“What if the problem is the inability to listen and the urge to react without thinking it through? Sometimes I think that’s why we are going downhill.”

Thank you James, good insights and I agree with you.  I don’t think I can find many who will argue that the school system stopped teaching critical and analytical thinking as well as listening a long time ago so the problem is not recent.

But the sales process is designed to handle this.  Given that the basic sales dance consists of:

1 - Introduction - establish credibly and trust

2 - Define the problem you are addressing to get everyone clear on the terms and on the same page

3 - Present a solution that has value to the customer, explain that value proposition, answer clarifying questions

4 - Do a ground clearing Close (push the customer to a start making choices).

5 - Objections - Listen to the objections from the customer, go back to #2 with a modified presentation. Loop through #2 through #5 until until there is either a close, you progress to the next Gate Keeper, you agree to meet again with more data, or they carry your broken body out the door.

Built into this process is the ability to handle James’ issues if you instead have ‘the ability to listen and the personal power to think it through” (thanks James).

This means you must be clever and devious in many ways.  It all falls on the salesman’s brain, dummies don’t sell well.  In fact sales is one of the highest mental arts there is.  All that stuff about rocket scientists, mathematician, etc. is a load of snow (I know, I am one).  They don’t require 1/10 the mental effort as does a good salesman.  In science you have years to figure out the truth of a matter - in sales you have only minutes, maybe only seconds to figure it out, make a plan, and act on that plan.  I find sales infinitely more fun and exhilarating than sitting my office working on epiphanies, which goes to the heart of the matter - nothing ever happens until a  sale is made!

Great ideas happen all the time (and most have little or no value), great closes are as rare as flowers in a snowstorm and even more valuable because they make the world work.

After 2 and half hours and miles of water on a nice sunny day you can win or lose by an inch, which in that sense is no different that a foot, a yard, a furlong, or a league; you lose and that’s it. It means that every second of the race is critical and any mistakes can be fatal in terms of getting to the finish line first. Because we all make mistakes the general rule is that the guy who makes the fewest mistakes that day wins. Sure you can be second, or third, and still get iron (a trophy at the end of the event), but, well, you understand. Oh yea, there’s nothing for fourth place.

I depend on a team, skill and communication are critical, mistakes happen and they suck, there is no time off, once you cross the start line you are in the on mode for every second until you cross the finish. Let your attention drift on for a minute and you pay the bill.

Martin Luther King used to talk about keeping your eye on the prize, don’t get distracted or diverted, always focus on why you are there.

Does that sound anything like business?

Welcome to shared realities.

What do you do when your product cost $40k+, can you make that free too?

In some cases, yes. I made us one of those cases so we did it.  We give the hardware free at our dealers. Oh, and by the way, I make more income this way than I ever could selling it. In fact I raised the price to make sure no one buys it so they have to go the free route.

Confused, OK, mine is a special case. I have a product that renders a billable service.  Too expensive to sell easily and without a major marketing effort.

It dawned on me that since the word DISCOUNT sucks when you are on the selling side of the equation that the opposite of MSRP had to be FREE.   I simply said, let me put  it into your place for nothing and let’s split the revenues it generates.  You never buy it, I always own it, you sell the service, and collect the money which we split. Simple, not necessarily a new idea, but one I had never tried. All my life I have sold products as in it becomes yours and you do with it what you want, with it.  I go on to fine a new customer,

Anyway, some folks call it the ATM or Vending machine model.

It is great new world for me.  Now your customer is my customer too because we both get money from them. Turns out there are other benefits too. I now get to see inside a bunch of different ‘retailers” and since it’s in my best interest for the retailer to be very very good at selling and delivering our now shared service, and because of this relationship I have a say in how they do it (if they don’t do well I can take my unit back and get someone else to make money with it), I can make them better even against their will, or perhaps awareness. I learn best practices by watching the good ones and make the poor one learn how to do it right, they have no choice, they make great money with me and that is the glue. If ego gets in the way, if they are dorks, if they are screwing up the market, whatever it is that makes them a poor performer or a pain, I can now fix or flee but I don’t have to suffer. And the revenue flows literally forever.

So I say “Thank You to FREE”, it works in ways I had never imagined.

That’s why we must always learn and adapt.

There is an old tome that goes ‘feed the winners, starve the losers (the idea behind commission sales). If you can figure out a way to scale the salesman’s volume then there is no problem then you get the best of all worlds. But typically scaling sales requires time and time is a fixed resource. 60 to 80 hours a week means that the salesman has no life left, eventually this will cause them to move on and you will have a giant hole to try to fill.

Raise the reward for what you get to get more (efficiency)? The fact is that there is only so much margin in a product. Add to this the problem is that management’s ego can only handle so much difference in pay, when the managed guy makes a lot more than the manager a whole new set of problems occur.

So how to you as a manager scale sales people?

Offer enough reward and they will put up with you?

Do that silly team training and motivation thing? Makes you as a manager feel good, but wastes their time, after all salesmen are hunters of other men’s souls in a way, they do it alone, you bring them together for your benefit, not theirs.

So how do you scale?

Brutal answer is you fire people to do it, you filter, get rid of the losers, try and try again to find winners. I call it voluntary turnover, you volunteer to turn over the poor ones to get good ones. What is makes it all harder is rarely can you tell what a salesman can do from his past record. He may have been good at the last place he worked but that says little about your place, it only suggests, it doesn’t guarantee. You have to be ready to turn them as fast as you get them until you hit gold. Hard but real.

Can you scale sales this way? Two answers, only without competition is one, the other is that Marketing does the closing so Marketing becomes the salesman. Remember, clerks don’t take business away from others, salesmen do.

So in the competitive environment of the 21^st Century how do you scale? Differentiation in the offering, Value Proposition, pricing, messaging or the like? Some or all of that works for a while but unless the completion is brain-dead it is only a short-term solution. The fact is that you need two things, differentiation to kick start and closers to take business away from someone else and finish. Both say that you will always moving, changing what you have to offer and taking someone else’s customer to offer it to. In essence, doing and seeking.

That’s why I call it foraging. How long do think mankind has been foraging for the next meal?  Have we figured it out yet?

*If you have never listened to the FireSign Theater of 40 years ago you are spending time learning what the past could have thought you about today, Their deadly accurate prediction of the then future culture that we live in today has saved me a lot of time. It’s that old ‘I’ve seen this movie before’ forward looking hindsight that is one of the visions that let’s me cut to the chase and reality check with such ease.

Assuming that what I offer you has value to you, if I need to sell it to you and you won’t buy it, the need emotion overwhelms and generates desperation that stinks, you will smell it and dominate the situation thus control me.

If I want to sell you something and you won’t buy then I will likely go away, you will have to call me back thus we have parity, neither of us will dominate the situation and there is no control, just a transaction.

My friend’s need for acceptance has swamped out his wants, try as he might, he is a victim when he should be a participant. No sale is made.

Needs are irrational, wants aren’t.

Indifference is cold, thoughtful, analytic, and liberating. Without the personal emotional attributes of confidence one appears to be confident in action yet free to be highly perceptive of the reality of a situation and thus its master. Confidence is a projection, frequently competitive in nature. Indifference to confidence is the root of power over a situation. Ever watch to confident sales people with opposing views clash, one must win by overpowering the other. Confidence and indifference is like a jujitsu match, the indifferent party takes the confident one’s energy and uses it to convert thoughts. Let me remind you that the assumption here is that both parties want to win and that is defined as one changing the other mind. Both are equally driven, both have the same goal.

Let me remind you that the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. Love and hate are both passions, both emotions which blind the user. If you are indifferent to the passions they are easy to manipulate and dominate. If you are indifferent to the passions then they are easy to embrace with control and become part of the tool box that makes you flexible to the situation. This kind of truth lets you use passions as needed without your own passions getting in the way. This kind of knowledge mixed with action is real power, which is what is really about to make a sale.

Does this sound strange; I hope you think so, because the point of this wordjive was to make you think about it.

Welcome to Hard Times, not a town in a Henry Fonda Western but your front door. Everyone wants a discount, times are tough, they are special, everyone knows that you make too much anyway.

Your salesman are weakening, they don’t have a clue about selling the value of the product or service even though they read all the books, watch the CDs and you bring in ‘Experts” to prop them up.

I always felt that in general there are three weak spots in sales people that no one wants to deal with:

First, your salesmen are nice people. To be blunt you don’t necessarily want nice people, you want people who can be nice. You want people who have an almost vicious determination to get the sale at the terms they want; nice is one of the many tools they use to do. A good high-value closer is, just below the surface, well, not a nice person. That is cool, most of us deep inside know we may not be the nicest folks in that what we will do to someone else’s head to achieve our goal has limited bounds.

Was that a distasteful thought we just went through, feel that I am being insensitive and maybe even hurtful in what I advocate. If so you really don’t want to go any further with me in the realities I will be exploring in this series, go find a more sunshiny blog to read, one about kittens and puppies perhaps.

Second, your salesmen don’t have the faith. They don’t have the faith that they can close the deal the way you want them to. The suffer from the ‘Stockholm Syndrome”, they sympathize with the customer and surrendered their own will. Lacking willpower means no Force-Of-Will. It is Force-Of-Will that keeps the good salesman working on the customers head until the customer believes the value proposition that justifies the cost of the product. The good salesman instills faith about him, the company, and the products in the customer’s mind. Only then is the value of the product or service well enough established that the discount is not the winning issue, faith drives the discount aside. It’s called a Value Proposition for a darn good reason.

Third, is Cohunes – Brass Balls. Some look at this as a lack of pride, the willingness to interact with people to n-th degree with a sole purpose. Don’t confuse this with Force-Of-Will, there is a fine and important difference. Force-Of-Will is about drive, Cohunes is about welding that Willpower without being bothered what people think of you. It is about using that drive, which is beyond having it.

Point of it all is that good sales people are animals inside, mental animals with few external signs of what is really going on inside themselves. True stealth creatures, how cool!

Let’s talk about salesmen for a bit.

First thought. It is said with confidence that 45% of salesmen don’t close. Personally I think this number is low, but I will run with the convention for this Blog.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t bring home the order, it simply means that in most cases they take the order, not develop it, THEY DON’T CLOSE! They function as clerks, not sales people, but of course they claim all the credit. In fact they will claim more credit for the sale because they know their weakness and will lie to cover it.

Because we managers are only interested in results we generally don’t seek to understand the difference. The problem is that this means we are out of control, our salesman’s performance is capricious, based on luck and Marketing in many ways. Is this bad? After all, we got the sale.

It is terrible for several reasons:

1 – We don’t know which of our efforts (marketing or sales) made the event happen, so where do we pour our limited resources, more marketing or more commissions?

2 – We loose predictability, the data about our sales pipeline is false or weak at best. If the salesman is really clerking then he in fact is doing three things.

A – Operating in the blind, most likely deceiving himself in the process.

B – Deceiving us, in essence selling us, most likely lying to us.

C – Not developing the customer meaning that customer retention is going to be harder and we are not getting maximum yield for that customer.

This lack of clear vision means that the actual effectiveness of our Marketing is not really understood, without this feedback Marketing cannot better tune itself, understand the success of that they are doing, get better at it.

Most important, we have a B or C player working for us in a time when A-players are on the market. If we understood the truth we could replace him with an A-player thus future-proof our company by increasing our overall quality of the process, moral, and power of our selling force.

I hope you like your clerks.

Hi there, I have been off-line for about two months doing the 10 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week thing bringing life to a bootstrap start-up I started, fitting the family in has left no time to think or write about anything not related to product development and then sales of my stuff. But this is not about me; it’s about customers and sales.

My product caters to the contemporary Carriage Trade. What’s that you say (I heard that you know, these blogs are two-way . . . sometimes, depends on if I a listening, and I have selective hearing)? Carriage Trade refers to the retailers of old who had no front door; you could only get in by having your carriage enter through a portal to a vestibule. That’s class-

Prices are very high, margins are, well, GREAT. But it is an emotional sale that deals with vanity. The point is that after all this work anyone in my company that even mentions the word ‘discount’ is looking for a pink slip. A killer value prop, and oh yea, we don’t even advertise and sales are, well, justifying it all.

High price, niche market with almost universal appeal, lots of pull. How do you do it?

First of all most other entrepreneurs I run across are thinking in old (10 years ago, how long is that . . . let me tell you, a long f**king time ago!) models, too much internet, failure to really understand the tribal approach, lousy sensitivity to customers, too much sensitivity to people like themselves thinking they are the customer, incremental product, and most fundamentally little or no transformational qualities (see Pine and Gillmore, it’s all about the leading edge of the new-old economy).

Thus you now have all the clues to figure it out. Am I going to tell you how to think to find your own version of my path.

Hell No!

I can’t. Like the old crazy Werner Erhard dude said, even if I tell you, you won’t get IT. It’s not intellectual, it’s emotional, you have to feel it, and there is no way that I tell you how to feel something, you learn to feel it by picking up the bread crumbs such as those I have dropped above, fill in the blank spaces, “feel the Force Luke”, your intuition will tell you. Then you do something entirely crazy, you take the leap, ignore all those SOBs that try to tell you what is right, commit, go crazy, and win the day.

Welcome to the new-old world. Go kick your bankers butt.

Adaos Amigos.

Barry the Curmudgeon

Thank you David Farragut, yes, forget the torpedoes, open up the throttle and kick your life into gear.

We may be looking at the great but final age of the Entrepreneur as we know it. I have a theory that I call the “moo-cow” society. It has nothing to do with politics, or economics, it has to do with society in general and the political/economic reality that drives. I see a world 40 years from now (2 generations that is) where we Type-A characters are, well, lets just say there are a lot fewer of us, and our “A-ism” has an entirely different focus. A society of forced equals where everybody has pretty much the same and conformal. We get a handle on poverty at the cost of the general wealth of the top-end and diversity at the cost of uniqueness. I see this not because of any social justice or morality issue, but simply because that’s the way you put 13 billion people on this planet without them all trying to kill each other. We practice a form of husbandry on the herd of mankind to get predictable and controllable results. Fortunately I will be dead because I find this repugnant, but this is only an opinion and oh, by the way, I am not asking you to believe my theory.

But if I am even close to right, for all this to happen, we really need to be the last generation of unconstrained go-getters. The entrepreneur way of life as we know it needs to change so as to be less unpredictable, less disruptive, less individual. The values in such a society will be aesthetic rather than material. Spiritualism, art and internal reflection will be the basis of the value system; I doubt the dollar, as we understand it now, will be in circulation

Now the political part. Our current new government is adjusting us to this new society. It doesn’t know that it is doing this because our political heroes are just seeking power in the old and ususal way, don’t think that far ahead regardless of what they say.

I tell you this not to get into an argument with you (don’t send me any emails with your opinions, they will go unread and unanswered). I tell you this so you will understand that this is the last great gasp of entrepreneurship as we now know it, 10 years from now it will be, well, different . . . and you won’t like it. So now is the time to make the push to follow your dream. About the time you succeed the rules will be changing in such a way as to assure that no one will be following you. It will be time to take the money and run.

I have always said that the entrepreneur state of mind is lonely; in the future it will be socially unacceptable too. So bask in the glow now, do your ‘thing’ and love it. Welcome to the new reality.

While I don’t do enough of it, every so often it is a good idea to take a short break and ponder who knows what? Here it is, midnight on Sunday evening, or is it Monday morning, and usually I would be in bed reading while the rest of the family slept. As usual I am reading three books at the concurrently, a cute Bob Heinlein novel called Job: a comedy of Justice, a collection of essays called Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think, and a neat little book on humor called Plato and a Platypus walk into a bar . . . . but tonight I am out on the porch looking at the lake lit by a full moon though broken clouds, wind blowing at a good 20 knots, a drink, a cigar, and my industrial strength cat Squeaky whom I sometimes refer to as ‘Squeakal-matter’ (like he cares). We are engaged in a year and a half long drought and is it supposed to rain tonight and oh joy, so far just some drizzle.

I have been working on fund raising for a business I started and was looking for a big chunk of change to get it going. I haven’t had much luck, the financial market has scared most folks, I am tired of the control freaks wanting 51%, VCs are out of the question, and on Thursday I fired my fundraiser. All he could find were people who ultimately wanted a piece of the action for finding someone else.

While I talk a lot about bootstrapping I haven’t done it in a while but a couple of days ago I finally said “F**k it, time to go back to my roots” and I devised a way to get going without playing the investor game. Gawd I feel better, this way I have some control over the process and will be dealing with the only people I really like, my customers. I put together a program, my two guys (COO and CMO) agreed, I got on the phone and found resources to make it happen, and we are off to the races. It’s about time I woke up and took my own advice, boy does it feel good! Trying to please investors can be a pain, their pompous attitude laced with fear stinks the room up. Trying to please customers is a joy, their honesty and happiness with getting a solution is a breath of spring air. As the singing lady Joni Mitchell said, “I’m a free man in Pairs, unfettered and alive!” Damn, it’s nice. It’s what Aristotle said is man’s essential property, his telos. Well the drinks done, the cigar is finished, the cat just squeaked at me that he is bored, and I feel great, time to write some literature.

When was the last time you felt like that?

“So what?” you might ask.  What does this do for you?

Well consider that you do it a couple of times. That word becomes an accepted data-point.   One way to look at it is brand recognition, you know that brand word.  Maybe you don’t know anything about it but you know the word, it is familiar and in that familiarity it becomes comfortable and perhaps non-threatening.  But it comes with a question.   What is it?

Remember the book/movie “The Manchurian Candidate”? A post hypnotic set of commands is activated with a single word.  Perhaps this is the reverse, a post-hypnotic curiosity is activated by the word.

So you cold-call the individual you sent the cards to and say the “word” in the introduction, the first words you get out before they hang the phone up.   Could this stop them from closing their mind?   Could this keep the door open long enough to get a second or third word in?  Could they be curious enough to ask what it all means?   Could you have a dialog as a result?  Could it lead to a sale?

One word.  What word would you choose?

A little while back I wrote that the real job of marketing is to make the potential customer unhappy with what they have.  I caught some interesting flack about that thought, got accused of being to simplistic naive, and crude.  So to torture those minds I would like to drop the other shoe. . . . good marketers are good Propagandists, the “P”-word in this age of political correctness and propriety.

Propaganda.  What a neat concept.  We use it all the time, daily in fact!  I like Jowett and O’Donnell’s definition.

“Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.”

Typically this is an emotional effort; after all, dissatisfaction has a lot of emotional content.  And yes, it is the overt manipulation of an individual or individuals.

Does that bother you?  If it does then you should take some time off and figure out why.  If you are comfortable with it then the real question is how can we get better at it?

The seeds of dissatisfaction, in essence fear, uncertainty, doubt (FUD) should be woven into every message and communication you make to your potential customer, and it should be done purely out of habit.  Happy people rarely change, and selling someone something is all about change.

Propaganda is not evil in and of itself.  Like all tools of mankind, it is the intended use that possess good or evil values (compare its use by Joseph Goebbels’ opposed to Billy Graham’s).  Your values are good if your product or service makes someone’s life better in some way.  Be proud of that.  Propaganda is a powerful tool, use it.

Forbes this month (Jan 2009 ) “The venture capital industry is staring at the most vicious shakeout in its  history . . . Returns are pathetic for most funds, [and] the public offering pipeline on which venture depends for its exit strategy is clamped shut.”

Bloomberg.com, “IPOs historically dry up at the end of a bear market and don’t begin to recover for months after a  rally as issuers and investors wait for signs of stability.”

During the last quarter, 38 companies withdrew or postponed their filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Bloomberg says “it may take until 2011 for the number of companies going public to return to their 2007 level, according to data compiled by the University of Florida. While the S&P 500 rose an average of 24 percent in the first year after a market plunge, the data show, it takes 34 months on average for underwriting to return to its rate at the start of a slowdown.”

Companies pursuing the traditional VC or investor routes are running into brick walls or valuations that are ridiculous

Yet this is one of the best times to start a business.

We are in a world rich with new technologies, applications of those technologies, services that can be based on those technologies, and perceptions based on those technologies that open unimaginable doors.

Even better, established businesses whose inertia, that is inability to change and adapt, and whose debt or commitment (financial, political, or social) are now untenable are thus going on the rocks and leaving unsatisfied customers with unfulfilled appetites looking for solutions.

This is possibly one of the best times in recent history to apply the bootstrap techniques creating your fortune.  I wish you well and in these stormy times expect to see good results for you on your journey down a good path, stick to it.

Happy New Year and New Era, Barry

It’s the end of the year and everything is supposed to change, reset, fire-up, get going . . .  you know, improve.  Doesn’t that happen every year?  Like the Nile flooding and rejuvenating Egypt, rebirth!

It is funny how easy it is to imagine time as big circle (couldn’t be something about planetary rotation could it?).  Well, I typically think of a year as a big loop with repeated energy patterns around it.  The ‘Holidays” is one such pattern or block of time that we have all traditionaly thought of a ’slow’ for everything but retrial.  It is symbolically the End. . .  and Start, of another turn on the helix, a continuing next loop through time.

There is always the calm before the storm, things are going to take off right after the New Year and there we go.  It was part of the cycle of life.

Well, the wheel hit a bump this year.  While the clock may be advancing the cycle isn’t.  It’s stuck, in fact it may be slipping backwards a bit in some places.

Fortunately a Bailout is going to get it going again (drum roll and high-hat hit).  But guess what?  That cycle can slip too (it’s part of the cycle now because it exists in our minds, more about that some later blog).

How can you plan ahead to be safe?  Can you foretell the future?

Well, yes . . . and then of course, no.  The probability of this calamity happening was very high, so it did happen and in that it was predictable.  Could you predict when and how?  Only if you believe in Issac Asimov stories.  Our whole system is so artificial that it floats by itself, but just every so often, because it is possible to do,  it does a bit of a reality check.  Welcome to that moment, it happened in your life-time, probability became reality.

Right now History isn’t working too well as a guild to the future so you are just going to have to fake it.

Please, oh Please, remember this.  The best, I mean the very best of the guys are supposed to and claim to be able to tell what will be going on tomorrow didn’t have a clue when it happened.  Don’t feel bad or guilty about being in the same place they are.  We, collectively as a culture, were wrapped in the warm cocoon of that special fabric, Disillusion and Denial(TM) , and loving it.

Now my friend is the time to move fast, maximize you agility, take action, and be cool

As Lord Byron said, “Adversity is the first path to truth.”

You can’t get on the path unless you engage the world

Copyright Barry W Thornton all rights reserved 2009

“Windows XP allowed to live again

Microsoft has given yet another reprieve to its seasoned Windows XP operating system.

But now Microsoft has put in place a scheme that will allow the hardware firms to get hold of XP licences until 30 May 2009.

Previously Microsoft extended XP’s life until 2010 - provided it was installed on netbooks and low-cost laptops.

Windows XP was originally due to disappear off shop shelves on 30 January 2008. It was to be removed so as to make way for Windows Vista which went on sale to consumers early in 2007.

Despite Microsoft’s claims that Vista has sold well, consumers have reacted badly to its release.

Microsoft granted the reprieve largely because of customer’s preference for XP.”

Never, ever, underestimate the power of the customer.  And never, ever, think you control the customer.

Last year I got smart and followed Bill Gates, we both left microsoft, he went on his way and I went to Ubuntu.

Oh my gawd!, look at my in-box. Given hard times everyone is trying to fill it. The spam level has exploded and I am getting bombarded with more promotions that ever. The result is of course I spend a bit more time killing this stuff and don’t look at any of it. These folks are getting desperate and the only solution to their very limited marketing imaginations is to turn up the throttle, which is increase, the volume of their customer communications. A simple answer, send more e-mails to your customers with more offers.

Does this really work? A Does it make sense?

Heck no!

I am so busy getting rid of junk communications from people I have done business with and expect to in the future that I don’t even read them anymore. I find myself hitting the UNSUBSCRIBE button more just out of spite for their stupidity.

I have my own stresses, don’t add yours to the pile. There must be a better way. And of course there is.

First, as the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy says, in friendly letters, DON’T PANIC!

This is the time to create stronger bonds, not alienate the customer. Here are some thoughts on how to do that.

1 – Don’t Broadcast Your Panic. It stinks. The customer can smell it and is repulsed, usually permanently. Control yourself, the big push isn’t going to save the day so get smart, stop and think . . don’t stampede with knee-jerk reactions. Calm down.

2 – It is all changing, the market and your customers. Define the change so you can adapt your approaches to fit it. In theory the ultimate skill of mankind is to adapt and evolve quickly so try to be a good functional human. This means the first thing is to find out the new rules. Take time to ask the customer what is going on and where they are going. Get feedback, answer questions, be useful and maintain those good relations you worked so hard to get.

3 - You are scared, they are scared, get above it even if you think the ship is sinking, get their input and project your wisdom. Be strong, not overbearing, show wisdom and strength. Become a bastion of hope, it’s what Obama did and worked for him, you still don’t hear a plan but the belief that one is coming keeps people tuned in and listening. Follow that path.

4 – Dialog with your customers. Engage them. Write content that encourages dialog, get their ideas and publish them to other customers. Timely, entertaining, relevant, hopeful content shows that you are on top of it, experts with strength. Listening shows you care, spreading the word, answer to questions and smart advise, all show that you are responsible, trustworthy, and concerned for them.

5 - If there ever was time to be social, this is it! Don’t run off into the ‘WEB.2” illusion, get real. Your customer’s have a desire to do well for others, figure out how you can get into that flow. If it is sales, give some of the cash flow to charity and make a point of it, it is really your customer who is helping out, make sure he knows it and can be proud that when the chips are down what is good for him (your stuff or service) is also good for the community. There a thousand variations on this, find one that works for you.

6 – If you have a local presence, partner with local companies to make an event. Simple things, take your internal expertise, your Financial, HR, Ops, Procurement, even Execs public. Set up a simple “ask the expert’ table top in a bookstore, supermarket, where ever, and offer up their experience and knowledge to those who want to learn or need knowledge. Take those dialogs, now questions from the common man, and use them as content for your email. Practical stuff that can get you newspaper and radio exposure as well as tell you customers you really care.

Use your imagination; push out with who you are, not just your “deals”. Build trust and show concern. It is cheap to do, just open your heart and show you have one.

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton all rights reseved

The other day I again ran across a major manager, in this case a CEO but this thought is not limited to the CEO class, who is a bully. I was reminded of something that Halibuton* said:

“A brave man is sometimes a desperado; but a bully is always a coward.”

When you meet and observe driven individuals that you will have to interact with it is important to learn early which kind you are dealing with. In business there is a strong lead and/or follow relationship issue in when two or more personalities work toward a transaction or common goal. Fundamental to the relationship is the issue of personal faith, that is in theory you both put faith in each other as an assumptive basis for the furtherance of your activity. It takes a brave person to deal with the truths frequently necessary to succeed, a bit of the desperado is not uncommon for part of the definition of desperado it to be bold enough to cast a fear aside, in this case to do what is right.

This is not the domain of the bully for he is a coward. The bully will use bluster to camouflage that character flaw, most commonly in the form of misleading you with their supposed fame. Bragging, name-dropping, innuendo, implying relationships, generally claiming what is not theirs are the tools they use and that you must watch out for.

As you build your business you are exercising bravery. For the faint of heart do not pick up the responsibility for their lives and the lives of others, they do not follow their dreams. They steal and claim dreams from others.

You will be besieged by bullies who will try to impress you with their skill, power, and virtue. This is always done with the intent of getting their hand into your pocket, to acquire your power and resources, and to leverage you in the launch on to their next victim.

This guy I met the other day reminded me that constant vigilance is the key to survival and success. Thus again, Andy Grove’s motto, “only the paranoid survive” comes home.

Have a prosperous New Year in these trying times.

Barry Thornton, a part-time follower of Socrates

*Thomas Haliburton (1796-1867) Scottish Humorist

Glitter is a distraction and mental occupier, it is rarely reality. I have found over the years that the more the lights blink, the more noise it makes, the more buzz and glitz produced . . . the less the profits and potential really exist.  By the time the lights are on you are late to the party.

We are creatures whose brains are based on the attention to change. For the couple of million years we evolved in being attentive to the snap of a twig or the flicker of a color in the tall grass was all that kept us alive. Fight or Flee is a core operating paradigm still in our brains. Ever wake up in the middle of the night because of a sound? Did you happen notice that your adrenaline was already flowing, the cognitive part of your brain, the consciousness, was the last part to come on line, you were already to take action when your eyes opened. You hear 300 to 3000 Hertz best because that is the frequency range of the sound braking twigs and rustling grass. You see more shades of yellow because living in tall yellow grass you had to see tiger stripes from dried grass in an instant. You are sensitive to change , it is the basis of our brains, all this thought stuff we do came much later in the brain’s development, in the last 1% of our evolution. Change is what our brains are all about.

Ever notice that one of the first questions out of most people’s mouths is “what’s new?”

We are driven by fads, the presentation of newness. We love it! Look at our response to hype. How about movies and music, the delivered product is typically a let down compared the promise of something new. What is greater than a new love?

I am not saying you should be cynical (which you should) but that this is the pattern of life, newness and change is attractive because we are wired for it (I am old enough to have seen bell-bottom become popular for the third time that I know of so I have to assume it happened many times before I became aware of them in the 60’s). Virtually everything has happened before but it is new to us the first time we experience it, thus it is exciting, it makes our brains perk up and focus, dream, and for a moment we are more alive than we have been in a while. The habituation sets in, we get used to it, it become normal and dull. Thus are we wired to think.

So what is the point for an entrepreneur you ask?

Simple, don’t fall for newness but use it to your advantage, and do so without shame. After all, it is life’s only consistent pattern besides death and taxes.

My last start-up (ClearCube Technology) was started in my garage, as we grew we moved into a rented apartment complex on the lake (it had a pool and gym, great view, water access, patio, etc. – all benefits for the employees). After that we moved into a strip mall office space and then we got a new CEO and it all changed. Suddenly our image required a big public space because our customers were Enterprise, Fortune 100 companies and we had to do the dog and pony show all the time.

Do we really need that now? We use a Contract Manufacturer for production and fulfillment so what are the real office needs? Who will come to our office other than people trying to sell us stuff? Who needs to be impressed and why?

None as far as I can see for the near future but let’s look at that closer.

How about the most important people, my customers? We do direct sales to Distributors, Doctors, and Patients. We can stage local events for the Distributors and the Doctors in a rented-by-the-hour presentation office space when needed. We have budgeted visits to them for everything from training to schmoozing, after all this is an Entertainment Economy so we do it right, rent a real stage.

How about Investors? No, if I can impress an investor with my office building and not my balance sheet then I am dealing with morons. They invested to make money, not to satisfy their ‘edifice complex’. As long as they understand that we will stage what we need when we need it (again, this is after all an Entertainment Economy), they have no reason to complain.

How about Employees? All my managers would rather work from home. They get more done without giving up over a hour a day to drive to work. More important I get people who would not relocate anyway. Communications – well we are Skype-nuts, I can see and talk with each on the computer at any time. Meetings can be done at my house or we can rent a space when needed. Skype is the water-cooler and the conference room. All have an equity stake and are motivated. If I hire intelligently most all the rest of the staff can also work at home and Skype to work. Jobs that fall below the independent worker level and require daily supervision can be outsourced as needed, they are so well defined that metrics alone can drive them. In general I get greater efficiency and happier folks. It is a new culture based on the Internet, why not take advantage of it?

How about my bottom line? No office overhead, no receptionist, no facilities person, Outsourcing IT is a gigantic help, office politics and social issues go away, time is used better, where do I stop?

How long can we do this? I think we can do this until fear sets in and we need organized waste for self-validation. I think I am too old for that, are you?

The idea was all this data collection and processing power, all the decision making software, data mining, analysis, and of course, automation and automated work flow stuff was going to tell us the future.  the problem is simply that it doesn’t work.  In fact, most of it exacerbated the problem.

Technology does make it happen faster, in the current case this means spin-in, out of control, but faster than if done by hand.

We have be awash in promises and claims that the great god of technology would make our business lives easier and better.  Business owners and managers could make better decisions and predict, thus control, the future with greater accuracy and in greater detail.

So we tanked with the help of the illusion provided by software that was to guide us.

The fundamental reasons for this are also simple; a L and the two Great D’s.

1 - Laziness - Thinking is hard, reacting is easy.  When we should have trusted common sense and critical thinking we chose the easy way, let someone (or something) tell us what to do.

2 - Denial - When the crap started hitting the fan we denied it.  We told ourselves it was only an anomaly, we ignored, in fact denied, the signs of what was going on.  We denied what our common sense should have screamed at us.

3 - Delusion - We deluded ourselves into thinking that it was not happening and what did would not happen to us.  It was the other guy’s problem.

Aren’t these a common and reoccurring set of issues.  Let George do it, in this case George was technology.

The lessons are simple.

1 -Technology doesn’t think, it doesn’t even react, it does execute . .  it can do that very fast.

2 - You can’t program common sense with Java or C+++.  Though I now do think that you can program greed in those languages.

3 - In general, EXPERTS SUCK.

4 - In the end, rational human thought and decision-making must prevail for us to succeed.

Nothing new here, that’s why we ignore it and chase the fairy dust.

Forget about the person in the way, he is a moron and lost. And you can’t tell a follower to lead, it is not in their DNA. Eh? Leadership and DNA? I question that because everyone is born a leader, but not necessarily obviously one but given the right conditions and guess what?.  Maybe it would be most accurate to say that leaders discover themselves over time. We all have leadership DNA in us, we are humans and it is part of the stuff we are made of. Most people don’t want to lead, which is simply denying a trait. It may be they never have an opportunity to lead, it may be that they don’t want to deal with the responsibility that always goes with it, or for some reason leading just doesn’t happen in their life cycle.

Leaders are rarely managers, managers usually follow. Once in while you get a combination of the two, I am not sure it is desirable in the large scheme of the things to have one person be both. I’ll tell you why. Leaders typically have an internalized goal that they drive to. This drive is almost spiritual, it is pure in nature and a combination of abstraction and solidity, but most of all it is non-negotiable. Such a presence inspires faith and thus motivates people far beyond what fear or greed can do.

The problem is that leading is non-negotiable. Getting things done requires negotiation, and that’s what managers do. You can lead to a goal so that people can manage to it. A leader responds in the moment to crises as they arise, never imagining they didn’t exist or wishing them away. And a leader never asks his followers to do something he or she wouldn’t do themselves. Most important is that they never give up, they endure.

A little too ‘John Wayne’ for you? Well it’s only the beginning of the traits you have to possess to take on that job. Let me offer that most CEOs I have met don’t have these characteristics. They are fair to good managers who acquired the job of Leader and let it go to their heads. Take a look at Morgan Stanley, Wachovia, or GM for a good starting reference point for the last sentence.

When you decide to take the reins and truly become the leader of your troops, you will bow to no one and you will finally be a truly free person. So get to it, onward into the fog.

————————————————————

The Ten Essentials Of Our Business

The Customer . . . .is the most important person in our business.

The Customer. . . . is the purpose of our work, not an an interruption to it.

The Customer . . . . is not dependent on us -  we are dependent on him

The Customer . . . . is part of our business, not and outsider.

The Customer . . . . is someone to work with - not against

The Customer . . . . does us a favor when he calls, we are not doing him a favor by serving him.

The Customer . . . . is deserving of the most courteous and attentive treatment we can give him.

The Customer . . . . is a person who brings us his wants, it is our job to fill those wants.

The Customer . . . . is a flesh and blood human being with feelings and emotions like our own, not a cold statistic.

The Customer . . . . is the person who makes it possible to pay our salaries

———————————————

Not much else to say compared to this.

I was at a lunch of an organization to find out about them and determine my interest in working to get on their Board. I like their premise and know I could help drive them to where they want to go. What I learned was that after 10 month of existence they still don’t know where that exactly is (they’re not a business but a non-profit). Those of you that know me, well, you know how I can be a pain-in-the-neck with my pressure to discover and my thruthaches and the like. So I was torturing the Board to push them to find out what they really want to be and no one understood what I was doing. I ask questions that sound like opinions to get a more profound answer and push people into self-discovery. While I am seeking knowledge they think I am telling them what to do, don’t worry, it is confusing but is style that leads from chaos to order (in a very Shakespearean way). Well, a person there and I had differing opinions and as you also know, I kneel to no one so I didn’t yield to this person’s sense of self-authority and importance.

Anyway, I was taking some heat from them and not responding in the desired fashion when the person in question whipped out the old line ’I know because of my education and my Ph.D!’ It was classic, I couldn’t have found a better line in movie. Surprise - I did conduct myself as a gentleman, I didn’t fall down laughing or say the obvious. I just looked around at the other folks to see if anyone else got it, some did, some didn’t.

I like these folks and what they ultimately can do, I would like to help.

But to the point, which is that you as an entrepreneur are subject to lots of people trying to influence you. Many of them have lots of letters before or after their name. Typically those letters say that person may know a whole lot about a narrow topic. None of those letters indicate that the have any COMMON SENSE.

Only you know the real truth about your enterprise, only you know the real goals, only you are responsible for what happens, only you live it. Don’t ever let an ‘expert’ dissuade you from what you know is right.

I repeat - THERE ARE NO DEGREES IN COMMON SENSE!

Does that make sense?

copyright Barry W Thornton all rights reserved

I was talking with an old friend, he has problems with some property, the zoning, and it’s future use as perceived by the city he lives in. Seems the city wants turn the area into a hipper, more modern area and didn’t like his industrial use of the property, they wanted to fine him and directed him to make some expensive changes. As we talked about it I realized that the only way to beat them (the city) was to take over the leadership. The old ‘find a parade and then get in front of it’ approach, something that politicians understand intuitively which why they are politicians; they have nothing to offer but the appearance of leading. In essence, I told him to “out politician the politicians”.

Politics is perhaps the best marketing in the world. The best of ‘someone is unhappy and we will lead them out of the wilderness and onto the blessed fields of plenty, sign here, and here, and, oh yea, sign here too!’

My friend is an entrepreneur. After our conversation he made up a sign to put on the wall of his office, he FAXed me a copy and I used it as the title of this blog.

He went on the attack, got a meeting and sat down with his City Councilman who immediately explained to him that he, the Councilman, couldn’t influence the zoning enforcement people. My friend didn’t complain about zoning but explained that he wanted to become a participant in their plan and do it now. He noted that the expensive work for the present zoning (which would be different in the new use plan) would mean he couldn’t spend the money on an architect to create the new plan to fulfill the City’s dream. And he wanted to be the first to get this dream going. The now cordial Councilman meeting ended, they shook hands and smiled.

A couple of days later my fiend calls up the enforcement agent to try to get a couple days extension on the compliance review. The agent’s boss remarked that the Councilman called and said that they had a good meeting, the review got put off because the zoning guys were suddenly busy, and that they would like to see his ideas to work with him on the direction. My friend is now leading the parade, not being trampled by it.

Now I know this is a long story but what does it mean to you as an Entrepreneur?

This is not about honey rather than vinegar. It is about getting those who you thought were leading to instead be follower. Your power is in your movement, it is mental jujitsu; use your antagonist’s energy to get what you want by stepping up the pace, get ahead of him. Sometimes your antagonist is an association you work with, sometimes it is associates that can’t focus or move clearly.

Just something to keep in the back of your mind as you work to change the landscape of your world.

Copyright Barry W Thornton all rights reserved

Try F.U.D. the acronym for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt!

If someone is happy with what they have you clearly aren’t going to sell them a replacement. Only when you break the relationship between what they have and how they feel about it can you expect to get new brain space, and brain space is what you need to convert them into a customer.

So F, U, and D are three great pry-bars or tools you can use to loosen up some brain-space. All of them start out as probes, until one hits a chink in the armor and gets some traction you have nothing, you just slide around on the outside of someone’s “satisfaction shield”.

You must probe with constant FUD questions to elicit response that will start someone thinking. Do this and in most cases a door will open.

Is this marketing or selling? Maybe it’s both.

Anyway, you must do a series of probative adverts, always asking questions that center around ‘what makes you think you are happy?’. Maybe you communicate a message that shows why they should be unhappy or happier. Maybe you do positioning statements or explanations that are really questions in disguise. Statements with words like ‘new’ or ‘better’ or the like are really questions, they ask ‘why don’t you have the newest or the best?.

Ever consider that the opening of any sales pitch is a marketing message or proposition? You bet it is! Every opening sales pitch is essentially an advertisement. Even if the target says no and walks way, just how is that different than having looked at an ad in a magazine or on TV ,and passed on it? It only becomes a sales pitch when some brain-space opens up and an idea enters the mind that can feed the unhappiness and start a change to occur.

In most ways technology marketing and sales is the easiest. Technology offers an addictive solution. Whatever the customer has, it is on the way to being out of date, not enough, too slow; whatever was good about it making the customer happy is now fading away. Technology is about change and change means something better is coming. It is only a matter of time.

What does this mean to the entrepreneur? - - It means two things. One is that the range for new ventures is almost unending and virtually unlimited, it is as wide as the scope of human endeavors and ideas. The second is that you only need to change one thing to make it new; only one problem has to be solved to tap a market. Your business will be based on what makes someone unhappy.  It really is simple after all.

copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton all rights reserved

Initially this would appear to be true.  If you look at the Fortune 500, of the 500 that appeared on the first list in 1955, only 71 are still there, on the list that is. Some of the biggies that disappeared from that list are well know to you, like Scott Paper, Zenith, Rubbermaid, Chrysler, Teledyne, Warner Lambert, and Bethlehem Steel.  Some died, some just gave up their independence.  There are though those who have persisted; consider GE which has been around for over 100 years, or P&G which started before the American Civil War and continues to succeed; as does Johnson & Johnson whose roots were planted back in 1886. Then there’s Nucor Steel who rose from near bankruptcy to the 151 spot on the Fortune 500 list or Xerox which turned over profits of over $1 billion in 2007, a mere seven years after suffering losses of over $300 million.

So what is at the root of long-term success and how do you build a company that will go the distance?

I think the key is self-afflicted abuse.  It is not what the world does to you but what you do to the world.  In the end it is you, the entrepreneur and with growth big-time business persona that is at the core of long term success.  You get your start as a leader, people follow for all the reasons that leaders lead and followers follow.  When this relationship malfunctions the game is over.  Inertia and management may keep the company going but not necessarily growing.  And you become jetsam to the company.  Unless another leader comes along your baby, the company will die of attrition.

Harsh reality - you must lead or die.

Much of marketing is about the message.  And what is the message about?  It is about making someone unhappy.

The message is that what they have now makes them unhappy and what you have to sell will make them happy.

A primitive view of one of the most elusive crafts in business but it is true.  They won’t pick up the phone or tap the keyboard to find out about you unless they are motivated - and being unhappy is one of the best motivators there is.  Your message is not about making them happy, it is to remind that they are unhappy and that there is a way to eliminate that feeling.

Too short and too simple, it must be right.

Think about it.

How many times have you seen this happen in others and in your self?

Along comes the idea, the solution, and we kick the ol’ horse in the sides and Giddy up!

One thing that kills off so many entrepreneurial efforts is that Giddy up part.  When we start a business we are inundated with challenges, we need many solutions, and each is a new idea inthe making.  When we are hurdling forward through time and space, spending money and resources to solve those problems that appear so critical we hardly ever look at the Whao-Back side.  We get ahead of our selves.

It used to be that our choices were reasonably limited, we could take the time to understand and appreciate each one of them.  Today our choices are almost infinite, each seems to have its own advocate, and they always to have to be selected immediately. We jump ahead full of energy, masters of the half-baked idea based on untested assumptions, only to stumble on our own feet.

This can be foolish, fanciful, and fatal.  Whao-Back counts a lot, try not to run amuck.

The market is tanking, your home isn’t worth bubkes (goat droppings), politicians are demonstrating that they are truly the maroons (thanks Bugs Bunny) that we voted them in to be, dark clouds swarm in and inundate us, TV is all about non-reality reality, and the press has gone stark raving mad.  Even Kramer is slipping his moorings and drifting out to sea.

But . . .

Inc. magazine tells us that a large percent of the of the companies listed in this year’s Inc. 500 were formed right after 9/11!

So you are an investor, what do you invest in now?  Real Estate sucks and the Market is a joke.   What do you do with cash to prevent it from attriting (I know it’s not a word but you get the idea) into toilet paper.

One answer is that you invest in small businesses that look like they have a good idea and market.

That’s what happened just after 9/11, one of the scariest times in decades.  So now those companies are filling the Inc. 500.

Get the idea?

I’m out of town on business. I am in the hotel bar with a guy from a company that could be a vendor for me in the future. We are both married men. He takes some time to hustle a lady down the bar; I’m not comfortable with it so I leave him to his devices. Later I find that he struck up a relationship with her and have subsequently meets her every so often.

He comes to me to do business and I say no. He asks why. Our possible friendship ends when I tell him the following.

“If you cheat on your wife, your closest, longest, and most trusted relationship, what makes me think that you won’t cheat me?”

To the entrepreneur – your personal character is the character of your business. I’m not a prude; but I am a very practical man. Get it?

copyright Barry W Thornton all rights reserved

But it is starting to smell bad to me. The other party has not created or asked for a MOU or LOI (Memo Of Understanding, Letter of Intent) and never asked to talk with me, the big cheese in this case. My man wanted me to write and LOI to give them, I said no. I found out that they have gone and represented our work to their investors as part of their plan. Supposedly their CEO knows what he is doing, but I am getting the feeling that they are really amateurs in all this business stuff. This gives me a cold feeling in my stomach.

Business relationships are a process. A bonding, a series of understandings and commitments, built in steps so that everyone knows what is going on and trust each other. These guys are representing a relationship between us and them to their investors, it involves our company and yet they have no relationship built with us. Not even a handshake, all they have is a contract from us stating our terms, not negotiated, not commented on, not sighed, it is only the rough draft.

I am concerned because experience tells me that no matter how optimistic we are, it can only get worse. These guys are fast and loose in a world that is getting more competitive and tight. It is not the right direction and one of my jobs as CEO is to protect us against our own enthusiasm.

What does this mean to the entrepreneur? Simple, follow Andy Groves’ thinking, only the paranoid survive. Common sense says that without the relationship process having taken its course, things will probably go wrong downstream. It is easiest to stop the problem before it starts, that way my guys can use their time, energy, and skills to nail deals that will be winners, not entanglements.

copyright Barry W Thornton all rights reserved.

I have been working on a spreadsheet for a project that is now behind because the partners in it are still working out problems.

As I write this I go back to the email, it is still working.

Nothing happens on time!

I look at the political scene, the war we are in, the stock market crashing, none of it is on time.

I order glasses, the say they will arrive in two weeks, it takes 3.

I go to a concert of a local group, they are an hour late getting on stage.

I go to a restaurant with a reservation and wait half an hour.

We live in a world that lacks predictability other than it will not be on time.

I guess that actually makes it a very predictable world. So what is the lesson learned?

Simple, don’t plan on it happening when you think it will.

Is that what you customers think about when they deal with you?

As an entrepreneur you are in a trap. Everything people promise you will be late yet your success will depend on your being one time to everyone else.

One of life’s little but consistent pains, figure out how to beat it and you will be very successful.

I repeated the story of Steve Jobs coming back to Apple and reducing the product line from 20 some-odd major products to 4 and turning the business around. I then described to them what is called the “Tyranny of Choice”

Psychologist have long recognized that too many choices cause considerable stress in individuals. We know a family, good friends of my wife and son (they tolerate me, my son is falling into the same class as I because he too sees the reality of the situation and has started to asking the common sense questions) who, when searching for a new car, almost had to go to a therapist. The stress of deciding made her physically sick, him neurotic (I know, I am not a clinical professional so this is an opinion based on his conduct and not a legitimate analysis) and the kids (two) distanced and abstracted themselves as a shield.

Why so much detail? Simple, it is an exaggerated but real example of what you do to your customers when you don’t apply common sense to what they want.

Margaret Mead, the famous ethnologist, demonstrated to the world (much to her humiliation and discredit) that people will tell you want you want to hear because of the context and content of the questions you ask combined with their desire to please and be of value.

I always tell you to go first to the customer to get the truth about what you should do. The real truth is that you have listen with the ear of common sense. In between the dreamy maximum and the abbreviated minimum is reality, the reality of what they will buy because it does just enough to solve the problem, not too much to create more problems, and represents both safety and value. Delight to the upside is based on the old tome, just solve one real problem and you have a good product. You can always (and should) come back with more solutions, but don’t overwhelm the customer, do one thing excellently as Bill and Ted would say, make it easy to see the value, KISS, and build the relationship and reputation for doing something excellently, then look for another good problem.

copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved.

COMMON SENSE

When I was 18 through 21 I worked in a carriage-trade hi-fi salon run by an old merchant named Paul Holtz. He had sold cloths, jewelry, and at that point hi-fi. [Carriage-trade refers to retail stores a couple of generations ago. Hi-end shops did not have street access, you had to have your carriage driven through a port into a courtyard where you alighted onto a portico, customers stepped out the carriage right into the salon. If wanted to walk in you used the trade entrance and you were not a customer. Thus you started your buying experience for that store with a grand entrance.].

I didn’t want to be a salesman but I needed the money so I did what Paul said, constantly think about your experience as a customer and it’s easy. High-end sales were and still are an experience event. Always KISS to the ‘n’th degree, way beyond just the words Keep It Simple Stupid, and always remember that value was in the eye of the beholder, which is driven by his dreams. It is your job is to manipulate, fulfill, and harvest those dreams. Always offer three choices (avoiding the ‘tyranny of choice‘, good stuff for my next blog) and keep the best one locked to create a final theatrical stage to work on. Most of all always remember that from the first awareness of the product (or service) to the final delivery it is dance and both partners know it. Dance well!

Well this professor had discovered some of what this old merchant naturally did based simply on watching people, no collage education needed. And guess what? Every bit of it is common sense. There is no magic, only an honest understanding of how you buy, and how others buy. No special words to write down in a lecture, no special SEO stuff, no book long explanations, only simple thoughts you already know. We are all trained consumers, your mom pushed you around in a shopping cart when you were a year old and your education began. - -So what is my point? KISS! You don’t need gurus, mentors, professors or the like. You do need to look inside yourself because you already have experienced all you need to market and sell successfully; only your personal fear (my definition of ‘the box’) blocks you from seeing it and executing it fearlessly and flawlessly.

And remember, everything starts with a sale. Sell first, then analyze

copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved

IP ain’t worth crap.

I just finished a bunch of work-arounds, that is I looked at several different patents and for each figured a way to do the same thing that didn’t violate the original patent’s claims. In a couple of them I came up with novel and unique ways to do the same thing that weren’t covered so I created new IP. In effect I rendered the original patents useless. So with guys like me around what good are patents, especially to the entrepreneur?

In fact they have tremendous value, but not as patents. The most powerful patent is a Provision Patent. Provisionals are vague and indeterminate; no one gets to see them (unless you are so foolish as to show them to someone, in which case you deserve what you get) so no one knows what you are doing. You have a year to turn them into a real patent so you can say patent pending immediately on your product or process and even I can’t do a work-around because you have not been granted any claims for me to work with. After you file no one really knows what claims the USPTO will give you, and your original claims may be modified, so it is still a minefield.

Patents take years to be granted, you can hassle with office actions for 4 or 5 years if you want (look up submarine patents (nothing to do with underwater boats)). If you are an entrepreneur in a hot field the real value, by the time you get the claims granted the technology or process will probably have been obsoleted by the market and not used in your product anyway.

IP does impress investors, gives them lots of security. IP impresses corporate folks because they live in fear anyway. IP impresses acquisition folks, IP is a great vanity device, for you personally and the company in general. IP’s value is intellectual and emotional security more than technological reality. It gives you an asset out of nothing in the early stages of your business. It is a rallying point for everyone who doesn’t understand its reality.

This truth should give you confidence. It’s like the Emperor’s Cloths, knowing truth you can then use it to your advantage and not be taken in by others.

Oh yea, watch out for all those patent professionals and consultants, their views are self motivated, use them to your drive your goals but don’t be taken in. You and your patent attorney must scheme to use everyone else’s beliefs to your end. It’s the idea of the IP that’s what makes it so valuable. Like most things, it’s the illusion as it appears in everyone else’s mind that is the real power.

copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved

The big difference between homo-sapiens and homo-sap is the quality of the use of the mind (you can have a big brain but a small mind, I see it all the time in corporate slugs).

There are two quintessential differences in the sapiens and the sap, or in your more comfortable vocabulary, the entrepreneur and the worker bees that make the non-entrepreneur world. It is all about decisions, that is of course decisions of merit, not just which movie will I go see or which restaurant will I go to. But the conscious decision to affect others lives.

If an entrepreneur is in fact “one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise” (Marriam-Webser – remember that the word enterprise goes far beyond just making money) then the entrepreneur lives in a state of constant question and decision. This exercises the mind in an absolutely unique way. It mixes what I call ‘noodling’ (grinding something over and over until you see a new pattern or way) with action, doing something. By my definition even a good General of an army is an entrepreneur. When you think and act your mind and brain change and you enter an elevated state of awareness. Taking responsibility for your actions takes you away from average people, your friends and family become more like associates, you don’t and can’t share this altered state of thinking with them, in the end you are alone and thus face the truth of human existence. We are isolated mortal individuals and that’s it.

Entrepreneurs are foragers, alone and unique, picking our way through space-time making constant decisions and acting on what to keep and what to throw away. A pretty cold view, a pretty cold reality, and pretty comforting to me because it is devoid of BS and guilt. We are free, and freedom tastes of reality.

Yea, I borrowed that last line. But what the heck, go for it, you don’t have any real friends anyway, just people you know and then of course, fellow foragers. Share the truth as you sit around the campfire with them for only those fellow foragers have even a clue of what you are talking about when you look inside.

copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved

It became increasingly clear to me that the term innovation is about hindsight. I have done many ‘innovative’ things, but at the time I didn’t think about innovation. Later, when there was a bandwagon going down the street, others, who I see in hindsight didn’t have a [Censored] clue, celebrated the ‘innovation’, patted me on the back, and tried to run around and get in front of the parade. I always felt humiliated inside and did my usual orthogonal turn and headed off somewhere else leaving it all to them.

To innovate is to introduce something new. To create something new is to invent, which is really to find or discover, to devise by thinking. And in that process what you think about is not an innovation; it is a solution. It is a solution that is good - the best solution. It comes from a love of work and taking risks, a drive to do it well, to see a need and understand it, and to being very, very, attentive to the details. It is the goodness of the result that gets people’s attention. It is the satisfaction their needs and wants that creates real value. It is their discovery that there is more than they thought in the world. It is making something that is great.

So when you listen to someone talk about innovation consider that you are really listing to someone with ‘has been’ thoughts trying to sound hip and on top of it.

Just do it right, do it well, think it out, and take the step forward. If your idea changes the way people do or perceive things and they pat you on the back for being innovative, it is time to run for you are in the presence of the 21^st Century’s version of the unwashed masses and their hunger to touch creativity will eat you alive.

What does all this mean to the entrepreneur? Simple, don’t think about innovating; just come up with a great answer to someone’s needs and sell it to them. Keep it that simple and the rest will be history.  Leave the talking about innovation to the non-creative, you don’t have time to be with them, you are on the way to your next great thought!

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton all rights reserved

First are those things a salesman or manager brings in to a meeting, 50 slides of who, what, where, why, and how. It is usually prepared by an expert (that guy who used to be named Pert again) in marketing or the like. These PPTs are the primary ingredient in Soma (Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ for you youngsters). Usually they turn the lights down a bit for dramatics, which means you can slip off into a light slumber without being noticed, just don’t snore.   What could be worse than a mindless delivery of someone else’s work (who is not there) that dictates the path of the meeting?

My usual reaction was to stop the presentation at the third slide (usually the presenter was just warming up to the topic of who they were) with the simple question - “specifically, in less than a minute, tell be which of my pains you are going to solve and how much will it cost”. If the answer gets my attention then I can become interested in the credibility of the company, etc. If not, why waste my time when I could be doing some thing for my customers? My peers used to tell me I was very ‘unprofessional’ (even brutal) and then thank me for cutting the meeting to its essentials, that makes me the essential unprofessional - think about it.

Second kind of PPT is just the facts. Slides brought upon demand to present data, information, and knowledge. Usually the purpose was for me to gain or express wisdom based on that collection. In any event, the presentation can go where the audience wants it to with the aid of the presenter, communication is two way, PPTs aren’t.

The problem with the first type of PPTs is that they rigidify the mind of the presenter, he is working to the slides and not the audience. They distract or conflict the mind and confine thinking. In many cases this is probably good because the presenter is a moron anyway. My son’s comment in an email to me is:

“A power point binds the mind and prevents abstract thinking through visualization (much like a movie compared to a book.). Talking on the other hand allows for input and flexibility.”

A presentation should be improv theater. I try to make each presentation a little different so it is fresh to me, that way it is spirited to the audience. I know where I want to go in the end, but the path to get there are different each time because each audience is different. You are there to get into people’s heads and you can’t figure out how to do that from a PPT. You do that by talking with them, not to them. Everyone knows where you are trying to go when you get together (the meeting has an agenda, right?), so why not just go there? When I present I do a hand out if illustrations are needed, or a white board in real time, otherwise it is I, looking into their eyes while weaving my arms and moving around, that are the tools of choice.

Passion is what gets people to think and act, and there is no passion in a PPT, just rigor mortis and pretty pictures.

Copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved.

Well let’s see. They have customers. They know what they want based on the most practical test there is, that is the customers are buying the product. They are willing to take the risk. They clearly can manage the process.  They can dig up the money. Time for a new business.

But the Patent Law says they can’t do it, so they come to the ol’ techno-whore, yours truly. I do what is called a work-around, a different way to get from Point A to Point B without going through the patent.

So now they have a better product (cheaper to build and delivering more effective customer features, benefits, and results) and it has fresh IP (the new product works in a unique and novel way so we applied for a patent on it).

An old idea with a new way of looking at it offering new customer pleasing features and benefits, built in the USA so some local folks get jobs, and the money stays here.

That’s an Entrepreneur at work, hats off to them. Customer first, then product.

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton all rights reserved.

Businesses are confederations of talent, as long as they produce want your customers wants you will build the team, spread the DNA, and follow the path. There is a lot to say for that kind of stability (look at Pixar and Disney, Pixar builds talent teams, Disney is a scavenger, but when Pixar looses the recipe they too will become scavengers (consider Disney and Ghibli)). Welcome to the new reality.

How does this burst of ego dribble affect the Entrepreneur you ask?

Simple, as you grow you will grind through staff. That core of folks that you collect when you start, well most are expendable and temporary. As you learn what the customer wants you also learn the limitations of people you thought were the key to success. It sucks but it is real. Should you feel bad?

Sure, but get over it. The worst conditions are to have friends in your management core (I have done this repeatedly, when will I learn?). One of the toughest management problems in a start up is the simple question . . . who is a keeper and for how long? Such is the nature of entrepreneurism – it is about risk, everyone takes that risk. That’s why there is a cliff on stock vestment, and then a vestment period. It’s important t to keep people but it also to reduce the pain when you have to get rid of them (hopefully they figure it out and leave).

Brutal thoughts? Hell yes! Please, oh please remember that there are no customers in your company, and it is the customer that keeps the doors open.

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton all rights reserved

As usual I found my self 1) running overtime about 45 minutes with the help of lots of questions from the listeners, and 2) yelling a lot, no one has ever tagged me as Mr. Congeniality. Many are appalled at my choices of adverbs and adjectives when talking about such things as VCs, bit-time CEOs, and corporate careers; but I get laughs and a few lights blink on (you can see it in their eyes) so it is not in done vain.

My son pointed out to me that my primary message is always the same; Francis Bacon was wrong, knowledge is not power, it is a mental holding pattern. Knowledge plus action is power, and in the end we do pretty much everything today for power. The difference between being an entremanure and an entrepreneur is action.

So again the theme is get off your ass and do something, customers will give the final idea so you can start with almost anything close. Only your personal insecurity retards the progress (it’s called the “BOX”, the one you are always trying to think out of). Just take it to the customer as soon as possible, they will straighten you out.

As short story before I close this testimony. I went to a presentation review for entrepreneurs a couple of months ago, I was a mentor along with a couple of other guys and we listened to a presentation by a couple of folks with an idea that they had poured $70k and a year into for software that involved volunteer work and women, they were looking for half a million and wanted us to comment on the presentation. They launched off on the idea, the pitch was all laid up on PowerPoint (which is only slightly better than morphine for numbing your mind). 5 minutes into it I stopped it and asked - The Question . . . “What did the customers say?” The CEO told me that they had not presented this to any customers yet, only friends, family, and experts (someone who used to be call “Pert”).

Well, I alienated everyone in the room with my usual question (delivered in my drill Sergeant’s voice) . . . “What the F*** are you doing? Without customer feedback this is all a work of fiction! You made this all up, there is no reality in this presentation, only you dreams”.

How can I comment on fiction in a real world? The other two mentors went on to talk about the cute slide show and how to make it cuter, they were corporate guys used to living in a cartoon,. I got up and left. I don’t live in a fictional world (I may be delusional at times but not that day). They were too polite to deal with the truth, what a waste of everyone’s time.

The truthache you have to have is the customer’s reaction – will he give you a check for your idea when you can get it to work and what does “work” mean???

Nothing else counts!

copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton all rights reserved

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about cellphones. 4 blogs I think.

Everyday now I get blog spam listing hundreds of ring tones for free. Today I got 9 such ‘comments’. What crap. Clealy the mindless activities of some desperate people trying to do something I don’t really care to understand.

My warning in this, be prepaired (the old Boy Scout motto), good boys they’re commin to get you too.

The internal entrepreneur’s problem is changing the way the business thinks and acts. Like different DNA in a body, he (or she) is attacked as a fatal threat by the rest of the business unless he is shielded or camouflaged.

Protection or shielding does not work that well because it permits all the ‘antibodies’ to focus on a clear target. And example would be a CEO deciding that he needs to change the course of the business to grow so he puts a spot light on the group trying to change the way people think. Targeting, simple targeting. That spotlight makes it clear to all who has to be wiped out to maintain the status quo. It is the guy rocking the boat that everyone can hate.

Camouflage on the other hand is surreptitious and a bit sneaky, doesn’t attract a lot of attention and in the internal entrepreneurs case lets him win converts, even gets the sympathy vote by the very people who will eventually be changed. By not putting the change mechanism in people’s faces you offer a way to adapt that is not confrontational.

Traditionally new ways were developed in a skunk works, a place that was simply not visible where the Standard Operating Procedures could be tossed out and newness could happen. Problem is that skunkworking doesn’t allow the newness to infect and drive the oldness to change, It leaves the oldness in isolation. You may get a neat new product but you don’t necessarily get a new way of doing things.

The point is that the internal entrepreneur’s job is really to adapt the organization to treat the customer in new ways. To do that his act must be visible and infectious to all but not threatening. Quite a trick, takes special guts, and in the end a love for both the business and customers because in today’s market place this has to be a continuous process.

Too bad GM can’t figure this out.

Question is, can your company figure it out?

(1) DNA are the units of biological knowledge that set the pattern for the entity containing them, Memes are units of cultural knowledge the set the pattern for the way the entity thinks.-

Copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved

This was one of those hard/easy exercises. Someone wants to copy a product that is patented. They are a start up and they would like some IP of their own in the process. It all involves lasers and skin, great! Some physics, some biology, a little chemistry, and enough legalese to understand what the other guy’s patent really says, and Presto! The old ‘TechnoWhore’ sinks one from across the court, and then considers a 50,000 foot view of it all.

Inventors create something out of nothing. Entrepreneurs create something out of nothing. We don’t usually think of an Entrepreneur as Inventors but they sure can look alike.

In each entrepreneurial endeavor there is the learning the “need” which, as in an Invention, culminates in an ‘ah-ha’ moment when the solution gels, you suddenly ‘feel” the whole thing, in Heinleinian terms you ‘grok’ it, and from that point on it is simply execution and management.

Usually invention (as we normally think of it) ends with an Intellectual Property, someone other than the inventor will monetize it. To the Entrepreneur the invention is the monetization.

So is invention a part of entrepreneurism? A vital element I would say! I think that it is even more so when you consider emerging countries. Breaking out of our structured thinking and looking at this theme is a path I will follow in subsequent blogs.

copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved

We were at GITEX, a computer expo that is what COMDEX wanted to be, It is bigger and more serious. The waves were us learning. It is the express desire of the UAE to become the IT center of all the countries in that part of the world, for now., and we were in the middle of the maelstrom. After looking around have to agree that they have a damn good shot at it. But about the Cell Phone.

No car? You take a cab. Here in the States you phone in a cab request if you can’t catch on one the street. You call a dispatcher who assigns a cab and directs it to you. Very hierarchal, vertical power structure, very us.

So here I am on the street edge in Dubai, cabs are all zipping by full; we have been there about 3 minutes. Then as if in a Ghibli animation a cab suddenly cuts across traffic, pulls up, addresses us by name, and we are off. My companion is very knowledgeable about this world and has set the whole thing up with a simple Cell Phone call. It goes like this.

Cabbies form ad-hoc working groups connected by cell phones whose collective is the dispatcher. Not only does each guy drive the cab, he also books it and others in his group. If they see someone flagging a cab and know one of their group around, they call him. They drop off a passenger and make an appointment to pick him up. If the cab is busy then one of the associate cabs will do it. In a way it is an organic cab cooperative, a distributed communal dispatch and marketing structure. An impressive use of the technology and the entrepreneurial sprit. Yet just the tip of the iceberg, that iceberg being the whole culture’s pent up thinking ability now made fluid by the Cell Phone.

I think it all happened like this. There is lot of money and the Ruled have nothing to do with creating it. The Rulers need to stabilize the Ruled so they don’t get in the way of the cash flow. It is the nature of the culture that the Rulers take care of the Ruled. Stability is in the family and the state has lots of money so they send all the kids to school. Families focus on kids who now have a way to a future better than theirs, and thus buy into the social contract and follow directions.

The problem for the Rulers is that after a while you accumulate a lot of well-educated entrepreneurial Ruled who see the guy behind the curtain. I sense that the dam is just starting to crack. Pakistan, India, China - incredible intellectual resources just now starting to learn how to market themselves. The beauty of mental energy is that it can flourish anywhere.

More on this later bu for now, high on the list of things that facilitate the failure of the dam is the Cell Phone, a product that almost works.

.

Copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 All rights reserved

I’m not talking about your cloths or that you may drool a bit too much or spit when you yell, but that your mind thinks it has stepped into a phone both somewhere and that you are invisible and not heard.

Let me point out that the phone makes you a temporary schizophrenic. When you talk on the phone your mind moves over a few inches to just outside your head (brain) and you conduct yourself as if there were a person there talking to you. Of course there is no one there and thus you are hallucinating.

Need proof? Watch others when they are on the phone. Animation, stand up, sit down, wave their arms, yell, be quite, swear, expose secrets, make faces, all these intimate actions into a piece of plastic?

And to whom are they waving their arms at?

If someone did this in your office without a phone in hand you would call security and HR (you choose the order) because you instinctively would know that they were nuts (probably schizophrenia).

I believe that Cyberspace is where your mind goes when you get on the telephone. For the last 15 years I have used the definition in Executive briefings and presentations to the Military, Health Care, and Financial Enterprise segments and I always got a chuckle. I also used to think that your mind goes to the same place when you read a book or get on the computer, but I now see I was wrong. Each of those (book, PC, etc.) involved a limited attention level because there is no reciprocity of thought - no one talks back to you. I recognize graduations here. When you Skype, email, IM, and the like, you are engaged in a very slow dialog. But on the phone where the interaction is done in full flaming real time and your concentration is highly engaged, you are gone!

So what do you do when our body is in a social space and your mind is in Cyberspace? [Again I reference the Firesign Theater in asking ‘How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All?]

If you think that you can multi-task or some other hip new-age skill then congratulations, you have mastered the art delusion, check out Scientology, you will feel even more comfortable.

Your mind simply doesn’t work that way. You do have to face truth because the truth works. It is hard for us to share spaces unless we put an avatar in each and stand outside trying to work the whole show. Can you do that? If you can’t you will have to vacate one of the spaces to concentrate on the other, which is what we all do. If well trained by our parents we will seek permission first thus putting one of the social spaces on hold. If we don’t then, well, you can draw you own conclusions.

By the way, a variation of this applies to driving while talking. Do you really want to do two important things badly?

Copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 All rights reserved

For those of you who thought or asked “Won’t new Cell Phone video technology solve the problem?”

The answer is NO, it will make it worse.

It goes like this: the video on the phone will be poor and small - you will think you are seeing something but in fact you won’t. You will experience the illusion of gaining information but in fact will not be doing so.

Assume that the person you are talking to holds the phone during the conversation. Then his body positioning will be dedicated to holding the phone (makes sense, right?). There will be no body language to read. If the phone is placed on a desk or table then the person you are talking to will be even further away, thus you will see even less.

All those ads on TV and the web showing crisp and clear images of smiling people on their Cell Phones; give me a break! You have been at this tehno-hype thing long enough to know that we are far away from those phones.

The problem is that out of habit you will focus most of your concentration powers on the image. You will do this because we are visual creatures and deep inside you instinctively believe that if you look close enough you will see some truth. So you will pay less attention to the audio and learn as much as you could have.

This data and knowledge stuff is not additive; it is multiplicative. If you get 50% of the audio and 50% from the video you do not score 100% (50+50=100), you get 25% (50 X 50 = 25)

At best you can fool yourself but my advise is that you will get better results by turning off the video and concentrating on the audio.

In the end it is all about concentrating and getting inside the other guy’s head. Ultimately the phone is a special theater. Each of us gets to package our pitch on a second-to-second basis to get maximum use of that stage. When you talk or listen you have to remember that the Cell Phone is just a bad radio, plan for it. If the conversation is heavy, use a land line for your best shot.

There is always a second ‘end’. This one is that a Cell Phone conversation is public property. The exposure people get talking business on the Cell Phone when at a Starbucks, and airport, in the plane, in a restaurant - well whaoo . . what foolishness, can I have the keys to your car too?

Copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved

For Second and Third-World countries (or better, regions, for it transcends nation-state boundaries) the Cell Phone jumped the temporal gap. This brought the best noted aspects of the Information Age to the folks on the last cars of the current Economic Age train. Thus the train got a lot shorter.

But most of us reading this blog live in the First-World, in places that still have land-lines in common use. If you have chosen to live most of your life using the ever-convenient Cell Phone, then you have not developed an interesting skill called “deep listening”.

You can hear many things on a land line that are not even transmitted on a Cell Phone. Things like breathing, small changes in pitch, diction, pronunciations, body movement, chair noises, background noises, all of which are important clues to what is really being said beyond just the voice message. It is claimed that 90% of a real conversation is done in body language. In business, where information is key to achieving one’s goals, losing all that information can mean failure. Worse off, when you don’t practice, you can’t get good at the skill. So when you do need it you can’t use it.

I never thought I would say this, but the land-line is a device that offers fidelity, that is faithful reproduction of the audio events going on at the transmission end. It is no hi-fi by any means! But it is hi –fi compared to a Cell Phone. What a Cell Phone has is good “intelligibility”. A term that means that the parts of the sound that the human mind can pick out and decode easily as speech aren’t always best communicated in a Hi-Fi Way. Cell Phones do things to the signal that, if you told a dinner-friend with hi-fi interest about, would cause him to get up and leave without paying. Even with these anti-fi processes going on what the other person actually said is something your mind spends a lot of time guessing about. This is even a better reason to not Cell Phone and drive at the same time.

So what does this have to do with business? Simple – on the phone, any phone, you are a blind man. If you are like me, if you want to hear them sweat. If you really want to hear either the pain, interest, apathy, or joy in between words, then the Cell Phone fails as a tool. While some folks say that body language counts for 90% of a conversation, let’s say it is only 75%, or even 60%. On the cell phone you get none. Over half the phone information we are basing our work on is invisible to us!

While the Cell Phone more or less gets the word across, the land-line lets you hear the chair creak! The recommendation from this old sea-dog is to have your social conversation on your Cell Phone. But for business you need a land-line in a quiet place where you can concentrate. You to this because you are blind. . . and smart! Serious results require serious planning.

Copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved

You accept that change in needed, and the future customer may not be today’s customer. Further let’s figure that you have tried, or are working on, all the variations of your current cash cow and customer set. It has become clear that you need to strike out in a new direction, in the modern slang, you need to innovate.

Before we go further let me point out that this thinking is inherently dangerous for the Enterprise.  It becomes a very disturbing cultural virus within a successful and stable company. The actions associated with this line of thinking have the potential of creating considerable FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) inside a normal enterprise infrastructure. It starts out slow but spreads like a metastasizing Cancer and is perhaps the most counter-productive and invasive business virus that can occur. Left unmanaged or deigned it will ultimately cause the Internal ‘faith’ issues of the business begin to disintegrate. Simply put as the knowedge of this search for a new company becomes known to all inside itbrings the question of each individual’s personal survival; this will become a pervasive fear issue and infect everyone’s mind. There is no way to stop it, addressing it too late merely fans the flames, talking about it spreads those flames. You must be very crafting when attending to this issue.

Discounting the issue of the people that already exist, the business domain we have described is of course, the domain of the Entrepreneur. For several of reasons the Entrepreneur seems to be able to find the hot products that can draw on future trends and customers to go with it while the Enterprise with all its resources can’t. And in that sentence resides the answer to the problem.

Let me add a thought here. When the Enterprise started it wasn’t an Enterprise, it was probably (an) Entrepreneur(s). That Entrepreneur morphed over the years to be come the Enterprise. Kind of like a butterfly, that small and irregular Pupus Entrepreneur became the structured and well organized (packaged) Enterprise Butterfly. Like a Butterfly, it is not easy to go backwards, especially when you need a new Butterfly. The two states of mind are usually too different. Those two minds are the CEO of the Enterprise and the CEO Entrepreneur. It is possible to do it, but it depends on luck and/or brute force, or a crafty Entrepreneur who has the discipline of mind to become two states-of-mind as we shall see. - So we went from the need for the new customer to the idea of 2 CEOs, or

” How can you be in two places at once when your really no where at all?”

- Fire sign Theater, a long time ago

Copyright Barry W Thornton 2008, all rights reserved.

I think it is accepted by most business folks, as least as words, that we are entering a time in which an enterprise must be continually innovative to survive and grow. Constant change is becoming the only constant.

To the last generation the big concern was living with Chaos. It was about marketing acting on the belief that they could tell the customer what to buy. In essence we believed that the propaganda that was practiced had predictable results.

The Chaos was that it wasn’t working. Big change, today we understand that we don’t make customers but that customers make us. We see further that every customer has a customer, we are part of an eco-chain we have little control over. A change that happens upstream of us gets amplified by those between final customer and us. What each one of the customers in the chain wants from us has to be considered and reacted to for in a way, we sell to the chain. We constantly have to re-invent parts of our process or business to stay in that food chain. Essentially this means that companies not innovating fast enough will seem to whither away. Companies not innovating at all are simply going to hit the wall without any skid-marks.

A business is a customer satisfying machine, if you don’t satisfy your customer the best then they become targets for someone else who will.

To use an analogy, Customers are Gold. And like a gold mine, they are in veins embedded in rock (in this case a ‘mental’ rock) or markets. The job of Marketing and Sales mine the vein and get the gold. When the vein begins to play out we see the cost of recover the gold increasing, there is a point where it is not profitable to continue, we either find a way to increase the profits or sell it to someone who can. Thus we have reached the end of our activity in that market.

If, when you are making good yields you start to look around and find another veins, set up and start working them then when the first peters out, the second is the business revenues. And on and on.

The search is for new customers. Maybe the untapped customers for what you do now. But if they are drying up, which is natural business environment event, you need to find new customers and give them what they want to buy.

If you are an enterprise with momentum, a well-practiced process, stable internal workings, and the like you will find this a challenging proposition. Typically you don’t know this new customer, and anyway he wants something different. But you need to find that new customer; he’s the next ‘vein’.

To explore this issue, that is find this new customer, must be practiced with great care, means you should go back in time, and is done with a unique character from inside you business.  These we shall explore next.

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton, all rights reserved.

1 - The value of copying the big (or well known) guy – there isn’t any. The problem of course is that you are poor second, the first guy set the mind space; you can only fit in on his terms. So be your own man, yourself. Everyone tries to be like the big guys so the opportunities in that area diminish. Take a smaller area where there are more opportunities.

2 - When you are ready to launch yourself, forget about burning up resources with a big-bang or GRAND opening. It may be good for your ego, but it has lousy bang for the buck. It has been pointed out that this is a problem that marketers have, the result of limited attention span and the “One explosion after another” syndrome, instant gratification and lots of ego coddling. Use up all your energy with a big opening and you set big (and possibly desperate) internal expectations. The world doesn’t work that way, it will take time and if you are in flash and bang mode depression will soon follow. The best time for a big splash is after you have very happy customers; let them do the splashing for you. Use their energy so that you can conserve yours for a slow and consistent push. Persistence is the key thought here, not flash and burn.

3 - I was looking for flexible printed circuit boards yesterday and ran into one of my pet peeves. I phoned a company and spent 5 or so (valuable to me) minutes on the phone with an automated phone system. In the end I was qualified and routed to a sales person who were not available - I got a voice mail. My choices were A) to back out an try again hoping to get another sales person or B) say ‘screw you”; I choose Option B.

I obtained this phone number from a web search, this company was the first one on the google search list so they paid the most for the rating. What a waste of money! They had me, only to turn me into an enemy in a way. I emailed the company asking the president to pretend that he was a new customer and try his own phone system. I then went on and found another vendor who answered his phone right off the bat, no fishing for a contact, and the young lady was knowledgeable, answered my questions, will get my business. Today I received an email from the president of the first company. All the usual platitudes about caring for the customer, his sorrow for the experience, how could he help me, and he gave me his direct number. Here is what I sent back:

“Found another vendor, pbcs are pbcs, you are in a commodity business, wake up, the world is changing, read some, get tuned in, my time was wasted, how many more potential customers have you killed off, time to break the complacency or you will be killed off in this semi-global world. Good luck, Barry”

My son says I am butt-head to vendors, to the stupid ones he is right.  What the heck, it’s only Wednesday, by Friday I will probably be screaming, must be the summer heat.

Copyright Barry W Thornton 2008, all rights reserved

They postulate, very accurately I believe, that there are three types of core personalities needed in a startup to get make is successful. These are the Mavens (who are driven by knowledge), the Relaters (who are driven by relationships), and Evangelists (who are driven by action). For those who doubt this it will only take a moment to note that most of the time while you only hear about or see just one of these characters in a business, closer examination reveals, lurking in the background, the others. Further introspection suggests that it is a bit of a folly to try to be all three at the same time. Sometimes you can be two, but all three, that’s a long reach.

This reflection is based on my understanding that I am truly not the world’s best Relater (I have a bad habit of saying what I think – bluntly - I call these verbal aberrations ‘truth-aches’, my mouth gets me in a lot of trouble). But if you want strategy, insight, invention and action, get out of the way, I’m your man!

This means that I must be comfortable with sharing and thus collaborating to accomplish my goals.

If you are an Entrepreneur in development (I have done this 5 times and still consider myself a learner) then you must become honest enough to position yourself accurately in the driving team that gets a business going. If you can do it all yourself, great!  But that strength can also be your Achilles Heel, watch out.

Copyright Barry W Thornton 2008, all rights reserved.

One form of human endeavor is entrepreneurship, (entrepreneur: (Merriam-Webster) one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise).  Most folks equate this definition with owning you own business or being your own boss.  This is not always the case as will see later when I blog on the entrepreneur inside the enterprise.

There are 10s of thousands of people with an opinion on the entrepreneurial process.  In fact case-studies and the like can make you pretty darn good at the organize and management nature of the definition above. There can be merit in listening to their observations and codifications to build out this aspect of the definition.

But the magic word here is ‘Risk”.  With this word we transition from the world of logic to the world of emotion.  So there are two aspects to entrepreneurial experience, the doing and the risking.  Here is my response to him:

“Dear Sir.

Your observation about not hearing from people who have skins on the wall is in error.  I, and the gentleman who sent me this mail of yours, live in skins lined huts out here on the Plain of Life, and so by your definitions are competent to talk to you.  So Grasshopper, take a moment and read.

Clearly this entrepreneurial thing is a two-stage operation.  My recommendation is that you have Stage One down pretty solid for when you get to Stage Two you will need to have the reactive skills of Stage One.  All these talkers you complain about are working Stage One, which is good.  Not clear?  I like stores so let me offer one.

This weekend the Austin Yacht Club had a sailing race up to Turn Back Canyon on Lake Travis.  My Son and I raced our boat up.  As we pass Pace Bend Park there are some cliffs over the water.  At the top of the cliffs are about 50 people; every so often one guy jumps off and all the rest make a lot of noise.  Most people are there because they secretly would like to be the jumper, but only 3 or 4 actually step out into free space and take the risk, and thus achieve the reward (crowd approval, personal satisfaction, experience, and the Thwap (my Son’s definition, the sound your testicles hitting the top of the inside of your skull as they violently contract in abject terror only to spring back by the sudden elation of knowing you did it and are still alive and well)).  Eventually, someone who has wanted to but has never jumped is driven enough to take the risk and so steps off the cliff.  They are a different person when they climb out of the water and never quite fit back into the crowd at the top of the cliff.

All those folks at the top of the cliff are like those people you are complaining about in the Austin Entrepreneurial Community.  They have done everything but stepped off the cliff, they have done everything but taken the risk and started a business.  They want to, they are learning the drill, and they are gaining on it, but they cannot yet jump.  Those people at the top of the cliff, those Entrepreneurial want-a-be’s, are probably better at organizing and managing than I am.  I respect them for those difficult to obtain and implement skills, I need them for my projects.  All of those folks are working hard on getting up the nerve and conditions to jump, to go out and get a skin.  At some point passion will overcome caution and they will risk it all to win.  And what they win is the transition in their souls.  I will then call them true Homo Sapiens because I believe that when you take that decision you mind changes and you start down a new path to wisdom.  I respect everyone on that path and feel personal sorrow for those that fall besides the trail.

Your problem is that you are looking for someone to show you the magic way.  They already have, but your mind is numb with fear, you just don’t have the ‘huevos’ to step off the cliff yet, so instead of looking inside for the answer you are spending energy and time blaming them.  Yet you still come again and again to meetings and complain, and look for a messiah to show you the way.

All entrepreneurs’ communities are like that.  It is a special filter and there are gradients of humanity, each at a different stage, each trying to become ‘whole man’.  So stop bitching, learn all you can, and then make your mind up to jump.  It is about you, not them.  From someone who has jumped a lot I can tell you that you stink of fear and fear makes your mind numb.  You can’t jump with a numb mind, you can only fall off and thus fail.

Now go do something, start a business, get off your royal rear-end and join our club, but please stop bitching about those who have not jumped, it’s their journey, not yours.

I lift a glass to your future, Barry”

Copyright Barry W Thornton 2008, all rights reserved.

There is something that you can do that is GREEN and SOCIAL at the same time.

First, figure out how to cut the commutes of as many people as possible. Math is simple, less gas and all that goes with it equal more GREEN. Car Pooling is something that can achieve measurable results immediately. Take a map and put a dot on where everyone lives. Look for the patterns and talk to the folks involved. Your fellow employees are burning barrels of gas at about $5 a gallon now and no sine of going lower. That helps them and a good SOCIAL attitude for the company to be practicing.

Second, revisit telecommuting. I have an office here in Austin and my associate works in LA. I have another in Sacramento, both in California. I fire up Skype in the morning and use it as an intercom for hours during the day. The video works well enough; I might as well be there. I often joke that Skype is a hole in the wall, on the other side is Mark in LA or John in Sacramento. We communicate through the hole, I can see them and they can see me.

A lot of studies suggest that telecommuting isolates people and reduces productivity. I think that is true. But when you leave the intercom on that isolation goes away and you get the best of both worlds. When you can see some one you can relate it sometimes is better than at the office itself. There are lots of services available, you don’t need HDTV quality; you just need a face. You can just pop into a guys cube now, no different than videoing in. People can even attend meetings, you don’t need to see everyone all the time, besides, texting lets people work on issues while they are hot and being discussed, in the old meeting format is was one-at-a time. The new meeting format is problem solving parallel world. Take a look into keeping people at home some of the time, they will overachieve at there to prove it is a good idea.

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton, all rights reserved.

One thing for sure is that the CTO interfaces the Executive Suite to technology as a business element.

• Technology is an Intellectual Property, an asset with legal rights.
• Technology is a philosophy, also an asset that claims ownership of market space.
• Technology is a symbol that can be used to affect the hearts and minds of people.
• Technology is a determinate; it dictates what you can do and how you will do it.
• Technology is an emotion, it elicits passions, it is something people put faith into.
• In a world of hot air and gas technology is seen as a fundamental truth.

To the rest of us it might be a few lines of code, some silicon and copper, scum on the side of a test tube, weird photons, whatever. Technology results in products which result in transaction.

But the CTO has to see technology for what it is iwith a worldly perspective. He has to see it in a lot more angles than the list above. No technology exists in isolation; it is something because of other things and events. In the final analysis the CTO can’t just be about the technology, his job is to be about the business of the technology and it’s life. It is clear that, when you think of the list above, technology has lots of lives. Maybe that’s why I think of the CTO as a Shepard guiding a flock of ideas and concepts to be sheared for the benefit of all.

Copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved

This GREEN pitch was hot in the 1960s as part of the Earth Movement. The difference is that then GREEN cost more energy than it saved. Today just the reverse it true.

Local and networked command and control, advances in heat transfer technologies with the addition smart systems and design, simple retro-fitting, just plain crafty correction of ‘mess’o little things’ as we say in the Texas, you can do amazing things. Today there are measurable cost savings both immediate and projected energy in all its forms. It that just make good sense.

But there’s more reasons why it’s a good idea.. We can make this GREEN thing profitable.

The simple fact of the matter is that if you figure out what to do for your company that will cut the losses, that will “plug a leak” in effect - and you make it work - you win!

At that point your company becomes a living expert in doing something that everybody wants to be part of, to do something GREEN that is success. Remember my entry on the CTO as a Pitchman – what a set up!

This is that ‘fundamental truth’, turn it into the good propaganda that it is and you will directly effect the valuation of the Company in all ways. Start with just one simple leak solved and use that success as a righteous stepping stone into your customer’s Executive Suite for some serious B-B logging in. You want to be famous not for being GREEN, but for having increased shareholder value using GREEN as a process.

Copyright Barry W Thornton all rights reserved

Your Department of Technology (the Office of the CTO) serves the whole company as well as the specialized areas of Engineering and R&D. Many of the rules about how a company exists in the world are environmental regulations that are changing all the time. All of this relates to technology so ultimately the CTO needs to be involved. Someone has to understand the whole works from the upstream vendors to the down stream customers with the goal of protecting the interests of both the company and customer. Let me point out that GREEN is both a physical and mental state. The regulations handle the physical, but just as important is the mental.

Let’s take a dumb example. I go to the widget store and buy a thing that comes in a package that is both the pilfer protection system and the container for both the shipping and shelving of the product. Cool, an efficient use of clear plastic that works for both of uses, we get and easy way to pack for shipment, out customers gets a pilfer proof product that sits on the self well and displays itself.

What about the real customer, they guy who uses it? We virtually assure that the real customer’s fist experience will be the struggle to get it out of the package. He will then send that now mangled plastic to some landfill.

But the package is great! And if left to Packaging Engineers, Marketers, and Ops it will just get better at stopping pilfering and stacking on shelves. Who speaks for the real customer in this chain? Who looks down stream enough to see:

1 – Physical - The packaging is bound to the landfill because the user threw it in the regular garbage can. He did that out of frustration and disgust with opening the package.

2 – Mental – We left a bad taste in the user’s mouth. He bitches about it to a friend. We spend all kinds of Marketing resources to get that friend to buy our Stuff. We now have to pay to overcome the negative our own package created.

Someone has to see past departmental walls, to see the whole as it affects the guy who really pays the money. The whole business, the company itself, is a technology to generate profits. Someone has to see that technology through GREEN glasses and who better than the CTO to look to that responsibility?

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton 2008, all rights reserved

Wheew – what’s all this leading to?  Well, how about the perfect platform upon which to seek and deploy actions and elements that make this human – to make the whole resulting organization good and fair to the people both inside and outside? You see, all the stuff in Paragraph One rides on the ultimate engagement of the stuff in Paragraph Three.

Sometimes, what you want do is to avoid the technology. Who better to see this than a technologist. Let me offer an example. I have run across companies that saw Web 2.0 as a solution to greater humanity toward and in their organizations, only to fail miserably. They went the Social Web direction because they ate too many buzz words, both Marketing and IT thought is was cool. They asked a few like mined customers, management assume they were right, they poured in the money and tanked. The wide-bandwidth CTO would have looked at it from 50,000 feet and 100 feet and asked the questions no one wanted asked and seen the relationships no one had time to think of because his vested interest is in the whole, not the parts. In closing for today let’s consider a retail store. Who is the CEO in our customer’s company? Probably the buyer themselves, maybe Dad, maybe Mom, depends on the products. Our CEO wants to message the Customer’s CEO ( and that is the right relationship, especially in high-end sales). Do we do a CEO Blog or Customer Portal? Do we write a letter and put it in each bag? Or do we have our CEO stand in the door way on Saturday and thank the customer on the way out while getting the only truthful QC he can get? Which do you think works best?

Over simplified – sure, but you get the point. More later.

Copyright Barry W Thornton 2008, all right reserved

CTO is business position. Businesses have a metabolism. Businesses input stuff, metabolize it, and of course, excrete something else. Whatever the business is, it takes in information and resources, the metabolizing creates value and, eh, effluent. The Value stuff becomes rewarding transactions, the energy and life of the business, and the effluent goes in the garbage. There is always some waste.

That grimy oversimplification takes us back to the CTO. If the CTO is a ‘deep ‘T”’ type, that is deeply focused on the technology and without much other bandwidth, you may be in a pickle as they say, and all this is meaningless. But if your CTO is a thinker as well, then the whole metabolic system noted above is a flow he will understand. Now you can add the word GREEN and make sense. In this case the CTO is probably one the best persons to be looking for insights as to how the GREEN filter can be applied to the organization’s life-flow. In the most simple vision this means:

1 – Less environment impact from what is taken into the organization.

2 – Less destruction in the metabolizing process.

3 – Greater delivery to the Customers both perceived and real output that is more socially and environmentally just.

4 – Better delivery of the waste of the process that is less eco-corruptive.

Why the CTO? How about Vision and training? To see, perceive, analyze, conclude, and speak out. That is the CTO’s real skill set. The freedom and mandate to think in an organization that desires conformity and adherence, who better then the science guy? Typically the CTO is already considered a little weird, what a great political position to be in to look for and promote a socially changing variable such as GREEN?

How about a quick couple of examples? Can your CTO figure out a way for the sales guys or delivery to burn less gas? Can he drive a group that examines consumables or disposables to find more efficient use or disposal techniques (remember, on organisms waste is another’s food). Can he help Marketing GREEN up the company’s image by seeing what it is doing right but never thought to tell anyone about? How long can this list go on? How deep is your imagination? What’s your CTO doing?

Size is not an issue, state-of-mind and perception are. If you have read any of this blog you know that I see the CTO as a propagandist as well as a Shepard of Science. Think about it, then act.

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton, all rights reserved.

Certainly not; especially today.

There is hardly a company around that does not have technologies integrated into their operations, and I do mean technologies beyond IT. Everywhere it turns a company is confronted with two new and determined issues, those of the “Greening” of the world and those of the Socialization of the organization. I think most of us are somewhat clear on the idea of Greening as it relates to the many ways a group of people working together can effect the environment they exist in. There are a hundreds buzz words it that describe this but in the end it all boils down to being less destructive to the limited resources we have at hand.

Socialization is different. In the simplest terms it is people looking sideways for a moment in their headlong dash for whatever it is that they seek. When you look sideways you see the other people also making a dash too. In that viewing it is hard not to realize that that it is really a ‘we’ world more than an “I” world.

One of the key elements in the concept of ‘civilization’ is the word CIVIL. Interactions between individuals to form a society, a civil society in which we can all live.

So what does this have to do with the CTO you ask?

Simple - Technology is one of the most profound artifacts of mankind. In many ways it is the soul of mankind today for it is the set of tools we use to shape our world, and in shaping the world we determine the social structures. In that thought lay the essence of my arguments.

The CTO must become far broader in bandwidth than tradition suggests. He must be far more intellectually ranging than the specialty of the company for no technology exists in isolation. Everything you produce has social ramifications including the makeup of the company itself. The technologist today must be an anthropologist too.

If your company is non-technical (I am having trouble imagining one that is not) the same exists. Let’s say you retail or distribute something. Aside from the issues of knowledge technology (as opposed to Information Technology), even if your products are rocks there is considerable technology involved. Your organization is a collection of people, all interacting to the goals of the company. People effecting people, after all you don’t work in isolation, and working with people means you are social institution, you have responsibilities and certain self-interests the result of which benefits the company.

It is clear to me that accepting social responsibility is a key element in building a long lived and healthy company. And who could better to do that than the CTO to minister to that end?

Sounds backwards, well it‘s not. The training of the broad bandwidth CTO is to study, ponder, analyze, conclude, and effect. Who is better prepared to drive the organization’s soul? Remember the caveats, broad bandwidth and education with an underlying love of society are critical, without these you have a good technocrat and the social heart of the organization will be a façade, it will fail.

We shall follow this thought further –

Copyright Barry W Thornton, 2008, all rights reserved.

Adam Galinsky of Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Illinois, and his colleagues spent some time with MBA students looking into two very successful approaches used in straight on negotiations. The essence of their work was that these approaches, perspective-taking and empathy yielded still the best results (this just reconfirms that understanding, this is not a new revelation). Please note that Perspective-taking is the cognitive power to consider the world from someone else’s viewpoint, whereas empathy is the power to connect with them emotionally and that Perspective-taking was as much as twice as effective.

So what does this mean for the Evangelist (or pitchman for that matter)?

It says you must know and respect your audience objectively or intellectually as well as emotionally to be really effective. Evangelism is not just a great pitch; it is a great negotiation! The goal is to gain a soul, which is to affect the wisdom on the individuals as well as the intellect and emotions. So there are three elements on the table that have to be considered. We must win the heart, mind, and soul to truly have succeeded with our evangelic approach to getting someone to in effect ‘change sides’. In the end all this about getting people to do what we think is right, for the entrepreneur ‘right’ ultimately deals with gowning his business. Even with a Kick-Butt product and the resources to get to market, owning and defending the ownership of market space still means winning hearts, minds, and soul.

More thoughts on this to come.

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton, all rights reserved

Evangelism is one of the most effective tools to deal with both stages and is not just limited to the technology world. Its effects cover all ranges of human endeavors. This tool is so much more than just arm waving and an enthusiastic presentation. It is in fact a venture-wide state-of-mind that is totally manageable and results in the most profound form of the network-effect based growth. It can be implemented in a ‘fuel-efficient’ and long lasting way that result in a market-dominating wins for its users.

So what are these techniques? Over the next few blog entries I would like to explore this further. Lets start with the basics. First in the Evangelist’s toolbox is simple propaganda. This word had gotten a bum wrap over the last century because the guys who did it really well were what we consider very bad guys. We use the same techniques but don’t like to call it propaganda; in its lighter form we call it ‘messaging’. But when done with vigor is it plain old propaganda.

I just finished a book called ‘True Enough – Learning to live in a Post-Fact Society’. One of the fundamental tenants of the author is that new technologies are prompting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact. What he has missed is that this is history, this transition occurred a long time ago and is one of the fundamental rules that the evangelist works under. Facts are without passion (I call them ‘isms’) and humans are passionate emotional characters, although today we can employ both therapeutic and recreational drugs to change that.

Evangelism works on modifying ones beliefs and looks for factual structures to support those beliefs. Sounds terrible eh? Well maybe that’s just another belief. And beliefs are malleable; facts are only deniable.

More in round 2, see ya

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton, all rights reserved

The goal of evangelism is certainly to win hearts and minds. All forms of evangelism are really propaganda, so in many ways he was right. But it is a soulless kind of evangelism when done by a bully. Evangelism works best when it stems from, and bases itself on, some fundamental righteousness. Being righteous and being big are two different things. When a lot of people hate you there is something wrong at the root of the matter. When the contest is between hate and love I feel that evangelism becomes a different art. Hate and love are two sides of passion.

We all know that the opposite of love is not hate; it is apathy. Not caring is a far stronger barrier than hating. It is easier to get someone who hates you to love you, for it is just turning around the passion that already exists. But the true mastery of the art is to get someone who doesn’t give a damn to care! Ah, that is the mastery of the craft, and it was clear that just becoming the defacto standard was far short of creating passion from apathy. Such is the bully’s path. You must decide when you step into the world of evangelism whether you are going to seduce the mind or the soul. I prefer the heart, for it is always true. That is just my operational opinion, each to his own.

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton, all rights reserved

It has been observed that an average corporation’s lifetime is about 40 years. 40 years from a wild entrepreneurial start-up to final maturation. Then they run out of steam. Not Margin and Profit mind you, but ‘oomph’, the risk taking, hang it all out, the bootstrapper’s way of thinking that cannot survive inside a functioning organization. You became a successful corporation because that state-of-mind once existed in your founders, but becoming successful mandates a change in thinking and conduct. Stability and control required that the corporate soul change from wild to tame. And guess what, MBA School can’t teach this, it’s in the soul or it’s not. MBA 105 course can teach all about entrepreneurs with case studies and lectures, but how do you teach someone to jump off a cliff into a foggy valley? You can’t, they’ve got to be nuts to do it.

Odds are you have the people who can think like this, but they need a trigger to jump and someone else to blame if it fails, otherwise their careers are shot. In the beginning the company had an entrepreneurial or ‘bootstrap’ state of mind that created new energy and direction and it worked, today the team is good at operating that legacy but locked into a state-of-mind that doesn’t see risk as an adventure but as an adversary. This early stage thinking is disruptive and threatening, and must be killed once it has been successful. Killed so that everyone else can remain secure. But don’t worry, orthogonal thinking and risk taking is a phoenix, you can do it again after a breather and once everyone has settled down again.

Just a thought, you can combine a start-up with a mature company but only if that startup leadership that can see itself as disposable. Only then can it be free enough to make the jump into the fog.

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton, all rights reserved

Who better than the CTO to be the best pitcher you can have. Before he (she) walks into the room people’s minds are programmed with stereotypical beliefs.

CTOs are technical people, logic, science and ration are the key words, morally they stand on the shoulders of giants - they don’t know how to lie.

CTOs are smart, they are visionary, and they live in towers, listen to Mozart and Monk, and get it.

What a well designed stage to walk out on. Even the most intimate meeting is the golden opportunity to convert people. Anybody, regardless of rank or file, will walk away from such a meeting and tell someone else, the awareness spreads, we begin evangelization.

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton, all rights reserved

The Chief Consumer Officer has the job of talking to the company from the consumer’s viewpoint. The job of being the consumer’s advocate, and from that perspective managing a new angle on the customer relations.

The average response to this statement is NO!. In our company everyone is customer-centric and we have tons of touch with our customers. From you to him maybe . . . just maybe. From him to you, virtually nothing.

In a humorous way let me suggest that a company is a lot like a fishing enterprise. Marketing casts a net, sales plucks the fish off, engineering makes new nets Hopefully lot’s of energy, each party talks to the other, everyone watches and knows the fish, after all the goal is to get lots of them.

But who is paying attention to the fish’s world? From a fishes viewpoint? And why should they?

So much for the fish, let’s talk customers –

You have a Marketing Department that is constantly probing the customer about what he wants to buy, what services he needs, what hardware is a must. They come back and report the future. The company CEO does lunch with the customer, plays back the reports, gets feedback, pays the bill,and everyone goes home. The company is secure in its handle on the customer.

Sales knows the customer, after all they get the orders! Living in constant fear of the dreaded ‘No’ word, only sales really hears the customer; after all, they are in the trenches together (someday I will put my short sales book, The Dance, up here). No one listens to the customer better than does the salesman.

Engineering knows the passion of the customer, the guy behind the curtain, in fact they talk to the only truthful people in the customer’s company, fellow engineers. For the truth is logical and thus only logical people speak the truth.

Time for a short story – One of my disciplines is anthropology. There was a woman ethnologist named Margaret Mead who visited and brought back the first records of life in Pacific Samoa Islands. She brought back tons of exotic sexual stories directly from these people, wrote a seminal book call Coming of Age in Samoa. International acclaims. Later visiting ethnologists did not find the same stories and myths. One of Miss Mead’s greatest discoveries was that people tell you what you want to hear because your questions tell them how to answer. Even to the best observer has this trouble. What a surprise. You see what you want to see, and don’t see the rest.

With that my time is up for today, more later in Part 2 and on….

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton, all rights reserved

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton, all rights reserved

Oh, and what does this have to do with technology?

Well everything - the choices, the whole line of thinking, and the cultural event that it constitutes, all are the result of and unique to the technology that makes the blog a reality.

Some of this blog will deal with the above; this will be my Tech& Biz Philosophy Category.

Some will deal with my interest in the ‘job’ of the Chief Technology Officer in businesses large and small and be my CTO Category.

Finally, I have a strong interest in the Buyer-Seller or Customer-Vendor relationship. I am a believer in the Chief Consumer Officer – the customer advocate inside a business. This will be my CCO Category.

All of this will reflect my view of technology and business evangelism.

Welcome aboard and I look forward to your comments.