METHOD AND SYSTEM TO BOND, OR INTEGRATE TIGHTLY, SOFTWARE TO HARDWARE, SOFTWARE TO OTHER SOFTWARE, HARDWARE TO OTHER HARDWARE, AND THE RESULT OF ANY BONDED COMBINATIONS TO ADDITIONAL SOFTWARE OR ADDITIONAL HARDWARE.

A zen master and his student were watching a fox chase a rabbit.

The Zen Master said, “who will win?”

The student replied, “Master, of course the fox will win, he is much faster than the rabbit and has sharp teeth.”

“No” replied the master. “The rabbit will win. The fox is running for a meal. The rabbit is running for his life.”

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{Image by Le Petit Poulailler}

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).

Don’t forget to take action!

Seth’s best blog posts from the last 2 years

#1

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The secret of the web (hint: it’s a virtue)

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.19 points

#2

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You should write an ebook

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.15 points

#3

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Scarcity

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.15 points

#4

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Tribe Management

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.15 points

#5

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Understanding the funnel

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.10 points

#6

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The web doesn’t care

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.9 points

#7

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Starting over with customer service

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.8 points

#8

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How to get traffic for your blog

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.8 points

#9

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Seth’s Blog: Building an albatross

I spent hours watching the albatross in the Galapagos hang out. The first thing you notice is that they have a terribly difficult time taking off. In…8 points

#10

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Seven tips to build for meaning

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.7 points

#11

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Make something happen

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.7 points

#12

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How to create a great website

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.7 points

#13

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Top 10 Secrets of the Marketing Process

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.7 points

#14

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The Long Tail and the Dip

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.7 points

#15

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Permission Marketing

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.7 points

#16

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Looking for trouble

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.6 points

#17

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One, a few, most or all

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.5 points

#18

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Nine things marketers ought to know about salespeople (and two bonuses)

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.5 points

#19

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How to create a good enough website

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.4 points

#20

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What do you know?

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.4 points

#21

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The intangibles

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.4 points

#22

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Seth’s Blog: Rough edges and attention

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.4 points

#23

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Seth’s Blog: The forces of mediocrity

Seth Godin’s riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.4 points

#24

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Hungry

I had lunch (a big lunch) with a college student last week. An hour later, she got up and announced she was going to get a snack. Apparently, she was…4 points

#25

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Seth’s Blog: Memo to the very small

What should my local chiropractor do? Or the acupuncturist? Or the pet store? What about that small church or mosque? The web has changed the game for…4 points

#26

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Seth’s Blog: Urgent personal finance advice

If I could only share one piece of personal finance advice to grads or to just about anyone, it would be this: Only borrow money to pay for things tha…4 points

#27

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Seth’s Blog: Do you deserve it?

Do you deserve the luck you’ve been handed? The place you were born, the education you were given, the job you’ve got? Do you deserve your tribe, your…4 points

#28

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Seth’s Blog: The spirit of the game

There are two ways to get ahead. You can work the system or you can beat the system. Beating the system usually involves some sort of subterfuge. Once…3 points

See the original lens

created by sethgodin

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:

2. 2. Finding, convincing to join and retain top-notch employees & consultants is a rare skill
      and
   3. 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 the team 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?

Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed

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}

Being an entrepreneur can be reduced to solving problems, issues and situations that arise (tactics), and the business per se is a meta-situation, where the entrepreneur is faced with a non-liner complex situation, looking for the innovative solution delivering value to its potential audience that will become the business.

What is there was a general framework to approach any problems? Not a solve-it-all equation, nor a silver bullet, just a framework from where to approach problems. Would it still be valid?
We believe so.

George Pólya’s 1945 book How to solve it has a genius-like approach to problem solving, voided from any content, and context rich, it might be one of today’s best kept strategy secrets of the best run companies in the world.

Here’s the general framework developed by George, revolving around four principles:

1. FIRST PRINCIPLE: UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
   • You have to understand the problem.
   • What is the unknown? What are the data? What is the condition?
   • Is it possible to satisfy the condition? Is the condition sufficient to determine the unknown? Or is it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory?
   • Draw a figure. Introduce suitable notation.
   • Separate the various parts of the condition. Can you write them down?
2. SECOND PRINCIPLE: DEVISING A PLAN
   • Find the connection between the data and the unknown. You may be obliged to consider auxiliary problems if an immediate connection cannot be found. You should obtain eventually a plan of the solution.
   • Have you seen it before? Or have you seen the same problem in a slightly different form?
   • Do you know a related problem? Do you know a theorem that could be useful?
   • Look at the unknown! And try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown.
   • Here is a problem related to yours and solved before. Could you use it? Could you use its result? Could you use its method? Should you introduce some auxiliary element in order to make its use possible?
   • Could you restate the problem? Could you restate it still differently? Go back to definitions.
   • If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem. Could you imagine a more accessible related problem? A more general problem? A more special problem? An analogous problem? Could you solve a part of the problem? Keep only a part of the condition, drop the other part; how far is the unknown then determined, how can it vary? Could you derive something useful from the data? Could you think of other data appropriate to determine the unknown? Could you change the unknown or data, or both if necessary, so that the new unknown and the new data are nearer to each other?
   • Did you use all the data? Did you use the whole condition? Have you taken into account all essential notions involved in the problem?
3. THIRD PRINCIPLE: CARRYING OUT THE PLAN
   • Carry out your plan.
   • Carrying out your plan of the solution, check each step. Can you see clearly that the step is correct? Can you prove that it is correct?
4. FOURTH PRINCIPLE: REVIEW / EXTEND
   • Examine the solution obtained.
   • Can you check the result? Can you check the argument?
   • Can you derive the solution differently? Can you see it at a glance?
   • Can you use the result, or the method, for some other problem?

It’s not often that we find books that were written over half a century ago, that are just as valid today as they were when they were first published. Such treasures are often forgotten or written off and can become part of any entrepreneur’s (unfair) competitive advantage portfolio.

___________
{Photography by Corey Ann}

Tags: Book, George Pólya, Unfair Competitive Advantage, Business Plan, Brainstorming, Process

What a great idea! Fun, viral, and for a good cause, do it yourself and see how it feels to wear a beard, or wear someone else’s beard! And as you get busy photoshopping a beard on you (I used GIMP), take a look at Kiva.org, and how they make it possible that you can lend $25 or more to the entrepreneur(s) of your choice, monitor their progress, and see the impact of your money directly and transparently; and once the Kiva loan is paid back to your account, you can re-lend it over and over and over and over. . . Have fun. . . I did!