Independent Thinking » Innovation

Why the Small Business Haters Have It All Wrong

Daria Steigman — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:02:59 +0000

Have you noticed a trend lately disparaging small businesses (especially solo-owned ones)?

It’s a bit ironic that the people who are taking chances, thinking creatively, and testing out new products and services are getting slammed for not creating jobs at a time when the economy is mired in inactivity.

The haters have it all wrong.

We’re not too big to fail. But we’re small enough to succeed.

One big thread in this conversation seems to revolve around employment. At one level, the naysayers have it absolutely right: I’m not hiring.

But that’s not my business model. My model is to partner. Which, last time I checked, generates income for other people so that they can pay bills, buy groceries, and shop at the mall–all the same stuff that salaried jobs enable, albeit at a much smaller scale. But I’m just one small business among many.

It’s not just about jobs.

There is a jobs crisis. But don’t blame small businesses for it.

I’m not an economist, but jobs don’t spring from nowhere. We need a reboot, and that’s going to require innovation, creativity, research and development, and risk-taking. (These and a bunch of other things too.)

Ashvini Saxena had a terrific post recently on how Entrepreneurship Benefits the Economy More Than Just Generating Jobs. In it, he talks about four other factors:

Entrepreneurs invent.
Entrepreneurs optimize.
Entrepreneurs find hidden demand (and create plans to exploit it).
Entrepreneurs hire people with skills.

Read Saxena’s post as well as the smart conversation in the comments.

Have you noticed an attack on small business? What’s your take?

Photo by Jan Tik (Flickr).

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Books, Velcro, and Celebrating Success

Daria Steigman — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 08:03:21 +0000

How do you measure success?

There’s a lot of conversation around business success, what it means, and how to measure it. (And we probably talk even more sometimes about lazy metrics and poor measurement.)

I’m not going to talk about measurement at all today. Just success. Because sometimes you need to celebrate the small victories.

One of my 2011 goals was to read more business books. I set two goals: (1) to read at least one book a month about business, entrepreneurship, and/or marketing communications; and (2) to review a book a month.

Velcro helps.

Velcro was one of my three little words for 2011. In a blog post to start the year, I wrote:

I’m good at coming up with ideas, but sometimes I need more focus to see them come to fruition… I need to keep the velcro handy to keep me locked in.

It worked. I started the year thinking about how 21st century businesses are putting the power of collaboration and openness to work. I also read about what makes a good entrepreneur and how to tap into your entrepreneurial DNA, received tips on how businesses can leverage social media to thrive, and ended the year thinking about being weird.

12 Books for 12 Months

Here’s what was on my 2011 reading list:

As for 2012? I have four books in the queue, including Mastering Uncertainty and The Introvert’s Guide to Business. Stay tuned.

What successes are you celebrating as 2011 draws to a close?

Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt (Flickr).

Is Groupon the Next Lycos?

Daria Steigman — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:10:22 +0000

Lycos used to be a big deal.

Lycos was one of the first ad-supported search engines. It completed one of the fastest IPOs in history. It was one of the first profitable Internet companies. And it barely exists today.

Look at the home page, and you see a flashback to the old Web.

Lycos developed a model, then other companies came into the space. They did it better. They saw opportunities. They innovated.

Which brings us to Groupon, which has been hemorrhaging for months.

Groupon’s founders never understood that the $6 billion offer from Google was never about Groupon’s business value. It was about buying an infrastructure that Google could build out.

Being the first on your block to do something doesn’t make you special. Or gifted. Or the best. It just makes you first.

What do you think: Is Groupon the next Lycos?

Photo by blathlean (Flickr).

“To Infinity and Beyond”

Daria Steigman — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:47:27 +0000

I didn’t realize until last night how much Steve Jobs changed my world:

He added color (orange desktop computer, red netbook).
He added usability (point-and-click operating system versus the old DOS).
He made music truly portable (mp3 player, streaming capabilities).
He changed the way we connect (smartphone).

My only Apple product is an iPod nano, and yet Steve Jobs’ impact is everywhere. Oh, and his tenure at Pixar produced the little movie clip above.

The world needs more disruptive innovators.

To infinity and beyond, Steve Jobs.

5 Reasons to Think Thought Leadership

Daria Steigman — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 09:04:16 +0000

There was an interesting conversation about thought leadership on #profschat the other day around what it is, what it means, where it fits into an organization’s priorities, who “owns” it, and how to execute a successful thought leadership strategy. And it got me thinking anew about a strategy that’s increasingly important in today’s fragmented marketplace.

Here are five things to consider:

1. You can’t anoint yourself a thought leader. Doing so is akin to saying you’re a guru or begging people to “like” you. No matter how many times you put “renowned expert” in your bio or on a profile somewhere, it doesn’t make it so. It’s up to other people to judge your content valuable, interesting, and useful to them.

2. Thought leadership is an investment. It’s not an insta-solution. Before you can be brilliant, you have to know what you’re talking about. That means understanding your business goals, your competitive differentiators, and your customer’s and prospect’s pain points across both the product/service lifecycle and your company’s operations. And that’s all before you develop a content strategy to educate people, problem solve, and be a go-to resource.

3. One-size-fits-all fits no one. If you understand your business and are targeting the right audience, what works for another person or company won’t work for you. Don’t imitate. The best voice—whether in words or in pictures—is your voice.

4. It’s okay to focus on today and look ahead. During the Twitter chat, Bruce Hallas expressed frustration at the difficulty of positioning himself as a thought leader when he’s interested in what happens 3, 5, or 10 years from now but his clients are focused on the “now.” Why can’t you do both? The “now” responds to people’s current needs. The “thinking” piece is an opportunity to educate us on the things we don’t know we don’t know (or don’t yet recognize as needs). I’d create special, perhaps-gated, content (e.g., white paper, e-book) to showcase your forward-thinking smarts. You can always re-purpose some of that content into bite-sized nuggets to tease your everyday audience.

5. Thought leadership pays off. Look at IBM. After years as a products company, IBM has reinvented itself as an ideas business. But you don’t have to clone IBM to be successful. In fact, a thought leadership strategy is perhaps even more important for small companies who don’t have the deep pockets to supplement their content marketing initiatives with mass market brand advertising It’s all about differentiating yourself and giving people a reason to pay attention.

Photo by visualpanic (Flickr).

Wired for Innovation

Daria Steigman — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 12:21:32 +0000

I caught up on back issues of Wired this weekend. Good writing is underrated, and this magazine has some of the best. Plus, where else can you read about behavioral feedback loops, hackers, a kerfuffle over a hijacked copy of a video game, and Harry Potter in the same place?

There were also two terrific pieces about innovation and entrepreneurship. One is an homage to Y Combinator and its founder, Paul Graham. The energy of the participants jumps from the pages, as in this instructive description of how Graham and his team select candidates for their start-up bootcamp:

Graham tends not to pay too much attention to a candidate or team’s business plan—it’s likely to change during the course of the program anyway. Instead, he zeros in on the character and intelligence of the applicants. After one team’s presentation, Buchheit says that he would use the product. But Graham is skeptical. “Are these guys winners?” he asks. “It’s all about the guys.” The group is not accepted. [Bolded emphasis added by me.]

The other is a Clive Thompson essay on the roots of innovation. In The Breakthrough Myth, he cites researcher Bill Buxton who thinks:

paradigm-busting inventions are easy to see coming because they’re already lying there, close at hand… Truly billion-dollar breakthrough ideas have what Buxton calls surprising obviousness. They feel at once fresh and familiar.

Good food for thought.

Photo by Karl-Ludwig Poggemann (Flickr).

5 Myths About Entrepreneurs

Daria Steigman — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 10:05:06 +0000

Check out this instructive post by Vivek Wadhwa, director of research at Duke University’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization. In it, he explores five myths about entrepreneurs:

Typical U.S. tech entrepreneurs are in their 20s.
Entrepreneurs are born, not made.
College dropouts make the best entrepreneurs.
Women can’t cut it in the tech world.
Innovation requires venture capital.

These are myths, not facts.

There’s some interesting data in the article that debunks the conventional wisdom in some circles.

Photo by +Rex (Flickr).

Spotify’s Business Disruptive Factor (And Why Vinyl May Finally Be Obsolete)

Daria Steigman — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 10:05:52 +0000

Spotify has landed in America.

The music-streaming service with 15 million songs in its catalogue is likely to be disruptive to the music industry in a way that Apple only dreamt of. Here are three reasons:

1. My vinyl is finally obsolete. I have a large collection of albums and cassettes that I’ve been reluctant to jettison–even if I listen to them only rarely. Enter Spotify, and I’m listening to The Go-Betweens, The Mekons, and Gang of Four again.

2. I don’t need a bigger iPod. It drove me crazy that I only had access to a small portion of my music library on the go (not to mention all the CDs that I’ve yet to burn). Until Spotify came around, I was thinking of investing in a mega-gigabyte iPod just to have everything at hand. Now I can stream what I want or download a playlist to listen to offline.

3. I can hear what my friends are listening to. Once our school days are over, most of us don’t talk music that much. Heck, if it weren’t for my brother (who totally turned me on to hip hop by suggesting artists to explore), my music collection would be stuck in the 20th century. Spotify lets me subscribe to my friends’ playlists. It’s digital curation, the music edition.

BusinessWeek has a terrific article about Spotify. One snippet that really stands out:

“Americans own their music; Swedes rent it… If Spotify gets what it wants, your records will no longer define you. Your playlists will.”

It’s an interesting piece about a changing marketplace, and worth reading.

Have you tried Spotify? Agree or disagree that this model will change the business landscape?

Update: A link to the BusinessWeek article has now been added thanks to alert reader Bill Farrell, who was able to find it online.

Disclosure: I received a beta invite to Spotify via a Klout Perk. Within two days I had upgraded to a Premium (paid) subscription.

Photo by Pink Sherbert Photography (Flickr).

Why Every Business Owner Should Think Rework

Daria Steigman — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:06:36 +0000

Rework is a deceptively simple manifesto for entrepreneurs that is all about challenging conventional wisdom and the way that business ought to be done. It’s written in brilliant one- and two-page bursts of ideas held together by big-picture business themes, much as co-authors and 37signals founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson believe that you should focus on actually getting work done rather than spending all your time planning out what you should, could, or might do.

Or, as the authors write:

“If you want to do something, you’ve got to do it now.”

I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe Rework since the book landed in my hands three months ago. Since then, I’ve found myself diving back into random sections almost daily for inspiration. As entrepreneurs themselves, Fried and Hansson “get it”; they understand that you can create a different path and succeed. They’ve done it, and we can too.

Check out my complete book review on Overdrive, which has more detail and some excerpts that illustrate why I think this book is a must read.

Artists and Entrepreneurs

Daria Steigman — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:05:21 +0000

Should business schools teach the arts?

Consider this, from an article in The Economist:

“Studying the arts can help business people communicate more eloquently. Most bosses spend a huge amount of time “messaging” and “reaching out.” yet few are good at it… Many of the world’s most successful businesses are triumphs of storytelling more than anything else. Marlboro and Jack Daniel’s have tapped into the myth of the frontier. Ben & Jerry’s wraps itself in the tie-dyed robes of the counter-culture. But business schools devote far more energy to teaching people how to produce and position their products rather that how to infuse them with meaning.”

The article also talks about managing creative people, art and innovation, and the fact that many artists are terrific entrepreneurs. Good food for thought.

Photo by Stefan Kloo (Flickr).