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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.

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Saturday, April 16, 2005

Rethinking Skype Conference Call Scenario

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 12:25 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Business & Finance, Collaboration, Technology

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Meetup.com Cuts Freebies, Charges $230/year

We have some news to share that we don't think you're going to like. There's no point in dancing around it so here it is. Starting May 1st, every Meetup Group will have to pay a monthly fee. Read on for the details.

How much? If your group starts paying in April, the charge is $9/month for the rest of the year. (If you wait until May 1st it goes up to $19/month). The substantial discount (more than 50%) is a "thank you" for being one of the first Meetup Groups.

Nine dollars?! To some, $9 every month may sound like a lot for an Organizer to pay, but remember, it's a group fee, not per person. If the Organizer splits the cost among the members who show up each month, it's probably $1 - $2 per person.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 8:35 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Business & Finance, Collaboration, Strategy

Monday, April 4, 2005

Teaching Entrepreneurial Skills

Earlier today I wrote about Dave Pollard’s essay on complexity and corporate dysfunction. I closed with the observation that while we need to find ways to sustain ourselves, entrepreneurial skills do not exist widely in our society – partly the result of apathy and partly the result of 100 years of The Organization Man. Shortly thereafter Pollard’s latest essay on teaching entrepreneurial skills came through my aggregator:

Meeting the Acute Need for Entrepreneurial Skills

The Idea: The New Economy will have an explosive need for critical entrepreneurial skills. Universities are not equipped or inclined to provide them. You can't learn them just by reading a book. We need to create a whole new 'channel' for entrepreneurial education. Here's how it might work.

[…] Here's the process I have suggested to several universities.

• Each 'session' would have as its theme one of the critical entrepreneurial skills in the mindmap above.
• Students would be given a set of pre-reading consisting of both theory and stories about great entrepreneurial successes and failures in applying this critical skill.
• Each session would be held, live, at the premises of a different entrepreneurial business, one with exemplary success at applying this critical skill.
• There would be no lecture. The session would consist of (a) a tour of the premises, (b) a brief story told by the CEO of the history of the company and how they'd learned to apply the critical skill, and (c) a Q&A session where the students would ask questions of the CEO. The course facilitator would jump in with answers and clarifications based on what other entrepreneurs had done. No 'large corporation' examples would be used.
• There would be no examination. At 'mid-term', the entrepreneurs who host the sessions would collectively grade the Business Plans prepared and presented by the students in one long Saturday session. The 'final' pass or fail would be based solely on whether the businesses proposed in the students' Business Plans had been successfully launched or not.
• Students would have access to 'coaches' on an ongoing basis. These could include existing entrepreneurs, course facilitators, legitimate entrepreneurial consultants […]

Dave goes on to highlight critical issues and barriers to success (an important one being the complete disinterest of the existing education bureaucracy), and issues a call to action to his readers to help flesh out a business model.

I’d love to see this work. I think it’s desperately needed. I’d volunteer as a beta customer. But I’m already entrepreneurial, and while people like me can certainly benefit from such a program I think it really needs to focus on those who think they can’t, or who never even consider they could, be entrepreneurs. There are countless thousands of people with useful, valuable skills that would love to make a living they enjoy but feel utterly overwhelmed at the prospect of going it alone. To them, entrepreneurship might as well be quantum physics.

Dave suggests getting to kids at the Jr. High/middle school level to get them used to the idea. Young people are far more risk tolerant than we older folks, and getting them connected to a strong entrepreneurial community early on is critical. Today most education systems still don’t teach basic checkbook balancing. And how can they? Kids don’t have any connection to a checkbook. They have no reality that says balancing a checkbook matters. Can we hook them into a system that engages, entertains, and educates at the same time? And if we can, can we do it in a way that starts them out creating a service or product that genuinely benefits their community?

I’m not talking about some charity event like selling cookies to fund a gym set, but something real, on-going, and meaningful.We need a program that engages boys and girls in equal numbers, builds something that, by the time they graduate high school, they can carry with them into the greater society. In the process maybe a lot of them will find they really like math or engineering or science or something and go onto university to specialize. But the rest would be useful and capable of something more than McJobs.

Adults are a different matter. The barriers here are apathy, fear, and risk aversion. Women are especially at risk of this once they’ve taken the “family track”. So I see a real need to get people excited about the possibilities, convinced they can do something more than mope around about their poor circumstances, and motivated enough to get up and try. To do that we need to take a lesson from the infomercial scam artists and find the catch phrase, the tag line, the simplistic metaphor that resonates with the fearful and makes them stand up from the sofa and say, “Yes! I can do that too!” But we can’t be too evangelical or we’ll be tagged with the same smarmy visage as televangelists. Can’t have that.

My point is that before we get to Dave’s vision of teaching we have to find a way to reach and excite all the potential students who really need it. Any ideas? 

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 7:31 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Business & Finance, Learning, Strategy

Economics in One Lesson

Henry Hazlitt’s 1946 classic on economics, Economics in One Lesson, is now available online. Excellent. It’s probably the best economic primer around and something I encourage everyone to read. It addresses economic principals and consequences in everyday terms anyone can understand. Next to Hazlitt I like Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics – not as quick to read but close, and very thorough.

Economics In One Lesson Online

Lynne Kiesling: Henry Hazlitt's seminal text Economics in One Lesson is now fully available online. It's a clear, straightforward articulation of basic economic principles. Thanks to the Foundation for Economic Education for doing so, and to Mahalanobis for the tip....

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 4:41 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Books, Business & Finance

Complexity Underlies Evolution of Corporations As Social Pathogens

In a recent essay on how the complex evolution of corporations and society underlies many of today’s social ills, Dave Pollard (who writes prolifically on such matters) explores how we got to where we are. He offers us context for why this evolutionary tale matters and, most importantly, insight into what we can, and cannot, do about it. This is a top-flight essay, worthy of the 10–15 minutes needed to read it, and important for anyone who has railed against corporate power and abuse.

I don’t want to offer any incentive to skip reading it, but I will highlight some points I think are important (but which do not do the essay justice):

• Corporations were designed to fill a need for risk spreading and capital accumulation. They served this purpose well.
• Unintended consequences accrued to this mechanism and substantially altered what corporations could, and would, affect. Corporations began to disintermediate labor from profit and instill a class system based on ownership.
• There have been numerous acts – by left and right, labor and management, government and civilians, individuals and groups – that have given rise to the corporate entity we have today, an immortal, amoral personage with rights and power that exceed the bounds of nation-states and operate without regard to long-term consequences.
• This all occurred without conspiracy, without a grand plan, without evil intent and in full view of general society.

To these Pollard adds one of his main points:

How Corporations Became Culturally Dysfunctional and Why Simple Solutions Won't Fix Them

[...] In other words, cultural evolution is a complex system, and to the extent it gives rise to dysfunctional entities like the modern corporation we cannot expect simplistic solutions (e.g. "rein in corporate power" and "put people before profit"), as desirable as such solutions may look in theory, to work in the real world. The reason they won't work is not because 'they' have all the money and power, it's because we, the workers, as integral parts of the evolution that has given rise (usually peacefully, with the worker massacres of the robber barons and Great Depression riots being notable exceptions) to the emergence of the modern corporation, are complicit in that evolution. It couldn't have happened without us. [...]

Pollard highlights the role we, as players in the cultural game, have in this complex system but there is an important, intertwining detail we should add. The division between labor and shareholder is not nearly so clear, nor the cause-and-effect so obvious, as we might think. Today’s baby-boomer generation is more closely tied to corporate success than any in history. Beyond simple employment, the 401k and IRA retirement plans of many are fully invested in corporate shares through managed mutual funds. Even as they lament the disastrous impact of corporate practices, many are wholly dependent on these same corporations for their future. This Boston Sun article gives some insight into just how deep this runs:

• Mutual funds reached a record $8.12 trillion in February, the Investment Company Institute, a trade group, reported last week. Money in funds that include stocks made up more than half of that, topping $4.9 trillion.
• The growing popularity of 401(k) plans and IRAs has fueled much of the industry's rise in the past two decades. It took more than 65 years for mutual funds to garner $1 trillion in assets and less than 15 years - from 1990 until now - to add another $7 trillion.
• But while American households have taken money out of company stocks, cash has steadily flowed into mutual funds. Households withdrew $447 billion from corporate equities in 2000, when Internet companies led an overall market decline. The hemorrhaging slowed and then picked up to $275 billion in 2004, according to the Federal Reserve.
• Meanwhile, households put $280 billion into mutual funds last year, the Fed reported. In February, the industry's trade group said $22.4 billion went into stock funds, and hybrid funds attracted $4.3 billion.

Why? The same cultural evolution that has granted such corporate success has given us equally massive failed social programs. No one in my age group (save for the mentally infirm) believes Social Security will provide them with anything more than a subsistence-level retirement (if that), regardless of the changes, reforms, re-fundings, etc. that the bureaucrats and the AARP work out. Those younger than me – at least those who think about such things – fear being taxed into oblivion just to support old people. I don’t wish to debate this, the point is these beliefs exist in numbers substantial enough to forestall any significant change in the status quo for years, if ever. There is not a single reliable estimate of Social Security’s future as all the scenarios presume that, at some point, Congress will leave the program alone. Such a presumption is pure folly.

While Pollard indicates that corporate pathology has risen around us, I believe we have more actively fed it and continue to do so. The baby boomers will continue to fight for the status quo because they are faced with two ill-fated extremes – placing their future in the hands of dysfunctional corporations, or dysfunctional government. It’s not pretty. As Pollard says:

[…] Complex systems, we learn from history, cannot be changed quickly or simply. The anti-corporatist, anti-globalization movement has demonstrated that. There is no panacea in legislation, new economy movements, or rioting in the streets. The effects of complex systems are not simply 'problems' that can be 'solved'. Only if and when enough of us, as individual actors in this system, change our behaviours in such a way that collectively we begin to change the dynamics of the system, will those changes ripple through to the way corporations behave and the impact they have on our lives and our well-being. Barring a crisis on the scale of the Great Depression, those individual behaviour changes are unlikely to come soon, to be coordinated or even to be subject to coordinated effort. The end of slavery and the emancipation of women and the approval of the Kyoto Accord (and, as I described in yesterday's post, the end of capital punishment in Europe and Canada but not in the US) were the emergents of millions of unpredictable and individual changes in perception brought about by millions of individual events.

[…] You just have to let go of the illusion that anyone is (or even could be) in control and enjoy the ride. If you'll pardon the mixed metaphor, when we reach the tipping point, the earth will move. The bad news is that it's futile to try to speed up the process. […]

I agree, we just have to do what we can – forage for ourselves in new ways, try to disengage from both the corporate and the government teat, look for ways to genuinely sustain those around us and our communities with services, businesses, and offerings that make sense. But it’s not easy. Being entrepreneurial hasn’t been a general-purpose skill since we settled the western frontier 150 years ago.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 12:23 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Business & Finance, Strategy

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