PicoBusiness

Running a small business in Somalia is an anarcho-capitalist’s dream, I guess.

Remember this story when you think that starting a business is “too much work.”

Wow

Be yourself.

One thing I’ve realized over the years of reading about CEOs and books on being CEO or becoming CEO or being like some famous CEO, is that every CEO is different. Some are workaholics, some are take-it-easy types. Some demand perfection from everyone, some expect failures as part of the development and risk-taking process. Some are very interested in community, some aren’t. Some are fantastic schmoozers and some are antisocial.

I will say that definitely being a workaholic seems to be a very common trait of a CEO. I’ve seen two reasons why people are workaholics. A) They feel that in order to succeed they need to put in long hours. B) They love what they do, it energizes and excites them, and they willingly put it ahead of other things.

Being an A) workaholic will probably suck out your soul, leaving you in the classic position of regretting on deathbed that you didn’t spend time with your kids. Being a B) workaholic probably helps you find energy to spend time with your family. I suspect it also brings your family and friends along with you, to some degree, because they see that you enjoy what you do and it makes you happy.

This only applies to entrepreneurs who are trying to build big, but they’re still valuable if you’re looking for VC money.

Allan Morgan:
Commandment #1: Talk to the VC partner who is already familiar with your market space.

Note - if there isn’t a partner who is familiar with your space at that VC firm, don’t bother with them. You’ll waste both your time and theirs, and if you persist and get some interest, you’ll almost certainly waste a lot of your time as they try to learn about your market. Best to skip it.

Hat tip: Fred Wilson

Echoing Scott Burkett’s experience, I get quite a bit of recruiter spam these days – unsolicited emails about software development/management/consulting positions that I have no expertise in. Occassionally, there are some good ones, but most of them are just clearly automated crap.

I assume that it’s because of the current candidate shortage, and it will go away with the next recession. And granted, it’s better to get too many opportunities than too few (not that I’m specifically looking for new work). I can only imagine what it’s like for someone who is diligently updating their resume every day, posting on multiple job boards, etc.

• GTD Tiddly Wiki – Javascript webpage that you can run from your local hard drive (no network connection required). I copied the page onto my hard drive and use it to keep track of what I’m doing.
• Protopage – A web-based organizer for bookmarks and a whole lot more. Easier to organize than a favorites/bookmark list, and it will work when you’re at a different computer.
• Bellygraph – I created Bellygraph because I needed something like it, to help keep me motivated to work on my goals.
• del.icio.us – I use this all the time to track interesting web pages, especially so I can mention them here.
• Bloglines – If you’re not reading blogs with a blog reader like Bloglines, you are almost certainly using your time inefficiently.

For tracking website stats and traffic:

• Google Analytics – unfortunately, they’ve had to refuse new accounts, but if you are fortunate enough to get one, it’s a great ‘dashboard’ for tracking who visits your website, how long they stay, and what they look at.
• Technorati – I use Technorati to keep track of who is linking to my blogs (Indefinite Articles, PicoBusiness and Stone Magic) and also who is linking to my websites.
• Alexa – I’ve just started using this, but it has some interesting statistics

Sites that I’m using more and more:

• Google Home – Like MyYahoo, but a little more configurable, and it integrates with Gmail.
• Jotzel – a great source of business news.
• del.icio.us/popular – the latest “cool” websites. Lots of techie stuff, but lots of business and personal development stuff as well.

Rob May won the ‘best management idea’ contest. His basic concept:

One thing I do that isn’t very common is that I write down the decisions I make and the projected outcomes. Each week, I take a few minutes at the end of the week and I make a list of decisions I made. I try to focus on decisions that have important consequences, have ambiguous input parameters, or are otherwise difficult to evaluate. I don’t waste time on simple things, although at some point I probably should take a few weeks and just focus on those.

There’s a lot more there, you should definitely read it and think about how it could apply to your own working life.

Not nearly enough, according to Kathy Sierra. The trick (according to the study she mentions) is to keep learning new and different things, not keep excelling and developing skills you already have.

For example, I write books. But writing books only helps develop brain cells for a while, until you get used to it, and then it stops helping. So you have to keep trying to learn and master new skills to keep your brain growing.

Kathy asks her readers what they are doing to learn new skills (she refers to it as Blowing your mind). Well, after thinking about it, I’m in the process of learning a couple of new things:

• Latin
• Yu Gi Oh card game

I should probably add some more to the mix. Some things I’ve learned recently that probably helped, but are probably fully incorporated are:

• Ruby On Rails – I suspect that every language helps you stretch your brain, just not as much as the previous one.
• Laszlo – ditto
• Bejeweled Alchemy

One sure way to tell when you’ve wrung all the learning out of something is when it takes you just minutes or at most a couple of hours to master a new variation. For example, Quake 4 involved 0 new learning opportunities for me, Star Wars Battlefront II only a few minor new things.

Ideas on what to do next
These seem fairly accessible:

• Fencing
• Dancing
• Singing
• Public Speaking
• Non-guitar musical instrument
• Learn another language, especially a non-latin one (German, Mandarin, Hindi, for example)
• Read and Write in those aformentioned languages
• Make films
• Art Photography
• Cryptography
• Windows application development (maybe)
• Painting/Drawing
• Music Composition

More as I think of them.

Everyone’s homework – think of one thing that you have no skill or experience in, and resolve to try it out, just a little.

Vodkapundit asks everyone to list their top 10 most-played songs in iTunes.

So here’s mine:

Battle of the Heroes – John Williams – Star Wars III
Descent Into Mystery – Danny Elfman – Batman
Heavy Price Paid – Bungie – Halo 2
Duel of the Fates – John Williams – Star Wars I
Peril – Bungie – Halo 2
Molossus – Hans Zimmer – Batman Begins
Impend – Bungie – Halo 2
Remembrance – Bungie – Halo 2
In Amber Clad – Bungie – Halo 2
Orbit of Glass – Bungie – Halo 2

You listen to nothing but movie and game soundtracks? Well no, absolutely not. But when I am writing my books, I listen to nothing but instrumental music that fits the mood of the book I’m writing (and the mood is fairly dark and heroic). I can’t listen to music with lyrics when I write, it messes with my focus.

Out of curiosity, I filtered out soundtracks, and this is what I got:

Where The Streets Have No Name – U2
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – The Propellerheads
Welcome Home (Sanitarium) – Metallica
Spybreak – The Propellerheads
The Shortest Straw – Metallica
The Frayed Ends of Sanity – Metallica
The Call of Ktulu – Metallica
Distintegration – The Cure
Punk Rock Girl – The Dead Milkmen
No One Lives Forever – Oingo Boingo

Metallica features prominently because of my exercise routine, which generally involves a strong, fast beat.

And the next ten:

Breaking Up The Girl – Garbage
In My Life – The Beatles
Like a Rolling Stone (Live) – Bob Dylan
Giants And The Thunder Titan – my son’s 10 second “theme song”
Justify My Love – Madonna
Ain’t No Fun – AC/DC
Don’t Crash The Ambulance – Mark Knopfler
The Voice – The Moody Blues
Ava Adore – Smashing Pumpkins
Fortress Around Your Heart – Sting

Nothing I feel particularly “shameful” about there. I am surprised by Breaking Up The Girl, though.

Crossposted from Indefinite Articles, which continues to degrade, and no longer generates trackbacks, comments or allows me to edit old posts.

Technorati Tags: iTunes, Blog Memes, Vodka

From Townhall via GeekPress:

Experts on a website called “Ask the Imam” say the act of keeping photographs of loved ones in an album is also prohibited in Islamic law.

And they go further than that: Even emoticons – the “smiley-face” icons widely used in email and mobile phone text messaging – are forbidden, rules Mufti Ebrahim Desai, a South Africa-based cleric.

Who do these people think they are? The RIAA?

I read “It’s not what you say, it’s what you do” by Laurence Haughton a while back, and I found it to be generally quote good. The general summary is: Develop effective metrics for every action you want to take (either for yourself or your organization) and then measure yourself rigorously against those metrics as you progress. In general, Dr. Haughton feels that it’s the abandonment of organizational initiatives that kills executional effectiveness – people notice when a “big idea” quietly dies, and then decide that the execs “don’t really mean it” when they come up with the next “big idea”.

Solution – never let an idea die quietly – make sure it has closure. This is a powerful idea, and probably ignored much more often than it should be. It is certainly something that I’m guilty of.

The book is obviously a lot more broad than this quick overview, and it includes a lot of ideas and techniques for going from idea to successful execution.

Here’s another, much more in-depth review of the book.

Another point in Dr. Haughton’s favor – he reads blogs, comments on posts that he likes, and follows up with commentors personally. (Very cool).

I found this book on building your own small business, apparently published online for free by a guy named Bruce Judson (sounds like a good idea, eh?)

It looks to be a really good read. I’ll try to read it and provide commentary here as I go through it.

In the New York Times

A new study that will be presented today to the National Academies, the nation’s leading advisory groups on science and technology, suggests that more and more research work at corporations will be sent to fast-growing economies with strong education systems, like China and India.

And

…Instead, the report found that multinational corporations were global shoppers for talent. The companies want to nurture close links with leading universities in emerging markets to work with professors and to hire promising graduates.

I will repeat… the ongoing development of the third world into a highly educated, skilled part of the world is not a bad thing. It is not a bad thing for freedom, for democracy, for capitalism, for humanity or even for humans in the United States. (I’ve riffed about outsourcing previously here)

Will some americans come out worse as technology development is globalized? Undoubtedly. But most Americans will adapt and prosper. We are famously adaptive to changing market conditions, and I don’t see this as any different.

We are on the cusp of so many wonderful developments – in nano-manufacturing, solar energy, fusion, genetics, circuit design… imagine if there were twice as many brilliant, creative people working on these problems, for the same (or only slightly more) than it costs now. Isn’t that going to be a massive boon to humanity? Aren’t well-educated masses a key foundation of democracy?

(Hat tip: Jotzel.

Update: Matt Yglesias points out this companion article – India is facing a skilled labor shortage.

Read this timeline, and focus on the first century and a half. Do you think those people were thinking that their businesses would someday merge to form the collosal behemoth that is Kraft?

Every big business was once a tiny business that saw an interesting problem in a new way. Every single one of those people probably worried about whether it would succeed, worried about competition, worried about paying their employees. You are not alone!

(Hat tip: Seth Godin)

At one point in the past, I accepted a counter offer after planning to leave, and, well, it worked out ok, all in all. However, this guy is very much against it, and his logic is quite sound. For me, the counter-offer was structured so that I moved into a brand-new, tiny organization focused on new technology, so the drawbacks he cites weren’t really in effect. Absent that kind of opportunity, I would definitely agree that you should not accept a counteroffer.

Certainly as a boss, the only time I would make a counteroffer is if I needed someone for a short-term emergency. Once that was over, I’d certainly cut them loose.