Well, baby boomer entrepreneurs, Seth Godin's new book, Linchpin, has been out for a month. What are we seeing about it's impact so far?So why are we doing this? Because it takes courage to look fear in the face, embrace it, learn from it and convert it into a positive force that only you can create. And in this day and age, we need more of it. A lot more.
Michael Symon, 2007 winner of The Next Iron Chef, has recipes for food and for business success. Learn how he starts new projects. Learn why national hotel chains are giving him offers to design and operate new restaurants. Learn his concepts that apply to any business strategy. Learn what you can do to effectively get your business started.
Learn why in a volatile business like restaurants, 75% of his initial staff still works for him. Find out what he means when he says his first goal is to figure out how to do it the right way, and then how to make money.
This is a 27 minute video by an amazing and entertaining entrepreneur. See if he can get you to “drink the koolaid”.
Shallie Bey
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In another EDA-funded study in the mid 1990s, it was found that 87 percent of all firms that had graduated from NBIA member incubation programs remained in business – and about 84 percent remained in the incubator's community.
It is estimated that in 2005 alone, North American incubators assisted more than 27,000 start up companies that provided full-time employment for more than 100,000 workers and generated annual revenues of more than $17 billion. Many thousands more jobs were created by companies that had already graduated from these business incubation programs and now operate self-sufficiently in their communities.
If a strategic focus on innovation and entrepreneurship makes the difference in businesses started in business incubators, a similar focus will work for you.
Find out more about business incubation by visiting the National Business Incubation Association at www.nbia.org.
If you can't find an incubator, you may be able to simulate the incubation process by participating in a structured process. See our suggestions on doing this by visiting Join The Baby Boomer Entrepreneurs.
Shallie Bey
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Though I am very proud of my degree as an electrical engineer from Purdue University, I don't know much about jailbreaking your phone. However, there is a very interesting blog called “What Do You Know” that recently spoke to the topic. It got me to thinking about us baby boomers who want to become entrepreneurs but haven't taken the step yet. What Do You Know...about Jailbreaking Your Life?
I, on the other hand, not only want to explain to you what jailbreaking your life is, I want to encourage and possibly even help you in taking the step. But let's begin with Robert's definitions:
Pwnage Tools is a program that facilitates the jailbreaking of an IPhone or Ipod Touch.
Technical Definition of Jailbreak: The iPhone and iPod touch hack that allow users to gain access to the entire Unix file system. In Unix terms, this refers to changing the root of the directory tree to /.
Understandable Definition of Jailbreak: A hack that gains access to areas of the iPhone or iPod Touch that users aren’t supposed to mess with. Typically, this is an immediate prelude to either installing cool programs, unlocking the handset for use with another cellular network, or both.
Through jailbreaking, you are able to add additional applications to your iPhone or iPod Touch. It allows you to do so by adding an application called Cydia (firmware 2.x) or Installer (firmware 1.1.4 and below) to your iPhone or iPod Touch. It also also modding (changing) of your iPhone/iPod Touch application icons, wallpaper, dock, status bar, chat bubbles, weather backgrounds, keyboard
On to Jailbreaking your life
So, do words like the following interest you:
Ending the pawn age (pwnage)
Controlling parts of your life that you aren't supposed to mess with
Installing really cool programs into your life
Then it is probably time to begin thinking about how to Jailbreak Your Life. Many people us entrepreneurship as the tool to bring freedom into their lives.
Among baby boomers, entrepreneurship is fast becoming an alternative to the traditional retirement path. Americans aged 55 to 64 are starting businesses at a higher rate than any other age group.
But mooding, as in changing the mood of your cell phone, is also necessary for jailbreaking your life.
You have to change your thinking, your mindset, from that of an employee to that of a business owner.
You also have to learn new skills that might not have been used in your last job description. One of those key skills that you must introduce is how to master marketing. You can have the best product or service in the universe but you can't sell it if people don't know about it.
Plan Your Jailbreak
You can consume many resources in the process of starting your business. Let me recommend to you that you use the many free and low cost resources that are available on the Internet. I have become particularly interested in social media marketing as a free tool to help with marketing. You can find more about that at: The Secret Recipe...
http://businessrebirth.blogspot.com/2009/04/baby-boomer-entrepreneurs-use-twitter.html
I have also created for you a free resource directory at:
Join The Baby Boomer Entrepreneurs
and a video for you Baby Boomer Entrepreneurs You Need A Guide
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzSVLQUTxYs
Now - Click the links and check out the resources I have for you. Make a good plan to Jailbreak Your Life!
Shallie Bey
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If you like that story, you want to read some of the work of The Story Lady.
Quoting from her bio on Amazon:
Ronda Del Boccio unknowingly began her path to becoming The Story Lady as a tot when she invented skits and stories with her stuffed toys. She was born with an eye conditions that mean she will never drive or see "normally," so she lives every day with added challenges that she calls "speed bumps."
All her life people have opened up to her and shared their lives in the safe space she innately offers. Recognized globally as The Story Lady, she teaches authors, business owners, entrepreneurs, and visionary individuals just like you to reach your ideal customers, readers, and associates through the power of your story.
Along with Bonnie Tesh, she co-authored the inspirational book I'll Push You Steer: The Definitive Guide to Stumbling Through Life with Blinders On.
Her new book The Geometry of Success comes out soon. She is an award-winning author, transformational speaker and mentor who teaches you how to connect with anyone through the power of storytelling and live from your power.
"When you share facts, you touch a mind, but when you share your story, you touch a life. And when you touch one life, you touch at least a thousand lives." -- Ronda Del Boccio, The Story Lady.
Ronda Del Boccio tells us to serve before we sell. And that is exactly what she does on her blog
Please check her out to get the story of your happy ending.
Follow her on twitter at http://twitter.com/thestorylady
Shallie Bey
If your goal for being an entrepreneur is to enjoy the life style you want without having to fully retire, how big should your business be? What are some of the things you should think about?
Seth Godin recently commented that he had been doing a lot of thinking about issues of scale and units of measure. He concluded: “Many businesses that are in trouble are in trouble for a simple reason: they’re the wrong size”.
If you are the typical Baby Boomer Entrepreneur, looking for a business as an alternative to full retirement, what size fits your life goals? What are the units of measure you should consider? Here are a few to start:
The folks at Small Business Labs continued the discussion by commenting in their blog and sharing some of their research.
They observed that most industries are moving towards a barbell shaped industrial structure with a few global giants on one end and lots of small businesses on the other. Mid sized firms are being acquired by the larger firms or squeezed out.
Their second major observation was that variable cost business models allow small firms to be competitive with large firms in an increasing number of market spaces. New technologies have reduced the cost of starting and operating a business.
So, baby boomer entrepreneur, what is the answer for you? What combination of size and agility will allow you to compete in your market while still allowing you to live your desired lifestyle?
Shallie Bey
Back track URL to Seth’s post:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451b31569e2011279821f8d28a4
Back track URL to SmallBusiness Labs:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8345675df69e201156f52f46c970b
Could you benefit from hearing the key issues in astronomy, biology, chemistry, or our beloved topic of entrepreneurship? Would that help you find and develop your business ideas?
In our topic of entrepreneurship, there are 737 free guest lectures on such issues as why you need a business plan -- to The 5 Essential Skills that Entrepreneurs Need.
This is the work of Richard Ludlow. Richard is a 22 year old Yale University student. He is also a finalist in Business Week’s 2008 competition for America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs.
Richard felt that many people could not have access to the top lecturers in fields of interest to them. The barriers might be money, location, or time. So he found a way to bring Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale to the students. As a Baby Boomer Entrepreneur, you get to benefit by being a fly on the wall. You can look for business opportunities, build your knowledge, or simply increase your skills in entrepreneurship, all for free.
Thanks to young entrepreneurs Xavier Lur for bringing this to our attention. Xavier blogs at
Go visit Academic Earth at : http://academicearth.org/ . I recommend to you Five Critical Skills That Entrepreneurs Need by Jerry Kaplan: http://academicearth.org/lectures/five-critical-skills-that-entrepreneurs-need . If you want an alternative view to Jerry Kaplan, you might want to see http://www.slate.com/id/2712/ .
Shallie Bey
Are you confused about how to use such social media platforms as twitter and facebook? Are you wondering how to keep your friends easy to follow and yet looking to follow and make new friends, then let me introduce you to Stanley Tang.
Stanley is a teen entrepreneur who has some insights on these subjects. He recently found a video by another teen, Min Xuam, that he thought was so good he decided to share it on his blog. It is called “How Twitter changed my life”. It isn’t the only strategy for how to used twitter and facebook, but it is a great strategy. This slide show, How Twitter Changed My Life, is well worth the time.
I was most impressed with the suggestion that you tweet not about what you are doing but what has your attention. This is a massive revelation for me. It really helps me understand why I love reading certain tweets and why others do not capture my interest.
Twitter is probably not a fad. Even if it is a fad, we baby boomer entrepreneurs must learn to effectively communicate with our markets. Teen entrepreneurs are creating new tricks for us old dogs to learn. Let's keep on learning so we can stay on the porch with the big dogs.
It took me awhile to finally decide to write this post as it runs against the tide of most readers’ opinions. And many feel strongly as I discovered at dinner last night with friends, but here goes. Outliers purports to reveal the real reason some people — like Bill Joy, the Beatles and Bill Gates— are successful. Yet what Malcolm Gladwell finds is, as Michiko Kakutani notes, “little more than common sense” – except when he draws conclusions about what’s most important for success.
I admit that my summary of the book is not as fascinating or sticky as the
vignettes in it, yet see if Gladwell’s conclusions surprise you:
1. Talent alone is not enough to ensure success.
2. Opportunity, hard work, timing and luck are also essential.
3. Poor children are less likely to succeed than those raised in rich or middle-class families.
4. It takes 10,000 hours of practice to become successful.
The first three seem blindingly obvious yet I disagree about what’s most important. And he over-generalizes. While it’s also obvious that mastery improves one’s chance for success, his conclusion that there’s a magic amount of practice time cannot be substantiated by the studies, interviews (Bill Joy, for example) and stories he offers…
…As Isaac Chotiner concludes, Gladwell “dislikes attributing individual accomplishment to the accomplishing individuals. He has set out to prove that people with social advantages do better than people without social advantages, and so the really wise thing for society to do is to arrange for more advantages for more people.” In fact Gladwell never really defines success.
Here’s my problem. He plays up the power of cultural background, timing and economic class and downplays the role in success of talent and perseverance...
You can read her full post at http://www.movingfrommetowe.com/2009/01/29/is-gladwell-right-about-what%e2%80%99s-most-likely-to-make-you-successful/#comment-2125
This is my response in turn:
Kare,
Thank you for your kindness in sharing your "cautionary notes" about Gladwell's conclusions. I agree with your topics of caution to varying degrees. I think that is exactly the issue, that we do not have mathematical precision on how to measure some of the points. I visited your blog and enjoyed not only your comments but those of your readers as well.
I posted a rather long response there that I would like to elaborate on here. I think Gladwell did take into account personal responsibility and perseverance and such things as deliberate collaboration. He lumps them under what he calls "meaningful work".
He says: "Those three things -- autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward -- are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying...work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful...hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning...once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig...the most important consequences of the miracle of the garment industry, though, was what happened to the children growing up in those homes where meaningful work was practiced...a lesson crucial to those who wanted to tackle the upper reaches of a profesion like law or medicine: if you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world."
Just as I pieced the run on sentence from pages of discussion on meaningful work, I think meaningful work is the tread that holds it all together. I suspect that it is not that Gladwell ignores the concept of purposeful effort that he focuses upon the cultural issues. I think he makes the point that people flounder until their culture gives them the opportunity to discover purposeful effort. So, my conclusion is that if you were to sit down with Mr. Gladwell, he would agree with your cautionary concerns, except perhaps about the 10,000 hours. It is the combination of advantage, however it is produced, with meaningful work, that ultimately marks the path of the outlier.
For the convenience of readers to this blog, I will share below my more detailed post to your blog.
Thanks for taking time to both read my original post and to share with me your observations. As a blogger, you know how precious a gift that is.
Shallie
____________________________________
Kare,
Thanks for a very thoughtful set of comments about Outliers. I do believe you are correct to say that the ideas should not be accepted unchallenged. Like many things around us, this is a story of trends and probabilities. There is no exact science that we can develop at this point that describes everything perfectly.
I tend to agree with your challenge of the 10,000 hour rule, for example. I have heard it said that one can become exceedingly knowledgeable about many things with 1,000 hours of study. One thousand hours for you and I as newbie bloggers will leave us much more talented than we were at hour five. The same is true for learning to drive a car, learning a foreign language, or playing softball.
I do believe that Gladwell is right about building upon successions of advantage. Small advantages can grow into large advantages. As a former venture capitalist, for example, I did some research on the probability of someone getting financing from a venture capital company. The odds are small that you will get any attention at all, perhaps one in 100 at the time. But if you could get attention to your idea, the investor began to help you think it through and your odds went to one in five. Similar numbers apply to getting your book published or even finding the perfect date with an on-line profile.
In my own personal life, I can see much of the trend that Gladwell discusses. People often ask me how I got from being a minority kid from a low income family in a steel town to the point of being visible to the President of the United States and appointed to be Superintendent of the United States Mint Philadelphia, the world’s largest Mint.
I can assure you that I did not start my youth with that as an aspiration. However, after a couple close scrapes with death, I did know that I did not want to be a steelworker all of my life. I had above average academic skills and was named a National Achievement Scholar by National Merit Corporation. That lead to a degree in engineering from Purdue University, which lead to sharing an office with an engineer who worked on a taskforce doing operations research, sort of a combination of engineering, operational planning, and finance in a refinery. When he was temporarily moved to fill another critical role, I was assigned to step up to fill in for him because we had become friends and I had been interested in what he was doing.
We discovered that I had a talent for this stuff and I was nominated to fill a position as a financial analyst in a new division that was being formed to train some oil people in understanding non-oil related business as a possible diversification strategy. I assumed a managerial role and officer title in a very small subsidiary of a very large corporation. This created eventually an opportunity to back up my trial and error education in business by going to a little school down the street, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
So when the head of the search team looking to fill the position of the President’s appointee to Superintendent of the United States Mint Philadelphia came to town, he and his team talked with engineers, and oil company executives, and bar association chancellors, and bankers, and the Dean of Wharton. One of the things they asked was if they knew any minority person who might be a good candidate for them to interview since the President wanted to make some non-traditional appointments of minorities.
I was not on the top of anyone’s list, but I was on everyone’s list. That got me the first interview. And that interview was much like the eye to eye meeting with a venture capitalist or the endorsement of a literary agent for your book. It changed my odds.
And interestingly enough, my advantage was I had been a steel worker as a kid. I had worked on the bottom rung as a laborer in exactly the same type of heavy industrial environment as the Mint. My ultimate advantage was the disadvantage that got me started on my course of self-improvement.
Surely there is much more detail to how finally getting noticed led to my selection, nomination and ultimate Senate confirmation to become the 16th Superintendent, the youngest in the history of the United States and the first African American. Yet, the point is clear to me that my life correlates exactly to Gladwell’s hypothesis. I worked hard in one way or another every day of my life, but working hard was not sufficient to make me step into a small place in history. Everyone around me worked hard.
Shallie Bey
