Innovation

There are tough times ahead for us entrepreneurs and small business owners. The economy has hit many of us hard, and we’re going to have to work to get out of this hole. That’s all the bad news.

The good news is . . . we can do it, if we do it now!

Now is the time to innovate and create and produce a real plan of attack to succeed. Now is the time to sit down and be creative about how to push your business forward without a marketing budget. Now is the time to think creatively about how you can get your company noticed, or get more sales, or more leads, with a new type of marketing campaign or idea.

The point is, now is the time to do this. Your competitors will probably cut jobs, and cut marketing and cut something else. Now is the time for you to eat their lunch by making aggressive steps forward while they cut, cut, cut!

Do it now.

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Jim Kukral, The Business Web Coach, is an award-winning blogger, speaker and successful web coach. For over 12-years, Jim has been helping both small businesses and Fortune 500 clients find success online.

Just a quick note to say that I’ll be at the upcoming New York Times Small Business Summit on November 17, 2008 .

The agenda looks great. The day features two keynotes: Gary Hirshberg, CEO of Stoneyfield Farm, and Liz Lange, Founder of Liz Lange Maternity. Then there are breakout sessions covering: strategies for growth in a tough economy, empowering your team, and the new marketing landscape. You can wander through the vendor fair and check out offerings to help you run your business. There will be speed networking, too, which is always fun and worthwhile. And a cocktail reception for more relaxed networking caps the day.

I hope you will stop in and say “hi” — I’ll be in the American Express OPEN Advice Center. I’ll be there to answer your questions. Anything you want to know about, anything you think I might be able to help with, I will be happy to try to assist you.

I understand they are setting me up with a plasma screen hooked to my laptop, so that we can talk about social media sites, for instance. Be happy to show you some of the neat little tricks I’ve learned about how to use social media sites for low-cost marketing without having social media take over your life.

When: November 17, 2008 from 8:30 AM to 6:30 PM

Where: Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers, 811 7th Avenue (at the corner of 53rd Street), New York, NY 10019

Find out more: Visit the New York Times Small Business Summit website.

Hope to see you there!

We say that, don’t we? Smug and cocky: “I get it – it doesn’t take a brick wall . . .”

But there I was, in the bathroom of the Woman’s City Club in Akron, Ohio, washing my hands. I looked into the mirror and it hit me!

I must first confess that at 51, my mirror gazing moments are few and far between. I’m amazed to find wrinkles by my eyes. After all, I have kids. I yell more than I laugh! Where did the laugh lines come from?

But on this day, in the middle of a monthly Boardroom meeting led by Norma Rist, I had excused myself to use the restroom. I looked in the mirror and my reflection yelled:

“You idiot – your business model is all wrong for you. You should be going in a totally different direction!” read more

The current state of economic affairs cries out for leaders.

But, not necessarily for the anointed, elected or self-professed type. In fact, not even the hired and titled type.

Now more than ever you need to lead - not for fame and fortune though, but because of who you will need to become in order to do so. You see, taking the task to lead isn’t particularly noble or altruistic, done authentically, it’s a selfish objective accomplished through selfless actions.

People, and by that I might mean those in your family, church, school, association, product group or company, are hungry to connect with something authentic, and few things feel more authentic than leadership driven from a passion to become better and, in doing so, make those who follow better.

• True leadership is an inside job. It requires you to focus on yourself, on being the true yourself that connects to a higher purpose and then goes to work on purpose. By higher, I don’t necessarily mean spiritual or religious, I mean authentic - something that drives you past your fear, to a place where you make decisions about the actions you take for the good of the cause.
• True leadership requires that you live a story. Your higher cause, the thing that drives you to work on yourself, needs a simple manta. A story you tell yourself, and then others, and that is passed throughout the cause, likely becoming on it’s own something larger than you first created. It’s the rallying cry for the troops.
• True leadership takes dogged determination. Oh, others will try to talk you out of lifting yourself up because you may ask them to raise their game, you might shine a light that allows other to shine as well, but you will encounter those who want you to stay in the dark with them. You may need to say “this is how we do it here” several thousand times before you believe it so thoroughly no one can doubt you.

But in the end, the lead you take is equal to the lead you make. (apologies to Lennon/McCartney)

John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach and author of Duct Tape Marketing.

It seems like a century ago now, but before the folks on Capitol Hill were yelling about financial markets and exotic investment instruments, they were yelling about skyrocketing energy costs.

Remember that?

One of the ideas that has been floated to help small businesses (and homeowners) reduce their energy costs as well as their carbon footprint is to install their own renewables-based energy systems. And, according
to a recently released report called “Freeing
the Grid 2008″ by the Network for New Energy Choices, many states have policies in place that provide incentives for them to do so.

These aren’t the standard tax-based incentives (although those exist at both the state and federal levels, too). Instead, state governments have laws on their books that combine permitting individual systems to connect to the grid with requiring energy companies to pay for electricity that is privately generated and fed back into the grid. “Freeing the Grid” rates all 50 states on their version of these policies. read more

“What matters is the humility that comes from writing it. What matters is the meta-cognition of thinking about what you’re going to say.” These were some of the inspiring words from author and top business blogger Seth Godin captured at the 2008 Inc.5000 conference for OPEN Forum’s Inside the Entrepreneurial Mind series. In the latest installment, New Perspectives on Business, Godin goes head to head with business expert Tom Peters, who said, “No single thing in the last 15 years professionally has been more important to my life than blogging.”

But they weren’t always so aligned when it came to the most important issues affecting business owners today. When asked which political party is better for small business, Godin stood firm in his belief that SBO’s should lead by example, “we need to act in a way we want the government to act, and vice versa.” Peters, on the other hand, drilled down to what he as a business owner is personally concerned with, “I kind of like it when the revenue exceeds the cost by a significant number” – a sentiment which clearly resonated with many of the SBO’s in the room who broke out in unbridled laughter.

For more insights from these experts: from the economic crisis to the importance of decency in business and from the You Tube phenomenon to thoughts on Generation X, visit New Perspectives on Business. read more

Great news! The lure of Wall Street and disproportionately paid finance executives is finally behind us. The current debacle presents an amazing opportunity to liberate America’s top talent from the great opportunity cost of being brave and starting something new. For the first time in decades, the most talented people might actually follow their true interests rather than the masses. Our economy will benefit in the long-term if we have the brightest minds taking the risks to make new and bold ideas happen.

Here are three reasons why I’m excited about the future:

(1) Bright minds will want to create value rather than move money.
Over the past decade, the smartest students I have known have sought a career in finance (my sample set are former classmates at Cornell University and Harvard Business School). Why? Because the classic story of the superstar banker or hedge fund manager making tens of millions of dollars per year was too salivating to pass up. The logic for ambitious, bright, over-achievers was: Get the best job in finance and have surefire success. Well, the migration of the brightest and most motivated minds to the world of finance – an industry based on moving money around and devoid of value-creation – made the notion of entrepreneurship and starting a small business seem sub-par. Suddenly, as Wall Street suffers, the brilliant minds are considering “something different.” The risk of pursuing a new idea or jumping into a friend’s start-up effort seems a little more tolerable or, dare we say, safe. read more

Scott Kirsner spent the last three years immersed in the movie industry in order to write a book called Inventing the Movies: Hollywood’s Epic Battle Between Innovation and the Status Quo, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs. He talked with directors like Francis Ford Coppola and James Cameron, editors, cinematographers, studio chiefs, producers, tech companies that sell technology into Hollywood, and even actors with an interest in new technology like Morgan Freeman. He discovered that Hollywood serves as a great case study for how any long-established, successful, and self-satisfied industry responds to new technologies and new ideas.

Even when a new idea seems to have obvious merit, and even when its inventor can make a strong case for it, 95 percent of the people involved in the industry fight the new idea with all their energy for as long as they possibly can until they realize it has the potential to grow their business in surprising ways. Case in point: within a decade of Hollywood’s fight against the Betamax video recorder, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, the studios were earning more from home video business than they were from ticket sales.

Here are five movies–all of which you’ve likely seen–that has an important back-story that innovators can learn from.

• Sometime technology needs to be just-good-enough, not perfect. The Jazz Singer will forever be remembered as Hollywood’s first talkie – even though it wasn’t among the first dozen to try to sync up the pictures on the screen with a soundtrack. But the technology that Warner Brothers banked on, developed at AT&T’s Bell Labs, was better than what came before it. It was just good enough to turn The Jazz Singer into a hit–especially combined with a performance from Al Jolson that practically leapt off the screen. The system still relied on phonograph records that could scratch. If the film broke and needed to be spliced back together, the entire movie would veer out of sync. The Warner Bros/AT&T technology was just good enough to start the sound revolution in Hollywood, though it didn’t endure for very long as a standard. Five years after The Jazz Singer, even Warner Bros. had switched over to a technology that more reliably linked the audio with the visuals.

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