Visionary leaders run the risk of overriding the ideas of the brilliant people around them.

Jack Welch, legendary CEO of GE, was known to walk in a room of great people solving important problems and proclaim “Here’s what I think we should do.” He would go on to explain his vision and reasoning. And then, after sharing his solution for the problem at hand, he would ask, “what do you think?” It is no surprise that he would get many nods of affirmation and not much disagreement or new, bold ideas.

Perhaps this is sometimes necessary in a large corporation, but never in a creative team. After all, a creative team’s purpose is to exchange, digest, and refine ideas. If you fail to capture the insights from each member of the team, then you are actually “losing value.”

The tendency to “act first” is a fatal flaw for leaders in the creative community. full discussion

Posted in Leadership

Last month (April 2008) the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business held hearings on the so-called underground economy. Its definition of “underground economy” is so broad, it may surprise you.

When I first heard about the hearings, I assumed the phrase “underground economy” related to the practice of hiring workers under the table and paying them in cash. After all, that’s the traditional definition of “underground economy.”

This paper from the Mises organization defines underground economy quite specifically: ‘There is a bustling and shadowy world where jobs, services, and business transactions are conducted by word of mouth and paid for in cash to avoid scrutiny by government officials. It is called the “underground economy,” which is as old as government itself. It springs from human nature that makes man choose between given alternatives. Facing the agents of government and their exactions, man will weigh the alternatives and may choose to go “underground.” ‘

full discussion

Posted in Leadership, Money Management

Sometimes great wisdom is shared with very few words. Here are some thoughtful quotes I have come across that provide great perspective…

“There is no competition in the world. If you can start something, carry it through and complete it, you are in the top two percent of our society” -unknown

full discussion

Posted in Leadership

Those of us who spend a fair amount of time online love our shiny new toys. We seem to always need something new to try out. And one of the shiniest toys these days is Twitter.com.

But the question I get from other entrepreneurs and business owners is, “why”? Why bother with social media tools like Twitter in the first place?

Well, today I came across a good business reason for using Twitter. full discussion

Posted in Sales & Marketing, Technology

How should we reconcile our tendency to seek the advice of experts with our desire to also question the status quo and try things differently? As creative professionals, we cannot become imprisoned by the past, but we must also not be stubborn and spend our time reinventing the wheel.

There is a somewhat healthy tendency in every discipline to defer to the knowledge of elders. Starting with the original “apprenticeship” structures of the 19th century to the traditional corporate hierarchies that permeate our life today, societies are built on collective wisdom from the past. Major conferences around the world gather industry “experts” to share their wisdom. We painstakingly listen to our elders’ projections as if they were coming from an oracle. full discussion

Posted in Planning & Strategy

For a number of years the price of technology to run our businesses has been dropping quite dramatically. Let me give you three general examples:

- Computer hardware — Computers far more powerful than the one with the Pentium I chip that cost me $2,500 a number of years ago, now sell for a little over $500. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices of personal computer equipment have dropped 10% to 28% each year since 2000.

- Telecommunications — The prices of making phone calls are much cheaper, too. VOIP providers now offer unlimited calling plans within the U.S. and Canada for affordable flat monthly rates. Competition from non-traditional providers, including cable companies and eBay’s almost-free Skype service, has pressured the established telecom companies like AT&T to come out with bundled services to give the VOIP and cable companies a serious run for the money, especially in big metropolitan markets. Small businesses are beneficiaries of all this competition, in the form of lower prices.

- Software – Prices for business software also have come down in price, dropping 3% to 9% each year since 2000. And that doesn’t even tell the full story. You now can find free alternatives on the market in many business productivity categories, thanks to the open source movement. Software-as-a-service options also make powerful software available at hard-to-believe low monthly prices. And as competition heats up in some segments, some vendors such as Intuit are giving away introductory versions of their feature-rich proprietary software for free, to snag you as a loyal customer with the hope of some day in the future “upselling” you to a higher level package as your needs increase.

So what’s all this talk about inflation rearing its ugly little head? full discussion

Posted in Money Management, Technology

While I was plotting my next post about how to make your site more conversational, a reporter from Businessweek rang, asking for my thoughts on how smaller companies might leverage search, and in particular, what I thought about the practice of “reputation management.” He ended up running our conversation as an interview, which you can find here. Some tidbits:

For a small company, to what extent does your first page of Google results define your company or your brand?

It’s all relative to each business and the category they’re in, but I think it can be said that a significant amount of the encounters that any potential customer or current customer has with your brand has very little to do with you getting them to think about you, but rather them coming across you through one way or another via search.… Whatever the results are is what they’ll think of you, and whether or not that’s fair is kind of beside the point. It’s just true…

full discussion

Posted in Planning & Strategy, Sales & Marketing, Technology

We all have a love-hate relationship with meetings. While some of the greatest ideas and solutions come up in brainstorm meetings, we also lose most of our time in discussion without action. Ideally, meetings lead to realizations that result as action steps assigned to individuals with deadlines. Realistically, most meetings are fruitless.

As we measure the value of meetings, we must realize just how costly it is to interrupt the workflow of each team member, literally stop all progress, and consume all brainpower with one topic. Clearly, meetings must be planned sparingly. But most teams plan meetings as liberally as they buy coffee.

Behance has come across a few habits of especially productive creative teams (from across industries) that we should all consider in our day-to-day work. full discussion

Posted in productivity

Yesterday’s startups starting on a shoestring might have considered subletting a small suite of offices, getting some second-hand furniture, hiring a part-time secretary and receptionist, and outfitting the office with a couple of computers, a network, a fax machine, a copier and a phone system.  Oh, and don’t forget making a trip to the office supply store to buy lots of stuff to write on or with.  And definitely don’t forget the coffee machine and other paraphernalia of an office.

But things have changed.  full discussion

Posted in Leadership, Money Management, Planning & Strategy