Technology
InternetBy MartinZwilling
2 days ago
 People who can’t manage their own lives don’t make good entrepreneurs. Small businesses require multi-tasking, work prioritization, and decision-making, with no entourage of assistants and specialists. That’s why Fortune 500 executives usually don’t survive as startup CEOs.
First you have to learn to accept total responsibility for things that happen to your business, just like you are responsible for everything in your personal life. Maybe you are comfortable with having a spouse in control of your personal life, but couples running a business are high risk. If you recognize yourself in these clues below, you may not be fully managing yourself. These points represent real problems for entrepreneurs trying to manage a startup: - You often feel overwhelmed and out of control. There is always more to do than time to do it. Usually the stress people feel does not really come from having too much to do, but from having to make decisions on what to do first, and not setting reasonable targets.
- Starting many things, but completing few. Productivity is all about the ability to complete tasks. It requires tradeoffs and decisions, to declare that something is finished. Get in the habit of finishing what you start. Perfectionists need not apply.
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World AffairsBusiness & FinanceBy MartinZwilling
4 days ago
 Continuous innovation is required to survive in business, beginning with your startup, and increasing in importance as your business matures. Technologists often insist that new things can’t be invented on a schedule, but successful companies seem to be able to do it.
Many people have tried to define a process for innovation, but most are too abstract for me. Finally I found a book, “ Robert’s Rules of Innovation: A 10-Step Program for Corporate Survival,” by Robert F. Brands, which seems to be more concrete, and chronicles several decades of practical experience to solidify the ten steps:
- Inspire. The first and most important step is to identify a leader who can inspire and drive the process. In a startup, that needs to be the founder or CEO, and that person has to be regularly and personally involved. This is an imperative.
- No risk, no innovation. Not every idea can, or will, be a winner. Without risk, there can be no innovation. Innovation teams perform best when they trust that failure will not result in punitive measures. Fear of failure can kill innovation.
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World AffairsBusiness & FinanceBy MartinZwilling
7 days ago
 By Ernst Gemassmer
Most of us have travelled abroad and experienced challenges and frustrations of getting what we want without being laughed at or insulting our hosts. Similar issues prevail when doing business in other countries, cultures and languages.
With the advent of the Internet, it’s easy to think of the world as one locale for your business. The opportunity is large, as I related in an earlier article, but there are some major challenges as well. As a follow-on to that article, here are a few examples from my personal experience:
- You need to translate/localize your products. I was once asked by a division manager of a major software company why we were not selling more products in Finland. I informed him that we needed to translate the software into Finish at a cost of $50,000.
He did not seem to understand that Finland was not part of Scandinavia and that English is not too well understood by most people there (with the exception of the Swedish speaking minority in Finland). Thus, we did not translate the product and sales remained at an insignificant level.
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TechnologyInternetBy MartinZwilling
9 days ago
 Starting a business is a lot like starting a marriage. At first, all parties are in dreamland, with a vision of changing the world, having lots of fun, and raking in the profits. But all too soon, reality sets in. Product development is stuck at that 90% mark, a key person leaves, and customers are talking but not buying.
In his book Reality Check, Guy Kawasaki summarizes some of the key issues. I’ve seen them too often, and they seem to be the same for every company (and every marriage) no matter how great the team is. I challenge any startup to show me they have avoided all of these:
- One of the founders isn’t delivering. Maybe he was the only guy around who could design the product you envisioned, but delivering a scalable, quality product is another story. Besides, he is now more interested in designing the next product.
- The product is behind schedule. When I was a software development manager, I tried to get a “bottoms up” time estimate from the team, and then pad it by 50%. Invariably we were in crisis mode by delivery time, and the common complaint was that “management” always forced unrealistic schedules on developers.
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TechnologyInternetBy MartinZwilling
13 days ago
 By Ernst H. Gemassmer
We all intuitively believe in maintaining personal and business contacts, but most of us don’t do well in this area, despite the advent of social networking. I’d like to share my personal experience with you, to prove my point.
My professional life started with a BS in Chemistry, an MA in International Relations and a Master of Business Administration. This clearly represents a good education with numerous contacts around the world.
Personally I got married, had three children and eventually divorced. Over the years we had lived in different parts of the US and abroad, meeting all the usual challenges of raising kids, changing jobs, buying and selling houses and trying to stay fit. I was totally focused on family and jobs. This was often challenging since a significant amount of my time was spent on business trips around the world, getting ready to participate actively in the emerging global economy.
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World AffairsBusiness & FinanceBy MartinZwilling
2 weeks ago
 Where did this pervasive sense of entitlement in our culture come from? I’ve written about this before, but I keep hearing top business executives proclaiming an entitlement to huge bonuses while failing, startups feeling entitled to venture funding without a good business plan, and regular people crying for their entitled home ownership, pension, and health care.
As a society, we seem to think we've evolved to the point where we can fashion a large portion of existence according to how we wish it to be. We notice what we like and what we dislike, so we work to make society match our dreams. Somehow, these dreams and wishes have morphed in many people’s mind to an entitlement.
In business, entitlement is evident when employees treat customers with indifference, or feel they are entitled to their job by merely “showing up for work.” Here are some examples of people rationalizing their entitlements, especially when the fantasy serves to owe them money or power:
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TechnologyInternetBy MartinZwilling
2 weeks ago
 A “downer” is defined here as someone who seems to dwell on the negatives of every business challenge, and loves to highlight bad news or potential problems. No matter how smart or experienced this person may otherwise be, things must change or they will kill your startup.
I’m not talking about someone who has an occasional bad day, but rather people who when asked, “How are things?” will proceed to give you a 20-minute dissertation on their latest health symptoms, the latest company problem, and the sad state of the world in general.
This brings down the mood of everyone around them, and often leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. We all know this kind of person, but they never seem to recognize themselves. So here are a few clues that you can look for in yourself, to see if you slipping into this abyss:
- “It’s just another long day at work.” You can’t remember the last time you were positively excited by something you did at work, or even in your personal life. Your brain has leveled all events and activities into a desert of sand dunes, where just getting from one to another is a struggle, and there is nothing new to see over the next hill.
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