Seth Godin is an amazing thinker. In a recent post he outlines some of the foundation elements for modern businesses.

When you sit down to dream up a new business, you can imagine a world without constraints. Or you can choose to build in fundamental pieces that will make it more likely your idea will pay off.

Here are some fundamental pieces of most new successful businesses. The goal is to build these elements into the very nature of the business itself, not just to tack them on. For example, the Scotch tape people at 3M can’t do #5, because of the structure of retail distribution and the way they mass produce and can’t track who is buying what.

You can live without some of these, but go in with your eyes open if you do:

1. Build in virality. Consider: Groupon.
2. Don’t sell a product that can be purchased cheaper at Amazon.
3. Subscriptions beat one-off sales.
4. Try to create an environment where your customers are happier when there are other customers doing business with you (see #1).
5. Treat different customers differently.
6. Generate joy, don’t just satisfy a need for a commodity.
7. Rely on unique individuals, not an easily copyable system.
8. Plan on remarkable experiences, not remarkable ads.

Read the whole thing here (Foundation elements for modern businesses.)

How can you treat your customers differently from what your competition does? I think that building “remarkable” into the experience is a very important part. What do you think? Leave a Comment.

Rypple has put together a short quiz to determine your Productivity Style. This is my result:

Well, that’s for sure. I suppose that now this means I have no choice but to consider how to best get a handle on these commitments and ideas…as if I don’t do enough of that already. But I haven’t been sharing it with you very much. That is something that I can change.

You can take the GTD IQ Quiz here. Come on back and share your results, I’d love to chat about how we can help each other out.

From the Behance Team, a cool video on the 99% – Eve Blossom: Create Containers for Collaboration

The video is about 16 minutes long.

Architect-turned-social entrepreneur Eve Blossom created a sustainable business – Lulan Artisans – that provides women and families in Southeast Asia with an economic alternative to participating in the sex trade. Extracting lessons from her nine-year journey, Eve urges us to be disruptive entrepreneurs, and to view our creative ventures as “cultures” – offering unique frameworks for collaboration – as much as “companies.”

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David Allen’s podcast at DavidCo has some interesting thoughts on the idea of being a “black belt” at Getting Things Done.

Allen describes the “black belt” practitioner as being more engaged and in control of their environment, rather than being a victim of it. The numbness that faces many of us, at one end of the “cranking widgets” spectrum and the crazy-busy-ness at the other, can often take away from the fact that we need to master the basic structures in order to properly manage our environment.

I see GTD as a philosophy, or an attitude toward our work, that envelopes more than just the Collect –> Process –> Organize –> Review –> Do –> Repeat cycle. Certainly mastering the process is important, essential really, to gain that confidence and experience the engagement that occurs when one is able to accept all of the different inputs and direct them to their proper place.

Just like a master chef is able to create an amazing dish with everyday ingredients that an amateur can only dream of, the Black Belt GTD practitioner is able to “effortlessly” direct their activities for maximum efficiency and effectiveness. The ease with which this happens is based on a great deal of practice, discipline, and the consistent execution of the fundamental principles.

Listen to the podcast here David Allen Podcast: David Allen – What is Black Belt? and share your thoughts in the Comments.

What would you like to work on to improve your own skill level?

GTD

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Merlin Mann has an update at 43 Folders featuring a trio of podcast interviews that he recently recorded. I listened to this one on “The Pipeline” where Mann discusses what he is doing now: 43 Folders – Merlin Mann & Dan Benjamin

We cover a lot of territory in less than 40 minutes, but we basically hit on almost every major topic that means a lot to me right now, including, the power of voice, the challenges of knowledge work, the perils of the Lizard Brain, the primacy of action, the seeming unavoidability of Buddhism, and the hidden dangers of following herds, chasing dumb traffic, and aping the “success” of others.

The MP3 is a massive 17.5 MB and runs about 40 minutes. I do recommend that you pop over to 43 Folders and read the article and listen to the podcast, which you can download here [Download MP3 of “The Pipeline, ep. 7” ]

Before you go, here are my raw, initial notes on the interview, to give you something to think about while you listen. Or you can just read these notes and let me know what you think. Up to you.

Here are a couple of the more interesting things I picked out of the interview, commentary below the jump.

• You can’t improve yourself by an order of magnitude by reading a list – you can make incremental improvements – This was a big thing in the early days of Productivity blogging, “7 Ways to ____”, or “19 Tips for Managing ___”. These lists, while interesting and useful, simply will not make you a better person by reading them. The important thing is to analyze them, see what would work for you, and implement them in your practice. Knowledge without implementation is trivia.
• E-mail is a controlling metaphor for how we relate to other people, e-mail is about relationships. Expectations “break” in email, email is not in itself the problem – A lack of appropriate filters is the problem with email. We all sign up for blog posts, newsletters, and so on, but do not always filter these emails into the right places for review at an appropriate time. The operative word is “relationships”. Here is a sample of some email folders, based on my own filtering setup:
  
  
  

  A way to arrange your e-mail folders for filtering incoming messages

  
  This arrangement works very well for me, as I can see at a glance when there are new items in each folder and can make an intelligent decision as to look at it or not. If it is a new newsletter, for example, I may choose to ignore it for now since I am working on something else at the moment. If I see that it is a message from an active client, I know that the message has a higher priority (or Urgency), and therefore I should consider looking at that message before I read or otherwise deal with any other messages. Because I have a much closer relationship with my clients, their messages have a higher value than a newsletter or a notification from Twitter that I have a new follower. Or a note from a friend about her starving baby condor in some Facebook game (a lot of the Facebook mail just gets deleted BTW, especially the Farmville stuff!).
• See clearly, act honestly. Principles of Buddhism that are sensible and non-religious – being mindful helps so very much. Good for troubleshooting, if you can’t see and think clearly, its hard to act clearly. No matter what your spiritual inclination it is a good idea to be mindful of the things that you are doing when you are doing them. That may sound like a big “Duh”, but you would be surprised at how often people just blunder through their day, responding and reacting to the things that happen to them. Instead of simply re-acting, being mindful of what is happening, really seeing the situation, can assist you in making the crucial decision that lies between the stimulus and the response. Then, after deciding, you can then begin to be pro-active.
• People get so attached to seeing themselves as they think that they are. More powerful words from Mann. Like the quote from Henry Ford, “If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right“, we are products of our thoughts. Sometimes we need to stop believing certain things about ourselves that simply are not true. Or start believing things that could make a positive impact on our work and our lives.

There are many more notes in the PDF linked above, I’d love to hear your own thoughts on any of these topics. Leave a Comment.

Justin McCullough at Leader 4 Hire shares a recent experience with a newsletter and a sales push: A Failed Sales Push by Chris Brogan and How You Can Do Better.

This is a detailed look at trust, marketing, and execution on an online sales push from some of the biggest names in Social Media – the good and the bad and how you can learn and apply this to your sales and marketing efforts.

Follow every bit of this through (except the last part) and you will succeed in your next email sales push. The sections I call “What’s Happening Here” should provide the key elements for you to model in your online campaign and sales efforts.

Nearly everything here is actually a success story other than the fifth area below.
First – Chris Brogan eNewsletter

Subject line of email from Chris: “Email marketing and the folks at Blue Sky Factory”

This is a great little sales piece from Chris. It clearly identifies his role in the email, why I (we) received it and who it benefits and why. On top of that, a nice bit of positioning and display of influence by offering an exclusive ebook download and discount to use Blue Sky Factory as a benefit to loyalty with Chris. Well done. This is the right sort of email marketing and who would expect less from Chris?

McCullough goes on to analyze the components of the newsletter, the links and sales pages, and the offers that are made. Pay attention to his description of how “marketing information” is captured when he has an opportunity to download a free e-book.

The big lesson in e-mail marketing

The email marketing campaign that McCullough details is a good one, executed well, until the the final part – where Sales and Customer Service fail mightily. I urge you to read the entire post, and the comments – they are a textbook example of how to manage a situation like this. Before you go, however, consider this:

Read the whole thing here: A Failed Sales Push by Chris Brogan and How You Can Do Better.

Here is another link, what are your thoughts?

Fron the Wall Street Journal

In its short lifetime, social media—services like Facebook and Twitter—have become popular marketing tools for small firms due to the low cost and easy-to-use format. Some entrepreneurs say they’re highly effective, but new evidence suggests otherwise.

“The hype right now exceeds the reality,” says Larry Chiagouris, professor of marketing at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business.

Last year, social-media adoption by businesses with fewer than 100 employees doubled to 24% from 12%, says a survey released in January of 2,000 U.S. entrepreneurs from the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business and Network Solutions LLC, a Web-services provider in Herndon, Va.

Meanwhile, a separate survey of 500 U.S. small-business owners from the same sponsors found that just 22% made a profit last year from promoting their firms on social media, while 53% said they broke even. What’s more, 19% said they actually lost money due to their social-media initiatives.

“It could harm you if you end up inadvertently saying something stupid, offensive or even grammatically incorrect,” says Mr. Chiagouris.

A business owner’s time and energy spent on social-media marketing—Folbot’s Mr. AvRutick says he dedicates about an hour a day—could also go to waste. Fifty percent of the latter survey’s respondents say it requires more effort than expected.

To gain positive results, entrepreneurs need to regularly interact with consumers through these sites and not simply create static profiles, says Jacob Morgan, co-owner of Chess Media Group Corp., a consulting firm in San Francisco that specializes in social media.

I am kinda busy with Tavern stuff this week, so I’m just going to share a link here:

The Social Sector Cloud | NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network

Cloud computing offers us all the same freedom for our information infrastructure. Most of us now host all of our applications and our data and our email systems documents/spreadsheets, etc. on our own servers or desktops. In addition to running a youth organization or a job training program or an environmental advocacy campaign, you are also running an information and technology system on which you do your work. With cloud computing, you access your software applications over the Internet using a web browser. Chances are you probably already do this with Yahoo Mail or Google Docs or Flickr or Salesforce or Twitter or Facebook.

Some of the benefits of cloud computing are obvious – many of the programs noted above are free (that’s good), version upgrades are instantaneous and don’t require you to contact an IT department and you can access your files from any computer.

Some of the downsides are also fairly clear — you may lose connectivity (and not be able to get to your stuff), the hosting company could go out of business (and you won’t be able to get to your stuff), and you need to really think through the security options and offerings provided (so that someone you don’t want to get to your stuff gets to your stuff). Hosted applications and platforms also require equitable access pathways, so while low cost hardware are available, it is broadband and mobile divides that are important.

Cloud computing on a broad scale will also fundamentally change how we work, where we work, and with whom we work. More importantly, over time we will see that the expectations that the cloud engenders have changed how we define what is worth working on. CrisisCamps are one example of how cloud computing lets us reimagine a problem and thus develop new solutions.

Michael Sliwinski has just published Productive Magazine #4:

Productive! Magazine about Getting Things Done and Lifehacks.

[With] great articles like:

* How to delegate if you don’t have a staff? by Michael Hyatt
* How to be productive and balanced when working from home by Stephanie Dickison
* Poutsourcing by Mike Vardy
* Reflections on publishing sensation – Four-hour Workweek book review by Art Carden
* 7 Irrational thoughts that disrupt your life by Steven Aitchison
* Zen to Done – 14-30 days to a habit by yours truly [Michael, not me, Ed.]

This is another excellent offering from Michael, with one of my favorite articles being “How to be productive and balanced when working from home” – a concept near and dear to my heart. The two best tips in the article: Stick to your Schedule and Get Comfortable.

These are extremely important, as I can testify. If you do not create a schedule for your work-week it is very easy to get sidetracked and discover that you have just spent 2 hours on Tweetdeck and now your work for the day has to get crammed into a much shorter period! I like to use Charlie Gilkey’s weekly and monthly planners for freelancers at Productive Flourishing to plot out the basics of my upcoming tasks.

Also, being comfortable is so important. I used to work in my cramped home office while sitting in a metal folding chair. Seriously. About a year ago I broke down and bought myself an actual office chair with wheels and padding and arms and everything. What an amazing difference it made to my productivity! The only additions to my home office that beat it were adding a second monitor to my laptop computer setup and the Kanban Board.

Click the link at the top of the post to visit the Productive Magazine home page and watch a short video, or here (Productive Magazine) to download the PDF.

Thanks Michael, great job!

I just read a troubling article in The Future of Work newsletter. I find it particularly troubling in this era of “Government-as-provider” thinking that seems to be all the rage in the US capitol.

Will Automation Lead to Economic Ruin?

by Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

Martin Ford is an entrepreneur, the founder of a Silicon Valley software firm, and a very thoughtful person. If you care at all about the future of the economy, the future of work, and the future of society, you will find this a very provocative read.

Ford asks an important but unusual question: will automation lead to economic ruin?

His basic argument? Technology is so good at increasing productivity that it could eventually eliminate just about every job in the entire economy. At first that sounds almost idyllic: we’ll have everything we need with almost no effort at all.

But wait a minute; if we don’t have to work, we don’t have jobs—and that means we don’t have any personal income. How do we feed and clothe ourselves?

Yet that’s a very likely future in Ford’s view. But he’s really just asking “What if?” He’s not claiming that a jobless high-tech future is inevitable, but he does raise some really important questions about what that kind of world might be like. Just as importantly he offers some very concrete suggestions about what we as a society could do to stave off disaster.

… this is where Ford gets really creative; he suggests imposing new taxes on companies to capture for society at large a small portion of the savings that come from automation. [emphasis mine, Ed.] When you think about it, most of the revenues society uses to pay for basic needs like defense, education, fire and police protection—and yes, even health care—come from personal income taxes. And as we experience one “jobless recovery” after another, the percentage of the population that is employed full-time—and paying all those taxes—continues to decline.

So Ford recommends a new kind of tax policy, one that transfers some of the productivity gains from automation into the federal treasury, for redistribution that creates purchasing power for those who are displaced by automation. Now before you get too worked up about that “socialist” idea, remember that without personal income there wouldn’t be customers for anyone’s products.

Let’s pause for a moment here and unpack what you have just read. If automation continues to improve and to displace workers from the workforce, would this cause some kind of large-scale poverty? I believe that the answer is, “It depends”. If some sort of android were suddenly introduced on the market that could cheaply replace a large percentage of the workforce in a very short time, then yes, I believe there would be an employment crisis.

However, I do not believe that this transformation of the workplace would happen quickly enough for labor markets to experience such a drastic upheaval. Certainly not requiring a new tax to support all of the newly unemployed – possibly forever. Unfortunately there is an apples-to-oranges comparison that – at first glance – appears to offer a morally-sound example of how this has happened in the past:

Another Ford—Henry—understood that reality so well that in the early years of the automobile industry he voluntarily increased the hourly wages of Ford Motor Company employees so they could afford to buy the cars they were producing—thereby increasing the market demand for those very cars. Think about that for a long time before you dismiss Martin Ford’s “radical” ideas for a very different kind of economic justice.

Ugh. “Economic justice“. The last words that you hear before someone steals something from you to give to someone else. This analysis seems to leave out an important issue: transformation of the workplace leads to a transformation of the economic system itself. An exponential increase in automation would indeed lead to the ruin of the current system, however, the system will, by necessity, have to change. The Industrial Revolution transformed not just the nature of the manufacturing system but the entire economy, and the governments that once controlled them.

The Industrial Revolution swept away the Feudal economic system, as automation transferred the ownership of the means of production from the nobility to the new merchant class (peasants with hand looms were replaced by steam powered looms, etc.). Obviously a steam powered loom was not in the political or economic best-interest of the land-owning nobility, but they did not have the foresight or the ability to control these technological developments. I would submit that the coming “era of automation” would have a similar effect.

Who Can Control the Means of Production?

Governments that would attempt to control these new means of production would soon find that there were less people willing to automate their businesses if it meant that they would have to give up their own profits to support the people that had been displaced. What is the point of replacing a worker with a robot if you can’t use those savings the way that you want to? Changes in law and policy often result in unintended changes in corporate behavior.

The ubiquity of the Internet in the developed world has already had a massive impact on personal behavior and once again threatens the status quo of the the current economic system with regards to the ownership of the means of production. Increased automation would soon reach a point of diminishing returns, with respect to the economic and political power of large corporations and manufacturing industries. In fact, the ultimate result of automation would likely come from the invention of a “nanofactory” that would have the potential of utterly transforming all economies. (The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology has more on the risks and benefits of nanotechnology)

In conclusion, I would like to say that I believe that increased automation is a good thing, something to be worked toward rather than be afraid of. In fact, I would like to see the systemic transformation of an economy that automation would bring. For more information on this subject, I recommend Cory Doctorow’s brilliant work of speculative fiction, Makers (Amazon aff link).