We can’t do it alone; we all need help sometimes.  One of the most important factors in the success of any endeavor, including a small business, is the existence of a network of support people – people who have been there, done that and are willing to help you get there and do that too. Mentors are readily available to business people in the corporate world; they are usually just down the hall or in the next office.  But small business owners are isolated; they can’t just run down the hall and ask a question.
So where do small business owners …read more

After getting your business started one the best things to do is invest in others through mentoring. As a business owner, investing in others can help you continually refine your skills as you teach others. According  to Entrepreneur.com, mentoring is termed as “educational and/or professional development support provided by experienced colleagues“.
Just think about the impact that you can have on the world by just choosing to mentor one person. Then that person might choose to mentor two more people and so forth. When you mentor, you are giving a gift that can keeps giving. It can also be a way …read more

Innovation. Seemingly a magical, creative art where ideas pop into the mind of relaxed and receiving brain cells (the hilarious “ideation” commercials come to mind where an incredulous manager says, “What are you doing?”, and the existential group leader responds, “Ideating”). Actually, there are NOT many NEW ideas and the “innovation” comes with successful market penetration, as it applies to new products, and with successful implementation, as it applies to new business processes. I tend to focus on innovative business processes.
Once more an innovation article failed to mention business process innovation. Times OnLine, a British publication, treated the subject with …read more

“Companies should devote R&D to new business models just as they do to new products. A new CEO today will need to preside over a changed business model three or four times in his career, but no one really knows how to do it. It’s not taught in business schools, and there is much to learn about how to manage a workforce that is no longer just within the four walls of an organization”.
AMEN!…and AMEN! This quote by Saul Kaplan, executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, from CFO magazine’s “Gaming the System” article, is fascinating because of …read more

Think of a business model where a firm provides services with a global freelance resource base: is it writing? editing? software development? CFO magazine’s article on “Gaming the System” introduces TopCoder, not only as a global freelance software development operation, but one that has participants compete on providing the best code for it’s application work. This is business competition where you have to finish before knowing whether you will be paid or not, because you have to win.
It seems that TopCoder’s success and growth is based on the fact that they were more of a non-business community in the first …read more

Harvard Business on-line’s post by Tom Davenport seems to deal with culture when describing two extremes to strategy development and execution:
1. Strategic Engineering- strategy is an engineering exercise with employees being the cogs in the machine.
2. Strategic Anarchy- executives get out of the way of employee’s entrepreneurial and innovative energies.
He suggests that a reconciliation of the two must take place.
While I see it as a culture issue I also see it like one of the commentors as not so much a reconciliation problem but one of creating a flexible environment controlled by standardized business processes. Letting elements of anarchy prevail …read more

 
As you know, I’m a big supporter of innovation processes being performed by a project management office (PMO). As such I am very interested in anything having to do with innovation strategy. An article in Strategy + Business spoke about a new book by John Kao on why the US is missing the boat in this area.
 
Two things stuck out:
1. Finland’s success in attracting the best people to teach their children and how this supports innovation and
2. The seeming reliance on a leader of the United States (the President) and tax money to fund government projects like space …read more

The coaching/mentoring PMO model, for many, may be the end of the road. That is because the vision was never for the PMO to be enterprise-wide and focused on executing strategies. Rather this model rises from the vision that the PMO merely assists and mentors project teams. Generally, set up and project review are focused on.   The value of this PMO can be higher, maybe 2-4% improvements in each of the areas of project budget, throughput, and projects completed. This value is low enough that the risk of failure of this PMO model, which is still perceived as painful …read more