Category Archives: Entrepreneurial Business Reading

The Truth About Solopreneurs

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If you are a solo entrepreneur with one, several or many clients, a start-up, use collaborators, have friends and family, occasionally need tech help or belong to a business group, not only are you NOT alone, YOU are in a tribe, YOUR TRIBE.

This may come as a shock to those of us who wear so many hats we don’t known what side of our heads the visor is on, but in reality, for as much as we DO we are part of a microcosm of our own making.

By definition, according to Tribal Leadership, by Dave Logan, John King and  Halee Fischer-Wright, a tribe is any group of about 20 -150 people who know one another enough that, if they saw another walking down the street, would stop and say “hello.”  A small company is a tribe, and a large company is a tribe of tribes.

My definition of a tribe is YOUR PEOPLE. The people you work with, confer with, collaborate with, respect, like, align, hire and hope to serve.  In essence, this makes us all leaders and conversely it makes us all part of a tribe.  What is most beautiful and powerful about this concept is that it is consensual. The power of many far outweighs the power of one.

So today I want to leave you with just one important thought, you matter very much to others.

The DNA of Entrepreneurs – Are you eating & sleeping your biz?

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Barry Moltz sent out a dispatch about entrepreneurs from the Harvard Business Review written by Jeffrey Stibel, CEO of Dunn And Bradstreet Credibility Corporation. It was so right on, I had to share it. 

If you are eating, sleeping and drinking your business, you are not alone.  Enjoy the read!  Enjoy the ride!  

Here is the article Jeffrey wrote about entrepreneurs in the Harvard Business Review:

 Entrepreneurship is a Disease

 Thanks Barry! You make the world a better place.

Reading for Fun & Profit – Small business advice

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Until recently I was a hardcore how-to reader, spending time inhaling nonfiction.  Why waste time on made-up stories when how-to do everything is indexed neatly in the library?  How-to books make you smarter. They break things into steps even a monkey can do! They strip away narrative and serve up facts gathered from lifetimes of experience, research and perspective.  Biographies, Leadership, Small Business Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Social Media tools and how-to be happy, fit and remodel a bathroom are all part of the endless possibilities.

Then by chance I picked up a used copy of the Human Stain and every rational argument I’d had on  “How-to Hands Down” dissolved.  Tidal waves of revelation, motivation, relationships and human experience swept me away into rapture. Tangles of deception, obligation and desire wafted from the book like smoke from a hookah.

After the The Human Stain I read American Pastoral, for which Roth won the Pulitzer and then decided to read the entire library starting with an author from every letter of the alphabet.

This lead me to my jumping-off point – H.

H lead me to rediscovering Hesse and his thinnest work, Demian, which I learned after devouring, was also among his heaviest, so there was NO WAY I was returning to H to kick myself in the head with Siddhartha.

Next off to B for Bill Bryson and a good laugh except my library doesn’t have any Bryson.  I settled on Malcolm Bradbury’s seminal work, Eating People is Wrong.  Ixnay on the ootsnay. Guard your brains for more useful purposes. They are bound to come in handy.

That’s when I discovered T.C. Boyle.  Never heard of him.  Well, the PEN/Faulkner Award people, the New York Times Bestselling people and the National Book Award people have.  So far he’s written 10 novels and eight short story collections so I plunged into Talk Talk.  I love it! I’m learning so much about perpetrating identity fraud, peppered with an angst-ridden love story AND how to program digital Demon Worlds that exist at 1000 degrees Fahrenheit.  Now these are things that can really further a career!  I’m going to hang in B for a while until I’m forced to return to Small Business Marketing, SEO Tools, Entrepreneurship and Leadership Principles.

You just never know when you’re going to be seated with the President of The Amalgam Bank and he wants to know which heat-retardant radar suit yields the best ROI.

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Surviving in Business – Entrepreneurial Wisdom

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Bunch of frogs !Image by Ioan Sameli via Flickr

After reading countless stories about deals that fell through -  I want to share with you a famous story that I resented reading, but in retrospect have found comforting.

Ping – A Frog in Search of a New Pond by Stuart Avery – tells of a frog who needs a new  pond and finds an owl who agrees to be his guide and mentor.  For years the frog trains with the owl to make his great leap over a vast waterfall to a bigger pond.

The owl gives the frog wisdom, discipline, tough and cryptic challenges – they bond, the frog gets stronger and better and you think it is going to turn out like the Karate Kid but it doesn’t.

On the day of the great leap the frog bounds in the air with perfection. As he is sailing across the great waterfall with the Owl watching proudly a hawk drops from the sky and swoops the Owl away digging its great claws into the Owl’s back.

The frog sees this in horror, loses his balance and crashes into the gushing waterfall.  Fighting to live, his little body crashes against rock and water – gets banged and submerged and suffocated. Then the frog suddenly thinks of the Owl’s lessons and lets go as his teachings would remind him.

He stops fighting and struggling, stops flailing against the current and lets the experience wash over him as painfully as it might be .  His instinct kicks in and then he lives.  End of story.

This is entrepreneurship and the struggle of small business to survive.  Sometimes you leap and sail, sometimes you leap and crash but as long as you live and learn, you’re good to go.

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Love & Business

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Fireworks over Miami, Florida, USA on American...Image via Wikipedia

If falling in love with the people with whom you work is a crime, I want to be guilty.  I’m an unashamed fan of work well done, inspired leaders and motivated people.  Awe, to me, does not go with shock, it belongs with words like brilliance, trust, accomplishment and courage.

Love and Profit, written by James A. Autry in the 90′s, was considered a ground-breaker in the thinking that love and profit actually go together in the corporate world.  This still remains to be seen.  Steve Farber wrote about it in The Radical Leap and it is the focus of The Go-Giver, which I looooooved. (Did I say  the word Love again?)

I’m going to ask you to reflect on those with whom you surround yourself and take stock of your genuine feelings.  If you find that you really like who you like, that it is flattery just to collaborate and freeing to voice opinions because they not only have a place at the table but spark innovation – then you are also in loving relationships that just might impact the rest of your life.

They also may impact other peoples’ lives by creating better products, services, more beautiful songs or poetic words.

But most assuredly they will transform your present experience.  If there is a choice, and there is, I’d rather live in love.

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