A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Do you use jargon or plain English when you are discussing stuff with your team or presenting to investors?

Every industry has its own jargon, AKA, terms and language, that people tend to use without thinking.

Any given time period has its own catchphrases and clichés—also used without thinking.

The problem is the former can make a discussion confusing, if not downright inscrutable, to some listeners, while the latter can render your words meaningless—or both.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but when discussing words an example often provides the same clarity.

And far be it for me to spend my time creating one when a perfect example has already been done.

Read it, heed it and take your own precautions to avoid doing it.

Hat tip to KG Charles-Harris for sending the article to me.

Image credit: HikingArtist

What drives entrepreneurs?

According to Daniel Isenberg, “entrepreneurs are contrarian value creators. They see economic value where others see heaps of nothing. And they see business opportunities where others see only dead ends.”

But Isenberg also believes (along with many others) that “the main motivator for entrepreneurs is the chance of making big money.”

Richard Branson believes, “If you get into entrepreneurship driven by profit, you are a lot more likely to fail. The entrepreneurs who succeed usually want to make a difference to people’s lives, not just their own bank balances. The desire to change things for the better is the motivation for taking risks and pursuing seemingly impossible business ideas.”

Branson has a great belief that Profit and social good are not an oxymoron or mutually exclusive.

In Screw Business As Usual Branson says that from the very start his entrepreneurial drive wasn’t for money, but to have the wherewithal to fund his charitable efforts.

And over the years he’s done exactly that by funneling much of his wealth into Virgin Unite and through Virgin Unite to many entrepreneurs in the developing world and beyond, as well as creating and funding The B Team: “Our mission is to deliver a Plan B that puts people and planet alongside profit.”

Three cheers for Plan B and the three Ps.

Video credit: The B Team

The ‘me first’ attitude so prevalent today makes everyday living anywhere ever more difficult.

That ‘me first’ is especially obvious when poop isn’t scooped.

“In the worldwide battle to get dog owners to clean up after their pets, enter Brunete, a middle-class suburb of Madrid fed up with dirty parks and sidewalks.”

Brunette’s mayor wanted a more creative solution that didn’t rely on substantial fines, because in tough economic times that fine could be the difference between eating and going hungry.

With the creative help of McCann Erickson, Brunete’s mayor tried a totally new approach to the poop—along the lines of ‘return to sender’.

Instead, this town engaged a small army of volunteers to bag it, box it and send it back to its owners. (…) Delivering 147 boxes of the real stuff seems to have produced a far more lasting effect in this town of about 10,000 residents. The mayor guesses a 70 percent improvement even now, several months after the two-week campaign.

The campaign wasn’t done as a surprise;

At first, Ricardo Rovira, who was part of the design team at the agency, worried that the mayor would not have the courage to go ahead with its direct marketing idea. But he did. McCann also made an amusing public awareness video, produced by Juan José Ocio, largely using actors. It was shown around town before concerts and community meetings.

According to Rovira, the campaign also netted McCann some real clients with serious money to spend.

This has been a fun little doing well by doing good story on a summer Wednesday that, hopefully, will inspire you/your company to DIY.

YouTube credit: McCann Worldgroup Spain

Here are the three main things to consider when hiring in order of their importance.

They aren’t rocket science, but they work.

1. Attitude—convincing someone to change it is like convincing the horse to drink the water.
2. Skills—can be learned; look for the frequency of job moves that required new skills.
3. Degrees—are like new cars that lose value the minute you take them off the lot.

Make sure the culture and management style they expect, based on discussions when interviewing, is what they get.

And practice daily the three main actions that will keep them loyal.

1. Appreciate them.
2. Provide ways for them to make a difference and notice when they do.
3. Provide feedback and challenges to help them grow.

Again, not rocket science.

Flickr image credit: Simon Cocks

Welcome to the Twenty-first Century where “brand yourself” is the call to action, whether people are more narcissistic is hotly debated, and interest in selfies is skyrocketing.

Social media allows people to share the minutiae of their lives with a single click and no thought whatsoever.

And billions do so in the belief that others will be interested.

In an oracular vision of the Twenty-first century Henry Ford said, “A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.”

These days it’s more accurate to say, “A bore is a person who opens his social media and puts his feats in it.”

Some things are constant, while others change with the times.

When you think about great entrepreneurs who comes to mind?

Not Steve Jobs if you limit entrepreneurs to those who invent something brand new; he didn’t invent technology; he took what was there, infused it with brilliant design and then convinced us we couldn’t live without it.

Bill Gates? Larry Page and Sergey Brin? Larry Ellison? Mark Zukerberg?

But could you build a powerful company culture off just their quotes 100 years from now?

Actually, will entrepreneurs even remember them in the Twenty-second Century?

But a century later you can do it off of Henry Ford quotes and it would be not only sustainable, but socially responsible.

Consider this small sample

• There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible. Ford practiced what he preached, too.
• Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right. This may be true for all of us, but it is especially true for entrepreneurs.
• Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success. Overseeing each of these stages is a perfect description of a founder’s primary responsibility.
• Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal. This isn’t to say that you should be blind to them, but keeping your focus on the goal allows you to overcome them by not losing track of what’s really important.
• A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large. Tony Hsieh has proved this in spades, as has Jeff Bezos. The difference is that Hsieh also practices the first principle above; while Bezos has ignored it.
• Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. The first half of the sentence has been proven over and over, but it is the second half that determines whether the effort is successful.

Parts of Ford make a great role model, while other parts should be treated as poison, which, in the long-run, merely proves Ford mortal.

(Find more Ford quotes here.)

Image credit: Wikipedia

Most businesses are lamenting the slow economy.

They have done all the cost-cutting possible and are still whining (through sky-high profits) that people aren’t buying.

I find this extremely funny (in a sickly way), since the reason people aren’t spending is that those same companies have slashed wages to the point they have no disposable income or they just aren’t hiring.

“The real reason businesses aren’t hiring is they’re not seeing consumer demand for their goods and services increase,” she said. “We need greater demand for goods and services. It is clearly true that if people receive higher incomes, that will help the economy.” —Heidi Shierholz, economist at the Economic Policy Institute

Even more revolting is the prevalent attitude that workers don’t deserve better pay, since they are strictly a “cost of doing business” and costs should be kept ultra-low.

That level of stupidity is breathtaking, although not terribly surprising.

Corporate America still hasn’t figured out that without people there is no company, but you would think they had noticed the connection between what people earn and what they spend.

That isn’t exactly rocket science thinking.

Henry Ford figured it out way back in the early 1900s when he raised his workers wages to a then-unheard-of level.

Ford was a pioneer of “welfare capitalism”, designed to improve the lot of his workers and especially to reduce the heavy turnover that had many departments hiring 300 men per year to fill 100 slots. Efficiency meant hiring and keeping the best workers.

Ford astonished the world in 1914 by offering a $5 per day wage ($110 today), which more than doubled the rate of most of his workers. (…) The move proved extremely profitable; instead of constant turnover of employees, the best mechanics in Detroit flocked to Ford, bringing their human capital and expertise, raising productivity, and lowering training costs.

Ford wasn’t being kind; he understood that if he wanted to sell cars people needed enough disposable income to buy them.

Ford’s policy proved, however, that paying people more would enable Ford workers to afford the cars they were producing and be good for the economy.

But Ford’s attitudes towards business, bosses and people don’t fly well in the 21^st Century world.

If anyone of significance today said, “A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business,” Wall Street would poop its collective pants.

(Hat tip to KG Charles Harris for sending the article.)

Flickr image credit: {Guerrilla Futures | Jason…

It’s fairly well-established that, as Tony Hsieh keeps saying, happy employees are more productive and are less likely to leave.

Happy employees enjoy their work and feel like they are having fun.

In fact, an entire nitch business has arisen (as it always does) promising to show managers how to make work fun through gamification.

Surprise, surprise, it doesn’t work.

But this new study, a working paper from a pair of professors at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests there’s a big difference between workplace games employees may decide to play on their own and games that are mandated by management.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone for two reasons

1. “Natural” doesn’t lend itself to being replicated.
2. What comes naturally is very different from having something contrived and synthetic shoved down your throat.

Fun doesn’t just mean acting silly or playing games.

Fun includes overcoming challenges, making a difference and all kinds of subjective intangibles.

Bosses may provide the guiding values that create the skeleton of culture, but fleshing it out requires contributions from all levels and each person—especially when it comes to fun.

Flickr image credit: Wilson B

LikeHack founder Jane Smorodnikova pointed me to an excellent video about productivity on a blog called Sparring Mind that is owned and written by Gregory Ciotti, the marketing director of a Boston startup called Help Scout.

Some of what’s included

• Why worrying about having “more willpower” is a fool’s game
• How world class experts stay productive… and what they do differently
• The science behind why better energy management = a more productive you
• Big pitfalls that lead to busywork and procrastination

I’m sharing the video, but the accompanying article is worth your time.

I especially like Ciotti’s closing line, “Multitasking is your enemy: Treat it as such. Block out unwanted distractions and as Ron Swanson would say, “Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.”

Based on today’s love affair with multitasking, the number of half-assed things being done could fill the cloud.

YouTube credit: Asap SCIENCE

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

An executive at a startup client sent me the video below.

And the following email exchange ensued.

(Him) The hammer thing took me entirely by surprise.  :)

(Me) Really? It just seemed a logical outcome of the way he was swinging it around))

Some folks are observant.  Then there’s me.

People seem proud of the strangest things these days…

Believe me, I’m not bragging about being unobservant.  I wish I NOTICED things!

I find that most of the things we are good/not good at boil down to choice and most of us, including me, excuse choosing not to [whatever] with some form of “that’s how I am” or, as another founder I’m working with keeps telling me, “that’s the way my mind works.”

Another executive I know never noticed things; then he decided he wanted to, so he focused on “really seeing” and now he does. Hope I didn’t offend you.

No offense taken.  I’ll give it a shot and see what happens.

Do you excuse, rationalize or choose to change?

Image credit: HikingArtist