I’m still long-term frustrated with how many people lose the potential steering and management benefits of business planning because they focus on the plan as document instead of the planning as management. With that in mind, I’m doing a webinar tomorrow, Thursday Nov. 19, at 11. am PST on the theme in the title of this post. Please click here now to register for that webinar (and yes, it’s free, of course).

There’s an important point I’m trying to make. Don’t dismiss business planning as part of your business life just because you don’t want (or have) to do a formal business plan document. Most of us running businesses don’t have to do a formal document. We do, however, want to do our business as well as we can.

It doesn’t have to be the big formal plan you avoid because it sounds hard. Keep it simple, just big enough to manage and steer your business. Write it down so you can track progress and make course corrections. But maybe you never print it; just leave it on your computer.

Here are five main components:

1. Define success

Be realistic. And recognize that success is different for different people. Is it about getting financed, growing big, becoming rich? Or is it doing what you like to do, while making enough to get by? Independence? Wealth? It’s not nearly as simple and uniform as sales growth, profits, and cash flow. Start with that.

2. Focus

You can’t do everything. You can’t please everybody. Focus on your keys to success, and your core competence. Focus on a well defined target market, and know who isn’t in your market, and why not. Strategy is a lot about what you’re not doing.

3. Understand the steps

Break it down into the steps you’ll need to take. What has to happen? How do you get to that success? What will it take. Define some key points, milestones.

4. Put it into specifics

Think about metrics and measurement so you can track progress. Lots of numbers and dates. Task assignments, responsibilities.

5. Follow up and manage

Track your plan. Set regular review points, look at plan vs. actual results, and make course corrections.

This weekend I finished Greening Your Small Business, a well written and easily readable new book by Jennifer Kaplan, dealing with a lot of background and a lot of specifics about the idea of “greening” the business. Happily, she starts out by defining what “greening” means, in several practical contexts. Then she deals with greening as green marketing, green travel, green purchasing, and a good understanding of the underlying business rationale.

One thing I particularly liked about the book was its list of 50 easy ways to make your business greener. To my mind, the simple and easy-to-implement tips are by far the most valuable. Here are my 10 favorites, taken from those 50 (all of this is direct quote):

1. Make recycling easy by providing clearly marked bins throughout the workplace.
2. Turn off lights (and other equipment) when not in use (i.e. at night).
3. Turn off computers and monitors every night. Just shut them down.
4. Make use of scanners and PDF formatting to digitize hard copy data for future use and distribution.
5. If your copier permits it, set the default to double sided.
6. Add this message to your email signature: by not printing this email, you’ve helped save paper, ink, and trees.
7. Fax electronically–send and receive faxes directly from your computer(s); if you fax the old-fashioned way, eliminate cover sheets by sticking a post-it fax cover note on the first page.
8. Whenever possible, eliminate direct mail from your media mix.
9. Create electronic versions of materials such as media kits, reports, and other documents, and then post them to your website.
10. Eliminate disposable items in the workplace.

I’m afraid I can’t say that I do everything on this list. But I am trying as much as I can.

[disclosure: Jennifer sent me a review copy of her book.]

I’ve been asked a lot lately about business schools and entrepreneurship, which is why I did this post, last Friday, about one thing wrong in that area; and then this one yesterday, on whether business schools can teach entrepreneurship. That’s become a very interesting discussion. I expect to post on it again, if only just to summarize some of those comments.

So, in the meantime, looking at Twitter and comment reactions to yesterday’s post, I sat down today and thought about what you can learn about entrepreneurship in a classroom, that will help you be a successful entrepreneur. Not that you can’t also learn all of this from books, websites, mentors, and advisors too; but learning it in class might be more efficient.

1. Cash flow

Cash flow is critical but not intuitive. Cash isn’t profits. That ebb and flow of cash related to accounts receivable and inventory management, collection days and payment days. This one by itself justifies studying entrepreneurship. Studying this in the classroom is way better than learning it the hard way. One cash flow disaster (running out of money) in business can cost you more than two years in business school. Easily.

2. Business planning

Yes, I really like business planning. I’ve liked it since I was first exposed to it in the middle 1970s. Don’t get bogged down in the formal academic full business plan, necessarily; but business planning is a great way to see a whole business, from strategic focus to objectives to specific milestones, tasks, responsibilities, management, sales, marketing, and finance. And it’s a great tool for teaching.

3. General business fundamentals

Never underestimate the fundamentals of strategy, marketing, data gathering, finance, and analytical thinking. There’s a lot to be said for learning how to translate concepts to numbers and back to concepts. Not to mention vocabulary, and analytical frameworks, and methodologies for isolating problems and layout out solutions. Disciplines and methodologies are good to know. And hey, buzzwords don’t hurt.

4. Communication skills

Writing — clear, simple communication, in practical English sentences — is so important. It is so often underestimated. And presentation skills, focusing on what’s most important and communicating that to others. My experience is that good business schools teach that.

5. Skepticism

A good education can teach you what not to believe, and why not. Enthusiasm is great, and you hear so much about passion and persistence and all, but not without a basis for reviewing what makes sense and what doesn’t.

We all forget too easily: the best startup funding is sales. Sure, angel investment, friends and family, SBA loans, all of those options are necessary for most startups. But sales is better.

If you can, find the early customers. Give them a deal, make them important, work with them to optimize their needs; but make a sale.

Even if you need to go out and find investment — and I speak now as an actual angel investor — there’s almost nothing as convincing as actual sales. People are spending money. It makes a new business proposal far more credible.

True, not all businesses can do that. But a lot of them can. And, as we write about business plans and seeking investment and all, we forget the real sweet spot: finance growth by making the sales.

It’s not that surprising, really; and we’ve seen it before with Facebook. When Twitter released a new feature, and it’s users didn’t like it, they had to change it back.

The Wired Magazine online story is Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter. I found it interesting reading.

For the same kind of thing in Facebook, here’s a link to a Google search for “Facebook user revolt.”

The user revolt is a high-class problem. It’s the trappings of success. It means 1) you have users; 2) they care about what you’re doing with the site they use; and 3) there’s a forum or medium they can use to make their opinions known.

This is a great sign of real success. It’s a problem only if nobody listens.

(Photo credit: Flickr cc, by Daliborlev)

Do you like my headline here, on this post? Can you write a better one?

Headlines are critical. I’ve noted that, with some frustration (I’m not so good at headlines) on this blog before, here.

Headlines come up today because being in New York last week to  judge the Forbes.com business plan contest gave me a chance to visit with my son Paul, who lives in New York, and is CTO of Huffington Post. And he told me what they’re doing on the Huffington Post about headlines.

Why do you care? Maybe because (whether you like its political views or not) in the last 2-3 years Huffington Post has posted huge growth in traffic and advertiser and investor interest and visibility and traffic. So they have to be doing a lot of things right. And, if you’re writing or blogging, you should know about how they do headlines.

It starts with a lot of testing. Paul was quoted in How the Huffington Post uses real-time testing for headlines in Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab:

The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees.

And then there’s Twitter. As a Twitter user, I enjoyed reading Huffpost crowd sources headlines in Snoo.ws. Here are highlights:

Using the hashtag #headlinehelp, visitors will be able to click on a link to an article and help write an appropriate headline that fits the story. Through social byproduct, the best headline will filter through to editors.

The Huffington Post made its first attempt at using the hashtag late yesterday asking participants to replace the headline, “No, YOU Lie,” regarding a story about Rep. Joe Wilson’s interjectory fireworks during President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress.

Hashtags are not perfect aggregators by any means, as previous use of them has seen contests hijacked and critical messaging spoiled. With Huffington Post’s reputation, they surely have gained some followers who may wish to use this idea in a negative way for the company.

How cool is that? I’d love to copy that idea. But reality rears up its ugly head: Huffington Post has hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter; I have barely four thousand. Mine are smarter and better looking, but still …

Or no, perhaps, not so cool? Maybe data-driven headlines are a problem (quoting The Noisy Channel on this subject):

I’m sure this approach must rattle some old-school journalists. And there is a real danger of optimizing for the wrong outcome. For example, including the word “sex” in this message might improve its traffic … but to what end?

OK, good point, but the discovery that there are some words (sex, violence, naked, brutal) which get better results is nothing new. It’s older than I am (I posted about words I won’t put into titles despite the temptation on this blog a couple of years ago).  What’s new is the ability to test quickly and bring a crowd into it in a practical way.

It’s not about asking people what’s new, or changing the news content. It’s about headlines. And gaining readers.

I’ve been a reader of Paul Kedrosky for several years now, so it was a privilege to listen to his 3.5 reasons for optimism last Friday at the Bend Venture Conference in Bend, Oregon. Paul posts at Infectious Greed and appears often in the media.

I admit its sorely tempting, but, after reflection (and some drafts), I’m not dumb enough to attempt to summarize somebody else’s brilliant 45-minute talk into a post like this. However, I can’t resist sharing at least these three high points and surprises.

1. The uninvention of fire

Consider this an opening salvo, which managed to wake up a sleeping crowd at barely after 8 a.m. on a sunny Friday morning. It worked something like a whack on the side of the head. For me at least. And maybe the coffee helped too.

FIRE = finance + insurance + real estate. For a generation or two now, a high percentage of our smartest people have been going from the high-status educational institutions into those FIRE industries. Now, after the fall, that’s less likely. Or so we hope.

2. Those population statistics

I’d heard somewhere that 40% of the people who ever lived are still walking around, alive today. No, as it turned out, or at least Paul K. seemed convincingly sure of himself as he said it, only 8% of the people who ever lived are alive today.

However, 50% of the lawyers who ever lived are alive today. And 75% of the scientists and engineers are alive today. You decide: good news, bad news, both? Which is which?

3. BioTech as attractive nuisance

Happily, the key visual on this theme is available here on Infectious Greed. It’s a very powerful image, showing that investment in BioTech hasn’t yielded a proportionate amount of new discoveries. I hadn’t heard the term “attractive nuisance” before, but it fit the context pretty well.

Accents, real speech, figures of speech, colorful speech. Expressions. The way we use language fascinates me. I wonder if technology changes it?

I have questions:

• Why is groovy so hideously and embarrassingly obsolete, but cool is still cool? Am I the only one who still likes Paul Simon’s song, Feelin’ Groovy?



• Why does just sayin work so well, especially in Twitter, to smooth out rough edges, frame thoughts, and soften things? It’s almost like a Photoshop effect to make a photograph look like a painting. I don’t get it. I mean, I’m just sayin.
• And why does is it just me seem to flow so well, almost like just sayin, as a statement softener?
• How do you pronounce LOL? Can you use it outside of instant messaging and/or Twitter? Is it okay in normal conversation? And what about WTF and OMG, both acronyms using single-syllable letters instead of single-syllable words. I think I know the answer to that one. Not that there is a single right answer. BTW, I liked it when my daughter was studying in Madrid, and came up with QTF. Although I hate the F part of that.

And also, some simple observations, about language in my lifetime, and how it’s been changing.

• I love the way Spanish has grown and prospered inside our modern American English. Starting with simple expressions like nada and the whole enchilada, there’s Spanish all over the place now, and I, for one, love it. I think it’s a living example of the kind of natural change that brought French into English a few centuries ago, and that gave us, gradually, the English we speak instead of the English they spoke in Shakespeare’s time. I like to see that living change. And I like it that it’s happened before. Deja vu. And here’s a test of popular culture: can you say deja vu without adding the Yogi Berra addition, all over again? Nobody seems to use the naked deja vu expression anymore. It’s verboten.
• I hate the expression that something sucks, meaning that it’s bad. Do you know where that expression has been? And if you don’t, I warn you, don’t ask anybody who was a boy in the 1950s or 1960s. And then there are those related expressions, like bite me, or it bites the big one. Not good. It’s weird, to me, that these are now commonplace, and accepted by picky censors, like on network TV.
• And, speaking of what’s acceptable on network television these days, I kind of like what Jon Stuart and Stephen Colbert have done with the beeped-out expression. Have you noticed how well they both use that? This stuff can be overused, but still, language and expression prevails.
• And all the cleaned expressions, like bleeping and fricken, [Ed. Note: and the popular (among sci-fi fans) frak from the Battlestar Gallactica TV series].
• Is it possible that all of the silliness related to code works and acceptable and nonacceptable has contributed to the twisting and distortions?
• Which reminds me, the overuse of certain words becomes just silly. I listen to people on a bus unable to say a simple sentence without adding fuckin after every three words. What’s up with that? Doesn’t it get in the way? I think an actual conversation with all that extra burden would be exhausting. Do they even hear it?
• I suspect that the worst language anywhere in this country, in terms of supposedly swearing and foul words and such, is found on the elementary school playgrounds, particularly where the fourth-sixth grade boys are playing?

I’m just sayin.

Here I was writing this post about new FTC rules for social media, feeling self-righteous about it, when it occurred to me that Shutterstock.com gives me a free stock photos account, which I use to illustrate this blog. And I’m an Amazon.com affiliate. I accept review copies of books, some of which I’ve reviewed here (although I bought most of the books I’ve reviewed, and I don’t go around asking for review copies, just accepting them, occasionally, when they’re offered). And I’m an employee of Palo Alto Software. So I don’t want to be a pot calling kettles black. Or a wolf disguised as a sheep.

Still, it’s about time. A new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ruling aimed at blogging and, I assume, Twitter starts Dec. 1. This is from the New York Times story on it:

Beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently. The new rules also take aim at celebrities, who will now need to disclose any ties to companies, should they promote products on a talk show or on Twitter. A second major change, which was not aimed specifically at bloggers or social media, was to eliminate the ability of advertisers to gush about results that differ from what is typical — for instance, from a weight loss supplement.

I’m glad they made it specific. I hope they enforce it. The same general idea was previously built into basic journalism ethics and it should have been obvious that it applied here as well. Ethics? I mean what do you think, when people are paying people to blog about their products, tweet about them, and do reviews on social media sites. Making endorsements look like honest opinion, or reviews pretending they’re objective, is ugly. I hope it’s obvious why.

What if some company offered to pay you under the table for talking it up with all your friends? How would you feel to be a walking talking advertisement parading as a person?

But it happens all the time. I got an email last month offering me money to endorse products on this blog. It was blatant and unembarrassed. The offer to shill for money was couched in terms like “business models” and “revenue streams.”  But it was pretty simple: if I would endorse products in my blog, they’d pay me. No, thank you.

Time magazine’s last issue included a story called Brought to You by Twitter, about tweeting for money:

A company called Izea, which made its name connecting bloggers with firms willing to compensate them for plugs on their blogs, has set up a similar service for the Twittersphere. At a site called Sponsored Tweets, Twitter users can sign in, set the price they want companies to pay them for tweeting an ad on their behalf and wait for the offers to come in. Jocelyn French, the mother of a 2-year-old boy and 1-year-old girl, has tweeted for a parenting website, a college-information site and Kmart, among others, at $1 a pop. “I figure, hey, why not get paid at the same time?” French says. On average, companies are paying Sponsored Tweets users $29 per tweet.

I hope you see the problem with that: first, it’s dishonest, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, because it’s presented as conversation.

Back in the 1970s when I studied Journalism in grad school, the generally accepted ethics were pretty obvious on this. Disguising ads as editorial was clearly out of bounds. But that was way before Amazon.com revolutionized consumer reviews, and then there was the proliferation of blogs and now Twitter blurring the boundaries. But still, put it back onto the personal level: if a company pays you to pretend you’re giving a legitimate personal opinion, that just doesn’t feel good. Right?

(Photo: Sarah Heinman/Flickr)

How do you react to this quote? This is Mark Shaeffer about social media experts, in this post. I quoted him in my post here yesterday:

How many have ever had a real sales job or have been actually accountable for delivering new value in a marketplace by creating, testing and distributing a product on a meaningful scale?   Very few.  Yet these are our marketing “gurus?”

Now wait a minute.

Who says marketing experts have to have sales experience? Why do they need to have been accountable for a new product?

I want my experts smart, experienced, and knowledgeable. I want them to listen. I want them open to new ideas. I want them to give good advice.

But I don’t care if they’ve had sales responsibility; or if they’ve launched a new product. Why should I?

Do I care if my doctor has built a house? Do I care if my accountant can sing? Why do I want experts to be managers?

What about you? Do you think a business expert has to have line management experience? Can a single-person expert really be an expert if he or she hasn’t run a company?

Do you think the best programmer makes the best manager?

“Line vs. staff” was a big deal to multinational executives and managers I consulted for in the 1970s and 1980s. As a consultant and newsletter generator, I was staff. Line managers had responsibility for sales numbers or profitability. And they were proud of it. It was important to their career.

Does that still matter? Or is it confusing makers and managers? And don’t the experts have to close some sales now and then to survive in business?

Not that the idea threatens me at all – I’m safe on this respect, since I’ve built a company, based on my own software, so whatever expertise I claim will pass that “sales or new product” test.

It’s just that experts and managers are like apples and oranges. Different skills. I want managers to be managers, and experts to be experts.

———-

Late addition: I had the above post ready to go when I was dealing with comments from yesterday and picked up Chris Brogan’s defense, here. He picked up on the same underlying assumption:

Have I held a sales job in a big company? Hell no. I’m not a salesman. Instead, I’m someone who equips salespeople with new tools to drive to value. I’m a hell of an opener, and decent with the first 2/3 of the cycle, but if my kids had to eat on my ability to close complex sales? Hell no.

Interesting perspective. Can you trust me? Beats me. I’ll let my work stand for itself. : )

No argument from me there.

(Photo credit: karbunar/Shutterstock)