A must watch for any entrepreneur, entrepreneur-in-the-making, student in any school, marketers . . . . anyone in business. Most valuable if you are NOT an architect, this movie is less about architecture (the WHAT), and more about digging down inside the self (the WHY) in order to “open the floodgates“, and unleash what’s inside (the HOW) in order to integrate WHAT you do with WHO you are (the WHAT + the WHO = the HOW) in a manner that is congruent to your own persona, philosophy and personality (the WHY).

What does it take to run a business?

What does it take to cook?

Could it be that the principles of one (running a business) are the same as the other (cooking)?

On one side we have David Becker, an accomplished chef and Author of Sweet Basil ; a cookbook of recipes that used in his restaurant outside Boston by the same name.

In the book he goes on record saying that to become an accomplished cook one must:

• Ignore all conventions;
• Practice, practice, practice;
• Cook from the heart;
• Don’t be afraid to take chances;
• Experiment and customize;
• Cooking isn’t a magic show, but it can produce some magic results;
• Be smarter then the food;
• The higher the quality and the fresher the ingredients, the tastier the results;
• Have fun, cook for the people you love, and drinks lots of wine

Translating the parlance into innovative entrepreneurship and brand building, I’d say:

• Learn the rules so you can break them;
• Do it, Measure, Adjust, Repeat;
• Whatever you do, do it with passion. If you can’t find passion in what you do, change what you are doing;
• Take chances, but don’t bet the house. Business is partly a game of chances, but you can control the odds;
• Kaizen!
• Keep it simple;
• Create value and pleasantly surprise your audience;
• Be one step ahead of everyone else in your field, including your audience, most of the thyme;
• Have fun, work with people you like that share your same principles, yet they challenge you appropriately.

P.S.: Just . . . don’t cook the books!

{Photography by: SODB.com Staff}

Someone said: If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

If you are reading this article, you must in the business world.
And if you an entrepreneur (or an entrepreneur-in-the-making), trying to navigate the uncharted waters ahead of you, you’ve left the safety of land behind you long time ago, and you are now the captain of your own boat, on this wonderful journey of entrepreneurship: I hear you.

Are you or someone else you know at a major fork on the road? Maybe evaluating your next move, your next start-up, or contemplating getting a job (or a iob) coasting for a while, or even evaluating the pros and cons of going to business school?
How about something different? Something truly different? If your vision is to BE an entrepreneur, if entrepreneurship as a lifestyle fits your worldviews, and yet you feel as if there’s one missing piece that you can sense but can’t eloquently describe . . . how about being exposed to a highly entrepreneurial environment, with access to one of the brightest marketers, surrounded by like-minded peers? Does that sound appealing?
Seth Godin (yup, the Purple Cow guy) has pulled another one of his move. He has put together what he calls the “Alternative MBA”, an internship at his offices, part working on his projects, part working on your own projects, part engaging in intriguing conversations.

Is it for everyone? Hardly.
And the only things in life worth doing are the ones that are not made for everyone, but only for those selected few. And yet I know that Seth is going to get inundated with applications from the world over.
Now, you owe it to yourself to:

1. read what Seth has concocted;
2. seriously think if that’s for you;
3. whether it is for you or not, spread the word to anyone you think might be interested or might know of someone who might be interested;
4. get inspired by Seth approach, he gives and gets, and chances are that at the end of the game, both parties, the interns and Seth will walk away feeling that they got a GREAT deal, win-win-win-win at its best;
5. ask yourself: how can I do something like this in my business? Maybe not an internship, how about hiring your customers as consultants? How about sending your CXO or VP of something to work at your best customer location for a week, free of charge of course? What insight would he or she draw? How about doing it with your worst customer, the one that left you last month after 5 years and vouched to NEVER do business with you, if you collaborate with the with no string attached, what insights would you gain? Could you ever get that from the best consulting outfit?

So here’s for you the link to the Squidoo Lens about the Alternate MBA, and to Seth’s post If you could change your life .

Whether you apply or not, the choice is yours, and remember a couple of things:

Guarantees: none.
Possibilities: limitless.

___________

{Photography by Baston}

It doesn’t fail, I had decided not to renew my HBR’s subscription and then I get the latest issue where the main article is pure gold. Which three articles have you read in your business life that deserve, in Olympic style, the Gold, Silver and Bronze Medal? Personally my Bronze medal goes to Alan Deutschman’s 2005 Change or Die. The silver Medal goes to Seth Godin’s 2003 In Praise of the Purple Cow , and now the Gold goes to Ed Catmull’s Creativity at PIXAR. Creativity at PIXAR is nothing less than the blueprint for Enterprise 3.0, encompassing Operations, Management, Strategy, Training, Talent, Management and sheer luck. All centered around creativity as practical strategy, with the background of Moore’s Living on the Fault Line, where functions that are not CORE are not part of the organization, the company is structured around fully integrated functions, like a 3-D puzzles, or a multi-dimensional (quantum) puzzle, where there are n-dimensions interconnected in more ways that it is visible or traceable, where the overall result is greater then the sum by a few orders of magnitudes. In a mature 2.0 business world, is your company still organized according to an org chart? How quaint! How 1.0. What can you do?

First you MUST read the article on PIXAR, it might make you think (again), it might make you ponder, it might make you angry, and be in awe. You might even hate it, and that’s ok too. If the article appeals to you and to your personality: make it part of yourself, make it part of your personal brand, and figure out a way you can deploy your new/changed vision into what you do.

Second, you can email the link to the article, or to this blog entry, to everyone you know, your boss (if you have one), partners, reports, investors. Blog about it, twit about it, FB-it, and let them know that you are open to talk and discuss its implications in what your do and in your relationship with them.

The third step depends on you and your company. If you are an entrepreneur in the making, this is going to be part of your DNA, and the DNA that you’ll pass onto your creation. If you are an Entrepreneur with a young start-up you are still in time to make these new ideas permeate into your company, into your people, and into everything you do, and most importantly in HOW you do “it”. If you are in charge of an establish company, change, real ecological change, takes virtually no time. It’s only the ripple effects of the change that take time to set in. If you work for an established company, and the corporate culture is on another planet from where PIXAR plays, you are in trouble. The article resonates with you and it has entered your thinking and expanded your worldviews; it’s going to be harder and harder waking up in the morning to go work which is just a job. The good news is that you hold the key, you have the solution to this dilemma, and you are in good company! Many employees are eager to fly solo and create something new, make a statement, and enrich people’s lives by creating a new brand. It still boils down to two points: plan and execute. Therefore – if that’s your situation – your first step will be to plan an exit route from your present situation. Will your inside view of your company, or of any organization for that matter, ever be the same?

___________
Photo Credits: tom.arthur

There’s a conspiracy of misinformation and half truths, one of them is the quote: “It’s not about you, it’s about the people that you choose to surround yourself with”. I believe consultants must have come up with this quote. It’s not wrong, it’s just that it is a 1/2 truth, for TWO main reasons:

1. Finding, convincing to join and retain top-notch employees & consultants is a rare skill and
2. Guiding these employees and consultant to follow the plan within the vision, and the guidelines is no small feat

Therefore, it is all about you, but not in a selfish way. Bill Gates surrounded himself of MVP (most valuable people), but he was the one with the vision, he saw what nobody else (who could execute) could see, and he sold to the team the concept to give 100% toward his vision. Sure he listened to everyone worth listening to along the way, incorporated thoughts and ideas into his own thoughts and ideas.

How does this affect you as the entrepreneur? It does, in many ways:

• The journey and the communication starts within you: not only WHAT you do, nor HOW you do it, but the essence of WHY you do it. Steve Job wanted to free people from using user unfriendly computers. Have you discovered the WHY you are an entrepreneur? is it only money?
• If it’s just money, that is the WHY and the WHO that will be the driving force of the business, that will determine the hiring that you will be doing (more WHO), your management style as well as theirs (HOW), the corporate culture of the company (HOW), the language and vocabulary that will show up over and over in emails, memos, web site copy, marketing collateral, and conversations (HOW).
• Strategy. Got a strategy to fulfill the vision, and a plan to achieve it. And if you don’t . . . that’s also a strategy, whether it is valid or invalid the point is mute, since it is part of the WHO you are. It would not be Debbie Fields, that Debbie that sold Mrs Fields Inc. for $800 million. Debbie said “if you don’t plan, plan on failing”.

Who are you? Who is the “WHO” reading this? If you are a successful entrepreneur and you are reading this, you already have your WHAT->HOW->WHO->WHY aligned.   If your company is not doing well and you believe you’ve given it enough time to mature, and it is still not working, you are in trouble: you’ve got your WHAT (your company products / services), you’ve got your HOW in place (brand, corporate culture, marketing, story, etc.), which are the product of a WHY that is not supporting the WHAT and the HOW, because it never went into realizing the WHO, which is you. What is your passion, what makes you tick, what makes you wake up at 5:00 AM before the alarm goes off, jump out of bed looking forward to work. Is it really work if you love it so much?

If you are an entrepreneur in the making you are in the best position, like a painter with a blank canvass you can paint any picture you want, you get to pick the theme, colors, tone, mood, and you can even cut the canvass Lucio Fontana’s style, and declare to the world that it is indeed a sculpture, not a painting. As an entrepreneur in the making, you don’t even have a canvass, you can go into any art form and medium of your choosing, and you can even make up your own art form or medium, and break all the rules there are and make then your own, John Cage did.

Business is indeed art.

And business is indeed the outmost form of self expression: think Steve Job and Apple, and how the iPod and iPhone is shaping and enhancing people’s lives, that is Art indeed.

WHO are you? What’s your art? What’s your voice? What’s your story? What’s your BRAND? Trutfully and congruently answer those questions to yourself, and that is just the beginning, the base for discovering the WHY, your WHY to entrepreneurship, which will lead to the HOW of doing things, which is going to be your own, and your own only style. From there it is a natural progress to build the WHAT, the vehicle that will carry forward your vision, the healthy WHO in the link WHO->WHY->HOW->WHAT.

You’ve got friends: Jackson, Walt, Paul, Ben & Jerry, Debbi.

When was the last time you were inspired? Randy Pausch did that for all of us. When was the last time you changed your mind about something that you used to look at as negative and tranformed it into a positive? Randy told us that brick walls, when things turns out harder than we had planned, are actually good things, because they offer us the chance to prove to ourselves how hard we want something, and keep the wishy-washy away from our goals; brick walls are necessary to cut down the competition from the good stuff. Randy’s is has moved from this world to his next, his imprint remains with us:

Interesting video of Moshe Safdie at TED. Notable is the conclusion, where – after quoting Theodore Cook – Moshe recites his own poem:

He who seeks Truth, shall find Beauty; he who seeks beauty, shall find vanity; he who seeks Order, shall find Gratification; he who seeks gratification, shall be disappointed; he who considers himself the servant of its fellow beings, shall find the Joy of Self Expression; he who seeks self expression, shall fall into the pit of arrogance; arrogance is incompatible with Nature; through Nature, the Nature of the Universe and the Nature of Men we shall seek truth; if we seek Truth, we shall find Beauty.

Inspired by: http://www.brain-fun.com/Brain-Teasers/EinsteinsRiddle.php Einstein’s Riddle: Einstein believed that 98% of people could not solve the following logic riddle. Wouldn’t it be interesting to use this as a hiring tool, not so much to make sure your candidate has the answer – although it would surely be nice – but to see how they will approach solving a problem. Here’s the riddle: There are 5 houses each with a different color. Their owners, each with a unique heritage, drinks a certain type of beverage, smokes a certain brand of cigarette, and keep a certain variety of pet. None of the owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigarette or drink the same beverage. Clues:

• The Brit lives in the red house.
• The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
• The Dane drinks tea.
• The green house is just to the left of the white house.
• The green house’s owner drinks coffee.
• The person who smokes Pall Malls raises birds.
• The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
• The man living in the center house drinks milk.
• The Norwegian lives in the first house.
• The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
• The man who keeps a horse lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
• The owner who smokes Bluemasters also drinks beer.
• The German smokes Prince.
• The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
• The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

Who owns the fish?

<- – - end of riddle – - – >

One way to arrive to the solution is to find those absolute statements that give the most significant information. I re-wrote the statements as follows:

1. The Brit lives in the red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is just to the left of the white house.
5. The green house’s owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Malls raises birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
8. The man living in the center house drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps a horse lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters also drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Prince.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

Also, I called the the first house 1, the second 2, etc. . . we have that:

• Statement I tells us the Norwegian lives in house # 1
• Therefore according to statement N, house #2 must be Blue.

• Statement H tells us the house # 3 drinks coffee;
• Let’s combine statements D and E. D tells us that the Green house and the White house are next to one another, with Green being on the left, and Green drinks coffee. The only possible location that fits these criteria is Green on house # 4 and White on House # 5.

• Now the easiest next step is to complete the color allocation, we have only Red and Yellow to assign, and only house #1 and #3 without color assignment. Statement A tells us that the Brit lives in the red house. Since we already know that the Norwegian lives in house # 1, house # 3 is the only one who can satisfy statement A.
• Conversely House #1 must be Yellow and according to Statement G, the owner must smoke Dunhill, and statement K tells us that house #2 has a horse.

• By combining statements J and O, we can see that the person who smoke blends can only be living in house # 2 or # 3. While looking at statement L, we can see that whomever Smokes Bluemaster and Drink Beer can live either in house #2 or house #5, and the only combination that satisfies J, O, and L is for the owner of house # 2 to smoke Blend (and therefore the Norwegian in house #1 to drinks water), and the owner of house #5 to smoke Bluemasters and drink beer.

• The easiest set to complete now is the “drink” set, with house # 2 being the only one that can accommodate statement C.

• House #4 is the only one that satisfies statement M of the relationship between nationality and cigarette

• Let’s now complete the cigarette set by applying statement F

• Having placed “birds” in House #3, we can now apply statement J

• We are now left applying statement B

• Leaving only the German who lives in the Green House #4, smokes Prince, and drinks coffee as the only possible owner of FISH!

Al, eat your fish out! P.S.: solved using the classic whiteboard and color markers