365 Great affirmations
Keith Johnson has put together an appropriate book for entrepreneurs. Self affirmation is usually the best form of motivation and inspiration to entrepreneurs. Using simple yet thoughtful and well chosen words, Keith’s book - 365 Great affirmations - offers entrepreneurs a motivational guide to help stay focused, overcome temporary challenges, obstacles in life - and help develop a lasting purpose of being meaningful and doing meaningful things.
Keith has been great giving me feedback for this blog. He deeply believes in entrepreneurship. Keith is kind enough to offer 4entrepreneur.net newsletter subscribers a free copy of his e-book.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
MMPA Oscar Week Luncheon
I was at the Multicultural Motion Picture Association (MMPA) Oscar Week Luncheon on Friday. It was for a good cause and attended by past and this year’s Oscar Award winners and nominees - as well as entrepreneurs and prominent leaders from the community. If you are a multi-culturally driven film maker or interested to learn more about the organization, visit their website. Here you go!
Copyright 2008 4entrepreneur.net
Academy Award nominees Christian E. Christiansen and Louise Vesth ( 2008, best short film - At Night )
Copyright 2008 4entrepreneur.net
Master of Ceremonies, Chris Schauble ( KNBC anchor ), checks and makes changes to his script before starting the event
The press waits for the guests to arrive.
Copyright 2008 4entrepreneur.net
Shaun Toub ( actor, Crash, The Kite Runner )
Copyright 2008 4entrepreneur.net
Copyright 2008 4entrepreneur.net
Oscar nominated actress Sally Kirkland
organizing team makes sure the show moves smoothly
Copyright 2008 4entrepreneur.net Oscar Winner Actor Louis Gossett Jr.
Copyright 2008 4entrepreneur.net
10 Social Media Tools for PR Professionals and Journalists
Help a Report Out (HARO)
PitchEngine
ReportingOn
Journalisted
Wikis
Media People Using Twitter
Twellow
BeatBlogging.org
WiredJournalists.com
see the complete list
Posted via email from Jay’s posterous
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
Navigating through conceptual generation
I have been writing posts on conceptual economy, especially on how it will impact you - whether you are an entrepreneur, a start-up company, a thriving business, or an employee of a Multi national corporation. It is critical to understand where you stand, so that you can prepare yourself accordingly. As the legendary Management guru Peter Drucker often said, you can not manage change - you can only stay ahead of it.
I divide my approach and understanding into 8 segments - hopefully I will be able to pave a path and offer a simple guide for you to navigate and thrive in this innovative, resourceful, and conceptual generation.
Entrepreneurship in conceptual economy - endless creative entrepreneurial opportunities
Never before in the history that entrepreneurs had so much flexibility and tools at their disposal like they have now. With the technology advancement and globalization of high speed internet, entrepreneurs have power to do amazing things. This is a welcoming news for knowledge entrepreneurs. Knowledge workers often had to rely on their parent organization or company to make significant impact - making it very hard to make it on their own. These days, with the availability of modern tools, even college students can compete with large multi-nationals. If you look at the recent history of innovation, numerous multi-national companies were results of college experiments - google, facebook, myspace.. just to name a few. This is just the beginning. The types of success eBay and Google experienced were very few and far in between. The frequency of entrepreneural success of this type will exponentially grow in the future. Technologies are maturing, costs of technology are going down drastically due to healthy competition. Barrier to entry is going down. What dot com boom promised prematurely - it is becoming a reality right now. Virtual communities - portals and social networking sites - are already offering previews of what can be expected on the horizon.
Sky is the limit for virtual entrepreneurs in conceptual economy. Entrepreneurs never liked to follow rules anyway. This time around, they will truly get to lead the way in coming up with unique, unthinkable yet surprisingly simple online business models. The model that works in one geographic location may not work in another. But, the beauty is that conceptual entrepreneurs will adopt - and they will adopt quick. Case in point - the way book publishing around the world is changing. A teenager in Japan wrote a whole novel using text messaging to her blog - and her fans downloaded portions at a time. The concept became so popular that when the hard copy of her novel came out, it was an instant best seller and she made over eight million dollars. Today, believe it or not - half of the top ten books sold in Japan are the results of mobile phone authors. Japan is usually one of the first countries to adopt to new mobile concepts. Usually, some concepts translates to other cultures and the others do not. Well, we may not see a cell phone novel on the New York Times list anytime soon.. but who knows..some variation of the concept may catch on in the US and Europe in the next decade. These are the changing times. Time magazine appropriately named you as the person of the year last year. You have tremendous amount of power to change the way you sustain as an entrepreneur or a consumer.
I consider Youtube generation as the first group to represent conceptual generation. Youtube generation is changing the way news is distributed. High traffic sites like TMZ.com and CNNs iReport already rely heavily on end-user generated content. Highly sophisticated cell phones have enabled regular people to capture live media footage and distribute to the world instantaneously. As conceptual economy matures, technology will also mature and truly open a platform for creativity and virtual entrepreneurship to flourish.
Beyond the more obvious virtual entrepreneurship opportunites, entrepreneurs will have tremendous capabilities to collaborate with resources from around the globe. Entrepreneurs will be leveraging on each other beyond outsourcing menial tasks but in a scale and scope unheard of ever before in the history.
One another concept that is catching on is the concept of replicating ideas that work in one country and taking it to other less developed markets. eBay became very popular early on in the US. Similar auction ideas mushroomed across the globe. Initially, local entrepreneurs started the wave and once the concept became successful locally - they got acquired by eBay for hefty sums. Indian version of eBay- Bazee.com was acquired in 2004 for whopping $ 50 million dollars. Similarly, eBay acquired iBazar, a French auction site and Tradera, Sweden’s leading online auction style marketplace.
In conceptual generation, we will see this trend growing in an exponential way. There are enough entrepreneurial ideas and concepts floating around the world that smart entrepreneurs can and will easily tap into and convert to viable ventures.
In factual note, America’s Gross National Product has grown over the years, but the actual, physical weight of the GNP has declined. Go figure. This clearly supports the emergence of the new economic model.
2. Political Implication - making of conceptual economy
If history is of any guide, government and legislatures have huge roles in building infrastructure to facilitate the new economic structure. It is often mistaken that the President or the federal government has direct power to fix economy. In fact, among very few measures that the highest level of the Federal government can take to influence the economy is to manupulate the federal interest rates. However, the areas the government can play a big role is in introducing new policies that encourage entrepreneurism.
The transportation act of 1920 and The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1944 led the way into a booming economy. Throughout the process, the government took a passive role and helped the private sector to grow. Both the transportation act of 1920 and the highway act of 1944 were not exactly Laissez-faire, but the private sectors got tremendous incentives and got to lead - at the end it worked out well in helping the economy. The 21st century faces larger challenges.
First off the bat, the government needs to acknowledge the arrival of the new economic model. Just like the way, silicon valley and companies like Hewlitt Packard and IBM played a big role in paving the IT revolution, this is the time that the government needs to increase incentive for research and development in the areas of nano-technology, bio technology and eco-friendly initiatives. These are some of the conceptual decisions that the governments can make appropriately and in a timely manner and pave path to maintain sustainable competitiveness in the 21st century.
4 entrepreneur Blog Carnival VII
Here you go! here is the new edition of 4entrepreneur blog carnival.
Jose DeJesus MD presents Checklists Can Improve Clinical and Business Processes posted at Physician Entrepreneur.
Rich Vosler presents Lessons in overcoming obstacles for network marketing posted at Sales Training Tips.
Anya Portnik presents If Selling Is So Simple Why Can’t Everyone Do It? posted at Gavin Ingham.
Edith presents If a Seven-Year-Old Can Do It, You Can Do It Too! posted at Edith Yeung.Com: Dream. Think. Act..
Carol Bentley presents How appealing are you posted at Carol Bentley.
Jose DeJesus MD presents Doctors Get Bonuses for Raising the Bar posted at Physician Entrepreneur.
GP presents You Never get a Second Chance posted at Innside Montana-Your Home at the Range, saying, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”
Ed Rivis presents More sales from self-service link building. posted at Ed Rivis.
Don D. Morrison presents Generating Targeted Traffic from Forums posted at dondmorrison.com.
Alvaro Fernandez presents A $225m Market to Train Your Brain posted at SharpBrains: Your Window into the Brain Fitness Revolution, saying, “This past Tuesday, the MIT Club of Northern California and SmartSilvers sponsored an event on The Emerging Brain Fitness Software Market: Building Better Brains to explore the realities and myths of this growing field.”
Neelakantha presents Virtual Hosting Blog » Whoops! The 15 Biggest Screw-ups in Internet History posted at Virtual Hosting.
David B. Bohl presents Small Business Trends Column - Aspiring Entrepreneurs: No Money?No Problem! Get Started Today posted at Slow Down Fast Today!, saying, “There are a number of things you can do right now to help you get started on the path toward building your dream business.”
Michael Walsh presents The Power of Discernment in Business posted at Business Growth, saying, “Attached is an article to help entrepreneurs tap into their internal wisdom, slow down and respond to situations instead of reacting to situations”
Ciara Carruthers presents How do you get your website to really take off? Get re-excited about it. posted at Website Copywriter and Webmaster Blog, saying, “Injecting the excitement back into my business.”
Michel Fortin presents Give Your Joint-Venture Offer An Extra Punch | The Michel Fortin Blog posted at The Michel Fortin Blog.
marketing
Richard McLaughlin presents Small Business International Development In Three Easy Steps – Third Transition To A Global Market Internet Business : Get International Clients posted at Get International Clients.
Rebecca Suzanne Dean presents Remember Your Emotions for Increased Sales Letter Pull posted at Rebecca Dean.
Ryan Healy presents A Tale of One Client, Three Copywriters, and a Space Ad posted at Ryan M. Healy, saying, “When a business owner wanted to grow his business, he hired three copywriters to write a single space ad. It might have worked out well for him, but he made a critical mistake. Can you guess what it was?”
Raymond Le Blanc presents Email Marketing - Dealing With List Fatigue posted at Internet Business . Cranendonk.com.
Kevin Fleming presents Using Google Local Business Center to Bring in New Customers posted at FOS Commerce Blog.
Sabrina Jefferson presents Internet Marketing Newbie Action Plan posted at Sabrina Jefferson.
Public relations
Mark Riffey presents Why, even now, your business should have a toll-free number posted at Business is Personal.
sales
Rebecca Suzanne Dean presents Stop Thinking. Begin Testing! posted at Rebecca Dean.
Brad Trnavsky presents Is what you are doing REALLY productive? posted at Sales Management 2.0.
Michel Fortin presents Breaking This Copywriting Rule Boosts Profits posted at The Michel Fortin Blog.
Jim Smoot presents 5 Tips for Controlling Cash Flow posted at A New Restaurant, saying, “Great tips for keeping an eye on the ever important cash flow.”
Sagar presents How To: Manipulate Del.icio.us to Drive Visitors and Dollars to Your Site, 20 Tips and Tricks posted at Smart Shopper: Personal Finance Advisor.
That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of 4entrepreneur using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
Entrepreneurship week @ Standford University
Entrepreneurship week @ Standford University Feb 22 - 29, 2008
more info
Low cost grantwriting training
Here is a great discount offer for grantmanship seminar that is coming up in Los Angeles. more info:
Tips for getting grants for your non-ptofit organization
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
Freelancers Union
Freelancers Union is probably one of the best resources that I have come across for entrepreneurs. If you are an independent consultant or a freelance contractor, this is a great source to guide you and give you a voice. Until now, independent contractors were not the center of focus for legislatures as well as the politicians running for public offices. This Presidential election, both democrataic and republican candidates have specifically addressed this segment of the workforce. Freelancers Union is a brainchild of Sara Horowitz, a former labor attorney. More than the union aspect of this non-profit, the company offers great resources and information for independent contractors.
I learned a hard way myself when I started consulting and didn’t understand fully the implication of being an independent contractor. Upside for employers is obvious. As an employee, employers are obligated to pay benefits and paid holidays and sometimes required to commit for long term contracts. Upside for independent contractors is also there - usually only for a short term. Flexibility and freedom are almost always the deciding factor for going independent. But, there are some serious down sides - ranging from not having company subsidized health insurance to missing out on company matched retirement funds. Freelancers Union is already offering subsidized health insurance for qualified members.
I strongly advise entrepreneurs to leverage on this group to understand and benefit from the services they offer. Membership is free! Its based out of New York for now but they are expanding aggressively. The city and the State of New York are on board. So are some of the prominent private sector companies including J.P. Morgan Chase and Rockefeller Family Fund.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
Greatest technological challenges of the 21st century
A panel of 18 maverick thinkers, convened by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), today identified what they consider to be the greatest technological research challenges facing society in the coming century.
Notable panelists on the NAE committee include former director of the National Institutes of Health Bernadine Healy; Google co-founder Larry Page; geneticist and businessman J. Craig Venter, Nobel Laureate Mario Molina, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, and climate change expert Rob Socolow.
In the interview below, Socolow, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, expands upon the NAE Grand Challenges project and the role that technological innovation plays in a vibrant society. A complete list of the 14 Grand Challenges is provided at the end of this Q&A with Socolow.
What exactly is the National Academy of Engineering?s Grand Challenges project?
In some respects we were given a crazy assignment: to identify and rank the greatest engineering challenges that lie ahead in the 21st century.
Ultimately we didn?t find it within our intellectual powers to rank these challenges. How do you rank the eradication of poverty versus keeping the planet habitable versus avoiding nuclear war? Instead we came up with broad categories of the challenges that lie ahead and within those categories identified specific initiatives.
What are those broad categories?
The first broad category encompasses environmental wholeness ? the need for humans to take care of our earthly home and to be good stewards of the environmental quality that we depend upon.
The second category was our own wellness ? the medical side of human life.
The third category acknowledges that we have a dark side as human beings ourselves and that our lives have a certain precariousness. We lumped challenges in this category under the word ?vulnerability.? It would be very nice if we could omit this category and attend only to environmental and medical well-being. But we live on a planet that experiences earthquakes and tsunamis. And we are a species that causes trouble for itself. We have a streak in us as humans that we have to recognize and contend with.
The fourth category we refer to as the joy of living. After you?ve got health and environmental soundness and you feel protected against the bad side of both human nature and Mother Nature, there is still something else to aspire to — self-knowledge and enlightenment.
The 20th century brought incredible advances in our understanding of our universe, our solar system, our Earth, our own DNA ? we have so much more of a sense of time and space beyond where our ancestors were 150 years ago. Engineering was the fulcrum that tipped open our world to these discoveries. It will play a similar role in the future, contributing to new understandings of our surroundings, our history, our science, our cultures ? contributing to our sense of what it means to be human.
Why do we need to identify grand challenges for engineering?
In part, this is about communication with the public. Many salaries are paid out of public funds ? for teaching and for research. What is the return on this investment? We need to make sure that people understand how past investments in science and engineering have improved human life. Engineering has delivered many successes: our electrified world, indoor plumbing, air travel ? we take these things for granted but we shouldn?t. No doubt there is a down side to, say, the automobile or to electrical power. These engineering successes can end up posing new engineering challenges. Notably, how do we make these innovations work on a finite planet?
Without investments made by previous generations, we would not enjoy the seemingly invisible infrastructure that makes our modern lives possible. It goes without saying that if we don?t make similar investments now we will rob future generations of the quality of life that they should enjoy.
The other important motivation for bringing attention to the grand challenges that lie ahead for engineering is that we want to make sure that young people know that engineering is an exciting profession, one that makes a difference to society.
What specific initiatives in the report are most compelling to you personally?
In terms of keeping our planet habitable, I would have to point to the challenges of managing carbon and nitrogen on a planetary scale. Managing carbon ? which is produced when we burn fossil fuels — by capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide, has gotten a lot of media attention, given the concerns over global warming. It?s a challenge my colleagues and I at Princeton have been working on for many years,
Managing nitrogen and avoiding dangerous interference with the nitrogen cycle is an engineering grand challenge that is not so well-known. In the process of fertilizing the planet we are massively increasing the amount of biologically available nitrogen on the planet. So we are not just warming the planet, we are fertilizing the planet. In both cases you are creating ecological change and disturbance. We fertilize the cornfields of Iowa and the nitrogen flows down the Mississippi. There is a region in the Gulf of Mexico where so much fertilization has been deposited that it is a dead zone during certain times of the year. So we have a situation where the ecological system bites back.
Could you say something about specific challenges within the other broad categories?
In the category of health, individualized medicine is paramount. We need to aspire toward a medical model that takes into account the particularities of the whole person, and part of this is an engineering challenge.
In the category of vulnerabilities, we outlined some of the important technological challenges in detecting surreptitious nuclear material and the importance of taking into account the whole fuel cycle when it comes to nuclear energy. We don?t want to engineer energy systems that create what might be considered an attractive nuisance ? systems that open up ways for nuclear material to fall into the wrong hands. Also, since we live in an increasingly networked virtual world, cybersecurity is a fundamental engineering challenge.
In terms of ?joy of living? the challenge that I find most compelling is individualized learning. New technologies offer extraordinary opportunities for learning to become tailored to personal aptitudes and learning styles.
You said that the committee declined to rank the grand engineering challenges of the 21st century. But National Academy of Engineering is inviting the public to do so?
Yes, people can go to the National Academy of Engineering website to download a copy of the report and to cast their vote on what they consider the most important challenges. You can find the website here: http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/
The public may ultimately come to the same conclusion as the committee ? that these challenges cannot be ranked because they are all so important. But we need to get everyone in on the debate and the discussion. After all, these are challenges and opportunities that ultimately affect all of society.
###
Former Secretary of Defense William Perry chaired the NAE panel, which released its report in Boston at the national meeting of the American association for the Advancement of Science.
THE NAE GRAND CHALLENGES:
- Engineering better medicines;
- Advancing health informatics;
- Providing access to clean water;
- Providing energy from fusion;
- Making solar energy economical;
- Restoring and improving urban infrastructure;
- Enhancing virtual reality;
- Reverse engineering the brain;
- Exploring natural frontiers;
- Advancing personalized learning;
- Developing carbon sequestration methods;
- Managing the nitrogen cycle;
- Securing cyberspace,
- Preventing nuclear terror.
A full list of the panel members, and their biographies, can be found at http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/7124.aspx
Source for this interview:
Contact: Teresa Riordan
609-258-9754
Princeton University, Engineering School
CALTECH/MIT entrepreneur forum
Water Overtakes Energy as the Critical Crisis?
Venturing in Water Technology and Opportunity
Saturday, March 8, 2008
at the California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, California
Despite a wet year, SoCal’s water problem remains. Growing population and declining import availability will eventually trump our reservoir buffering of nature’s occasional bounty. But if SoCal has it bad, what of elsewhere, especially foreign lands where water already is desperately lacking? Or where every conceivable use and abuse of it takes place in the same place at the same time, and it is wholly untreated. Indeed water-borne disease fills half the worlds’ hospital beds and unsafe drinking water kills millions annually. Unless behavior and technology can sufficiently advance water’s use and reuse soon, “water” stands to displace “energy” as the crisis. This necessity, against a tapestry of infrastructure neglect and lack of innovation, signals opportunity for new ventures in a long sleeping industry.
Today’s program keynote speaker will set the stage for new ventures: addressing key facets of water generally and specific situations from SoCal to across the globe. With that perspective, we will feature entrepreneurs and panelists involved in pushing the technology envelope for greater water efficiencies and economies. Confirmed speakers include:
Keynote
Timothy F. Brick
Chair
Metropolitan Water District Board of Directors
Entrepreneurs/Panelists
Yoram Cohen, Ph.D.,
Professor
UCLA Dept. of Chemical Engineering
Director
Center for Environmental Risk Reduction
UCLA, and nationally recognized water researcher
James M. Harris
Chief Executive Officer
Crystal Clear Technologies, Inc.
Moderator/Co-Producers
Michael M. Krieger
Attorney at Law
Willenken Wilson Loh & Lieb L.L.P.
Lynn Foster
Emerging Technologies Director
Greenberg Traurig L.L.P.
Date
Saturday morning, March 8, 2008
Location
Registration and Continental Breakfast:
8:00 a.m. at Baxter Hall, Caltech
Program:
9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. at Baxter Lecture Hall
Networking:
11:30 a.m. - 12:00 noon at Baxter Hall, Caltech
FOR INFORMATION
Entretech
295 South Hill Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91106
ph: 626/356-9933
fx: 626/356-7515
email:
entretech - A great resource for entrepreneurs
Blogs: Back to the Basics
I came across the following post by Josh Hawkins on strategic implications of blogs. He covers nicely on the topics of branding, PR, and using as a tool of influence. However, I want to add to the three categories of blog creators that he mentioned his article - with a very important segment of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs do not represent any of those three categories. Entrepreneurs can very well blend in different scenarios as employers, employees or customer evangelists. But, in essence what attracts entrepreneurs is the fact that there are no rules - often they are the trend setters, the trail blazers and the risk takers. So, I would put entrepreneurs as the number one beneficiary of the whole concept of blogging.
by: Josh Hawkins
I was in a PR meeting last week and blogging came up. These conversations always seem to turn on risk, exposure, liability, trust, competition. Unfortunately, these topics tend to derail attention to the key benefits of engaging in social media tactics as part of more general marcom strategy.
I subscribe to the school of thought that believes markets are conversations, and that brands live and breath with consumers and their experiences with products and services - not with pixel perfect design or in finely tuned copy. If you buy that, you can see how blogs can provide an extremely powerful conduit that brings internal corporate strategy and product management into alignment with consumer understanding, motivations and values. The more closely aligned these conversations become, the more likely you are to engage in successful brand management and marketing strategy.
But too often blogs - along with other social media and CGM in general - are relegated to stepchild status in the marcom mix. If blogs are to be pursued, it most often involves having PR consultants use social media monitoring tools to identify “influentials” - by some proxy such as inbound links or search ranking - and pitch stories, often by emailing press releases. I remember having these same conversations years ago with campaign managers worried about loosing control of the message, or coming off as “inauthentic.” Of course, it all changed when Joe Trippi and the Dean campaign parlayed a blog strategy into a fund-raising bonanza.
Nevertheless, these concerns remain very salient in the corporate sector. But, I think the root cause is often a lack of clarity over the different kinds of blogs and the role they play in driving brand experiences in a consumer-driven media environment.
I see blog strategy as breaking out into three distinct, but interrelated, categories: corporate, employee, and customer evangelist.
- Corporate blogs often have direct c-level involvement with high-level industry perspectives, PR announcements, and thought leadership messaging. Sometimes these will have filters such as PR or legal oversight. Other times, you have blog mavericks like Bob Lutz and GM’s Fastlane blog that have a slightly more direct flow of communication. In general corporate blogs can provide a useful platform to quickly address issues, level-set and respond to salient customer complaints or broad consumer concerns. When done right, these also provide an avenue for consumers to engage with leadership in meaningful dialog over corporate strategy and marketing messages. Customer evangelists get a “bat phone” to elevate market-critical issues. Customer concerns get a platform to call out opportunities for improvement with unparalleled immediacy. On the other hand, when these fail to include meaningful back and forth with customers, corporate blogs can also come off as regurgitated press releases and scripted commentary that does little more than insight cynicism.
- Employee blogs represent a slightly different approach. Here organizations trust their employees to be brand ambassadors and actively engage with customers in a dialog over value and service. Employee blogs can also be canaries in the coal mine for identifying customer concerns or problems that need to be addressed. Most importantly, employee blogs give customers direct input into the direction of feature development and service delivery. Smart organizations harness the power of customer input across the board, including the development of marketing messages (a much more authentic way to glean market insights than focus groups or customer sat surveys). Organizations as large as Microsoft have undertaken significant employee blogging programs, such as Channel 9, and have been able to reap significant benefits.
- The third approach is to facilitate customer evangelist blogging. At one level this can be a simple as reaching out to vocal advocates and being responsive with new information, creating a customer advisory board with devoted resources and actively recruiting customer participation. Blogs often organically grow out of such a program. There is also a more intentional approach like what Vespa did with their customer evangelists at Vespaway. With this type of program, brand collateral, privy access to events and marketing collateral, and sometimes the blogging platform itself is provided to harness the energy and passion of customer evangelists. The balancing act here is to “keep it real” and make sure the community is participating for the right reasons. These efforts can backfire if selective benefits begin to outweigh the organic participation that grows out of a genuine desire to share, endorse and promote a brand based simply on positive experiences.
Each approach to blogging has its own unique benefits and risks. And each requires an intentional road map and commitment to be successful. But blogging is no ordinary marketing tactic. It’s more an indicator of the healthfulness of a brand; confidence, transparency, and an acknowledgment of a certain degree of vulnerability. This last part is often the hardest characteristic to come to terms with. But it is an inevitable dimension of doing business in today’s media environment.
Blogs, social media, and word of mouth promotion all represent the front lines of brand experiences. This form of online content is keyword saturated, link-rich, and frequently updated. Search engines give preferential treatment to online content with these characteristics in search result rankings. What’s more, search engines are used by over 90 percent of consumers searching for information about products and services. And the vast majority of purchasing decisions and consumer behavior are driven by peer-generated content, which is a defining characteristics of CGM and blogs.
That’s the “no duh” part of the equation. There’s also deeper level, and value dimension, that is so damn important which surfaces with blogs and blogging. My friends at social media consulting group, Frank, get this and capture it with an integrated suite of services. Their graphic below provides a nice snapshot of some work involved, the possible directions a blog strategy can taken an organization, and some of the benefits that can fall out of such an approach.
Original Post: http://splinteredchannels.blogs.com/weblog/2006/06/blogs_back_to_t.html
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
4 entrepreneur blog carnival VI
Welcome to the February 15, 2008 edition of 4entrepreneur blog carnival. We have been receiving great submissions on a weekly basis. I learn a great deal from these posts. Noteworthy posts for this edition include submissions from Alvaro Fernandez - talks about managing stress; Louise Manning - writes on mandate for leadership; Cindy King - on marketing to different cultures; and Karl Goldfield discusses sales coaching. We are making this a weekly thing. Keep those posts coming. Enjoy!
entrepreneur
CMOE presents Strategic Formulation > eadership In Action posted at Teamwork.
Alvaro Fernandez presents Stress and Neural Wreckage: Part of the Brain Plasticity Puzzle posted at SharpBrains, saying, ““My brain is…fried, toast, frazzled, burnt out.” How many times have you said or heard one version or another of these statements.”
Terry Dean presents 21 Ideas for Hot Press Releases - Part 1 posted at Integrity Business Blog by Terry Dean.
Louise Manning presents The mandate for leadership posted at The Human Imprint.
Successful Footsteps presents Do You Need a New Idea to be Successful? posted at Become Successful.
FruitfulTime presents What feelings do you instil in your audience? posted at FruitfulTime Blog.
Hill Robertson presents Reasons to Build a Customer List posted at Hill Robertson, saying, “One of the most important things to be successful in any business is to have a customer list.”
business plan
Jeniffer presents Running A Business-Week 3–Money Matters | thethirtydayyear.com posted at thethirtydayyear.com.
entrepreneur
Michel Fortin presents Give Your Joint-Venture Offer An Extra Punch posted at The Michel Fortin Blog.
Mark Riffey presents A competitor went out of business. What do you do first? posted at Business is Personal.
GreatManagement presents What I learnt From One Of The UK’s Best Selling Business Authors posted at The GreatManagement Blog, saying, “This idea is that you describe your future life in the present tense.”
Tiffany Colter presents Writing Career Coach: A Pleasant surprise and How I got here Part 2 posted at Writing Career Coach, saying, “A pleasant surprise on how to have success beginning from the first day of this New Year!”
Thursday Bram presents Expand Your Writing Skills: Project Management posted at thursdaybram.com.
Adriana Copaceanu presents Finding Your Carrot - How to Get Motivated when You Work for Yourself posted at The Gift Basket Exchange Blog, saying, “Thanks for taking a look at my submission. This is very new to me: I just learned about blog carnivals this morning. Please let me know if you need anything else from me. Adriana”
marketing
Ed Rivis presents Write Press Releases that Sizzle. posted at Ed Rivis.
Anna Farmery presents 10 Ways Brands Can Benefit from Joining the Conversation posted at The Engaging Brand.
Terry Dean presents How to Write a JV Email posted at Integrity Business Blog by Terry Dean.
Donna Kozik presents Love or Lust: You and Your Book posted at My Big Business Card, saying, “If you’re toying with idea of marketing yourself with your own book, you want to pay more than a passing glance during this season of love, says Donna Kozik of www.MyBigBusinessCard.com”
Cindy King presents 5 Factors To Consider When Marketing To Different Cultures posted at Get International Clients.
Sam Carrara presents Customer Service- Wendy’s posted at Sam Carrara’s Marketing Education.
Public relations
Henry Bagdasarian presents Professional Networking posted at Free Identity Theft Prevention, Detection and Fraud Solutions.
sales
Karl Goldfield presents Coaching sales champions: Building a plan Part 3: Hunters, Gatherers, Communicators, and Collaborators posted at Coaching sales champions.
Andrew Erickson presents Merchant Processing 102 posted at WebSite Werx.
Jim Logan presents The importance of customer loyalty and its three element foundation posted at Accelerate Business Group, saying, “It’s hard to disagree customer loyalty isn’t a strategic success factor for most businesses. So, what makes a customer loyal?”
Alan K Rudi presents Be a Sales Expert | Successful Business Leadership posted at Successful Business Leadership, saying, “Everyone is in sales. Learn nine critical, specific sales skills for everyone.”
start-up company
Campus Business presents How to Raise Money to Start a College Business posted at Campus Business.
entrepreneur
Alexander Kohl presents ?Trust Me, I Know It Works? posted at Green to Profit - Becoming a Sustainable Entrepreneur.
That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of 4entrepreneur using our carnival submission form.
Top 50 Business Plan Posts: 2008
Two posts from 4entrepreneur.net were chosen for the Top 50 Business Plan Posts: 2008 @ evancarmichael.com. There are other great posts from business plan experts like Guy kawasaki, Mike Schultz, Susan Gunelius..
Here is a quick link to our post.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
How Does FDA Perceive Entrepreneurial Enterprises?
Value of FDA Compliant Global Drug Development Plan
Date: Thursday, February 21, 2008 Time: 6-9 pm
Location: UCI University Club- 801 East Peltason Dr., Irvine, CA 92697
Register @: www.socal.tie.org
The product life cycle for life science enterprises costs in
investments 900 million and it takes 10 to14 years before one makes a
market launch. The regulatory landscape is increasingly global. Last
year FDA approved only 3 new drugs when 10 year ago about 12 drugs were
approved. The cost of drug development is increasing and number of
innovative products are being approved is reducing. To add to this
mix, Venture funds are available to only the very few favorable drug
candidates. How do the corporations find a way to successfully comply
with the FDA and at the same time the investors need? Do multiple
regulatory body accept each others findings? Does a VC consider
investing with regulatory risks in mind? Does the corporate culture
within a give enterprise yield to a favorable outcome? How do all stake
holders contribute so that the citizens have access to innovative drugs
that are safe and effective?
Turning your passion into a rewarding profession
I recently attended a colorful exhibition held at El Gallo Gallery in East Los Angeles. I find the art scene and the entrepreneurial spirit that exists in East LA quite fascinating!
I have been to this place few times before. The first time I was there – it was about a couple of years ago I attended a screening of a HBO movie – “Walkout”. It was an epic Hispanic civil rights film directed by Edward James Olmos that I also had a small guest role. This time around, the place was expanded; the crowd was diverse – ranging from dynamic art community to local music talents and filmmakers. Amidst great creative vibe, I met several people who are turning their true passion into rewarding professions. Here is my take on a pattern that you will most likely find among successful entrepreneurs!
Be passionate! This may sound like an obvious tip. But many people follow their passion half-hazardly and end up delivering mediocre result. I recently interviewed Philippa Burgess, the partner at Creative Convergence for my TV show that I am putting together.
She emphasizes on the importance of being passionate, believing in yourself and believing in your faith to get you through. When you are passionate about your effort, it validates your seriousness and commitment. In case of many successful entrepreneurs, they all share similar stories about how people once bought into their passion.
Create a niche - Successful entrepreneurs are good at creating their niches. Creating a niche out of a popular profession or skill is easier said than done. That’s where your creativity ought to kick in. As I have written in one of my earlier posts, people tend to fall for clichés and end up getting lost in the mediocrity trap. Jim Marquez, an East LA based author (and an ESL teacher) is an example of somebody who has created a niche for himself. He has written seven books, numerous columns for popular Los Angeles and European based Art Publications. His material is raw, uncensored yet lively and original. He covers controversial topics yet offers great poetic, truthful social commentaries and stories. His passion and niche helped him self publish all his books. As I often advocate, barriers to entry has truly gone down for creative entrepreneurs to take matters in their own hands and create and promote original materials.
2008-2009 Economic Forecast
Investing in LA County
Feb. 20, 2008
more info on the event
Don’t miss this special two-panel event on Wednesday, February 20, 2008, featuring the region’s most influential business leaders. Tim Leiweke, President and CEO of AEG; William Witte, President of Related California; and Remco Waller, Chief Financial Officer of Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, will discuss why their companies have invested in multi-billion dollar projects in LA County.
In panel 2, LAEDC Chief Economist Jack Kyser is joined by Dr. Jay Bryson, Global Economist of Wachovia; Robert Bach, Chief Economist of Grubb & Ellis; and Leslie Appleton-Young, Chief Economist for the California Association of Realtors, to discuss the health of the LA economy for 2008.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
The mandate for leadership
Dr. Louise Manning, Managing Director of LJM Associates Ltd submitted the following post for our upcoming blog carnival. She has written several interesting posts and an e-book on the topic - The Human Imprint.
———-
Whilst I have been watching the US presidential election campaign I have been pondering on who gives you the mandate to be a leader?
Sometimes it feels that you stood still and everyone else took a step back so you are therefore now the one in the front and you are almost the leader by default. Why did the others take a step back did they believe that they didn’t have the time, skills, ability or inclination to take the lead; did you by pondering whether you could lead actually show that you might be capable and that’s how you got the job? That can be quite a negative feeling and you are left with the thought “How did I get here? Am I worthy? Can I do it?”
You feel a little more positive when there is a lot of group jostling and collectively the group push you to the front. You feel endorsed and that you have their collective approval to be leader. Although ultimately your actions and delivery will determine how long you have their support and some of those aforementioned questions can gradually sneak into your mind.
Winston Churchill is reputed to have said ” Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.” It takes a great, resolute character to make these words their life mantra.
So, there is a third kind of leader. This person has a conviction, an aspiration,and they will always believe in these aims and goals even if no-one else agrees. They have a bedrock of strength, they believe in their abilities and they walk their path in life because they want to make the journey and they want others to come along with them. They have given themselves a mandate to lead. In consequence others if they feel the leader is honest, authentic and real will trust them and ultimately their leadership and give them a mandate too.
Louise Manning invites you to join her in exploring the issues of the human imprint at http://thehumanimprint.typepad.com ©Louise Manning. All rights reserved Worldwide. Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article providing the article is printed in its entirety, you leave all of the links active, do not edit the article in anyway and include the copyright statement.
Subscribe to 4entrepreneur RSS feed for the latest posts.
The Illusions of Entrepreneurship
Scott Shane recently wrote a great book by this title. Think you are a savvy entrepreneur? Take this test he has on his blog. It is interesting - but harder than it looks!
The Accidental Entrepreneur I
I am starting a series on accidental entrepreneurs. I will dig in entrepreneural history to find articles and case studies that could shed some light on the journey of some of the brilliant pioneers - who had never intended yet turned out to be great in business. Barriers to entry for becoming an entrepreneur in the early days was quite high. In most cases, successful entrepreneurs of that era were scientists and technology pioneers like Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison and Marie Curie who already had ground breaking inventions. I found this article written by Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel Corporation. He is one of those stories.
by Gordon E. Moore*
3 December 2001
Beginnings
Like many other scientists and engineers who have ended up founding companies, I didn’t leave Caltech as an entrepreneur. I had no training in business; after my sophomore year of college I didn’t take any courses outside of chemistry, math, and physics. My career as an entrepreneur happened quite by accident.
And it ran counter to early predictions. When I was graduating from Caltech with my PhD in chemistry in 1954, I interviewed for jobs with several companies, one of which was Dow Chemical. Dow was interested in setting up a research laboratory in California, and they thought I might be someone they could send to headquarters in Midland, Michigan, to train to come back here in some kind of managerial role. So they sent me to a psychologist to see how this would fit. The psychologist said I was OK technically but I’d never manage anything. Dow did end up offering me a job in Midland, but the transfer back to California was no longer a part of it.
There is such a thing as a natural-born entrepeneur… But the accidental entrepreneur like me has to fall into the opportunity or be pushed into it.
I didn’t go to Midland after all, but went instead to the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, which has roughly the same relationship to Johns Hopkins that JPL has to Caltech, and where I could continue to do basic research in areas related to what I had done before. But I found myself calculating the cost per word in the articles we published and wondering if the taxpayers were really getting their money’s worth at $5 per word. Just as I was starting to worry about the taxpayers, the group I was working in was, for various reasons, breaking apart. So I decided to look for something that had a bit more of a practical bent, and at the same time see if I could get myself back to California.
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory interviewed me and offered me a job, but I decided I didn’t want to take the spectre of exploding nuclear bombs, so I turned it down. Then one evening I got a call from Bill Shockley, who had gotten my name from Lawrence Livermore’s list of people who had turned them down. Now, Shockley is a name that has a Caltech association. After earning his BS here in 1932 he went on to invent the transistor. He had been working at Bell Laboratories, and now he wanted to set up a semiconductor company out on the West Coast (a lot of Caltech connections here - the operation was financed by Arnold Beckman) with the idea of making a cheap silicon transistor. Shockley knew that a chemist was useful in the semiconductor business; they had chemists at Bell Labs, where they did useful things. And I was a chemist, so Shockley caught up with me. Still not an entrepreneur, I decided to join this operation.
 |
| William Shockley’s employees drink a toast to him on the day in 1956 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the transistor. Eight of the crew shown here, went off on their own the next year and founded Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. Photo: Robert Noyce |
I was employee number 18. This was a startup operation. All of us except Shockley were young scientists, in our late twenties. I had no management experience or training. Unfortunately, neither did Shockley. He had run a research group at Bell Laboratories, but this was to be an enterprise rather than a research group, and he had no real experience in running a company. I suppose maybe I should have been suspicious when none of the people who had worked with him at Bell Labs joined his new venture, but I didn’t even begin to think about that then.
Shockley was phenomenal from the point of view of his physical intuition. One of my colleagues claimed Shockley could see electrons. He had a tremendous feeling for what was going on, say, in silicon, but he had some peculiar ideas for motivating people. For example, the company had something we dubbed the PhD production line. One day he told a group of us: “I’m not sure you’re suited for this kind of a business. We’re going to find out. You’re going to go out there and set up a production line and run it. You know, do the operation, not direct it.” This didn’t go over especially well, because the group dutifully tried to operate a production line on a product that was still in the early stages of development.
He also set up a secret project. Those of us who weren’t involved couldn’t know what it was, although Shockley did let us know that it was potentially as important as the invention of the transistor. In such a small entrepreneurial group, having in-people and out-people created some dissension, the sort of thing that makes it hard to keep everybody working together as a team. As another illustration of his motivating skills, one day Shockley asked a group of us what we would like to do to make the job more interesting. Would we like to publish some papers? We said, “OK,” so as a way of satisfying this demand he went home that night and worked out the theory of an effect in semiconductors. He came back the next day and said, “Here. Flesh this out and put your name on it and publish it.” Finally, the beginning of the end, as far as morale was concerned, occurred when we had a minor problem in the company and Shockley decided that the entire staff was going to have to take lie detector tests to find out who was responsible for it.
Then he switched from his original idea of building a cheap silicon transistor to building a rather obscure device known as a four-layer diode. We viewed this with considerable concern, because some of us didn’t understand exactly where the four-layer diode fit in. One day, when Arnold Beckman came around to talk to the group, Shockley made some closing remarks, just out of the blue, indicating that he could take his staff and go someplace else if Beckman wasn’t enthusiastic about what was happening there. So, given all these problems, we decided that we had to go around Shockley to solve them. A group of us contacted Beckman and sat down with him through a series of dinners to try to work out a position for Shockley, in which he could give us the benefit of his technical insights but not of his management philosophy. We were thinking in terms of a professorship at Stanford. By that time, he had won a Nobel Prize, and Nobel Prize winners can get a professorship almost anywhere.
What we didn’t appreciate is that it’s awfully hard to push a Nobel Prize winner aside. Beckman decided (as the result of advice he had received elsewhere) that he really couldn’t do this to Shockley. We were told essentially that Shockley was in charge, and if we didn’t like it we probably ought to look at doing something else. We felt we had burned our bridges so badly by that time that we clearly had to leave, and we started to look at alternatives. (Shockley’s company held on for a few years, was acquired by Clevite Corporation, and died eventually.)
Setting Up Fairchild Corporation
Each of the eight of us invested $500 in this startup… Fairchild put up some $1.3 million to get us going, and we started Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation.
And this is where I finally became an entrepreneur. One of our group had a friend at Hayden Stone, a New York investment banking house. He wrote the friend a letter saying that there was a group of eight of us here that really enjoyed working together, but that we were leaving our current employment, and did he think that some company might like to hire all of us. The investment bankers said, “Wait a minute,” and sent one of the partners, Bud Coyle, and a young Harvard MBA named Arthur Rock out from New York to visit with us. They talked to us and said: “You don’t want to look for a company to hire you; you want to set up your own company.” That didn’t sound bad. By doing that we could stay where we were. We had all bought houses by then (they were affordable in California at that time), and we wouldn’t have to move. It seemed a lot easier, so we said, “OK; fine; let’s do it,” and they said they would find backing for us.
So we sat down with The Wall Street Journal, and went through the New York Stock Exchange listings, company by company, to identify which ones we thought might be interested in supporting a semiconductor venture. We identified 30-some companies, and Arthur and Bud went out and contacted every one of them. They all turned it down without even talking to us. Then, quite by accident, Arthur and Bud ran into Sherman Fairchild, who happened to be a technology buff; he really loved new technology. He introduced them to the chairman of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, who was willing to take a shot at supporting this new company.
 |
| The Fairchild Eight (a.ka. the Shockley Eight) at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959. From left: Gordon Moore, Sheldon Roberts, Eugene Kleiner, Bob Noyce, Victor Grinich, Julius Blank, Jean Hoerni, and Jay Last. Photo: Courtesy of Wayne F. Miller, Magnum Photos |
Each of the eight of us invested $500 in this start-up. That may not sound like much now, but it was a month’s salary in 1957. Fairchild put up some $1.3 million to get us going, and we started Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. We still weren’t really quite entrepreneurs, but we had learned something along the way. We had learned from the Shockley experience that none of us knew how to run a company, so the first thing we had to do was to hire our own boss - essentially hire somebody to run the company. We advertised for a general manager. Now, when you advertise for a general manager for something like this, what you find is that every salesman in the country is convinced that he can run a company. But buried among all the responses from salesmen was one from Ed Baldwin, the engineering manager for the Hughes semiconductor operation. In the mid-fifties, Hughes was making diodes and was one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world.
Baldwin came and told us a lot of things we didn’t know, so we decided that he was the right guy to bring in to run our company for us. We hired him, and he taught us a variety of things that we hadn’t learned before - since most of us had not even worked for a successful manufacturing company. He taught us that the different parts of the organization should be established with different responsibilities; for example, you have to set up the manufacturing operation separate from the development laboratory. You have to engineer and specify manufacturing processes, which is completely different from getting something to work once in the laboratory. He even taught us that we should bring in a marketing manager, which we did. And everything was working fine: the development and preproduction engineering for our processes and first products was complete; we had a thick process-spec book that recorded all the detailed recipes; and we had interested customers. Then one day we came to work and discovered that Baldwin, along with a group of the people that he had suggested we hire, were leaving to set up a competing semiconductor company down the road. This was the first of the Silicon Valley spin-offs that we suffered.
Running the Company
Our first transistor took two mask steps, and that was a fairly significant development operation.
We never really quite understood this. Baldwin had the same potential equity participation that we did; but he never invested his $500 so he never got the stock. He didn’t consider Fairchild Semiconductor his company, and since he wanted his own company, he left us. (He and his group also left with the “recipes”; eventually they had to return the copy of the spec book to us.) After our initial feelings of shock and betrayal, we sat down and discussed what we should do. Should we go out and hire another guy to come in and run the company? We decided instead that we would try to go it alone with one of our own. So Bob Noyce, who was the one of us with the most semiconductor industry experience, became general manager. I took a sideways step to his previous position as director of research and development.
Besides what Baldwin had walked off with, we had a few other ideas coming along at that time. One of them was something called a planar transistor, created by Jean Hoerni, a Caltech post-doc whom Shockley had recruited. In fact, I had joined Shockley for the trip down to Pasadena to recruit him. Jean was a theoretician, and so was not very useful at the time we were setting up the original facility at Fairchild, building furnaces and all that kind of stuff. He just sat in his office, scribbling things on a piece of paper, and he came up with this idea for building a transistor with the silicon oxide layer left on top over the junctions. Where the silicon junctions come to the surface of the silicon is a very sensitive area, which we used to expose and had to work awfully hard to keep clean. Hoerni said, “Why not leave the oxide on there?” The conventional wisdom from Bell Laboratories had been that by the time you got done, the oxide was so dirty that you wanted to get rid of it. Nobody had ever tried leaving the oxide on. We couldn’t try it either, because it required making four mask steps, each indexed with respect to the next with very high precision - a technology that didn’t exist. Our first transistor took two mask steps, and that was a fairly significant development operation.
So we couldn’t even try Jean’s idea until a year and a half or so after we had gone into business. When we finally got around to trying it, it turned out to be a great idea; it solved all the previous surface problems. Then we wondered what else we might do with this planar technology. Bob Noyce came up with the two key inventions to make a practical integrated circuit: by leaving the oxide on, one could run interconnections as metal films over the top of its devices; and one could also put structures inside the silicon that isolated one transistor from the other.
Noyce and Kilby, who was at Texas Instruments, are often considered co-inventors of the integrated circuit. In fact, they did dramatically different things. Kilby built a laboratory model - a little circuit with transistors and resistors - by etching long, thin semiconductor structures, all connected by tiny wires. It really wasn’t a practical production process. What Bob did was to take the idea of the integrated circuit - this planar technology - and come up with a way of building a practical device.
Turning the First Stone
Literally dozens of companies came out of the Fairchild experience. Not only did the technology come out of it, but Fairchild also served as a successful and encouraging example of entrepreneurship - the if-that-jerk-can-do-it-so-can-I syndrome.
It turned out that the world really wanted some of these new devices, which led to some management challenges. We didn’t have any idea of the magnitude of the opportunity we were dealing with. We were still a bunch of guys in a laboratory, somewhat amazed that people actually wanted to buy our products. We hadn’t thought about expanding, but here again our theoretician, Jean Hoerni, had early on made a contribution by designing the layout of our facility to allow for what we presumed to be sufficient expansion - an extra furnace here, more nitrogen cylinders there. But we had little notion of the impact of our discovery. Here we had developed and engineered the first integrated circuits, the first family of logic circuits – very simple devices with simple gates and flip flops - and put them into production. I remember calling the senior people in the laboratory together and saying, “OK, we’ve done integrated circuits. What’ll we do next?” And we started looking for all the peculiar physical effects we could find to see what new devices we could invent. We had no idea at all that we had turned the first stone on something that was going to be an $80 billion business.
As a result of our ignorance, we sent our profits back to the parent company on the East Coast rather than asking to reinvest them in expanding Fairchild Semiconductor more rapidly. Now, its not clear that we could have expanded a lot more rapidly even if we had tried, because there were significant limitations on the management crew we had. We were all still going through on-the-job training. We were mining an extremely rich vein of technology, but the mining company was too small to handle what was going on. The net result was what I call the “Silicon-Valley effect”: every new idea that came along created at least one new company. Literally dozens of companies came out of the Fairchild experience. Not only did the technology come out of it, but Fairchild also served as a successful and encouraging example of entrepreneurship - the if-that-jerk-can-do-it-so-can-I syndrome.
While we were learning on the job, Fairchild grew to be about a $150 million business and some 30,000 employees by the late sixties. It was a fairly significant corporation by the time we were done. But things began to deteriorate - partly, I think, because it was controlled by an East Coast company. The West Coast tail was not very effective at wagging the East Coast dog. Fairchild developed some management problems. In fact, the board fired two chief executive officers within a six-month period, and was running the company with a three-man committee as the board of directors. Clearly the direction of the company was going to change. When Bob Noyce (who was the logical internal candidate to become chief executive of the parent company, Fairchild Camera) saw that he would be bypassed for the job, he decided to leave. I felt that new management would probably change the nature of the company significantly. I decided I’d rather leave before any changes, than after. So the two of us set off to do something else. We had really come a long way at Fairchild. We had also made a tremendous number of mistakes, and we had squandered opportunities along the way. It was excellent on-the-job training, but there probably is a more efficient way of training entrepreneurs than by letting them make all the mistakes. Fortunately, good products make up for a lot of problems in an organization, and I think that was what happened in our case.
 |
| Moore (left) and Noyce at Intel in the early seventies. Starting a company wasn’t always easy. Photo: Intel Corporation |
When Bob and I started looking around for business opportunities, we identified one that we thought would minimize the advantages of the established companies, such as Texas Instruments, Fairchild, and the others. This opportunity was one that would change the leverage. The semiconductor industry had gotten to the point by then where having large, low-cost assembly plants in Southeast Asia was very important competitively. But technology was capable of making a more complex chip than we were capable of defining. If you identified a complex circuit function, it tended to be unique; it might be used only once in every computer, so the unit volume did not allow you to amortize the design cost. The net result was that relatively simple circuits were still being made, even as the technology continued to evolve. We thought we saw in semiconductor memory an opportunity to make a product of almost arbitrary complexity that could be used in all digital systems, and that would change the leverage from low-cost assembly back to cleverness in processing silicon. We started our business on this idea.
Now, this was at a time when venture capital was at a peak. Bob Noyce called Arthur Rock and said, “Hey, we want to set up a new company. Would you help us raise the money?” Arthur said sure, and that was the commitment of our first round of financing. We wrote a single page business plan. It was very general. It said we were going to work with silicon; we were going to do diffusion and other similar processes and make interesting products.
The Birth of Intel
At Fairchild we had no idea that we needed an organization - that we had to set up a manufacturing department and an engineering department and a sales force.
Then we started looking at technologies that would be appropriate for the business we were undertaking. In retrospect, I call it our “Goldilocks” technology strategy. We pursued three different directions. One was a particular kind of bipolar transistor, called a Schottky bipolar, that was different from what was being used then. It turned out that the technology worked just beautifully, better than anyone could have expected. In fact, it worked so well, that competitors were able to copy it rapidly. That was technology that was too easy. We chose another technology for assembling a lot of memory chips in one package - flipping them over and doing an advanced type of assembly. We’re still working on that one, 25 years later. That one was too hard. Fortunately, we also chose a third one - a new version of the MOS (metal oxide semiconductor) technology called silicon-gate MOS. Here the transistor’s “gate” electrode that previously was made of a metal (usually aluminum) - the M in MOS - was replaced by a film of silicon that had several important advantages for device switching speed and packing density on the silicon wafer surface. And that one was just right. By concentrating on this one technology and focusing our attention on a couple of difficult problems with it, we were able to solve the problems and get on with it. But the established companies that were tending their main business and doing new process development on the side, didn’t have time to focus on solving the problems and took several years to get going on it. Our initial estimate was that we had five years to grow big enough to prevent the existing companies from putting us out of business. In fact, we had seven years before the big companies got into our technology. Fortunately, very much by luck, we had hit on a technology that had just the right degree of difficulty for a successful start-up. This was how lntel began.
 |
Intel’s 4004 chip, which contained 2,200 transistors, was a 4-bit microprocessor and addressed 9.2 K of memory (on another chip). Although this computer-on-a-chip began the revolution in personal computers, the company missed the boat on getting into the PC business. Copyright © Intel Corporation |
At Intel, we decided not to make the same kind of mistakes that we had made at Fairchild. At Fairchild, for example, we used industrial distributors to sell a good portion of our products - we sold them to a distributor; the distributor sold them to the final customer. We recorded the sale when the product went to the distributor. But in our business, prices only go down. The only question is whether they go down at 20 percent per year or at 80 percent per year. Once at Fairchild, for example, when we had our distributors well stocked with our products, Motorola introduced a competitive device at a significantly lower price. To match their prices, we would have had to reverse sales revenue we had already counted and to take a terrible hit on our profit-and-loss statement, which we didn’t think we could afford. So we sat there and watched our market share deteriorate while that inventory sold out. We decided we wouldn’t let this happen at Intel. We don’t take credit for a sale when we sell a product to our distributor, but only when it has moved off his shelves to the final customer. This was a bit of “technology” that we had to sell to our accounting firm, because it had been done previously. But it turned out to solve that particular problem very well. It is now standard industry practice.
From my own point of view, I had grown very frustrated running a laboratory at Fairchild. As the manufacturing group grew more competent technically, they were less willing to listen to the people in the laboratory as the experts. So when we came up with some new idea in the laboratory - for example, stable MOS devices - we had great difficulty transferring the detailed instructions to manufacturing. We were much more effective in transferring new technology to the spin-off companies than we were internally. To avoid that problem at Intel, and to promote maximum efficiency of transfer from development to manufacturing, we decided not to set up a separate laboratory. We’ve set up a variety of different kinds of mechanisms and organizations along the way to make the development-to-manufacturing transfer as efficient as possible, even at a sacrifice in efficiency of either the manufacturing or the development process individually. This has minimized spin-offs, because we design our development specifically to transfer into the factory; so we don’t have the problem of developing technology and ideas that we have no place for. Technology transfer is always difficult. We have tried to minimize the need to transfer it.
From the beginning at Intel, we planned on being big. Since we had already been fairly successful at Fairchild, anything less successful in our new venture would have been a disappointment. So, at the very beginning we recruited a staff that had high potential and that we thought would be around to run the company for some time. This is an opportunity that many start-ups miss. There is no better chance to train managers than in a start-up, where they have the opportunity to see the entire company as it grows. It starts small and simple; one can see all the operations as they get bigger. I think that people looking at start-ups, venture capitalists in particular, ought to push very strongly not to squander the opportunity to develop management during that time period.
We also tried to minimize bureaucracy. When we started Intel, for example, each one of us took an area of technology as his own. And instead of purchase requisitions, we gave our engineers purchase order forms, so they could work with the equipment supplier directly and just hand the salesman a purchase order. This shocked some of the vendors, but it was a very effective, no-bureaucracy way of getting going. Unfortunately, we can’t do that today any more, but at the time, when we were a fairly small company, it worked very well.
Another thing we had learned along the way was to raise money before we needed it. One thing you find out after a little bit of experience as an entrepreneur is that the bank will lend you money as long as you don’t need it. You can sell stock as long as you really don’t have to. With good advice from directors such as Arthur Rock, we have always had plenty of capital on hand, so that we haven’t been hindered in our ability to raise more.
At Fairchild we had no idea that we needed an organization - that we had to set up a manufacturing department and an engineering department and a sales force. All these things sound logical, but they take a while to figure out. And one of the most important elements in an entrepreneurial organization is people management. There are a lot of things that I’ve learned very late in life about managing people, and if I could go back again to the beginning of Intel, I would do many things differently. For example, I have come to appreciate the value of regular one-on-one meetings with subordinates, where the subordinate controls the meeting agenda. Such sessions are very efficient for transferring information in both directions.
Top 10 Company
“What the heck would anyone want a computer for in his home?”
I suppose I can’t end without bragging a bit about Intel. We just completed our 25th year; our revenue was $8.8 billion, and our earnings were over $2 billion. That puts us at least in the top 20 and maybe in the top 10 of the world’s most profitable companies. We have steadily increased our lead as the largest semiconductor manufacturer and have more than 30,000 employees worldwide.
But there are some things I’m not quite so proud of that have come along with it. In 1984, for example, we hit a peak of 26,000 employees; in 1986 we were down to under 18,000. Laying off 8,000 employees is not a very pleasant task, and it’s something I think could have been avoided had Intel management been a bit more careful and perceptive.
And I can look back at a few missed opportunities. Some we missed by default. I remember talking with venture capitalist Bill Davidow, when he worked for Intel, about an engineering workstation. Intel sold something we called a “development system,” which was a special-purpose computer for the engineer. We imagined that the engineer in the future would have a single computer on his desk, and we talked about what it ought to be. But even though we talked about it, we were too darned busy doing other things, and we never got around to moving in that direction. So we missed that chance completely. I suppose I could also look at the PC as an opportunity we missed. Long before Apple, one of our engineers came to me with the suggestion that Intel ought to build a computer for the home. And I asked him, “What the heck would anyone want a computer for in his home?” (I still sometimes wonder, in spite of having a few of them.) The only example he could come up with was something for the housewife to put her recipes on. I could imagine Betty at the stove cooking, poking at her computer to read the recipe. It seemed ridiculous! Well, perhaps we didn’t miss that opportunity after all, because we do make a profit out of the PC business - not by being in it, but by serving it. And that may be the best way.
 |
In 1969 Intel’s 106 employees pose in front of the original plant in Mountain View, California. Noyce stands in front at left and Moore at right. Work was already under way on the microprocessor, which was invented by Intel engineer Ted Hoff (standing at right behind Moore). The world’s first commercial microprocessor, Intel’s 4004, was introduced in 1971. Photo: Intel Corporation |
We missed other opportunities by poor execution. One that really bothers me is that in 1985 we were driven out of the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) business, the business in which we had made our first significant profits and which had gotten us started as a successful company. But we were driven out partly because we didn’t execute a couple of generations of products very well, and partly because Japanese dumping drove us out. Different economics for the Japanese companies allowed them to run their factories and sell their products far below cost. But it still bothers me that we couldn’t compete successfully in a business we had created.
Now, I don’t mind missing an opportunity because we tried and failed. We took some fairly aggressive and not always successful steps toward producing computer products early in the company’s life - for example, the 432. The 432 was probably the first 32-bit microprocessor; it was hardware designed to execute object-oriented software; the hardware and software were designed together and had many advanced features. At the time that we designed the system, the technology wasn’t quite ready for such complexity, and in order to get all the functionality on the chip, we had to sacrifice performance. It ended up being so slow it could do hardly anything, and we had to abandon it. But at least it was an aggressive shot - one that we just didn’t target correctly.
Another shot that misfired was digital watches. We were the first company in the liquid-crystal, digital-watch business. We hoped the watch was a path to a portable digital product that could be expanded to do much more than tell time. Other companies entering the electronic-watch market drove prices through the floor. The business opportunity we saw was completely destroyed, if it ever really existed. I still have my $15-million watch, along with memories of Microma Watch, a division of Intel. It wakes me up in the morning; it has a good alarm system on it, and liquid-crystal displays last for at least 20 years.
In retrospect, there are a lot of things we could have done better along the way, but we did enough right to grow a fairly large company. The world has really been changing, too, during this time period. Industry here and abroad has enjoyed huge improvements in efficiency. For example, I mentioned earlier that we had 26,000 employees in 1984. We just passed 26,000 employees again during this last year, and the company is five times as big in revenue as it was then. The competition today is a lot stronger than it was in the past. A start-up company today probably can’t afford the sort of on-the-job training that we could.
Learning by Trial and Error
Most of what I learned as an entrepreneur was by trial and error, but I think a lot of this really could have been learned more efficiently.
There is such a thing as a natural-born entrepreneur, for whom the entrepreneurial urge drives everything, and who can make a business out of almost anything. But the accidental entrepreneur like me has to fall into the opportunity or be pushed into it. Then the entrepreneurial spirit eventually catches on. To me the opportunities to start a company are few and far between. Things have to line up right. I’m not the sort of entrepreneur who can just say, “I’m going to start a company. Let’s look for an opportunity.” In my entire career I think I’ve seen only about three ideas come by that I would consider a basis on which to try to start an enterprise. But starting a company is certainly exciting, and building a successful enterprise is satisfying and rewarding.
Most of what I learned as an entrepreneur was by trial and error, but I think a lot of this really could have been learned more efficiently. I think a place like Caltech could offer an opportunity to avoid the need for trial and error in a lot of this. Broadening the education to include some instruction in business - a little bit about finance and organizations - would certainly be useful, and I think a course in this direction would probably be a significant addition to the curriculum. But a technical education is probably the best start for an entrepreneur in a high-tech business.
 |
| Gordon Moore Photo: Intel Corporation |
And it’s important to remember one other thing that is essential for any entrepreneurial organization: do what you do well. Look at other things as incremental opportunities, but don’t change the basis of what you do well. For Caltech, what it does well is train the best scientists and engineers in the world. My advice to Caltech is this: help students a bit if they want to move in entrepreneurial directions, but don’t change the basic nature of a Caltech education.
*Gordon Moore is chairman of the board of Intel Corporation. He is also chair of Caltech’s board of trustees, elected last fall to succeed Ruben Mettler. This article is adapted from a talk he gave at Caltech in March (1994) at the groundbreaking ceremonies of the Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering, being built with a $16.8 million from the Moores.
*Originally published in Engineering & Science, Summer 1994, vol. LVII, no. 4, California Institute of Technology.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
Back stage pics from the Super Bowl
Daihan Lee sent these pictures that he took at the Super Bowl while on assignment with ESPN.
4 entrepreneur Blog Carnival V
Here is another edition of 4entrepreneur Blog Carnival. I am receiving hundreds of entries each week. I try to keep the posts as unique as possible. Keep those entries coming!
Rob Moshe writes a piece on leadership - Live Your Best Life By Serving Others. posted at Rob Schaumer.
I posted Dwayne Tucker’s post in my last carnival. He entered this post with a free download offer for 4entrepreneur.net readers - Free Desktop BackGround posted at Dwayne Tucker - PhotoShop Blog / Tutorials, saying, “Hey Jay it’s me again Dwayne Tucker from DwayneTucker.com I made this free desktop background entrepreneurs around the world can keep when they need a boost of energy!” - not bad, keep it up!
Rich Vosler submits his second motivational post How to get more belief in yourself posted at Sales Training Tips. Vosler’s posts are great reads for entrepreneurs who are directly on the front line of sales.
Another good post on brand development for small companies and entrepreneurs. Chris Stowell presents Strategy Development isn’t just for the big boys. posted at Teamwork.
business plan
I wrote about business plan competitions on this blog a while back. Amanda Gladden has done a great job explaining what they are and featuring some of the contests going on out there today. Business Plan Competitions - What are They posted at Woman Start Your Business Now, saying, “Business plan competitions have been around for several years, primarily offered by business schools initially, they are becoming increasingly mainstream- being offered by some states, wineries, economic development programs and even Avon. If you are in the early stages of planning or are a young start up, do not turn up your nose at this excellent source of seed funds and advice.” Thanks!
Carol Bentley writes an interesting post on mind maps Getting your thoughts on paper posted at Carol Bentley. Sounds like it is worth looking into.
entrepreneur
Susan Tatum presents Improving Technology Marketing Results - Taking the 1st Step. posted at TechnoBuzz.
Jose DeJesus MD writes about the importance of having business credit cards - Business Credit Cards and Why You Need them posted at Physician Entrepreneur.
David B. Bohl presents Success in 2008? It’s Achievable – And Here Is How You Can Do It! posted at Slow Down Fast Today!, saying, “How do you define success? Are you successful when you achieve your goals you set out in life? Or do you feel successful even when you haven’t achieved them all, but are working towards them and feel good in life?”
Joel Libava presents a great interview with the author Scott Shane. I have read his book. It is a great book for entrepreneurs - Interview: Professor Scott Shane on Entrepreneurship and Franchising posted at The Franchise King Blog, saying, “Here, Scott Shane a professor at Case Western Reserve University discusses Entrepreneurship, and his new book…”
To include an unique perspective, here is a post from an Innkeeper from Montana. GP presents So You Want to be an Innkeeper posted at Innside Montana-Your Home at the Range, saying, “”We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.” This quote is an innkeeper’s motto”
Shamelle presents Your Inner CEO: Unleash The Executive Within posted at Enhance Life.
Colleen Palat presents Starting Your Own Online Tutoring Business Can Be Simple | posted at Colleen Palat, saying, “Earn $25 - $75 per hour by tutoring online in your pajamas.”
marketing
Ask Matt presents Using Stumbleupon To Bring Visitors to Your Blog posted at BlogTactics.com, saying, “Using Stumbleupon to bring visitors to your blog.”
Ask Matt presents Free Traffic Tactic Videos and Understanding that SEO Malarky… | iamUncovered.com posted at BlogTactics.com, saying, “Free Traffic Tactic Videos and Understanding that SEO Malarky…”
Ian Richardson presents A Niche is a Notch. Catch? posted at Make Everything EzyAs123. Anna Farmery presents What Drives Your Brand? posted at The Engaging Brand.
Adrian presents How to Successfully Advertise Your Blog posted at Path to Your Destiny, saying, “A comprehensive article on how to market a blog (or any website you may own). Enjoy!”
blue skelton presents Blog Marketing: 6 Dangerous Ways to Trigger a Rational Response posted at Blue Skelton Publications, saying, “Here are 6 exciting ways to trigger a rational response from your readers. To sell a product, you must show your customers that they have need for the product. Here are 6 ways that you can accomplish this:”
Carol Bentley presents Death of the long letter posted at Carol Bentley, saying, “Are the marketing approaches of the past dying? Carol addresses the issue and gives tips for your business.”
Ask Matt presents Dealing With A PR0 Penalty From Google For Blogroll Links posted at BlogTactics.com, saying, “Dealing with A PR0 penalty from google for blogroll links.”
Ask Matt presents Simple Way To Increase Optins and AdSense Clicks posted at iamUncovered.com, saying, “A simple way to increase optins and adsense clicks.”
Public relations
Mark Riffey presents How small business owners can profit from the mistakes of a billion dollar global corporation posted at Business is Personal.
sales
Karl Goldfield presents Coaching sales champions: Building a plan Part 2: Finding Talent - Unearthing potential and making stars posted at Coaching sales champions.
Colleen M. Johnson presents Say It With Confidence posted at cmjoffice.com Blog, saying, “Speak with authority, knowledge, passion and confidence when you are selling your services or a product.”
start-up company
Raymond presents Cheap and Affordable Ways To Create A Virtual Office For Your Small Home Business posted at Money Blue Book.
That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of 4entrepreneur using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
Super Bowl Commercial
Cool Super Bowl commercial: created and enacted by deaf members of Pepsico workforce, EnAble
Management Secrets of New England Patriots
I wrote a column on New England Patriots a while back when they clinched the 16-0 perfect season. I am not a big Pats fan but I am fascinated by the consistent leadership that the team has shown over the years. (I was actually a big Chiefs fan when Marty Schottenheimer coached the team. Marty was a great coach and always wanted to see him win a Super bowl…) Patriots won three Super Bowls and critics thought that was that and the end of the dynasty. But, the Patriots are proving the critics wrong again! With a win this weekend, they will have yet another Super Bowl..and this time with a perfect record.
It amazes me that this low profile team in the late ’90s has risen to become one of the greatest NFL franchises. In 2005, James Lavin wrote an interesting and thoroughly researched book on the Patriots – Management Secrets of New England patriots
. The book highlighted the management and leadership traits that helped them win the three super bowls. Great leadership traits among players, coaches and the owner Bob Kraft has to be the main reason they are consistently performing well.
I was watching a press conference on NFL channel last week. As always, Coach Belichick and the players were humble, showing great deal of respect to each other and more importantly to their Super Bowl opponent Giants. This has been their ritual. Unlike some of the teams who blow their own horns, the Patriots always praises their opponents.
I agree with all these traits that Lavin mentioned in his book! I highly recommend entrepreneurs in leadership and management roles to read the book.
- Respect opponents, Do not undermine your competition
- It’s Leadership! not luck
- Humble ownership/ top management sets the right direction
- Consummate Leadership is the key
- Winning with class
- Smart coaches/ leaders & coachable players/staff
- look for overlooked talent
- Focus on value (Performance/pay)
- Expectations – Past performance is no guarantee for future results. Be creative!
- Everyone’s a coach. Every member of an organization needs to take a lead.
- Being competitive is not a bad thing. Don’t get mad, get even!
- Best marketing is a great product
Subscribe to 4entrepreneur RSS feed for the latest posts.
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite
-
Entrepreneur.com: Latest Articles- Get the Most From Your Written Testimonials
- From Keyword to Business Idea in 8 Steps
- 5 Ways to Audit Proof Your Tax Return
- 10 Questions to Ask a Financial Advisor
- What to Know, How to Collect
- Need a Business Idea? Here are 55
- Hotel Industry Embraces Green Revolution
- New Hip Destination
- A Green Machine
- The Roof, the Roof, the Roof is in Bloom
-
Ask the VC
- Start-up Cost Projections For First Time Entrepreneurs
- Communications Advice for Pitching Venture Capitalists
- 2009 New York Venture Summit
- Participate in the 2009 Startup Executive Compensation Survey
- How To Get A Job In Venture Capital
- Does The Concept of Addressable Market Matter?
- Do VC's Guess The Exit At The Beginning?
- What Advice Would You Give Mompreneurs?
- What Are VCs Good For?
- Risk Tolerance is a Competitive Weapon
-
Bootstrapper - a good compilation for start-up entrepreneurs
- Savings and Retirement Plans for Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners
- Avoiding Financial Pitfalls During Divorce
- When GTD Goes Too Far: How To Avoid Productivity Paranoia
- Calculate This! 100 Financial Calculators Every Entrepreneur Needs
- 52 Creative Ideas for Finding New Clients
- Review of “Escape from Corporate America”
- Music to Your Wallet: 50 Places to Find Free Music Lessons Online
- 50+ Google Reader Productivity Hacks
- 50 Awesome Tools for Researching Your Family’s History
- 50 Fun Ways to Use the Wayback Machine
-
Fast Company: Latest Sales-marketing articles
- Is Your Marketing Strategy a Recipe for Failure?
- Order Versus Chaos
- Devil's Food
- The Journal-ist: Matters of Perception
- Just Say No
- Can PR Save China?
- What Makes a Product Cool
- Apple: Box By Box
- A Mad Man Gets His Head Together
- All Eyes On Apple
-
INC.com Latest eCommerce articles
- Survival of the Fittest for Online Retailers
- When Collaboration and the Law Collide
- Finance: How to Get Chummy with Your Banker
- Street Smarts: Surviving the Recession
- E-tailers: How to Beat the Competition
- Report: Crisis Communication Up
- Nation Could Lose Two Million More Jobs
- Report: Small Businesses at Risk
- Cyber Monday Sales Spike
- Will the Grinch Steal Christmas?
-
engadget
- HDMI 1.4 officially detailed: Ethernet / Audio Return channels, 3D, 4K x 2K support
- Yahoo Japan fires up video delivery service for Sharp AQUOS TVs
- Liquid helium trumps liquid hydrogen at AMD's Phenom II overclocking love-in
- ATP PhotoFinder Pro loses the base station, takes us to geotagging nirvana
- Palm Pre said to sync up nicely with Apple's iTunes
- Solar paneled umbrella will charge your gadgets while you hang in the sun
- "Mole" says UMD-less PSP-Go! is on for E3, slimmer PS3 to follow
- Nokia spins off Home Control Center team as There Corporation, slips product into 2010
- Palm Pre User Guide: the highlights, so far
- Medion's Akoya P7700 D PC will do your multimedia right on a budget
-
Smashing Magazine
- Modal Windows In Modern Web Design
- Wordpress Theme Development Frameworks
- 20 Time-Saving Tips to Improve Designer’s Workflow
- The Ultimate Motion Graphics Tutorials Round-Up
- Ask SM: CSS Quick-Question Edition
- Do You Want Fries With That Logo?
-
-
-
-
-
Forbes on entrepreneurs
- The Best Way To Find (And Fill) A Job Online
- When Social Networking Is Not Working
- Turing Data Into Knowledge
- How To Say 'Hi'
-
-
