are quoted from the article).

• 1. Employee Morale: Truman Bewley found out that pay-cuts affected everyone’s morale, while firings only affected the minority. I am sure all of you, who have seen layoffs agree that the people left behind, are much more productive than they were ever before. When you see your colleague getting fired, you work extra hard to make sure that you are not next in line. Pay-cuts don’t have the same effect, as everyone is on the same boat, and there is no shock effect to spur employees.
• 2. Fear of the best people leaving: The job market has slowed down in the recession, but there are still plenty of firms that are hiring. If an employer cuts salaries across the board, it is quite likely that the better workers will find work elsewhere. So, firms which implement across the board wage cuts, risk disgruntling their better employees and have them leave for greener pastures elsewhere. This factor is a major contributor to sticky wages.
• 3. Get rid of Wally: Not all employees are created equal; some are more efficient than others. In all companies there is some deadweight. Some of your employees will be like Dilbert, some like Alice and then you will have a Wally. If you kept Dilbert and Alice, and fired Wally – your team will still do well, if anything the overall productivity of your team will increase. Even the Pointy – Haired boss knows that it is far better for him to fire Wally, than to take a chance by cutting the salaries of Alice and Dilbert, and risk losing them to Elbonians.
• 4. Preparing for the turnaround: Another factor that contributes to sticky wages is the hope of a turnaround. I know several people who are hanging around in companies without any work or pay – cuts. While there isn’t much demand for their skills now; their employer doesn’t want to take a chance. The employer is worried that if they let this person go, the competitors will build a strong team in this particular area, and drive them out of business when the market eventually turns.

Basic business money making concepts

These will probably give you a clear sound “Duh, offcourse!”, yet it’s the basics we need to comprehend.

(Source : Personal MBA)

• Product: make a physical product, then sell and deliver it for more than it cost.
• Service: provide a useful service, then charge a fee.
• Shared Resource: create a shared resource that can be used by many people (like a gym), then charge for access.
• Subscription: offer an ongoing subscription, then charge a recurring fee.
• Insurance: write an insurance policy against some specific bad thing happening, collect premium payments up-front, then pay out claims only when the bad thing happens.
• Resale: acquire an asset, then sell the asset to another buyer at a higher price.
• Lease: acquire an asset, then allow another person to use that asset for a certain amount of time in exchange for a fee.
• Audience Aggregation: create and distribute information that appeals to a specific set of people, then sell access to that audience (advertising, direct mail, etc.) to an interested third-party.
• Commission: sell an asset you don’t own on behalf of a third-party, then collect a percentage of the sale price as a fee.
• Dividend: purchase an ownership stake in a business, then collect a corresponding portion of that business’ profit over time as a dividend.

Going 70 20 10…

The 70/20/10 Model is a business resource management model pioneered by Eric E. Schmidt. This model dictates that, to cultivate innovation, employees of a company should utilize their time in the following ratio:

• 70% of time should be dedicated to core business tasks.
• 20% of time should be dedicated to projects related to the core business.
• 10% of time should be dedicated to projects unrelated to the core business.

Source

Sound interesting? Check the following article.

Business patterns

The latest post from personal mba features called “Patterns That Work” has some nice insights…

In many areas of life – including business – you’ll find a few underlying patterns that appear over and over again when you take a moment to look beneath the surface of what you’re doing. For example, here are few sentences that, combined, describe how the vast majority of businesses make money

• Make a physical product, then sell and deliver it for more than it cost.
• Provide a service, then charge a fee.
• Create a shared resource that can be used by many people (like a gym), then charge for access.
• Offer an ongoing subscription, then charge a recurring fee.
• Offer insurance against something bad happening, collect premium payments, then pay out only when the bad thing happens.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you do something new – choose a core pattern that works, then focus your time and energy on making something people find remarkably useful.