Fast growing, entrepreneurial organizations need employees who regularly demonstrate entrepreneurial characteristics and work habits. Management of entrepreneurial companies must work diligently to recognize, identify and attract this type of employee during the recruitment process to assure a steady stream of the people with the “Right Stuff” to fuel growth of the venture.

Employees come in all shapes and sizes with all sorts of different skills and quirks. Their outlook and approach has been tempered by past experiences, good or bad. In the relatively short period of time that you have to do hiring, you have to cut through the prospective employee’s resume and verbal statements and figure out if he or she has the “Right Stuff”. This is really important because just as “a bad apple will spoil the barrel”, an employee with the “Wrong Stuff” will drag your whole effort down. It would be one thing if a Wrong Stuff employee simply didn’t contribute, but it is worse than that-he usually sucks up scare management time, creates diversions for Right Stuff employees- you get the picture.

So what are the characteristics of highly effective “Right Stuff” entrepreneurial employees? Here are a few to keep in mind as you interview potential new hires, you probably can think of others.

Ability to Deal With Risk. An entrepreneur has to operate effectively in an environment filled with risk. The Right Stuff Employee can deal with risk and uncertainty. He is able to make progress towards goals and is able to make decisions when lacking one or several critical resources or data.

Results Oriented. The Right Stuff Employee is results oriented, she takes ownership to get the task done. She is a “can do” person who demonstrates common sense in her decision and actions and is able to cut through and resolve problems that divert others. Her business judgment is sound and becomes stronger with each experience, decision or recommendation. While supervisors and managers may disagree with her ultimate recommendation, they usually agree that the alternatives she presents are reasonable for the situation at hand.

Energy. The Right Stuff Employee has high levels of enthusiasm and energy; he consistently generates output that is higher than could be reasonably expected. He is fully committed to the organization, its goals and overall success.

Not only does he desire to make a contribution to results, he needs to see the results of his contributions quickly, not measured in years! He will seek out an organization that solicits and acts upon his ideas, gives credit where credit is due and points out errors and poor decisions quickly and clearly. He performs effectively with limited supervision and is able to self-motivate and set priorities with minimal guidance.

Growth Potential. The Right Stuff Employee’s reach exceeds her grasp today. Today’s Right Stuff Employee is often next year’s supervisor and a department manager soon thereafter. She is willing to accept much higher levels of responsibility that is the norm for her position, title, experience level or salary. She acts as a strong role model, trains and coaches others, and soon begins to assume supervisory responsibilities, again much earlier than would be expected in a normal corporate environment.

Team Player. The Right Stuff Employee is a true team player, she recognizes how her role contributes to the overall effort and success of the organization. She accepts accountability and ownership for her area of responsibility and expects others on the team to do the same. She also recognizes the roles and contributions of others and applauds their efforts sincerely.

Multitasking Ability. The Right Stuff Employee is flexible to accept new duties, assignments and responsibilities. He can perform more than one role until the incremental duties and functions assumed can be assigned to co-workers in newly defined roles. He is also willing to dig in and do grunt work tasks which eventually will be performed by lower level employees.

Improvement Oriented. The Right Stuff Employee is more than willing to challenge in a constructive way existing procedures and systems; to her the status quo is temporary. She suggests changes and improvements frequently and encourages others to do so also.

Right Stuff Employees are easier to manage in some ways but require a higher level of management involvement in others. Ordinary (average) employees will not produce extraordinary results over time; Right Stuff Employees will generally produce extraordinary results consistently over time. Unfortunately, unless properly motivated, managed and rewarded, Right Stuff Employees could perform at lower levels and only produce ordinary results. So what makes a Right Stuff Manager?

First of all the Right Stuff Manager must herself have the characteristics of the Right Stuff Employee. Beyond that she must have the basic skill set of sound business judgment, practical hands-on experience, general management skills and common sense. She must be committed to and contribute to the organization’s vision and mission and must convey this commitment in multiple ways: written, verbal and by actions. She needs an awareness, understanding and interest in the technology trends what affect the venture and its customers.

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J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

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For more information: visit eco-la.org

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Ready to leave your job behind and become your own boss? It takes a certain kind of person to make it through the first few years. To help you along, we’ve culled the best tips from our own members – people with years’ of experience in running their own businesses.

1. Don’t work for less than you can afford to, but do offer a discount to customers or clients who sign contracts with you.
2. Find people who will refer jobs to you. If they send you nightmare jobs, make sure they’re balanced out with rewarding (profitable!) ones.
3. Surround yourself with supportive people and don’t be discouraged by anyone. If your idea is good and you’re determined to stick with it through the first few difficult years, your chances of success are great.
4. Be flexible in your thinking. Prepare to change the way you work, the products you use and the services you offer, in order to meet the demands of your customers.
5. Admit your mistakes, correct them and carry on.(For example, if you purchase a piece of equipment that does not meet your expectations, send it back, sell it or exchange it!)
6. Develop a good relationship with your bank manager and creditors. Show a genuine interest in solving problems. Pay as much as you can afford to, to everyone to whom you owe money.
7. Get trained! You’ll be spending a lot of time doing things that have nothing to do with your area of expertise, like bookkeeping, marketing, and IT support!
8. Avoid isolation. Even if you work closely with your clients, you won’t be part of a gang anymore. Develop your own network of entrepreneurs that you see regularly and bounce ideas off. Ideally they’ll allow you to vent your anger and share your successes.
9. Separate your work and personal life. Set your working hours and stick to a strict timetable. When you’re not available to clients, leave a message on your answer machine letting them know when they can expect a reply from you. Let them know how to reach you in an emergency.
10. Plan some ‘thinking time’ into every day. If you pack your diary with back-to-back activities, your business will never grow.
11. Plan time to do something you enjoy at least a few times a week – recharge your batteries!
12. Write a business plan so you’re clear about what you’re doing, and update it every year.
13. Develop an excellent telephone manner and react quickly to any complaints or problems.
14. Confirm orders personally and immediately, especially those you receive on email.
15. Never lose sight of the big picture – look for innovative, little-explored directions in which to take your business.
16. When you find someone cleverer than you, employ them!
17. Solicit advice from people who know, for example, other entrepreneurs and reputable small business advisers – the DTI offers lots of information and support for new businesses.
18. Don’t enter a business or a venture that you know nothing about. You’ll be running to catch up for the rest of your business life.
19. Have an existing, loyal customer base and start locally.
20. Be aware that you will get through any initial investment quickly, so ensure you are covered financially until at least the end of the second year.
21. Focus on a specific goal and work at it until it’s achieved
22. Never worry about how to get things done when you are first developing your idea.Money and resources will come together once you have set your goals and begun to work at them.
23. Make quality in every aspect of your business your primary focus and aim. If it isn’t, you will eventually go out of business.
24. Use the Internet. Use email. Build a website (if you aren’t familiar with websites, try HTML for Dummies), send out email newsletters, buy online banner advertisements and register your site with all the major search engines.
25. Delegate. You might have to hire a good PA, lawyer, or marketing professional to ensure you’ll be profitable in the future.

source: ivillage.co.uk

More useful articles on entrepreneurship:

Tips for budding entrepreneurs

11 Principles of Entrepreneurial Leadership

Top 7 Hiring Mistakes for Startup Businesses

Top 10 Most Practical Blogs for Entrepreneurs

10 tips for entrepreneurs seeking angel capital

15 entrepreneur blogs worth reading

10 critical steps to writing a business plan

10 cool colleges for entrepreneurs

Selling a business: Top 10 tips for entrepreneurs

Top 10 reasons for buying a franchise

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In the time of the recession, I hear more people discussing the need for ‘sustainable’ innovation. As the legendary venture capitalist Eugene Kleiner would say – Even turkeys can fly in a high wind. In the times of strong economies, even bad companies can look good -. We need a new breed of entrepreneurs who understands the meaning of sustainable innovation and its impact in creating sustainable competitive advantage – creating companies and innovations that can weather through the tough economic times.

It is time for America to look at entrepreneurship from a whole new dimension. We need to address entrepreneurship at the grass roots and pre-college level. Gone are the days when getting a college degree would give you a pass to get a good job. Introducing a couple of college entrepreneurship courses won’t cut it anymore. What is innovation? Innovation requires dedicated entrepreneurs with right attitude, drive, and persistance to take risk. Xylus Sand has written an appropriate piece on innovation.

Innovation doesn’t come from the antiquated academic structure geared towards the industrial revolution of the 20th century. The world is changing. People and governments around the world are focusing on innovation…and the easy accessibility to innovative tools, combined with diminishing barrier to entry and the fast changing dynamics of social, political and economic condition is strongly influencing what once was the regional monopoly on innovation. But, the beauty is this is nothing new – the Union weathered through depression, several economic downturns and always came out strong. It can be done again, but we must follow different strategy – the strategy that will demand to bring about changes at the fundamental level.

We need to focus on youth entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial acumen needs to come at an early age. Picasso once said – Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up -.. Creativity, entrepreneurial, innovative drive dies when we grow older. It is important to keep creativity, inquisitive mindset, the DRIVE alive. Reforming education can be a polarizing topic, but introducing entrepreneurship in classrooms across America soon should be a no-brainer. Inclusion of entrepreneurial themed courses could expedite the much needed reform across the board.

On my blog and on my twitter page, I receive several emails and DMs everyday from Kids, teens and college students who are passionate about entrepreneurship. Its inspiring to see kids working with their parents and starting websites to offer advice on managing money. High school kids are developing successful business models out of social media sites like MySpace and Facebook – the concept that boardrooms across America are scrambling to understand. College film students are bootstrapping and developing studio quality movies.

I will be featuring some of the mind blowing entrepreneurial ventures sent to our blog. Stay tuned!

Like always, as so many of you have already done, feel free to email ideas, comments, feedback on our effort. Ideas4entrepreneur@gmail.com, 877 466 2360

Here is a small list of websites relevant to youth entrepreneurship –

a. The Funded Founder Institute b. SBA Youth Entrepreneurship Center
c. DECA
d. National Academy Foundation
e. NFTE
f. Ashoka’s Youth Venture
g. YSN Network

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4entrepreneur.net ( and YCEN Young Creative Entrepreneur Network ) is exploring ways to introduce entrepreneurship among youth in inner cities of Greater Los Angeles. Email us at ideas4entrepreneur@gmail.com with any feedback, creative suggestions and potential partnership/sponsorship opportunities.

Students take a break from auditioning for the video shoot..

Commissioner, Julie Matsumoto from Operation Street Kidz talk to the crew and the team about rehearsing for the shoot

Corey Jordan, a senior at Blair High has a dream of making a career in entertainment, but focuses on finishing school, wants to play basketball for Texas…

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Starting a business is a major commitment that will consume 24/7 of your life with no end in sight. It is always good to know what you are getting into before you take the plunge. From my experience writing business plans for large and small companies alike for the last 8 years, there are basically two reasons why you need a business plan – the first reason is to re-assure yourself that this wild dream that you have in your mind is actually attainable. And, the second reason is to convince a lender or a venture capitalist. More than likely, you are writing for the second reason. Whatever your reason may be, as the legendary management guru Peter Drucker would bluntly put – always ask yourself what your business is, who your customers are, and what the customer considers value.

In my opinion, here is a list of pointers that will save you headaches later.

a. Be clear about what you are selling.

Spend as much time as you need to define and clarify what you are selling. From the gettgo, come up with a 15 second elevator pitch. This will come handy later on. If you need professional help to come up with a pitch, companies like – 15secondpitch can help. This is a great resource to help you discover who you are, what your company does, and what others perceive of you and your verbal and written messages.

b. Come up with Mission, Vision, and Objective statements for your venture.

Mission, Vision, and Objectives – They may all look the same at first glance, but they reflect different rationale.

The mission statement represents the underlying operating philosophy and the values of the company – ‘The mission at Company ABC is to provide a reliable, yet affordable XYZ technology for residential customers.’

The Vision statement represents a long term plan – that provides a direction to make significant impact – ‘Our vision at company ABC is to become a global niche leader in XYZ technology by the year 2009.’

The Objective represents definitive goals for different purposes within the company. Peter Drucker first popularized the term “management by objective” in his 1954 book ‘The Practice of Management’. Objectives can be set in all domains (services, sales, R&D, human resources, finance) – ‘The main objective of company ABC is to understand the target market, to implement the most optimized form of logistics, to include a series of efficient fulfillment processes and to provide an unmatched form of customer service.’

c. Be honest with your Strengths and Weaknesses.

You can conduct a simple SWOT analysis on your venture. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Create four quadrants and fill up with honest lists of answers. This simple test allows you to assess your compatibility with the venture that you are getting into. This test will also indicate opportunities, threats and barriers to entry that exist in your vertical market.

d. Conduct a thorough research on your vertical market.
Leverage on new Internet research tools to conduct comprehensive studies. At every stage of your research, be open to adopt new directions based on your findings.

e. Make sure there is a real opportunity.
or move on to a different venture.

f. Make sure your product or service addresses pain point (s).

This goes back to the point (a). Understand and address your customer needs.

g. Conduct a thorough research on your competitors.

Create a matrix and conduct a thorough competitive analysis. See what your competitors are offering.

h. Make sure your product or service addresses pain point (s) better than your competitors.
Its all right if your competitors got in the market before you did. But, focus on doing things little bit differently that you address the customer needs, pain points better than them.

i. Be realistic with the revenue projections.

Don’t fall for cliches like – ‘According to Forrestor’s research, our market will be $ X billion by ___’, ‘We will drop our product in China and we will make billions.’ There is nothing wrong with wanting to become another Google or Microsoft, but make sure you have unique product or services. If you have a patent on your innovation, that helps. If you already have an angel investor on board, that gives you credibility. If you have a veteran management team in place, thats going to help you a lot! Always be ready to explain to lenders and Venture Capitalists how you are going to reach the big numbers – and never ever use cliched answers.

j. Surround yourself with people smarter than you. Do not be afraid to ask for help.

Always reach out to people smarter than you. Big ideas take right people to bring them to life. You want to do things smartly and not give your idea away, but at the same time you need to be open to sharing with right people. One rule of thumb is – it is better to team up with people with complimenting skill sets. If you are an engineer, you don’t need another engineer to support your point of view. You need a professional sales partner to sell your product, and a sharp finance guy to keep the numbers in order.

k.. Seize the opportunity to scale up – quick.

Big deals don’t happen on their own. Big deals happen because of right people, right product, right momentum in the market among many possible variations. If you have everything in order and luck is in your favor, seize the opportunity to scale up – and do it quick! Otherwise, good entrepreneurs know when to pack up their bags and move on to another opportunity. I advise entrepreneurs to get out of business if the venture doesn’t take off within two years.

More to follow on this topic.

If you need help with business planning, please  contact Jay Maharjan & Associates @ 877 466 2360 ext 1

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Jay Maharjan interviews Lindsay Davenport, the former world # 1 professional tennis player and the winner of multiple grand slam tournaments, including Wimbledon, US Open and Australian Open. Davenport talks candidly about making of a professional tennis player at an early age, entrepreneurship and overcoming insecurities growing up.

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Looking for a job? Consider creating your own. There are a number of social resources to help you connect with other entrepreneurs and get your business ideas off the ground.

Here are the top 10 social networks for entrepreneurs. Each helps entrepreneurs succeed by providing them with the guidance, tools and resources they need to setup their company and gain exposure.

Have another social site to add to this list? Tell us about it in the comments.

1. Entrepreneur Connect

Facebook reviews

2. PartnerUp

3.  StartupNation

4.  LinkedIn

5. Biznik

6.  Perfect Business

From business networking to a video center where you can learn from successful entrepreneurs, a business plan builder and even an investor center, you’ll have most of the resources you need to create or regenerate your business. There is a free basic membership and a gold membership that costs $29.99 per month.

7.  Go BIG Network

8.  Cofoundr

9.   The Funded

Posted via email from Jay’s posterous

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As an entrepreneur, making that first impression is crucial. I recently saw this survey posted on 15secondpitch.com that caught my attention. According to Jim Convery at 15secondpitch.com, ” 69% of 2505 professionals said they have trouble explaining what they do, and/or feel uncomfortable pitching themselves. And, of three groups with a strong need for effective self-promotion, over one-third said they hate going to networking events and/or do not have unique business cards.”

Laura is the co-founder of 15secondpitch and has been featured in number of publications and television shows, including ABC News. Here is an exclusive 4entrepreneur interview with Laura Allen

4entrepreneur: What is a 15SecondPitch?

Laura Allen: The 15SecondPitch is a clear, concise and compelling way to explain who you are and what you do in just 15 seconds. We live in a very exciting time when people are also extremely busy. If you don’t grab their attention in the first 15 seconds, you’ve lost them for good.

4entrepreneur: What motivated you to come up with this idea?

LA: What I noticed in 2002, when my partner Jim Convery and I started the business was that many people had a lot of trouble answering the question, “So, what do you do?” Over the years, I found that the people who were great at networking and connecting with others were the people who always had a great job, they never had to look for more clients and they generally had a much easier time making things happen for themselves. I realized that most of my peers were having trouble landing a job and the 15SecondPitch helps with that!

4entrepreneur: What is the secret to developing a powerful & effective pitch?

LA: We walk people through the 4 Key Steps of creating a great 15SecondPitch using a tool we developed called the Pitch Wizard. Your users can see this for themselves by clicking the link in “Box # 2” on our homepage. I’ve met a lot of people who don’t like networking, so I figured if we made it easier to answer this question, we’d make it easier for people to relax and have a better time at networking events. I know that I used to struggle every time someone asked me what I did for a living, because I used to give the “Jack of All Trades” pitch where I would tell you everything I’d ever done in my life. That was exhausting for me, and especially for the people who had to listen to it!

4entrepreneur: What are some of the differences in strategy when it comes to developing a15SecondPitch for a large corporation versus for an individual entrepreneur?

LA: When I work with individuals, I am entirely focused on helping them achieve their goals. Sometimes they need to find a new job, so we craft a pitch and individual marketing strategy that helps them achieve that. When I work with small business owners, we usually focus on making more sales. When I work with a large corporation, the pitches are still highly individualized, however, I also need to make sure that the pitches follow standard corporate message guidelines. “Corporate” pitches can be very successful!! Imagine if you worked at one of the top Wall Street firms or one of the most creative ad agencies? These companies have spent billions of dollars on making sure people know about them. Then, when you meet someone who works there, they get to talk about What Makes Them the Best at what they do, in the context of working for a large company that most people have heard of.

4entrepreneur: How do you measure the effectiveness of your pitch?

LA: First, ask yourself, “What do I want to accomplish with this pitch?” Do you want to take the VP of marketing to lunch because you’d like to work at his or her company in the future? Do you want to meet new and interesting people to expand your social and professional network? Do you want to make more cold calls during the day? Do you want to make more sales or attract more clients? Figure out exactly what you’d like to happen and then craft your pitch. You also need to actually go out and TEST your pitch. Do people understand what you do? Are they excited about talking to you? Do they seem to be running for the exits? Pay attention to how people are responding to you, and tweak your pitch accordingly.

4entrepreneur: Do you recommend any free resources online for entrepreneurs – to prepare an effective pitch on their own?

LA: I always recommend the 15SecondPitch.com Pitch Wizard, of course! It’s a great way to get your started with your pitch. I recommend that people go test out their pitch at a local Meetup http://www.meetup.com group. There are so many excellent meetup groups all over the country and many of them are free. This is a great low-risk way to see how your pitch works.

4entrepreneur: For entrepreneurs and businesses who are interested in seeking professional services from your company, how can they contact you? What are some of the types of services that you and/or your company offer?

LA: The best way to reach me is via email at: laura@15SecondPitch.com. I spend a lot of time on the phone doing 90 minute sessions with my clients, so I am able to respond to people much faster via email. We’re doing a great promotion now called the Entrepreneur’s Package:

http://www.15secondpitch.com/entrepreneur

For people who want a “pay as you go” option, I offer $149. phone sessions. We’ll also be releasing a series of information products shortly and also offering a series of teleseminars.

( 4 entrepreneur Interview: copyright 2008 4entrepreneur.net )

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General Business Finance

Learn more about business finance from these blogs.

1. Startups.co.uk Money Blog: The writings in this blog will help you avoid cashflow headaches, deal with taxes and more.
2. Rosemary’s Business Finance Blog: Read Rosemary Peavler’s About.com business finance blog for great advice on cost cutting, effective finance and more.
3. Shoestring Smarts: Shoestring Smarts will help you learn how to build and operate a successful business on a limited budget.
4. Mostly Economics: Mostly Economics is full of helpful Indian economic and business research that can help you cut your costs.
5. Pakdi: Pakdi’s blog discusses layoffs, money, business, and more in Malaysia.
6. Young Professional Finance Blog: Get great ideas for finance from this blog that highlights young professionals.
7. Freakonomics: Read this blog to learn interesting concepts in business economics.
8. Lion and Gun: In The Lion and Gun, you’ll find news, philosophy and more related to politics, business and finance.
9. Wallstrip: This blog highlights company stocks at their height, and examines the reasons why that company is doing so well.
10. Art of Money: Learn more about business finance through this blog about online business.
11. SpendMatters: In this blog, you’ll find practical advice for spend management.
12. AL6400: Alan Yu’s blog is all about making and saving money in your business.
13. Maver Management: Maver Management Group offers advice and information for cost cutting, profit, and more.
14. Money Talks: In this blog aggregator, you’ll find some of the best posts for business finance and cost cutting.
15. Business in General: Read this blog to get insight and advice into business finance, growth, and more.

Accounting

Effective accounting can help you find money, so get a few tips and ideas from these business accounting blogs.

1. Basic Accounting: Use the advice in this blog to learn how to use accounting to make your business finance situation better.
2. Accounting Observer: Jack Ciesielski’s blog is all about accounting, investment, and finance.
3. re: The Auditors: This blog focuses on business finance problems.
4. Samarak: Samarak offers useful advice, tips and news for small business accounting.
5. Sox First: Read this blog for insight into Sarbanes-Oxley, management, compliance, and more.

News

Stay informed about the world that affects your business, and you’ll be able to make better decisions about what to cut and what to keep.

1. Dealbreaker: Dealbreaker highlights business news and financial gossip, pointing out mistakes from other companies that you can learn from.
2. Curious Capitalist: The blog offers commentary on markets, the economy, and business.
3. Traders Trade: Stay updated on the latest in business and financial news through this blog.

Business Inspiration

Get inspired to cut costs and improve your business with the inspiration found in these blogs.

1. Small Business Trends: Get inspiration for building a financially stable business from this blog.
2. Business Pundit: Drea Knufken’s blog discusses smart business.
3. The Entrepreneurial Mind: Dr. Jeff Cornwall’s blog will help you learn more about financial management and more.
4. Freelance Switch: This blog for freelancers can help you learn how to cut costs and build a better freelance business.
5. Small Biz Survival: In this small business resource, you’ll learn about focusing on income producing activities, smart marketing strategies, and more.
6. Freelance Folder: Freelance Folder offers wisdom for working efficiently and cutting costs as a freelancer.
7. Small Business Blog: Through this blog, you can learn how to make financial efficiency of marketing, managing and growing your business.

Business Resources

Use these blogs to find low cost or free business resources that you can take advantage of.

1. Small Business Mole: Make use of this blog to find money-saving business resources.
2. Small Business CEO: Small Business CEO is all about resources and knowledge for small business CEOs.
3. Fresh Inc.: In Fresh Inc.’s blog, you’ll find lots of useful business resources that can help you save money.
4. Entrepreneur.com: This blog can help you learn smart strategies for a slow economy, find money saving business resources, and more.
5. YoungEntrepreneur: YoungEntrepreneur highlights creative and often low cost ideas for startups, and provides regular advice for business cost savings.
6. Invoice Factoring Blog: Read this blog to get great ideas in invoice factoring and more.
7. Mind Petals: In this group, you’ll find creative entrepreneurial activities that can help save your business money.
8. Business Idea of the Day: Get new business ideas every day from this blog.
9. Neville’s Financial Blog: Neville’s Financial Blog highlights low cost, successful business ideas.
10. Dorm Room Biz: On the Dorm Room Biz blog, you’ll find out tips for bootstrapping and creating a successful business on a dorm room budget.
11. How to Change the World: Guy Kawasaki offers wisdom on bootstrapping, venture capital and other creative funding ideas.
12. Biz Plan Hacks: Use these business plan hacks to run your business smarter.
13. Open Innovators: Open Innovators offers a variety of great ideas for business finance, including crowdfunding.

Startup

These blogs offer cost cutting and business building advice specifically for startups and growing businesses.

1. Up and Running: This blog from Entrepreneur will help you learn how to start your business and establish healthy finances for it.
2. FastUpFront: The FastUpFront business blog offers advice for staying out of debt, avoiding bank loan mistakes and more.
3. College-Startup: College-Startup offers great advice for reinvesting your profits, making business work on a dime and more.
4. StartupNation: Read this group blog to get great advice on starting your business on the right financial foot.
5. Noobpreneur: Here you’ll find plenty of cost cutting ideas and business inspiration.
6. Inspired Business Growth: Wendy Piersall’s blog focuses on entrepreneurial finance in the growth stage.
7. The Vest Pocket Consultant: Through Rosalind Resnick’s blog, you can learn how to effectively grow your small business without breaking the bank.

Frugality

Get inspiration for running a frugal operation with the help of these blogs.

1. Young and Frugal: Employ these frugal ideas for millenials in the way you conduct business.
2. Principled Profit: Read Principled Profit to get guidance on being frugal and ethical.
3. Frugal Hacks: Frugal Hacks will help you be more frugal in business, and use smart ideas to save more money.
4. Being Frugal: This blog will give you great guidance for being frugal, even when starting your own business.
5. Frugal Freelancer: This freelancer blogs about saving money and being frugal.
6. Festival of Frugality: This carnival blog will help you learn how to pinch pennies in business and beyond.

Business & Personal

These blogs offer a mix of personal finance, business, and entrepreneurship.

1. I Will Teach You to Be Rich: Ramit Sethi’s blog is full of pearls of wisdom for low cost, productive business.
2. Get Rich Slowly: Get Rich Slowly offers great personal finance advice that can be applied to business, as well as entrepreneur resources.
3. Mint: The Mint blog will help you learn how to reduce your personal and business expenses.
4. Consumerism Commentary: Flexo offers advice for frugality and smart money management.
5. FiveCentNickel: Five Cent Nickel has inspiration for cost cutting in personal and business finance.
6. WalletPop: WalletPop offers great advice for managing your personal and business finances.
7. Blueprint for Financial Prosperity: This personal finance blog can help inspire you to be more frugal with your business finances.
8. Personal Business & Finance Blog: This blog promises to provide you with answers to all of your finance problems in business and beyond.
9. Simplenomics: The Simplenomics blog will inspire you so simplify your entire business, including your business finances.

Cost & Supply Management

Cut down on costs in your raw materials and more with the help of these blogs.

1. Better Projects: Read this blog to learn about project cost management and more.
2. Expense Management: Expense Management will help you learn how to reduce your business costs.
3. Online Outloud: Read this non-conformist business blog for advice on cost management and beyond.
4. Expense Solution Blog: Read this blog to find solutions to expense management and more.
5. 360 Vendor Management: This blog advocated vendor management so that you can get the most out of your vendor money.
6. Buyer Analytics: Use the advice in this blog to learn how you can make procurement more affordable.
7. Purchasing Transformation: This blog will help you meet challenges in supply chain and purchasing to save money.
8. The China Sourcing Blog: Learn more about using China sources to cut costs through this blog.
9. Supply Excellence: This blog will help you find strategies for cost saving in supply management.
10. TEMptation: With this telecom expense management blog, you’ll learn about a variety of ideas for expense management in telecoms and beyond.
11. E-Sourcing Forum: Read this blog to find out how you can attain success in supply and spend management.
12. Vendor Management: In this vendor management blog, you’ll find great information about improving relationships with your vendors to save money.
13. Effortless HR: Read Effortless HR to learn about payroll expense management and more.
14. Consumerist: This blog will help you consider your role as a business consumer, and learn how to get more value out of your purchases and interactions with suppliers.
15. Credit Card Processing and Merchant Account Services: This blog will help you better understand how to use credit card processing and merchant accounts, and can help you figure out how to save money on these expenses.
16. The Business Finance Blog: Here you’ll find out about business loans, alternative financing and more for small businesses.
17. Maximum Business Credit: This blog offers great information for financing your business in an affordable way.
18. VC Freak: In this blog, you’ll learn all about venture capiral news, startup funding, lending, and more.
19. MSBCHQ: MSBCHQ offers great advice about business credit and credit services.
20. Venture Chronicles: Through Jeff Nolan’s blog, you’ll get great insight into venture capital, finance, and more.
21. Commercial Finance Zone: Get help with commercial finance by following the advice on this blog.
22. The 21st Century Supply Chain: Get interesting ideas and perspectives on supply chain management through this blog.
23. Procurement Blog: This blog will help you make sense of procurement and better understand how to save money in the process.

Marketing & Customer Service

Learn how to make better use of your marketing dollars with help from these bloggers.

1. Startups.co.uk Marketing Blog: This blog offers a variety of useful topics on marketing that can help you save money and reach your audience more effectively.
2. Solo Business Marketing: This blog has great ideas and inspiration for effetctive and low cost marketing.
3. Basic Marketing: Read this blog to learn the basics of effective marketing, so you can better use your marketing budget.
4. Heart of Business: Heart of Business will help you design your business to make your customer happy.
5. Matt’s Creative Advertising Blog: In this blog, you’ll find excellent ideas and resources for creative advertising.
6. What About the Mailbox with No SPAM in It?: This blog explains how to make your marketing efforts more effective for your money.
7. Schipul Blog: Get smart and creative marketing thoughts from the Schipul Blog.
8. Marketing Genius: Maple Creative’s blog offers marketing tips and more to help you succeed with less money.
9. Duct Tape Marketing: Read this blog to learn about effective marketing ideas that are also affordable.

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Project Needs and Beneficiaries

The earthquake was the biggest to hit Haiti in over 250 years. Widespread damage and collapsed buildings are widespread. Casualties and death toll are not yet known, but are expected to be high given the quake’s proximity to the capital and flimsy construction of buildings. This Fund will provide emergency relief to victims and survivors.

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Successful leaders don’t start out asking, “What do I want to do?” They ask, “What needs to be done?” Then they ask, “Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?” They don’t tackle things they aren’t good at. They make sure other necessities get done, but not by them. Successful leaders make sure that they succeed! They are not afraid of strength in others. Andrew Carnegie wanted to put on his gravestone, “Here lies a man who knew how to put into his service more able men than he was himself.”

Check Your Performance

Effective leaders check their performance. They write down, “What do I hope to achieve if I take on this assignment?” They put away their goals for six months and then come back and check their performance against goals. This way, they find out what they do well and what they do poorly. They also find out whether they picked the truly important things to do. I’ve seen a great many people who are exceedingly good at execution, but exceedingly poor at picking the important things. They are magnificent at getting the unimportant things done. They have an impressive record of achievement on trivial matters.

Mission Driven

Leaders communicate in the sense that people around them know what they are trying to do. They are purpose driven–yes, mission driven. They know how to establish a mission. And another thing, they know how to say no. The pressure on leaders to do 984 different things is unbearable, so the effective ones learn how to say no and stick with it. They don’t suffocate themselves as a result. Too many leaders try to do a little bit of 25 things and get nothing done. They are very popular because they always say yes. But they get nothing done.

Creative Abandonment

A critical question for leaders is, “When do you stop pouring resources into things that have achieved their purpose?” The most dangerous traps for a leader are those near-successes where everybody says that if you just give it another big push it will go over the top. One tries it once. One tries it twice. One tries it a third time. But, by then it should be obvious this will be very hard to do. So, I always advise my friend Rick Warren, “Don’t tell me what you’re doing, Rick. Tell me what you stopped doing.”

The Rise of the Modern Multinational

The modern multinational corporation was invented in 1859. Siemens invented it because the English Siemens company had grown faster than the German parent. Before the Second World War, IBM was a small maker, not of computers, but of adding machines. They had one branch in England, which was very typical for the era. In the 1920s, General Motors bought a German and English and then Australian automobile manufacturer. The first time somebody from Detroit actually visited the European subsidiaries was in 1950. A trip to Europe was a big trip. You were gone three months. I still remember the excitement when the then head of GM went to Europe in the 1920s to buy the European properties. He never went back.

21st Century Organizations

Let me give you one example. This happens to be a consulting firm headquartered in Boston. Each morning, between 8 A.M. and 9 A.M. Boston time, which is 5 A.M. in the morning here in California and 11 P.M. in Tokyo, the firm conducts a one-hour management meeting on the Internet. That would have been inconceivable a few years back when you couldn’t have done it physically. And for a few years, I worked with this firm closely and I had rented a room in a nearby motel and put in a videoconferencing screen. Once a week, I participated in this Internet meeting and we could do it quite easily, successfully. As a result of which, that consulting firm is not organized around localities but around clients.

How To Lead a 21st Century Organization

Don’t travel so much. Organize your travel. It is important that you see people and that you are seen by people maybe once or twice a year. Otherwise, don’t travel. Make them come to see you. Use technology–it is cheaper than traveling. I don’t know anybody who can work while traveling. Do you? The second thing to say is make sure that your subsidiaries and foreign offices take up the responsibility to keep you informed. So, ask them twice a year, “What activities do you need to report to me?” Also ask them, “What about my activity and my plans do you need to know from me?” The second question is just as important.

Prisoner of Your Own Organization

When you are the chief executive, you’re the prisoner of your organization. The moment you’re in the office, everybody comes to you and wants something, and it is useless to lock the door. They’ll break in. So, you have to get outside the office. But still, that isn’t traveling. That’s being at home or having a secret office elsewhere. When you’re alone, in your secret office, ask the question, “What needs to be done?” Develop your priorities and don’t have more than two. I don’t know anybody who can do three things at the same time and do them well. Do one task at a time or two tasks at a time. That’s it. OK, two works better for most. Most people need the change of pace. But, when you are finished with two jobs or reach the point where it’s futile, make the list again. Don’t go back to priority three. At that point, it’s obsolete.

How Organizations Fall Down

Make sure the people with whom you work understand your priorities. Where organizations fall down is when they have to guess at what the boss is working at, and they invariably guess wrong. So the CEO needs to say, “This is what I am focusing on.” Then the CEO needs to ask of his associates, “What are you focusing on?” Ask your associates, “You put this on top of your priority list–why?” The reason may be the right one, but it may also be that this associate of yours is a salesman who persuades you that his priorities are correct when they are not. So, make sure that you understand your associates’ priorities and make sure that after you have that conversation, you sit down and drop them a two-page note–”This is what I think we discussed. This is what I think we decided. This is what I think you committed yourself to within what time frame.” Finally, ask them, “What do you expect from me as you seek to achieve your goals?”

The Transition from Entrepreneur to Large Company CEO

Again, let’s start out discussing what not to do. Don’t try to be somebody else. By now you have your style. This is how you get things done. Don’t take on things you don’t believe in and that you yourself are not good at. Learn to say no. Effective leaders match the objective needs of their company with the subjective competencies. As a result, they get an enormous amount of things done fast.

How Capable Leaders Blow It

One of the ablest men I’ve worked with, and this is a long time back, was Germany’s last pre-World War II democratic chancellor, Dr. Heinrich Bruning. He had an incredible ability to see the heart of a problem. But he was very weak on financial matters. He should have delegated but he wasted endless hours on budgets and performed poorly. This was a terrible failing during a Depression and it led to Hitler. Never try to be an expert if you are not. Build on your strengths and find strong people to do the other necessary tasks.

The Danger Of Charisma

You know, I was the first one to talk about leadership 50 years ago, but there is too much talk, too much emphasis on it today and not enough on effectiveness. The only thing you can say about a leader is that a leader is somebody who has followers. The most charismatic leaders of the last century were called Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Mussolini. They were mis-leaders! Charismatic leadership by itself certainly is greatly overstated. Look, one of the most effective American presidents of the last 100 years was Harry Truman. He didn’t have an ounce of charisma. Truman was as bland as a dead mackerel. Everybody who worked for him worshiped him because he was absolutely trustworthy. If Truman said no, it was no, and if he said yes, it was yes. And he didn’t say no to one person and yes to the next one on the same issue. The other effective president of the last 100 years was Ronald Reagan. His great strength was not charisma, as is commonly thought, but that he knew exactly what he could do and what he could not do.

How To Reinvigorate People

Within organizations there are people who, typically in their 40s, hit a midlife crisis when they realize that they won’t make it to the top or discover that they are not yet first-rate. This happens to engineers and accountants and technicians. The worst midlife crisis is that of physicians, as you know. They all have a severe midlife crisis. Basically, their work becomes awfully boring. Just imagine seeing nothing for 30 years but people with a skin rash. They have a midlife crisis, and that’s when they take to the bottle. How do you save these people? Give them a parallel challenge. Without that, they’ll soon take to drinking or to sleeping around. In a coeducational college, they sleep around and drink. The two things are not incompatible, alas! Encourage people facing a midlife crisis to apply their skills in the non-profit sector.

Character Development

We have talked a lot about executive development. We have been mostly talking about developing people’s strength and giving them experiences. Character is not developed that way. That is developed inside and not outside. I think churches and synagogues and the 12-step recovery programs are the main development agents of character today.

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1. Shareholder Value as a Strategy. The notion of producing attractive returns for investors is as old as investing, but this was a decade when the pursuit of shareholder value eclipsed too much else. Increasingly sophisticated tools and metrics for value-based managementpushed the consideration of stock price effects deep into operational decision-making, and made sure everything pointed toward bonus day. By 2009, even the man most known for focusing on value was saying it was a dumb idea. “Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy,” Jack Welch proclaimed. “Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.”
2. IT as a Utility. The current mania for cloud computing is the latest step in a long process by which enterprises have dispensed with their proprietary glass houses and begun buying computing capabilities as services. One impetus was the Y2K scare, which forced attention onto those onerous legacy systems as the new millennium dawned.
3. Enterprise Risk Management. Sounds crazy right now to say that the last decade was notable for risk management. But especially after 9/11, companies saw the sense of bringing the many and various pockets of it under the same umbrella. Newly empowered chief risk officers looked for trouble spots on a landscape ranging from financial hedging to pirates on the open sea.
4. The Creative Organization. The decade saw a general revolution in the way many organizations came to view their source of competitive advantage, and a commitment to finding ways to produce creative output more reliably. Even before they embraced “design thinking,” managers were encouraging collaboration, drawing on diverse perspectives, and engaging whole workforces in “ideation.”
5. Open Source. Purist geeks will be quick to point out that the term open source and some very substantial achievements came in the late 1990s, but here we pay homage to the spread of that model beyond software code. Was it only in 2001 that Wikipedia was born? And how many things have been wiki’ed since?
6. Going Private. Cheap debt reignited the LBO scene just as post-Enron reforms created real disincentives to operate as a public company. As the decade wore on, private equity’s playbook for turning around businesses was increasingly held up as best-practice management. Now, ideas like, ahem, leveraging up don’t seem so wise, but private equity’s devotion to strategic focus and demanding governance might endure.
7. Behavioral Economics. Okay, by now, you’re all shouting “that’s definitely older than 10 years” and you’re right. But talk about a set of ideas whose time has come. In the prior decade, can you remember when someone with Steven Levitt’s profile had a breakout bestseller? Or when someone modifying the word economist with “rogue” (or “rock star”) could keep a straight face?
8. High Potentials. Consulting firms and other deeply knowledge-based businesses knew this all along, but in the past decade the rest of the corporate world woke up to the fact that some managers are more equal than others. Formal programs were established to identify, cultivate, and retain “hi-po’s”. Executive coaching, a perk often provided for the anointed, experienced explosive growth as an industry.
9. Competing on Analytics. Decades of investment in systems capturing transactions and feedback finally yielded a toolkit for turning all that data into intelligence. Operations research types, long consigned to engineering realms like manufacturing scheduling, got involved in marketing decisions. Managers started learning from experiments that were worthy of the name.
10. Reverse Innovation. The bigger story here is the maturation of the concept of globalization, particularly with regard to emerging economies. Most big corporations in 2000 saw them primarily as a source of natural resources and, increasingly, cheap labor. Then, as rising employment fueled the development of middle classes, cities in India and China came to represent valuable markets. Now, these non-US consumers are coming to the foreground. Firms like GE and Microsoft are doing R&D in emerging markets, optimizing on those preferences and constraints, and then bringing the results back home.
11. Sustainability. More than anything, the first ten years of the 21st century will be remembered as the decade that businesses went green — if only in their marketing to a public highly attuned to Al Gore’s inconvenient truth. We’re not cynical on this point, however. The efforts we see by companies large and small to reduce their carbon footprints and other environmental impacts are sincere and effective, as far as they go. But ten years from now, as we revisit this exercise, forgive us if we declare 2010-2020 to be the decade of sustainability. “The idea was in the air before 2010,” we can picture ourselves writing. “But this was the decade when it really took hold.”

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In life, it’s said that two things are certain – death and taxes. But in business there’s only one certainty: taxes. Tax obligations go hand-in-hand with running a business. From the federal government on down to city hall, you need to be aware of which taxes your business needs to pay, how much in taxes you owe, and when you need to file. Make a mistake and your tax bill grows. At the same time, if you plan ahead, take the right available deductions, and prepare your tax returns properly, you can save on the amount of taxes your business must pay.

Taxes may be the least favorite topic for small business owners, but it’s one of the most important. The steps you take before the end of the tax year can help your business save money almost immediately. At the same time, the beginning of the next tax year is a good time to review whether you are maximizing your deductions and maybe even get a second opinion on additional ways you can save on taxes. Knowing how to minimize the amount of taxes you pay means that you get to keep more of the money you earn. Failing to properly manage your taxes means that your business might wind up in trouble.

“You could sink your business,” says Richard M. Colombik, an attorney and CPA based in Itasca, Ill., who has served as the State of Illinois Bar’s liaison to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). “It might put you in a position where your profitability is so small that it is not worth the effort that an entrepreneur has to put in to run their own company. They might be better off getting a job working for someone else.”

The following pages will detail the different types of business taxes you need to be aware of, how to determine your deductions, and tips for how to save on taxes so your business — and you — can ultimately benefit.

Types of Business Taxes
There are a variety of taxes for business. “Understand your responsibilities to help you meet them on a timely basis and avoid costly penalties for failing to act on time,” advises Barbara Weltman, a tax an business attorney and author of J.K. Lasser’s Tax Deductions for Small Business and the Big Ideas for Small Business newsletter. Here is a rundown:

• Income taxes. There are federal and, in most cases, state income taxes to contend with, whether the business pays the tax (as in the case of a business organized as a C corporation) or the owner pays the tax on his or her share of business income and expenses (as in the case of a business organized as a sole proprietorship, partnership, limited liability company, or S corporation).
• Employment taxes. If you have employees, you must withhold income taxes and the employees’ share of Social Security and Medicare (FICA) taxes. You must also pay the employer share of FICA, plus state and federal unemployment tax. If your business is incorporated, you are an employee if you work for the business and you owe these taxes even if you’re the only employee. If you are self-employed, you owe self-employment taxes (the equivalent of the employee and employer share of FICA) on your net earnings from the business.
• Sales taxes. If you sell goods and services and you are based in a state with a sales tax, you may be required to collect sales taxes on your transactions. While the customers pay the sales taxes, you can be subject to penalties for failing to collect the taxes and pay them to the state.
• Excise taxes. Depending on what type of business you operate, certain businesses may pay excise taxes on fuels, highway usage by trucks, and for other activities.

Taking the Right Deductions

Set up books and records
Even though you may use a casual approach to recordkeeping for your personal taxes, you can’t do this for business. “The tax law specifically requires certain records in order to take deductions,” Weltman says. “Without these records, legitimate expenditures may not be deductible.” Here’s what you need to comply with tax rules:

• A system to track your income and expenses. This is easily done with computer-based recordkeeping solutions that enable you to handle this matter yourself.
• Procedures to collect and store required receipts and other proof of expenditures. Set up file systems to categorize your receipts (e.g., car-related expenses, meals and entertainment costs, and capital expenditures).
• Policies on certain recordkeeping. For example, if you use your personal vehicle for business, you need to track your business mileage in a diary or log book. If you have employees and reimburse them for their business-related car expenses, explain how to them how records must be kept.

Make smart tax elections
Under the tax law, most expenses incurred in business are deductible, while most income is taxable (there are, of course, some exceptions). The tax law gives you options on when and to what extent you claim certain deductions or report income. Here are some examples cited by Weltman:

• The cost of buying business equipment usually is deducted by claiming a depreciation allowance (fixed by law) over five or seven years, or longer periods. However, under certain conditions, you may qualify to elect first-year (Section 179) expensing to deduct the entire cost of equipment in the year it is placed in service. (See below information on changes to federal law regarding Section 179.) Making this election accelerates the deduction, giving you an immediate tax benefit for your outlay.
• The expenses of a personal car or truck used for business can be deducted in one of two ways: claiming actual costs or relying on an IRS standard mileage rate. If you keep good records of your costs, you can then choose the deduction method that produces the greater write-off.
• Selling property on the installment basis where at least one payment will be received in the year after the sale generally means that the gain will be spread over the period in which the installments will be received. However, you can elect to report the full gain in the year of sale, even though payments won’t be received until later. This election makes sense when you have current losses that can be offset by the installment sale gain, meaning that the gain is fully sheltered from tax.

Keep current with law changes
The tax law is constantly changing, with major legislation, court cases, and IRS rulings appearing frequently throughout the year. Many of these developments present positive tax opportunities — if you know they exist and you act on time. Often, waiting until the annual meeting with your accountant may be too late to learn about and act on these opportunities.

For example, starting in 2008, Congress passed a measure as part of the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 that let businesses deduct the full price of qualifying equipment purchased or financed during that tax year. Usually, under Section 179 of the IRS code, businesses that buy qualifying equipment can write off those expenses in smaller increments spread out over a series of years. But the new measure allowed businesses to deduct the full purchase price for the year that they bought it in, a move that could let a business pay lower taxes in the current year and still buy or lease more equipment to write off in subsequent years. In addition, Congress raised the dollar limits on these deductions. The limits were $125,000 per item not to exceed $500,000. They were raised to $250,000 per deduction, not to exceed $800,000 for the total amount purchase. Congress extended this under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Another example came following Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma in 2005. A number of tax-saving breaks were created to run for a short time. The charitable contribution limitation was raised for individuals and corporations, but only through the end of 2005.

Colombik says that a lot of new tax provisions aren’t properly utilized by small and mid-sized businesses because they or their paid tax preparers aren’t aware of the deductions. “No one knows everything about taxation because they keep changing the law,” he says. “The tax law is so incredibly broad based. I don’t believe that anyone could be an expert in every single area. It would take a lifetime just to be an expert on retirement plans.”

When businesses ask their tax preparers if there is anything else they can do to save on taxes, most often the response is, “No. You’re doing everything you can.” Colombik says that isn’t necessarily truthful. You’re taking all the deductions that your tax preparer knows about and that’s why you might want to get a second opinion. He recommends finding a dual degree professional from the American Association of Attorney CPAs, who can understand both tax planning and the law.

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Of course, if you’re going to do it, you want to do it right, right? Here are 10 business trends for 2010, according to Entrepreneur Magazine:

1. Green power. Cleantech, including smart grid, solar, biofuels, and batteries, overtook IT and biotech to garner 27 percent of all venture capital in the third quarter of 2009, according to Cleantech Group.
2. The senior market. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, three of the top 10 industries with the fastest employment growth relate to “aging services,” including healthcare, elderly and disabled services, and community care facilities for the elderly. USC even has a new master’s program in aging-services management.
3. Discount retail. At Wal-Mart, dollar stores, and resale shops, business is booming. While sales at Neiman Marcus dropped 14.8 percent, Family Dollar had record profits of $291.3 million in 2009. And according to the National Association of Resale Professionals, sales at secondhand stores grew by 31 percent last year.
4. Local business. The Department of Agriculture says that farmers markets have seen 5 percent annual growth for the past five years. Major chains are introducing “Locally Grown” sections to their produce departments and the USDA recently launched a “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” marketing campaign.
5. Education. There’s no better time to retrench or reinvent yourself than a bad economy. Revenues at institutes of higher education are expected to grow 4.9 percent to $421 billion in 2010, according to IbisWorld.
6. Parental outsourcing. The new name for childcare, housecleaning, and other domestic services, “parental outsourcing” is booming. And revenue for tutoring, test prep, and driving schools is expected to increase to more than $7 billion in 2010. Likewise for sports coaching.
7. Health and wellness. Revenues from healthcare and social assistance grew 3 percent to $452 billion during the second quarter of 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And the Home care industry grew 7 percent annually over the past five years, according to IbisWorld.
8. Texas. The Wall Street Journal named Austin and Dallas top “Youth Magnet” cities, and Texas cities dominated a host of 2009 “best cities” lists for relocation, home-building, and job creation.
9. Affordable alcohol. We’re still drinking just as much, if not more, we’re just drinking lower-cost booze and we’re doing it at home. In any case, the alcoholic beverage industry is expected to see record revenues of $455 billion in 2009.
10. Pets. Americans spent $43 billion on pets in 2008, and that number’s expected to grow by 5 percent for 2009.

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Entrepreneur TV interviews the Legendary Rock n Roll artist Bobby Womack. Womack talks passionately about beating the odds, following his passion with full of personal anecdotes first time int his exclusive interview.

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Entrepreneur TV is proud to support2009 VAF Legends of Tennis Charity Tennis Classic. The tennis legend Rod Lever will be honored at the event. All the proceeds from the event will go to various charities in India. For more information on the event, please visit www.thevaf.com

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Entrepreneur TV is proud to support The Diversity Awards once again this year that will take place on Sunday, November 22, 2009. Entrerpeneur TV strongly believes and supports the mission of MMPA (Multi-Cultural Motion Picture Association ) and its signature event The Diversity Awards to utilize the cinematic medium to foster a better understanding about diversity and what it means to our society by showcasing how all cultures, stories and histories are inextricably interwoven and linked.

Recognizing the Achievements this year:

Limited tickets for this By-Invitation only event available through 4entrepreneur.net at tickets.pdf

To sponsor the event, click here sponsorship.pdf

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Donna LeBlanc is a renowned  entrepreneurial therapist and the author of “The Passion Principle”

LeBlanc’s latest book, The Passion Principle, is based on her revolutionary psycho-spiritual approach to understanding and using personality signatures or styles to capture passion and purpose in life and work. The book and CD collection reveal so clearly the patterns and reactions in our lives that block our success and keep us stuck. Vivid, clear, and totally authentic, she places her thoughtful lens on each of each issue, struggle, strength and greatest hope and provides a plan for creating the life we each desire for ourselves.

( 4 entrepreneur exclusive Interview: copyright 2009 4entrepreneur.net, Photo credit: www.donnaleblanc.com )

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Starting a business is a major commitment that will consume 24/7 of your life with no end in sight. It is always good to know what you are getting into before you take the plunge. From my experience writing business plans for large and smallcompanies alike for the last 8 years, there are basically two reasons why you need a

business plan – the first reason is to re-assure yourself that this wild dream that you have in your mind is actually attainable. And, the second reason is to convince a lender or a venture capitalist. More than likely, you are writing for the second reason. Whatever your reason may be, as the legendary management guru Peter Drucker would bluntly put – always ask yourself what your business is, who your customers are, and what the customer considers value.

In my opinion, here is a list of pointers that will save you headaches later.

Be clear about what you are selling

Spend as much time as you need to define and clarify what you are selling. From the gettgo, come up with a 15 second elevator pitch. This will come handy later on. If you need professional help to come up with a pitch, companies like – 15secondpitch can help. This is a great resource to help you discover who you are, what your company does, and what others perceive of you and your verbal and written messages.

Create a proper legal structure for your business

Right legal structure will save you headaches later. There are many legal factors that come in play while choosing the right structure for your business – always consult with a good business attorney. For an instance, choosing a Corporation in many cases will cost you more on taxes with its double taxation clauses, but will provide you with the most immunity from personal liabilities. There are websites like FindLaw that provide both free and premium services for small businesses.

Come up with Mission, Vision, and Objective statements for your venture

Mission, Vision, and Objectives – They may all look the same at first glance, but they reflect different rationale.

The mission statement represents the underlying operating philosophy and the values of the company – ‘The mission at Company ABC is to provide a reliable, yet affordable XYZ technology for residential customers.’

The Vision statement represents a long term plan – that provides a direction to make significant impact – ‘Our vision at company ABC is to become a global niche leader in XYZ technology by the year 2009.’

The Objective represents definitive goals for different purposes within the company. Peter Drucker first popularized the term “management by objective” in his 1954 book ‘The Practice of Management’. Objectives can be set in all domains (services, sales, R&D, human resources, finance) – ‘The main objective of company ABC is to understand the target market, to implement the most optimized form of logistics, to include a series of efficient fulfillment processes and to provide an unmatched form of customer service.’

Be honest with your Strengths and Weaknesses

You can conduct a simple SWOT analysis on your venture. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Create four quadrants and fill up with honest lists of answers. This simple test allows you to assess your compatibility with the venture that you are getting into. This test will also indicate opportunities, threats and barriers to entry that exist in your vertical market.

Conduct a thorough research on your vertical market

Leverage on new Internet research tools to conduct comprehensive studies. At every stage of your research, be open to adopt new directions based on your findings. Make sure there is a real opportunity. Or, move on to a different venture.

Make sure your product or service addresses pain point (s)

This goes back to the point (a). Understand and address your customer needs.

Conduct a thorough research on your competitors.
Create a matrix and conduct a thorough competitive analysis. See what your competitors are offering. Make sure your product or service addresses pain point (s) better than your competitors. Its all right if your competitors got in the market before you did, but focus on doing things little bit differently that you address the customer needs, pain points better than them.

Be realistic with the revenue projections.

Don’t fall for cliches like – ‘According to Forrestor’s research, our market will be $ X billion by ___’, ‘We will drop our product in China and we will make billions.’ There is nothing wrong with wanting to become another Google or Microsoft, but make sure you have unique product or services. If you have a patent on your innovation, that helps. If you already have an angel investor on board, that gives you credibility. If you have a veteran management team in place, thats going to help you a lot! Always be ready to explain to lenders and Venture Capitalists how you are going to reach the big numbers – and never ever use cliched answers.

Surround yourself with people smarter than you. Do not be afraid to ask for help.

Always reach out to people smarter than you. Big ideas take right people to bring them to life. You want to do things smartly and not give your idea away, but at the same time you need to be open to sharing with right people. One rule of thumb is – it is better to team up with people with complimenting skill sets. If you are an engineer, you don’t need another engineer to support your point of view. You need a professional sales partner to sell your product, and a sharp finance guy to keep the numbers in order.

Seize the opportunity to scale up – quick.

Big deals don’t happen on their own. Big deals happen because of right people, right product, right momentum in the market among many possible variations. If you have everything in order and luck is in your favor, seize the opportunity to scale up – and do it quick! Otherwise, good entrepreneurs know when to pack up their bags and move on to another opportunity. I advise entrepreneurs to get out of business if the venture doesn’t take off within two years.

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about 4entrepreneur.net – 4entrepreneur.net is a website dedicated exclusively for the causes of entrepreneurship. If you are interested to contribute or an entrepreneur seeking advice, email to ideas4entrepreneur@gmail.com or call 877 4662360

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“As the Emmy-winning creator of the smart, addictive TV dramas Lost, Alias and Felicity, J.J. Abrams’ name looms large on the small screen. As the writer/director behind the blockbuster explode-a-thon Mission: Impossible III, the upcoming Cloverfield and the next Star Trek movie, these days Abrams also rules the big screen — bringing his eye for telling detail and emotional connection to larger-than-life stories.

Abrams’ enthusiasm — for the construction of Kleenex boxes, for the quiet moments between shark attacks in Jaws, for today’s filmmaking technologies, and above all for the potent mystery of an unopened package — is incredibly infectious.”

- Ted.com

“As a boy, JJ Abrams was fascinated with magic. As a television writer, director, and producer, he has beguiled audiences with a masterful use of suspense, plot reversals, and special effects.”

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I believe that marketing is more of a science that an art. Every entrepreneur should be on top of their marketing strategy. Here is a list of 10 tips to take charge of your campaign.

Prepare a formal marketing plan – i.e. if you don’t have one already. Regardless of the size of your venture, having a thorough marketing plan is a no-brainer. In many instances, entrepreneurs wear more than one hat. A well-written marketing plan can be a practical reference tool to fall back on.

Update your marketing plan - This should be a yearly ritual. Often, entrepreneurs and start-up companies have one set of plan that they had written in order to get a loan or to present to a venture capitalist. Upon starting any venture for a year, it is critical to assess your marketing plan and make appropriate changes to the plan.

Align marketing strategy with your core business goals - When I write business plans, I dedicate a good portion of my plan for a detail marketing strategy. Marketing strategy or the marketing plan can be a part of the overall business plan. When updating your marketing plan, make sure to align with your core business goals. As we all know, business goals can also change over a period of time. For an instance, if demographics of the buyers who buy from you is changing, the new marketing strategy needs to address that and introduce new marketing means that align with this new target group.

Measure the spending - Most successful companies are great marketers by design. Luck can take you only so far. Once in a while, companies get free publicity and create a huge buzz! But, you can’t rely on that. For every company that gets a rare easy break, there are thousands that go unnoticed. You need a sustainable marketing plan that can be measured at every step of the way. From the strategic point of view, conduct a detail analysis of your previous year’s spending. Create a matrix of each and every marketing campaign conducted and find out the return on the investment made. Based on the hard facts, re-assess the marketing dollars spent and scrap the marketing initiatives that didn’t yield results and re-allocate to the ones that worked.

Forecast expected return - Forecast expected return for the upcoming quarter. Base your forecast on a thorough research and try to be as thorough as you can. All large corporations have strong forecasting methodologies in place. Right forecasting is the key to scaling an operation. If your business has a dedicated marketing team, forecasting ties in to the accountability of the team.

Re-align marketing collaterals - Make all the marketing materials current. There is nothing worse than your pitching a service that is different from the one shown on your brochure. What you pitch needs to align with the current business plan, marketing plan, the company website, and other advertisement campaigns running in parallel. The presentation can be very simple but by all means all the marketing collaterals need to be aligned and convey an uniform message.

Execute constant PR campaigns – With the advent of the Internet, running a PR campaign has never been easier. Prepare an electronic Press kit for your company and send it along with other sales material. Send press releases as often as possible. Businesswire is my favorite when it comes to getting exposure to larger media outlets like Forbes and Investor’s Business Daily. Business Wire charges between $200 – $500 per release depending on the targeted geographic reach. I am currently exploring some of the online free services like Prfree and Free-press-release.

Collaborate with products, clients, strategic partners that strengthen the brand

Leverage on satisfied clients to reach to other clients – Get testimonials from satisfied clients to include in your press kit, other marketing materials

Establish strong direct response/ market response logistics

If you need help with creating a marketing strategy, please contact Jay Maharjan & Associates @ 877 466 2360 ext 1

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The rules of entrepreneurship still apply in principle, but the medium has changed drastically. This is probably the best time in our history to pursue entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are defying the logic and business rationale to make things happen individually. Gone are the days when you needed huge capital and veteran management teams to form companies and to wait for another several years to rake in the profit.

Markus Frind is the founder of a free dating site PlentyOfFish.com. He spends about two hours a day in his house managing his website that gets twelve billion page views a year. He is the only employee in his company. By the way, did I tell you he makes $5-6 million per year with Google ads.

Similar to Markus Frind story, another entrepreneur Dave Lu from FanPop also makes millions from his website. Fanpop is a place where fans of anything and everything can share and interact with fellow fans.

One trait that is common with both entrepreneurs is that each of them is leveraging on simple inexpensive tools that are readily available to most entrepreneurs. You might ask how these successful online ventures are relevant to the conceptual economy. Conceptual economy encourages entrepreneurs to use both left and right brains. Technical and subject matter experts like Markus and Dave are not focusing solely on their technical skills. Rather, they are conceptually leveraging on their technical skills as well as testing their creative skills to conceptualize, design, develop and market their ideas – in most cases on their own without any help.

Entrepreneurs must take the lead in conceptual economy. Corporate world usually takes the back seat when it comes to adapting new ventures and most likely will be the last group to realize and accept the arrival of this economy. Microsoft would have never thought of starting Facebook – the highly successful social networking site on the Internet. What it took was the guts of a visionary young entrepreneur by the name of Mark Zuckerberg. Mark was a Harvard dropout with a great idea that was ahead of its time. At Harvard, Mark hacked the Harvard student records for fun and created a networking site for his fellow students. The site became very popular. In a short period of time, the concept has revolutionized the online social networking scene. In the beginning, Facebook was popular among only High School and College students. With the recent change in their policy to include adults, the site has seen a huge surge, providing a great social and networking platform for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Recently, Mark turned down one billion dollar cash offer from Yahoo, validating the notion that this is just a tip of the iceberg and the upcoming opportunities are endless. Potential of social networking sites like Facebook is far from being fully realized. Imagine the power of bringing captive group of individuals from around the world who share common interest, same values and complimenting business opportunities. As large businesses and traditional knowledge workers stay skeptics and try to analyze the concept, entrepreneurs have the opportunity to run with what they believe in and bring them to life. Eventually, this economic model will affect every aspect of the society. But for now and probably for the next couple of decades, true beneficiaries will be the entrepreneurs who choose to take the initiatives.

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Excerpt from a BusinessWeek article (read the original article)

RENAISSANCE MAN
Well before his death, before the almost obligatory accolades poured in, Drucker had already become a legend, of course. He was the guru’s guru, a sage, kibitzer, doyen, and gadfly of business, all in one. He had moved fluidly among his various roles as journalist, professor, historian, economics commentator, and raconteur. Over his 95 prolific years, he had been a true Renaissance man, a teacher of religion, philosophy, political science, and Asian art, even a novelist. But his most important contribution, clearly, was in business. What John Maynard Keynes is to economics or W. Edwards Deming to quality, Drucker is to management.

After witnessing the oppression of the Nazi regime, he found great hope in the possibilities of the modern corporation to build communities and provide meaning for the people who worked in them. For the next 50 years he would train his intellect on helping companies live up to those lofty possibilities. He was always able to discern trends — sometimes 20 years or more before they were visible to anyone else. “It is frustratingly difficult to cite a significant modern management concept that was not first articulated, if not invented, by Drucker,” says James O’Toole, the management author and University of Southern California professor. “I say that with both awe and dismay.” In the course of his long career, Drucker consulted for the most celebrated CEOs of his era, from Alfred P. Sloan Jr. of General Motors Corp. (GM ) to Grove of Intel.

– It was Drucker who introduced the idea of decentralization — in the 1940s — which became a bedrock principle for virtually every large organization in the world.

– He was the first to assert — in the 1950s — that workers should be treated as assets, not as liabilities to be eliminated.

– He originated the view of the corporation as a human community — again, in the 1950s — built on trust and respect for the worker and not just a profit-making machine, a perspective that won Drucker an almost godlike reverence among the Japanese.

– He first made clear — still the ’50s — that there is “no business without a customer,” a simple notion that ushered in a new marketing mind-set.

– He argued in the 1960s — long before others — for the importance of substance over style, for institutionalized practices over charismatic, cult leaders.

– And it was Drucker again who wrote about the contribution of knowledge workers — in the 1970s — long before anyone knew or understood how knowledge would trump raw material as the essential capital of the New Economy.

Drucker made observation his life’s work, gleaning deceptively simple ideas that often elicited startling results. Shortly after Welch became CEO of General Electric in 1981, for example, he sat down with Drucker at the company’s New York headquarters. Drucker posed two questions that arguably changed the course of Welch’s tenure: “If you weren’t already in a business, would you enter it today?” he asked. “And if the answer is no, what are you going to do about it?”

Those questions led Welch to his first big transformative idea: that every business under the GE umbrella had to be either No. 1 or No. 2 in its class. If not, Welch decreed that the business would have to be fixed, sold, or closed. It was the core strategy that helped Welch remake GE into one of the most successful American corporations of the past 25 years.

Drucker’s work at GE is instructive. It was never his style to bring CEOs clear, concise answers to their problems but rather to frame the questions that could uncover the larger issues standing in the way of performance. “My job,” he once lectured a consulting client, “is to ask questions. It’s your job to provide answers.” Says Dan Lufkin, a co-founder of investment banking firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Inc. (CSR ), who often consulted with Drucker in the 1960s: “He would never give you an answer. That was frustrating for a while. But while it required a little more brain matter, it was enormously helpful to us. After you spent time with him, you really admired him not only for the quality of his thinking but for his foresight, which was amazing. He was way ahead of the curve on major trends.”

Drucker’s mind was an itinerant thing, able to wander in minutes through a series of digressions until finally coming to some specific business point. He could unleash a monologue that would include anything from the role of money in Goethe’s Faust to the story of his grandmother who played piano for Johannes Brahms, yet somehow use it to serve his point of view. “He thought in circles,” says Joseph A. Maciariello, who teaches “Drucker on Management” at Claremont Graduate University.

Part of Drucker’s genius lay in his ability to find patterns among seemingly unconnected disciplines. Warren Bennis, a management guru himself and longtime admirer of Drucker, says he once asked his friend how he came up with so many original insights. Drucker narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “I learn only through listening,” he said, pausing, “to myself.”

Among academics, that ad hoc, nonlinear approach sometimes led to charges that Drucker just wasn’t rigorous enough, that his work wasn’t backed up by quantifiable research. “With all those books he wrote, I know very few professors who ever assigned one to their MBA students,” says O’Toole. “Peter would never have gotten tenure in a major business school.”

I first met Drucker in 1985 when I was scrambling to master my new job as management editor at BusinessWeek. He invited me to Estes Park, Colo., where he and his wife, Doris, often spent summers in a log cabin, part of a YWCA camp. I remember him counseling me to drink lots of water, ingest a super dose of vitamin C, and take it easy to adjust to the high altitude. I spent two days getting to know Drucker and his work. We had breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. We hiked the trails of the camp. And I became intimately familiar with his remarkable story.

Born in Austria in 1909 into a highly educated professional family, he seemed destined for some kind of greatness. The Vienna that Drucker knew had been a cultural and economic hub, and his parents were in the thick of it. Sigmund Freud ate lunch at the same cooperative restaurant as the Druckers and vacationed near the same Alpine lake. When Drucker first met Freud at the age of eight, his father told him: “Remember, today you have just met the most important man in Austria and perhaps in Europe.” Many evenings his parents, Adolph and Caroline, would gather the intellectual elite in the drawing room of their Vienna home for wide-ranging discussions of medicine, politics, or music. Peter absorbed not merely their content but worldliness and a style of expression.

When Hitler organized his first Nazi meeting in Berlin in 1927, Drucker, raised a Protestant, was in Germany, studying law at the University of Frankfurt. He attended classes taught by Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. As a student, a clerk in a Hamburg export firm, and a securities analyst in a Frankfurt merchant bank, he lived through the years of Hitler’s emergence, recognizing early the menace of centralized power. When his essay on Friedrich Julius Stahl, a leading German conservative philosopher, was published as a pamphlet in 1933, it so offended the Nazis that the pamphlet was banned and burned. A second Drucker pamphlet, Die Judenfrage in Deutschland, or The Jewish Question in Germany, published four years later, suffered the same fate. The only surviving copy sits in a folder in the Austrian National Archives with a swastika stamped on it.

Drucker immigrated to London shortly after Hitler became Chancellor, taking a job as an economist at a London bank while continuing to write and to study economics. He came to America in 1937 as a correspondent for a group of British newspapers, along with his new wife, Doris, whom he had met in Frankfurt. “America was terribly exciting,” remembered Drucker. “In Europe the only hope was to go back to 1913. In this country everyone looked forward.”

So did Drucker. He taught part time at Sarah Lawrence College before joining the faculty at Bennington College in Vermont. He could be a difficult taskmaster. One Bennington student recalled that Drucker said her paper “resembled turnips sprinkled with parsley. I could wring his fat frog-like neck,” she wrote in a letter to her parents. “Unfortunately, he is a very brilliant and famous man. He has at least taught me something.”

Drucker was a professor of politics and philosophy at Bennington when he was given the opportunity to study General Motors in 1945, the first time he peeked inside the corporation. His examination led to the publication of his groundbreaking book, Concept of the Corporation, and his decision, in 1950, to attach himself to New York University’s Graduate School of Business. It was around this time that Drucker heard Schumpeter, then at Harvard University, say: “I know that it is not enough to be remembered for books and theories. One does not make a difference unless it is a difference in people’s lives.”

CREATING A DISCIPLINE
He took Schumpeter’s advice to heart, beginning a career in consulting while continuing his life as a teacher and writer. Drucker’s most famous text, The Practice of Management, published in 1954, laid out the American corporation like a well-dissected frog in a college laboratory, with chapter headings such as “What is a Business?” and “Managing Growth.” It became his first popular book about management, and its title was, in effect, a manifesto. He was saying that management was not a science or an art. It was a profession, like medicine or law. It was about getting the very best out of people. As he himself put it: “I wrote The Practice of Management because there was no book on management. I had been working for 10 years consulting and teaching, and there simply was nothing or very little. So I kind of sat down and wrote it, very conscious of the fact that I was laying the foundations of a discipline.”

Drucker taught at NYU for 21 years — and his executive classes became so popular that they were held in a nearby gym where the swimming pool was drained and covered so hundreds of folding chairs could be set up. Drucker moved to California in 1971 to become a professor of social sciences and management at Claremont Graduate School, as it was known then. But he was always thought to be an outsider — a writer, not a scholar — who was largely ignored by the business schools. Tom Peters says he earned two advanced degrees, including a PhD in business, without once studying Drucker or reading a single book written by him. Even some of Drucker’s colleagues at NYU had fought against awarding him tenure because his ideas were not the result of rigorous academic research. For years professors at the most elite business schools said they didn’t bother to read Drucker because they found him superficial. And in the years before Drucker’s death even the dean of the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management at Claremont said: “This is a brand in decline.”

In the 1980s he began to have grave doubts about business and even capitalism itself. He no longer saw the corporation as an ideal space to create community. In fact, he saw nearly the opposite: a place where self-interest had triumphed over the egalitarian principles he long championed. In both his writings and speeches, Drucker emerged as one of Corporate America’s most important critics. When conglomerates were the rage, he preached against reckless mergers and acquisitions. When executives were engaged in empire-building, he argued against excess staff and the inefficiencies of numerous “assistants to.” In a 1984 essay he persuasively argued that CEO pay had rocketed out of control and implored boards to hold CEO compensation to no more than 20 times what the rank and file made. What particularly enraged him was the tendency of corporate managers to reap massive earnings while firing thousands of their workers. “This is morally and socially unforgivable,” wrote Drucker, “and we will pay a heavy price for it.”

The hostile takeovers of the 1980s, a period that revisionists now say was essential to improve American efficiency and productivity, was for Drucker “the final failure of corporate capitalism.” He then likened Wall Street traders to “Balkan peasants stealing each other’s sheep” or “pigs gorging themselves at the trough.” He maintained that multimillion-dollar severance packages had perverted management’s ability to look out for anything but itself. “When you have golden parachutes,” he told one journalist, “you have created incentives for management to collude with the raiders.” At one point, Drucker was so put off by American corporate values that he was moved to say that, “although I believe in the free market, I have serious reservations about capitalism.”

We tend to think of Drucker as forever old, a gnomic and mysterious elder. At least I always did. His speech, always slow and measured, was forever accented in that commanding Viennese. His wisdom could not have come from anyone who was young. So it’s easy to forget his dashing youth, his long devotion to one woman and their four children (until the end, Drucker still greeted his wife of 71 years with an effusive “Hello, my darling!”), or even his deliciously self-deprecating sense of play.

During his early consulting work with DLJ, the partners flew out to California to meet with Drucker at home. After one of his famously meandering monologues, Drucker thought everyone needed a break.

“Well, boys,” he said, “why don’t we relax for a few minutes? Let’s go for a swim.”

The executives explained that they hadn’t brought their swimming trunks.

“You don’t need swimming suits because it’s just men here today,” replied Drucker.

“And we took off our clothes and went skinny-dipping in his pool,” recalls Charles Ellis, who was with the group.

Surely, Drucker never fit into the buttoned-down stereotype of a management consultant. He always favored bright colors: a bottle-green shirt, a knit tie, a royal blue jacket with a blue-on-blue shirt, or simply a woolen flannel shirt and tan trousers. Drucker always worked from a home office filled with books and classical records on shelves that groaned under their weight. He never had a secretary and usually handled the fax machine and answered the telephone himself — he was something of a phone addict, he admitted.

PRIVACY PREVAILS
Yet Drucker also was an intensely private man, revealing little of his personal life, even in his own autobiography, Adventures of a Bystander, the book he told me was his favorite of them all. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Drucker Archives at Claremont Graduate University contain only one personal letter from his wife to him. Doris had clipped two images from a 1950s-era newspaper, one of a handsome man in a plaid robe, fresh from a good night’s sleep, another of a couple in love, man and woman staring into each other’s eyes, over a late evening snack. She glued each black-and-white image onto a flimsy piece of typing paper and wrote the words: “I love you in the morning when things are kind of frantic. I love you in the evening when things are more romantic.” It is undated and unsigned.

It was Doris, in her own unpublished memoir, who told the story of how she once locked Drucker in a London coal cellar to hide him from her disapproving mother. As Doris’ mother turned the house upside down in a frantic search for a man she thought was sleeping with her daughter, Peter spent the better part of the night crouched in a cold, dark hole. Doris’ mother had long hoped her daughter would someday marry a Rothschild or a German of high social standing. The last thing she wanted was for her to marry a light-in-the-pocket Austrian.

In his later years, as his health weakened, so did Drucker’s magnetic pull. Although he maintained a coterie of corporate followers, he increasingly turned his attention to nonprofit leaders, from Frances Hesselbein of the Girl Scouts of the USA to Rick Warren, founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, considered Drucker a mentor. “Drucker told me: ‘The function of management in a church is to make the church more churchlike, not more businesslike. It’s to allow you to do what your mission is,”‘ Warren said. “Business was just a starting point from which he had this platform to influence leaders of all different kinds.”

Still, it was clear Drucker cared deeply about how he would be remembered. He tried in 1990 to discredit and quash an admiring biography of quality guru Deming, whom he seemed to consider a rival. And when Professor O’Toole assessed the influence of Drucker’s landmark 1945 study on General Motors, he concluded that the guru not only had had no impact on GM but also became persona non grata at the company for nearly half a century. “I sent it to Peter, and he spent hours going over it with me,” recalls O’Toole. “He was a little unhappy with it because he didn’t like the conclusion. He felt he had had a big impact at GM. I thought that was either very generous of Peter or else he was kidding himself.”

During the same period, Drucker, then 80 years old, penned a severely flawed foreword for a new edition of Alfred Sloan’s My Years with General Motors. In one passage, Drucker quotes Sloan as saying that the death of his younger brother Raymond was “the greatest personal tragedy in my life.” Raymond, however, died 17 years after Alfred. In another section, Drucker noted that the publication of the book had been delayed because Sloan “refused to publish as long as any of the GM people mentioned in the book was still alive. On the day of the death of the last living person mentioned in the book, Sloan released it for publication,” wrote Drucker. In fact, Sloan generously heaped praise on 14 colleagues in the preface of his book, and all were still alive when My Years with General Motors was first published.

Whether the mistakes were a result of sloppiness or his declining intellectual power is not clear. But Drucker was no longer at the top of his game. The dean of the Drucker school, Cornelis de Kluyver, had reason to believe that Drucker’s influence was on the wane — the school was having difficulty attracting big money from potential donors. To gain a $20 million gift for its puny endowment, de Kluyver agreed in 2003 to put another name on the school, that of Masatoshi Ito, the founder of Ito-Yokado Group, owner of 7-Eleven stores in Japan and North America. Students protested, even marching outside the dean’s office toting placards decrying the change. An ailing Drucker volunteered to speak directly to the students. “I consider it quite likely that three years after my death my name will be of absolutely no advantage,” he told them. “If you can get 10 million bucks by taking my name off, more power to you.”

In April, during our last meeting, I asked Drucker what he had been up to lately. “Not very much,” he replied. “I have been putting things in order, slowly. I am reasonably sure that I am not going to write another book. I just don’t have the energy. My desk is a mess, and I can’t find anything.”

I almost felt guilty for having asked the question, so I praised his work, the 38 books, the countless essays and articles, the consulting gigs, his widespread influence on so many of the world’s most celebrated leaders. But he was agitated, even dismissive, of much of his accomplishment.

“I did my best work early on — in the 1950s. Since then it’s marginal. O.K.? What else do you have?”

I pressed the nonagenarian for more reflection, more introspection. “Look,” he sighed, “I’m totally uninteresting. I’m a writer, and writers don’t have interesting lives. My books, my work, yes. That’s different.”

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SUBMIT YOUR PITCH

This is your rare opportunity to pitch your business idea to Sir Richard Branson.

Are you seeking capital or business partners for a new business? The Perfect Pitch 2009 will introduce your business to hundreds of accredited investors and entrepreneurs.

Plus, the Top 3 submissions will each win the following package:

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* Top 10 will be announced on September 21st, 2009
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All pitches will be seen by accredited investors, so every pitch has a chance to GET FUNDED.

For more info, click here

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In the time of the great depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a visionary President laid out a series of bold initiatives under the plan famously known in the US history as the ‘New Deal’. The New Deal was created mainly to stimulate the economy, come up with a short-term aid for unemployed, and reform much needed economic and banking systems. FDR’s bold outlook provided a strong foundation for growth and brought a new direction for the country entangled in the laissez-faire governance. FDR’s New Deal was instrumental in bringing economic recovery during most of the latter part of the twentieth century. Some of the measures taken under the New Deal (FDIC, SEC, Social security) in the 1930s continue to have strong impact to this day. Stronger Post depression era governance, along with the consistent economic upturn provided a healthy breeding ground for the rising entrepreneurial culture in America.

Lately, historians are comparing the FDR administration with Obama administration as both presidents came to the office needing to take drastic measures to stabilize the economy and bring about changes that would have long term impact in the economy. I think the analogy ends there. The approach that FDR had to take versus what the nation is going through right now has a stark contrast. The world is changing. The conceptual economy demands changes and emphasis once again on what made this country great – a serious look at the entrepreneurial foundation. Strong governance helped but entrepreneurship flourished on its own in the 20th century. In the conceptual economy, the good governance alone will not be enough to keep entrepreneurs competitive when rapidly growing economies around the world are catching up.

In the time of the current recession, it should be a priority to talk about fostering entrepreneurship. Fostering entrepreneurship is like providing a sustainable stimulus plan to the economy. Looking at the immediate needs, there should be a government led policy to introduce entrepreneurship commissions in all metropolitan cities. With the double digit unemployment rates in cities like Los Angeles and Detroit, these commissions would be instrumental in introducing right measures to stimulate the economy before the crisis trickled down. These commissions would address current issues as well as focus on advising on sustainable models. These commissions would be the leaders in collaborating with public schools and higher learning institutes in introducing entrepreneurship to the new curriculum. These commissions would also bridge the gap between the government and the educational institutes in coming up with innovative, sustainable plans to nurture ideas, provide means to take them to the market. As we stand right now, many government agencies and non-profit organizations are involved in entrepreneurship in bits and pieces, but no one organization has the influence or means to make major recommendations at the highest level.

The current administration has its hands full with many issues, but introducing strategic policies related to fostering entrepreneurship and small businesses should be the utmost priority. Refocusing on entrepreneurship at the fundamental level would lead the way in reshaping the current economy.

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Hollywood, CA , – On Saturday, August 22, 2009, the American Society of Young Musicians (ASYM) will be hosting its “Live from Hollywood at The Music Box” awards show and concert event, honoring some of the biggest names in music. Among those being honored for their work and contributions to the music industry include; Rock and roll legend Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, receiving the Trailblazer Award, producer and star maker formerly of Universal Music, Musicians Advocate Russ Regan, popular indie band Tea Leaf Green, R&B star J. Holiday, Rhythm and Blues pioneer Bobby Womack, award-winning jazz trumpeteer, Joey Sommerville, and chart-topping multi-platinum legendary band Aerosmith, receiving Rock Icons Award honors!

In the spirit of supporting creative youth, 4entrepreneur.net is planning an exclusive behind the scenes video coverage of the event and bring candid interactions with some of the most successful creative entrepreneurs and talent in the entertainment industry. Stay tuned!

Jarvee E. Hutcherson, national president of the American Society of Young Musicians stated, “in these times when we need to encourage the human spirit through music now more than ever, we know that the support that we receive from both our radio station sponsor and the record labels, has helped our mission grow, while servicing young artists, more and more each day.”

( Russ Reagan, entrepreneur, executive who was President of both UNI Records, and 20th Century Records )

The American Society of Young Musicians has in the past, played host to some of music’s most prolific artists including; The Goo Goo Dolls, Lisa Marie Presley, Chris Botti, Foo Fighters, James Taylor, Rod Stewart, Stevie Nicks, Quincy Jones, Bonnie Raitt, Liza Minelli, and Josh Groban, just to name a few.

If you are interested to collaborate with 4entrepreneur.net to support ASYM by sponsoring the event, please contact us at ideas4entrepreneur@gmail.com or call 877 466 2360… (live 24/7) for sponsorship opportunities or special invite for future events.

visit ASYM site for program details

The American Society of Young Musicians is a non-profit, 501 © 3, national organization.

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Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and one of the biggest success stories that came out of the dotcom era talks about the fundamentals of sustaining a business.

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Idealab’s Bill Gross is reflected in a solar tracking mirror on the firm’s rooftop in Pasadena. His ESolar opens an innovative energy facility today in Lancaster.

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Rupert Murdoch’s comments this week about twitter had me thinking about the rationale behind his statement. Murdoch sees no monetary value and the future for twitter and predicts that the only successful business model on the web right now is related to search.

Even though I agree that search is the only real money maker on the web, I disagree that other meaningful business models will not emerge soon. Twitter represents more than a simple and often wrongly perceived tool that only updates live status of mundane things in a micro blogging form. Twitter represents the arrival of the new form of communication. It might take a while to monetize twitter, but the arrival of twitter business model represents one of the few moments in the history of media that qualifies for the level of revolution.

I agree with Clay Shirky (TED presentation) that there were four periods in the last 500 years when media model changed enough to qualify for a revolution – including the printing press in the middle 14th century, the arrival of the 2 way conversational media some 200 years ago ( first the text based telegraph followed by voice based telephone ),

the arrival of the recorded media that came in the form of photos, recorded sound, television and movies in the early 1900s , and obviously the last one being the arrival of the Internet.

Historically, all media revolutions enabled the capability to enhance communications between people whether it was in one to one (telegram, telephone) or one to many communication formats (television).

In the case of the Internet, the impact has been exponentially larger because of its unique capability to reach masses in a revolutionary, many to many format. Even though internet provides that platform, applications like twitter (and in my opinion, at this time, twitter is the only company that understands this model well) enables individuals or businesses to practice this concept.

How often can you communicate with 5000 people on your network instantaneously?
Email is effective but twitter takes ‘many to many’ communications to the next level. Unlike with email, people on your

twitter network have already opted in, so most likely your message is received well among like minded people and you can hear from them instantaneously as well – allowing to truly focus on the message rather than focusing on the medium.

BTW, I got my first invite for a national television appearance that came in the form of a twit. I am a strong believer in adding value. As long as twitter adds value to its users, a moneymaking business model will emerge. Twitter is a great conceptual age business that offers a great tool for its users to make money before going after a quick buck itself.

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a former MD turned entrepreneur Miles Beckett presents his Sherman Oaks based start-up EQAL – the social media producers behind shows LG15, Harper’s Globe (co-produced with CBS).

twiistup VI Showoff Trophy winner

Social Media meets Hollywood: Entrepreneur, Grammy Winning singer ‘Chamillionaire’  – talks about connecting with fans through Social media

Is PR Dead? comment on our twitter page Social Media expert Brian Solis on leveraging social media

Brooke Burke – promoting her startup ‘modern mom‘

Bakespace.com, another SoCal start-up

More misc. pics from the event:

(Photo: Kenneth Yeung – www.thelettertwo.com)

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