 In previous articles on New Collaborative (Existential) Enterprises, I’ve explained what existential enterprises are, how to avoid the most common landmines, how viral marketing works, and the role of innovation. This article will focus on assembling the team for your New Collaborative Enterprise. This step is what differentiates NCEs most from traditional small enterprises. It is also probably the hardest step, the most important, and the most personal. Assembling the NCE is a juggling act. You need to simultaneously accomplish two things:
If this isn’t hard enough, these attributes are likely to change constantly: You may change your mind about what you want your NCE to do, you and your partners’ skills and expertise may change, and your attitude towards your partners may change (or vice versa). All of these will require changes to the team. The good news is that the selection of the team isn’t your (or any one person’s) job — it is the essential collective responsibility of the team itself. NCEs are self-selected and self-managed enterprises, because a cohesive group together can always make better decisions than any one person can. As you’re assembling the team, your first job is to explain what an NCE is and what’s so good about them to your potential partners (I’ll cover this in next week’s article in this series), so that they accept the shared responsibility for building the team and the enterprise. This will take some practice and may have some surprising fallout. You might find that as the team assembles itself, you’re the one with the redundant skills, and the other potential partners will urge you to self-select yourself out of the enterprise. If so, it’s back to square one, creating a new team, possibly doing something somewhat different from what you had envisioned, where your skills and expertise are truly critical to the enterprise. If it sounds a lot like dating, it’s because that’s precisely what it is. You may also find that, with the collective wisdom of the team, you may have second thoughts about what you want the enterprise to do. One team member may inform the team that the need you thought you had identified doesn’t really exist, or is quite different from what you’d thought. When you refocus on a new need, a new enterprise objective and purpose, it is likely that the skills and expertise you will need to bring it to fruition will also change, and the whole constitution of the team will need revisiting. Just remember, the selection of the team is a shared responsibility. There is no hierarchy. There will also be a temptation, until the Internet and our society really understand NCEs and help facilitate their formation, to settle for something less than the ideal team. Obviously I can’t tell you (and your team) that this is a categorically bad idea. But it’s like lowering your sights after you’ve unsuccessfully asked several lovers to marry you, and propositioning someone you don’t really love just to get a ‘yes’. Sometimes it’s better to keep looking rather than settle for something that’s not likely to succeed or make you happy. If you want to be rich and miserable, an NCE is not the answer (marry someone rich instead). Each potential partner brings acquired skills and knowledge to the enterprise. Let’s look at what these terms mean. From what I’ve observed in over a hundred entrepreneurial businesses, there are five key groups of business skills:
While a base level of all these skills is essential for anyone who hopes to succeed in business (or anything else in life), we each excel at only a few of these skills. What we do best is largely a function of what we most enjoy doing (because all of these skills can be learned, and practice makes perfect). Our niche skills, our ‘distinctive competencies’, may be broad (across all five skill groups) or deep (e.g. the writer who composes brilliantly but can’t even deliver his own speeches, or sing his own songs, well). Knowledge, on the other hand, is what you have learned about specific subject matter. If I want to write software, just having the skills is not enough — I also need to study and learn programming languages and about information systems and the business environments in which they’re used. Some knowledge can be acquired academically, while other knowledge can only be learned from experience. The combination of skills and knowledge is what we call expertise. Ideally, you want your enterprise team members to have expertise. But if you’re young, you may have the skills but not the knowledge. And if you’re old, you may have the knowledge, but your skills may be rusty. Your team may therefore consist of some people with skills and others with knowledge — as long as they love and respect each other, that can be just as good as having expertise, and may be a lot easier to find. I can see some eyebrows raising when I talk about loving the people you work with. We have been culturally conditioned to leave our emotions at the door when we go to work (and school), to spend half our waking lives sublimating what we feel and just doing what we’re told. In a hierarchical organization this is ideal, though it saps the energy and creativity out of workers. But how sick is that? Why should we spend half our lives being what we’re not? If your enterprise is to be a place of passion, joy, and fulfilment (and it should be!), then it will be a place where emotions run free, and that means its partners need to deeply respect and love each other. No matter how perfect a fit their skills and knowledge are, if they don’t care for, and about, each other, your enterprise will be a place of chaos and conflict, and will eventually self-destruct. That makes the task of assembling the team even harder. But imagine — a whole team of people, doing what they do best, their expertise perfectly meshed, engaged and passionate and crazy about their jobs and each other — isn’t that worth the hard work of assembling the perfect team? I have reviewed, quite negatively, the first generation of social software tools designed to help people find other people they want to be with and/or work with. It does not surprise me that many of these tools ask you for lots of personal information and seem to be used more for finding dates than business partners. In fact, I think that’s what’s good about them. Assembling the team for an NCE is a job of matchmaking, of seeking love interests, as much as it is a job of acquiring skills and knowledge in human ‘containers’. That’s one of the reasons NCEs must be self-selected: No one person can accurately gauge the affection that partners will have for each other, and it takes an enormous amount of energy and effort to find just the right people, more than any one person can hope to muster. The next generation of social software tools will, I believe, make it much easier. The pioneers of NCEs will need extraordinary patience and tact, as all pioneers do, because we’re not used to dealing with each other this way, especially in establishing business relationships. Like all pioneers, we’ll need to learn by doing, and document what works and what doesn’t, and share this with each other, to make the road easier for those that follow. Last but not least, I have to confess, I have found no proven, successful model yet for a complete Existential, New Collaborative Enterprise. I am hoping that when I meet with Charles Handy, whose concept of Existential Enterprise is entirely consistent with the NCE concepts I have been writing about since before I had heard of his work, he will be able to tell me some success stories. I have studied about a dozen enterprises that claimed, or appeared, to be excellent models, but found them critically lacking in one or more attributes. I know of many enterprises that have some of the attributes of an NCE, and they all believe those attributes are what make them successful and happy, but these aren’t yet the stuff of great models. If you took these attributes and combined them in one enterprise, you would have a complete NCE, and there is no reason to believe it wouldn’t be a great company, and a perfect model for other pioneers to follow. But I must be honest — all the individual parts have been tested and work wonderfully, but the whole has yet to be put together in one vehicle and driven. Before the publication of the book of which these articles are a part, I am hoping to find one, or even better, a few. If not, readers will have to settle for some limited-scope success stories instead of a comprehensive one. To illustrate this ‘chapter’ on Assembling the Team I would then fall back on three family-owned businesses I know well. Their partners meet all of the criteria I have described above — they love and trust each other, they have a perfect match of skills and knowledge between them, with no overlap or redundancy to cause ‘expertise conflicts’, and they make all key decisions collaboratively and by unanimous consensus. My only reason for not describing them in more detail here is that they didn’t have to go through the hard part of finding each other, assembling the perfect team. They were already together, by fortunate accident of birth or marriage. What’s interesting is that I also know of many failed and miserable family-owned businesses, all of which lack the love, trust, respect, and/or mesh of essential skills and knowledge that my three successful proto-NCE family businesses have. And even more interesting, neither the partners nor the employees in these three NCE-like family businesses work anywhere near as hard as most people. They have more leisure time, more time set aside for social activities, and more fun than those in any other businesses I know. And even when they are working, it is a true labour of love. They are workplaces of great joy. We all deserve as much. PS: I need your help, dear readers. I have been using Charles Handy’s term Existential Enterprise, and my term New Collaborative Enterprise (NCE) interchangeably. This is probably confusing to readers, but I can’t decide which term, if either, to use. I wrote about NCEs several times before I discovered Handy’s work. His term is simpler and needs no acronym, but the word ‘existential’ sounds kind of academic, theoretical, even intimidating to those who don’t know what it means. So what name should I use? |
June 22, 2004
HERDING CATS: ASSEMBLING THE TEAM FOR YOUR EXISTENTIAL ENTERPRISE
June 21, 2004
WHY WE’RE SO TAKEN WITH IMAGES
 Nowhere is the intellectual and imaginative poverty of psychology so clear as in our (lack of) understanding of how the brain processes images. Years of medieval torture of small mammals to try to understand this process has produced only a sketchy, inconsistent and contradictory set of theories: The retina, they claim, sends only critical data about movement, edges, and colour to the brain, which reconstructs the rest of what it ‘sees’ from memory. The left brain processes text while the right brain processes images. The slow-working cortex processes non-urgent complex images while the more instinctive amygdala and sub-cortex process urgent messages of life and motion. Last week’s Law and Order rerun featured duelling psychologists, one of whom argued the murder defendant’s sub-cortex was so inflamed by seeing Arabs, or even hearing the word ‘Arab’, that he was ‘hard-wired’ (from birth) to hate and kill Arabs and was therefore not responsible for his actions. The prosecution’s rebuttal featured similar pictures of inflamed sub-cortices of other people in response to other images and words, people who were not ‘blinded by hatred’ to the point of ‘mindless’ homicide. As usual in such cases, a deus ex machina was used to rescue the prosecutors — turns out the defendant’s military father abandoned his mother and took up with an Arab woman, causing the defendant’s bitter mother to brainwash her son to hate Arabs. So, fortunately, none of the absurd and murky psychological theories was needed. Our evolutionary success would certainly be best be served if we indeed had some kind of ‘fast track’ image processing mechanism that would, for example, cause us to process the image of a person raising a gun towards us (or a bear rearing up) more urgently than the image of a sunset. Tests suggest that we scan and remember objects spatially, going from the most important (facial expression, brightest, closest, fastest-moving) to the least important details rather than raster-like left-to-right or top-to-bottom. So if we don’t have enough time for a complete scan before the object passes from view we can at least glean the critical information (‘that was my Mom’, ‘that guy has a cute dimple but bad shoes’). Is our processing of a photograph different from that of the object(s) it depicts? It is, after all, a two-dimensional unreal, asensual representation of a three-dimensional, sensually complete and complex ‘real’ object or scene. Most animals are quite disinterested in pictorial representations, even if they’re accompanied by ‘realistic’ sound and motion, even if they’re in a mirror — and even if the object depicted is one they’re very interested in in real life. Since we are, after all, animals, that suggests that we’re probably using different parts of our brain to process the representation than we would use to process the original, ‘real’ image. Why then do we sometimes respond more emotionally to a good picture of a loved one (“awww…what a great picture of…”), than to that same loved one sitting elsewhere in the room at the very moment when we view their image? And why do we use the word ‘imagination’, which literally means the ‘forming of images’, to describe the intellectual process of thinking about and inventing that which does not exist in the real world at all? I’ve written twice about pigs on this blog. Once I described the atrocity at Wood Lynn Farms, where the Long family of London, Ontario and their criminal corporate cohorts allowed 10,000 pigs to die of excruciating neglect and abuse. The photo that accompanied that story was so troubling that several readers wrote to me asking that I not include such pictures on my blog — they were too upsetting. The other pig was the invented narrator of my short story Myron’s Tale, which I illustrated with the photo above. It’s not my photo, but to me it is perfectly evocative of my point in the story — ‘the very picture’ of freedom and contentment. Pigs, as you may know, are, contrary to myth, very clean and extremely intelligent animals, who love the water, use mud to cool themselves and protect themselves from insects, are very sensitive to and stressed by the bad odours most of them are forced to live with in their factory farm prisons (they have an acute sense of smell, and make excellent trackers) and are particularly adept at video games. If you were from certain cultural groups in our society, your first reaction to seeing Myron’s picture might be revulsion — you would have been brainwashed to think of pigs as ‘unclean’, disease-ridden, unfit to touch let alone eat. If you were brought up on the Babe movies, you would probably think Myron was loveable and huggable. A friend of mine went hunting wild boar last weekend — if you can call letting men with guns, bows and arrows chase down and kill animals raised for ‘sport’ in a small fenced-off private ‘preserve’ hunting. But I doubt his amygdala would fire off and get him salivating and filled with blood lust at the mere sight of Myron’s image above. In fact, if he saw the horrible conditions in which most factory-farmed pigs spend their tragic lives, I suspect he, like most of us, would become a vegetarian (oops, botanivore) overnight. Though neither the Wood Lynn Farms pictures, nor mere pictures of the inside of slaughterhouses, would be sufficient to provoke such a lifestyle change. The handful of grainy, bizarre pictures of Abu Ghraib torture, and of the beheading of Americans by hooded, anonymous executioners, have provoked more emotion than all of the thousands of pages of grizzly description of Iraq war deaths, injuries, and violence combined. The Bush Regime tried in vain to prevent the media from showing even the flag-draped coffins of dead American soldiers killed in the same war, because they knew the emotional impact of those photos would be more powerful than the most impassioned and articulate anti-war rhetoric. And the staged photo-ops of the toppling of the statue of Saddam and military deserter Bush in his ‘mission accomplished’ flight suit were brilliant propaganda. So why, amid all the mud-slinging in the current US election campaign, haven’t we seen more ‘negative’ pictures and clips of the party leaders at their worst, the smirking chimp butchering the English language in his heavy-drinking party-hardy youth, and the wooden, Neanderthal-looking Kerry in his long-hair anti-war days? Is this visual propaganda beyond a tacit line that no one (except perhaps The Daily Show) dares to cross, because the images are too powerful, psychological weapons? I have a theory (of course). It is that we cannot bear very much reality and therefore we self-censor. In the real world we do everything we can to avoid seeing, hearing, feeling anything negative. That’s perfectly understandable. We don’t visit slums, crack dens, slaughterhouses, prisons, factory farms, tenement houses, hospitals (unless we absolutely have to), war zones, third world squalour, animal pounds, nursing homes. We ensure all these things are kept behind closed doors, away from us, where we don’t have to see them. We want the homeless off the streets, the graffiti cleaned up. Out of sight, out of mind. We are excited by the idea of violence, and will watch it endlessly depicted in the movies, but we don’t want to see real violence. We will watch the hero suffer torture bravely, and exact ruthless revenge, but we don’t want to see or hear real torture and death, the screams of true agony, mangled stumps of appendages gushing blood, piles of bodies with their faces half missing, naked blister-covered bodies lying in pools of their final excrement. And likewise we don’t want to see negative images. Not images of the dead, military and civilian alike, in Iraq, their faces contorted with the final expressions of pain and anguish, dishevelled, missing body parts. Not images of what goes on in the ten percent of all homes where sexual and physical abuse are routine parts of life. Not images of suffering, pain, misery, anger, violence, hopelessness in all those buildings we drive by every day on our way to our antiseptic workplaces. We are offended by such images, they cause us real and lasting pain, and when we are forced to watch them (rarely) we are outraged. We do not want to know. And despite the attempts of Hollywood to densensitize us, when we do see powerful, negative images, it shocks us to our very souls. We want to believe they are not real — rigged for propaganda purposes, photoshopped, anything. Tell me this wasn’t real, it didn’t happen. Most of us, thanks to our culture’s propensity for putting all these things out of sight, and the media’s self-interested willingness not to subject us to this reality, we don’t have to deal with this very often, and when we do, our reaction is to try to self-heal from the trauma of the images, rather than to do anything about the underlying cause of what they depict. I can’t look. Is it over yet? And then we look for someone or something to blame, ideally something abstract — loss of family values, deranged terrorists — that we can’t do anything about, so we are absolved from responsibility for doing anything about it at all. For billions in the world, however, these images are part of the horror of everyday life. Seeing death or incredible suffering every day, sometimes involving those you love, is a normal occurrence. These people and these animals live lives we cannot, dare not even imagine. Words we can deal with. They are abstract, they can be discounted, written off. Images are harder. They tell a story, they provoke our stunted imaginations. They force us to face reality. There is a reason we are so sensitive to horror, to suffering. Like all sentient creatures on Earth we are at heart sympathetic, driven to quickly deal with and eliminate atrocities, responsive to and responsible for our immediate environment. Despite what your church may have raised you to believe, nature abhors pain and suffering, and all her systems are designed to minimize it — not because she is ‘good’, but because a world of boundless joy and beauty makes you want to live, and evolution favours those who want to live. In a world of endless, hopeless, grinding pain, misery, violence and suffering — our world — what’s the point of living? Might as well kill yourself, and maybe take some of those you blame with you. That is, unless this terrible reality, and the images, and your ability to imagine, this reality, are all hidden away where you can’t see it, can’t picture it, can’t imagine it. If we can’t see it, because it’s behind closed doors, or on the other side of the world where the media cameras are never turned on, we can pretend, and believe, that it isn’t happening. That it isn’t real. That we aren’t responsible. |
June 20, 2004
FRIDGE GRAFFITI
| Writing poetry with the limited words they give you in the box of magnets is a challenge. But I like the slightly wonky effect of their crookedness.
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THE SCRAPBOOKING PHENOMENON: BLOGGING + PERMANENCE?
 My daughter spends much of her workday at the computer, but has no interest in blogging. Her hobby is scrapbooking, a hobby that now supports a $2.5 billion industry. A scrapbook is essentially a photo album on steroids, replete with souvenirs, commentary, and now, special thematic papers to make your collage a work of art. Special scissors are involved, as are many art media (paint, chalk, etc.). Stores catering to the hobby are springing up everywhere. People belong to scrapbooking circles (where you share your technical skills in scrapbooking, more than the actual scrapbooking content, with others), and are signing up for classes in scrapbooking and attending scrapbookng conferences. There is a Scrapbooking for Dummies book.
Last week, during a delightful dinner with fellow Canadian bloggers Seb Paquet and Gary Lawrence Murphy, we talked a little about this, and my dinner companions defined the hobby as Blogging + Permanence. Where a blog consists of nothing but bits and is totally etherial, a scrapbook is tangible. It has heft. It has presence. It is also a social hobby, far less solitary than blogging. Mothers and daughters work on their scrapbooks together. And the subject matter is much more personal than most bloggers’ writings and photos (livejournal bloggers excepted). This is perhaps because the privacy of scrapbooks allows this intimacy — no fear of stalkers stumbling on your scrapbook the way they can on your blog. And scrapbookers are overwhelmingly female. They are also, photobloggers aside, of a more artistic bent than the vast majority of bloggers. The whole point of blogs was to make website composition simpler, so the writer could concentrate on the words. Scrapbooks are all about composition, and that composition is getting more sophisticated all the time. Some scrapbookers are even taking art classes so they can supplement their photos with portraits and other works of art. The hobby is even encroaching on genealogy, with much richer stories about, and embellished with artefacts of, one’s ancestors than one finds on the usual ‘bare’ family tree. I keep thinking there should be more overlap between the two hobbies, but while there are lots of websites on how to scrapbook, there are very few blogs devoted to scrapbooking (and those that are seem to have mostly been abandoned, presumably so their writers can pursue their favoured hobby instead). There is certainly a ready opportunity to bring the hobbies together: Scanning the pages of a scrapbook into a blog would not be difficult, and would create a backup copy of the scrapbook that could be given to others or shared with those far away. And if the blogging tools weren’t so clumsy, they could allow us to print out our blogs and preserve them, with some of the related real-life scraps, the comments threads etc., in a hard copy archive that those (like my father) who say they find reading online too hard on the eyes could browse. Why doesn’t this happen? Probably because the content is different, and the intended audience is different. The audience for your scrapbook (besides yourself) is the person sitting beside you, commenting on each page, sharing your art in a very tactile way. The audience for your blog (besides yourself) is the vast, mostly unknown horde of readers who find your ideas interesting, your compositions provocative or inspiring, your information useful, but who, for the most part, won’t miss what you’ve written next week when it disappears into the impenetrable blog archives. Blog posts are ephemeral, quick flashes, fireworks, left brain stuff. Scrapbook pages are memories, permanent vehicles to recall, richly, again and again, treasured memories. Drawing on the right side of the brain. |
June 19, 2004
SATURDAY ODDS & ENDS
 Four interesting or useful remainders for the week: NY Times Ombudsman Calls for Curtailing “Unnamed Sources”: There are situations, says Daniel Okrent, when it’s essential to cite such sources to get important news out without blowing the source’s cover, but when they’re cited to explain Barbra Streisand’s insistence on scattered rose petals on her hotel bathroom floor, it’s being abused. Okrent says three key ways to stop the abuse are (a) don’t allow sources to remain unnamed if the story isn’t important, (b) advise the source that if it turns out his story is false, his identity will be revealed, and (c) explain to readers the motivation of the source for remaining anonymous, so the reader can judge their credibility accordingly. It’s a bold plan to reduce media spin. Japanese Inventor Plans “Invisible Walls”: I reported last year on an invention that would allow those living in cramped space or with poor views or no windows, to use computer technology to create a false window. Susumu Tachi’s invention works by “projecting an image onto itself of what is behind it”, and has already been applied to clothing to make the wearer appear invisible. I think this is fertile ground for open space collaboration — the opportunities of this technology for making people’s life better are enormous. Absolutely critical is ensuring that the innovations that come from it are affordable. Nationalmaster Automatically Graphs Over 4000 Geographic Statistics: This unique resource produces a world map or other chart that illustrates data from crime rates to grain exports. The map above is an example, showing gas prices: Bright green $1.50-$2.00/litre, dark green $1.00-$1.50/litre, dark blue $0.70-$1.00/litre, bright blue $0.03-$0.70/litre. Multiply by about 4 to convert to price per gallon. Turkmenistan is $0.03/litre, Uruguay is $1.95/litre. Average is $0.88/litre. Tiny URL: This free resource can reduce long URLs to manageable size. Especially useful for newspaper article URLs that seem to go on for pages, and especially if you’re sending them in a text e-mail, so line breaks don’t split them in two. Best way to use it is to put the TinyURL maker on your browser toolbar, so you can just click on it when you’re on a page with a long URL, instead of copying the long URL. Instructions on how to do this are on the main TinyURL page. |
June 18, 2004
Awfully Personal Question for June 19, 2004
 Welcome to That’s Awfully Personal, an opportunity for blog writers and readers to reveal a little more about themselves than might normally happen during the daily blogging process, and hence get to know each other a bit better. It’s a little like the late, great Friday Five, but more challenging. Each week our Awfully Personal Panel will post one or more new questions for you to answer on your blog, or in the comment space below if you don’t have a blog.
For more on how That’s Awfully Personal works, please see the How to Play section below. Here is this week’s Awfully Personal Question:
How to Play “That’s Awfully Personal”:
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TECHNICAL NOTE: SIDEBAR CHANGES
| Thanks to reader encouragement, I’ve gone ahead and expanded my right sidebar Table of Contents to include all 40 subcategories, not just the six main categories. All my 700+ blog posts are indexed by subcategory, for those that prefer finding articles this way over using my Google blogsearch bar. I’ve used anchors to get you to the subcategory lists — not pretty, but functional. I was going to combine the six category Tables of Contents into one, with a pictorial GUI you could click on, until I discovered how many people have permalinks to these six existing category tables and use them as a quick way to check “if Dave has blogged about this issue”.
I’ve also, reluctantly, removed my Salon Blogs Directory from the sidebar. It took an enormous amount of time to update and maintain, and got surprisingly little traffic, even from the new Salon Bloggers it was designed to benefit. Salon.com ignored my requests to publicize it, which would have given it a lot more visibility and might have given me the impetus to continue it. And the ‘monthly hits’ totals that I compiled have become increasingly meaningless due to the huge number of Google hits to many sites from idiots looking for porn (usually in the wrong places). From time to time I will publish a list of active Salon Blogs sorted by inbound links, highlighting new Salon Blogs. It’s really important that we welcome new bloggers to our community, so if you’ve written something up on new Sloggers, let me know and I’ll publicize it. For those who have sent me notes on broken and updated links on my blogroll, please be patient — major update of the blogroll coming soon. I just wish I could master those little ‘twisties’ so it didn’t take up so much real estate. |
WHY DOES SMALL BUSINESS VOTE CONSERVATIVE?
 Time for another of life’s imponderables. Both in Canada and the US, family farmers and small business people have, in recent years, consistently voted conservative, and show every intention of doing so again this year. This makes absolutely no sense: Most farm states and provinces are net recipients of government largesse (i.e. they receive in equalization payments and services more than they pay for, subsidized by the more urban and more liberal states and provinces). And even though in the past 20 years conservative governments have spent more than liberal governments, that money has largely gone to tax cuts for the very rich and defense spending, creating huge deficits that small farmers and small business people have to repay in taxes, and receive almost no benefit from.
I talked to a few local farmers and small business people to try to find out why they vote conservative. This small sample may not be representative, but what they told me was:
Yesterday the US House of Representatives passed a Republican bill that would give $140 billion in tax breaks to “businesspeople and farmers”. Who benefits? “Companies with foreign corporate profits, timber companies, oil & gas drillers, movie studios, wine distributors, manufacturers of bows and arrows, and tobacco farmers”. The rest of us, including small farmers and small businesspeople, will foot the bill. But I’ll bet that if small farmers and small businesspeople are even aware of the bill, they won’t be outraged and might even be more inclined to vote Republican because “it’s pro-business”. And the Democrats, whose Southern flank supported the bill because of the tobacco subsidy, are really in no position to shout foul. In a country with only two parties both feeding at the same trough, the rich & powerful win and everyone else loses. In Canada, which has five parties to choose from, the ‘first past the post’ electoral system undoes the benefits of party pluralism. With the three small parties all socially liberal, Canadian liberals are forced to ‘vote strategically’, which means voting for the Liberal Party instead of their real choice, the NDP or the Green Party, to prevent the 30% of Canadian conservatives, who have only one voting choice, from stealing the election. We’ll find out in ten days whether they did so or not. Alas, both the US Republican and the Canadian Conservative parties are consistently and heavily propped up by small farmers and small businesspeople. Without that support, these parties would be history. It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s the reality that both right-wing parties are counting on for election success this year. It’s a brilliant con. |
June 17, 2004
A HERETICAL APPROACH TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP: EXISTENTIAL ENTERPRISE 101
 ©2004 The Caring Enterprise Coach
This article is a summary of what everyone should know before starting their own business. It assumes that you’ve done the following groundwork:
If you talk to your local accountant or small business advisory office, they’ll probably tell you about the importance of doing a business plan to raise financing, the need to incorporate and register your business name, how to advertise your product and service, and the importance of administrivia like business cards and letterhead. They’ll also probably tell you that entrepreneurship takes courage, patience, an ability to handle enormous stress, and a willingness to take risks and work long, hard hours. And they’ll tell you that growth is paramount. Most of this is nonsense, and all of it is putting the cart before the horse. Why do they tell you this? Because it’s what they’ve been taught, and because of the frightening failure rate of small enterprise. But most entrepreneurial businesses don’t fail because of bad advertising, cowardice, owner laziness or inability to handle stress. They fail because they are poorly thought out, poorly researched, set up wrong, marketed wrong, badly managed, and given terrible business advice. I base this immoderate assessment on my experience working with over a hundred entrepreneurs, listening to their stories, and seeing what works (and what doesn’t) in small enterprise, and why. Let’s take a step back and consider what an entrepreneurial business is. It is a (usually small) number of people with a shared idea and a willingness to work together to make that idea commercially viable. That means, according to what they teach you in business school, finding capital, developing your product and then going out looking for customers for it. This is a recipe for failure. The money you borrow (which in an entrepreneurial business is always horrifically expensive) compromises your control and immediately presents the possibility of the loan being called, and the personal assets securing it being forfeited. And there are a million possible reasons why there could be few, or no, customers for your product. The #1 reason entrepreneurial businesses fold is because they simply run out of cash. The #2 reason is because the owners make one or more fatal decisions, and the most common fatal decision is to produce a product that nobody wants to buy. Here’s an alternative model, based on what Charles Handy calls Existential Enterprise, and which I have called New Collaborative Enterprise. Its first two principles turn the business school formula upside down:
This isn’t rocket science. The first rule simply says do your research before you start, do it thoroughly, and do it with potential customers. That way you have sales before you have costs. Then rule number two becomes easy — your customers finance your business, and the debt is quickly extinguished when the product is delivered. This is an oversimplification, of course. You can’t always finance operations this way. But if you have to borrow, the principle is the same — pay it off fast, as part of the same transaction that gave rise to the debt in the first place, and never give up equity — it’s like selling your soul. Most women can confirm the insanity of spending cash you don’t have — which is one reason women entrepreneurs tend to start their businesses more slowly, and keep them going much longer. Time for some more heresy. MBA graduates will tell you to select a management team with a balance of skills — operational, financial, sales, management etc. But they don’t know what your particular business needs — if the business is an R&D outsourcer it needs people with deep knowledge about research, not accountants and sales executives. An Existential Enterprise will follow these principles instead:
This may sound idealistic, but it works. Partnerships are a very common form of business organization, and those formed with family members and others where there is a bond of love and trust are especially durable. And many large businesses are learning the benefits of flat organizational structure, decentralized decision-making, and the abolition of titles. Next, the business school grad will tell you you need systems that provide each person with compensation and reward that is ‘commensurate with performance’. That means your partner who’s independently wealthy and who self-promotes like crazy will get money he doesn’t need, and the young, modest partner with a big mortgage will get less money than he needs, and so will probably leave to get more. And the partner who values and needs her spare time but who has critical and scarce skills will be bribed to work long hours and so will probably leave to get less. Here’s a more sensible approach:
Now everyone in your enterprise knows what you’re trying to accomplish, what it will take to achieve it, what’s in it for them, and what their individual role is. If each member has the key attributes and basic skills listed at the start of this article, you have all the ingredients in place for a successful (on your own terms) enterprise. All you need to do now is communicate well and avoid the landmines. Think of it as a jazz combo versus a traditional symphony orchestra. In the jazz combo, everyone knows their role, takes their cues from each other, and communicates network-style with the other band members and with the audience (customers). If the audience gets restless (customers are dissatisfied or their needs change) you can improvise quickly. You don’t need hierarchy. By contrast, the symphony orchestra, like the traditional business, is hierarchical, communicates only through the guy at the top, and is totally stuck to the rehearsed script (the business plan). If the audience is unhappy, the symphony just ignores them and plays on. Which business model makes more sense to you? Once you’re up and running, here are three final principles to keep things going smoothly:
Most of the problems in traditional entrepreneurial business — the ones that lead to the stress, long hours, divorce, sacrifice, unhappiness, and, often, failure — are created by the MBA mythology of how to start, build and operate a business — a mythology that often defies intuition and common sense. And that’s all these ten principles are: Common sense, that I’ve seen work in dozens of small, successful enterprises, and the ignorance of which has been the undoing of dozens of others I have worked with. That’s why people with no formal business training are sometimes the best entrepreneurs: They don’t have to unlearn all the nonsense, and guided by common sense they instinctively build something closer to the Existential Enterprise model than the Business School model. I’m not saying that this is easy. Adhering to these ten principles (especially the first two) requires a lot of time and energy, and considerable intelligence. But they are relatively fool-proof and stress-free. After all, what could be more joyful than creating a successful enterprise with people you love and trust, on your own terms — a true labour of love? |
June 16, 2004
TAKING VEGETARIANISM MAINSTREAM
 Vegetarianism has a bad rep: Many people still think vegetarian cuisine is boring, unhealthy, and eccentric. People make jokes about tofu and yogurt, and too many vegetarian recipes highlight (yawn!) eggplant, zucchini, artichokes and plain white rice. And over-steamed vegetables are the new Kings of Bland — as tasteless, colourless and wilted as the dreadful boiled vegetables they replaced, and as unappetizing as food can get.
If we’re going to get rid of the farm factories, the grotesque abuse of farmed animals, and the massive waste and destruction of Earth’s land for monoculture animal feed, we need to be bold, aggressive, and create some buzz about meat-free diets. The failure of vegetarianism to go mainstream has three causes:
Here are ten steps the industry, and we as citizens and consumers, could pursue to take vegetarianism mainstream:
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