Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

The famous sociotechnologist (sociologist studying the impact of technology on society), Howard Rheingold digs deep into the implications of technology becoming transparent.

How will our world change when computers become transparent?
Much like the tranformation of culture when the telegraph became the telephone, when the computer moves from desktops and modems to mobile devices and transparent technology, there are huge societal changes imminent. Mobile Internet brings computers and the Internet to the masses because it works into our everyday lives. Rheingold refers often to “wearable computing.”

What are the implications of these changes?
1. Bring information and location together. Imagine running to catch your flight and your contacts project a red carpet to your terminal. No guessing there. Imagine going on a nature hike and your glasses display information about each plant. If the information is not there, imagine contributing it to the web and having your GPS enabled mobile device record your lattitude and longitude with the information.
2. Ubiquitous computing can mean privacy concerns about how information is used. Potential corporate or government control.
3. Democratic power. In the Phillipines, the people, enabled with texting on the mobile phones, amassed a group large enough to oust the president.

What are the different outcomes possible?
1. Way more freedom. The ability of people to circumvent big business and big government and big media and mobilize movements for what they really want, rather than what big brother wants them to want.
2. Way less freedom. Depending on the technological infrastructure and legislation, the changes could imply that we loose our privacy and our freedom.

From a business standpoint, the mobile Internet presents new challenges, but also new opportunities if we choose to embrace it.

I’ll never remember these measures when I return overdue Intellectual Capital to the Library today so I’m recording them here:

Measures of the Whole

Market-to-book ratios: If Microsoft is worth $85.5 billion and its book value is $6.9 billion, then its intellectual capital is $78.6 billion. Three problems: 1) The stock market is volatile. 2) Evidence that book and market values are understated because acquired companies cost a premium over market capitalization. 3) While it’s nice to say Microsoft has $78.6 billion in Intellectual Capital, so what? What can I do with that info?

Tobin’s Q: Compare the cost of asset replacement with the market value of the assets. The closer to 2, the more you can command a price. You have something they don’t have. That could be a monopoly or that could be your intellectual capital.
Companies Fixed Assets and add back accumulated depreciation and account for inflation. This will show you what’s happening to a company over time. How well are they using their assets? A measure of Intellectual Capital.

Calculated Intangible Value: An elegant way developed by NCI Research. They wanted a way to convince to put money into businesses with very few tangible assets. This is a way to calculate the value of a brand. For example with Merck:
1. Calculate average pretax earnings for 3 years. $3.694 billion.
2. Go to the balance sheet and get the average year-end tangible assets for 3 years: $12.953 billion.
3. Divide earnings by assets to get the ROA: 29 percent.
4. For same 3 years, find the industry average ROA (for pharmaceuticals, 10 percent – if company below average -> STOP NCI method won’t work)
5. Calculate the “excess return.” Multiply the industry-average ROA (10 percent) by the company’s average tangible assets ($12.953 billion) to understand what the average drug company would do with the assets. Now subtract that from this company’s pretax earnings from step 1 ($3.694 billion). We get $2.39 billion.
6. Pay Uncle Sam. Calculate the three-year-average income tax rate, and multiply this by the excess return. Subtract the result from the excess return, to get an after-tax number. This premium is attributable to intangible assets. For Merck (average tax rate:31 percent), that’s $1.65 billion.
7. Calculate the net present value of the premium. You do this by dividing the premium by an appropriate percentage, such as the company’s cost of capital. Using an arbitrarily chosen 15 percent rate, that yields, for Merck, $11 billion.

That would be Merck’s calculated intangible value. This CIV permits company-to-company comparisons using audited financial data. A weak or falling CIV might hint that you’re spending too much on brick and mortar and not enough on R&D or brand-building. A rising CIV can help show that a business is generating the capacity to produce future cash flows, perhaps before the market–or budget committee–has recognized it. Over time, Tobin’s q out to be parallel to CIV. “Knowing a company’s CIV could help you judge whether a low price-to-book ratio reflects a fading business, or one that’s rich with hidden value that isn’t yet reflected in the stock.”

Human Capital Measures

Employee Attitudes: Correlation between happy employees and strong financial performance. Though not proven as cause, people who feel they are learning, needed, and useful will be more productive than people who are idle and uncertain of their role in the company’s success; they’re also likely to treat suppliers, customers and each other better.
So conduct employee surveys but be careful that some just generate what’s on people’s minds at the moment, which can be useful data.

Tenure, Turnover, Experience, Learning: Celemi International measures using the following:
1. Average years in profession.
2. Turnover among experts.
3. Senority among experts.
4. Value-added per expert and per employee.
5. Percentage of customers who are “competence-enhancing” or challenge the company to learn more.
6. Rookie raio (percentage of employees with less than two years experience).

Questionaire:
1. Among the many skills possessed by your employees, which do customers value most? Why?
2. Which skills and talents are most admired by your employees? What accounts for any difference between what customers value and what employees value?
3. What emerging technologies or skills could undermine the value of your proprietary knowledge?
4. Where in your organization do high-potential managers most want to be assigned? Where do they least want to work? How do they explain their preference?
5. What percentage of managers have completed plans for training and developing their successors?
6. What percentage of all employees’ time is spent in activity of low value to customers? What percentage of expert employees’ time is spent in activity of low value to customers?
7. When competitors are hiring, do they hire from you?
8. Why do people leave you to accept jobs elsewhere?
9. Among experts in your labor market–including headhunters–what is your company’s reputation vis-a-vis its competitors?

The Knowledge Bank: Alan Benjamin, former director of SEMA group, one of Europe’s leading computer service companies, developed a measure of the value of the knowledge bank of a company. This is what Benjamin does:
1. Treats capital spending as an expense, not an investment.
2. Calculates the employee’s salary seeding the future as an investment and book it as capital spending.
3. Conservatively estimates the value added by R&D
4. Draws a new bottom line and calculates the knowledge bank which the company can call on in the future.

Traditonal
Sales $2.7 million
-Overhead $500,000
-Capital Spending $100,000
-Labor $1.5 million
Surplus would be about $600,000

For Benjamin
Deferred Labor (added to knowledge bank): + $800,000
Expensed Labor (no residual value): -$700,000

Sales $2.7 million
-Overhead $500,000
-Capital Spending $100,000
-Labor $700,000
+R&D value added $40,000
Surplus would be about $1,540,000
($600,000 cash and the rest in banked knowledge) Determining the bank is the first step. Then we find out our return-on-human-capital (knowledge bank divided by profit) which should be lower than ROA conventionally measured.

Structural Capital Measures

To picture this, you need measures of the value of accumulated stocks of corporate knowledge, and measures of organizational efficiency (the degree to which the company’s systems augment and enhance the work of its people rather than obstruct them).

Valuing Stocks of Knowledge: Anson considers structural capital in 3 groups: 1) a technical bundle (trade secrets, formulas, proprietary test results, etc.) 2) a marketing bundle (copyrights, corporate name and logo, warranties, advertising, package design and copyrights, trademark registrations, etc.) and 3) a skills and knowledge bundle (databases, manuals, quality control standards, asset managment processes, security systems, business licenses, noncompete clauses, proprietary management information systems, etc.) Three basic tests to the value of an asset: Does it differentiate your product or service? Does it have value to someone else? Would someone else pay a fee for it? Price the assets not by cost but by their comparable value in your industry. Then rate the relative strength of your asset versus the comparables using the scorecard called the Valmatrix. (0-5 scale, 100 total possible points, breadth of product line, barriers to entry, etc.)

Working Capital Turns: The ability to substitute inventory for information. Like Dell Be careful to measure everything. The goal is to see how much you save compared to others who have more inventory.

Measuring Bureaucratic Drag:
Suggestions made versus suggestions implemented.
Time-to-market.
Ratio between revenues and SG&A costs.
Set-up times, minimum profitable lot sizes, etc.

Measuring the Back Office: Value added=Change Don’t write 2X2X2, write 23

Customer Capital Measures

Customer Satisfaction: Loyalty (retention rates), increased business (share of wallet), and insusceptibility to your rival’s blandishments (price tolerance).

Measuring Alliances: Savings for both parties from shared processes such as inspection and electronic data interchange, figures on inventories for both buyer and seller and availability all help establish the value of intimate relationships between you and your customers or your suppliers. Keep track of your customers’ financial strength and growth and your share of their business: If you are a key supplier to a strong customer, you have a valuable asset.

What’s a Loyal Customer Worth?: What is the net present value of your customer base? How much is a new customer worth? How much is it worth to keep an old one?
1. Meaningful period of time over which to do the calculations.
2. Calculate the profit your customers typically generate each year you keep them. Both costs and profits. If possible, segregate this number into age, sex and other useful information.
3. Then chart the life expenctancy.
4. Once you know the profit per customer per year and the customer retention figures, calculate the net present value of a customer. Pick a discount rate–if you want a 15 percent annual return on assets, use that, since customer capital is an asset. Apply the discount rate to each year’s profit, adjusted for the likelihood that the customer will leave. In year one, the NPV will be profit / 1.15. In year n, the last year in the period you chose, the NPV is the nth-year’s profit/ 1.15n. The sum of years 1 through n is how much your customer is worth–the net present value of all the profits you can expect from his tenure: In effect, it’s what someone else would pay to get the customer.

You can use this information to determine how much it costs to acquire new customers. This is invaluable information.

Keep it simple. No more than three measures for each.
Be strategic in your measures. Measure those things that give you your competitive edge.
Measure activities that produce Intellectual Wealth.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Epidemics can rise and fall in one dramatic moment. That dramatic moment is the Tipping Point. There are social and viral epidemics. This book is concerned with the epidemics spread by people.

There are three rules to the Tipping Point.
1. The law of the few (Connectors, Mavens and Sellers)
2. The stickiness factor.
3. The power of context.

1. The law of the few

Paul Revere, on his famous ride informing “The British are coming!,” had a partner and fellow revolutionary, William Dawes, who rode with him on a separate route. Dawes headed for Lexington through the towns west of Boston, but he didn’t successfully gather the support that Revere did. Everywhere Revere went, his initial word to the towns spread like wildfire. Paul Revere, says Gladwell, was a Connector and a Maven. His message, the same message as Dawe’s, had far more impact because of it.

Connectors:

• Know everyone.
• Have unusual gift for rapidly making new friendships and acquaintances.
• Gladwell took 200 random names from the phonebook and asked people how many surnames were shared by people they knew. Connectors said 80-100+. Average was 21. My response was 26 :). I’m obviously not a connector yet.
• Roger Horchow airplane ride convinced Gladwell that some just have a gift.
• Important because of the sheer quantity of people they know.

Mavens:

• These folks know everything about a particular area.
• Airwalk hired a fashion Maven, on the edge with everything hip, to “Tip” their shoes into a larger market moving the company from $15 million to $175 million in two years.
• Mavens are valued for what they know. They are trusted by everyone because everyone knows that they know.
• Most likely to pass around deals and coupons.
• They are not persuaders.

Sellers:

• These people have an innate ability to persuade.
• ABC’s polls always favored Reagan more than other candidates because Peter Jennings unknowingly lighted up when he spoke of Reagan. He had the ability to persuade even though people didn’t know they were being persuaded.

2. The Stickiness Factor

An epidemic will grow or stop growing because of how much it sticks. The most popular children shows on TV: Seasame Street and Blues Clues demonstrate the importance of the stickiness factor.

Seasame Street The folks at Seasame Street found the show on the premise that keeping a child’s attention was equivalent to them learning. They saw the success of commercials and patterned Seasame Street in short, 3-4 minute segments. They almost failed because the childhood experts told them not to combine realty with the muppets. But adding Big Bird to the street kept children’s attention far better. They determined the attention level of each program after they developed the distractor system to which was a slide show of interesting images that would compete with the program for attention. Whenever the children looked at the distractor, they assumed that part of the show wasn’t holding attention. They shot for 90% attention. Seasame Street was a huge success because it was sticky. They later learned from eye movement studies how to increase the amount of learning that took place on the show. If the muppets were too distracting, the children only paid attention to them.
• Blues Clues This show out did Seasame Street because they took 30 more years of child research and improved the show. Short segments aren’t as successful as story lines for children. Children love interactivity. They also love repetition. Blues Clues repeats the same show 5 times, but has enough depth that children love to watch it over and over. It may be the stickiest children’s show of all time. It beat Seasame Street because it focused on children and not on adults like Seasame Street.

3. The Power of Context

• New York Crime Example of the New York drop in crime rate because they repainted the subway cars faster than the gangs could grifiti them. They also put people in jail for trying to get onto the subway free or peeing in the streets. They stopped the little things and the murder rates and horrible crime dropped 60 percent in the area. Bernie Goetz drove these changes. Soon after New York put him in charge of the police department for the entire city and he turned the city crime rate around by 40 percent.
• The magic number of 150 In the army, in hunter gatherer societies, in the gore corporation and in Methodist churches (Divine Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood moves to the Bestseller list overnight in San Francisco and the book clubs), 150 people tend to be the largest size you can get a group and have it actually act together as one voice, in unity without more complex structures of organization

Tipping Points can be caused or prevented. AirWalk shoes orchestrated a Tipping Point for their shoes. They can be deadly. Micronesian suicide rates show a Tipping Point among the teenage boys. Teenage smoking, in spite of the efforts to fight it, is still on the rise even though teens know that it’s not good for them. Teens choose to smoke to rebel and be cool like people they see smoking. They don’t want to hear adults tell them it’s bad for them. Some think people some smoke because it provides a drug to deal with depression. Treating depression may reduce smoking problems. There is a point when an occasional smoker “Tips” and becomes a chain smoker when they have sufficient levels of nicotene. Gladwell thinks it would be possible to stop the Tipping Point from moving to chain smokers by reducing the nicotene content so that they can never get enough nicotene.

Interestingly, in the afterword, Gladwell says the difficult challenge to cause a Tipping Point is to find the Mavens. They are more difficult to find. When Ivory soap places an 800 number for questions on their soap, it’s a Maven trap. No one but Mavens call those numbers. Connectors make it their business to find you. You don’t need to find them. Another example, Lexus, when they had to call back a large group of cars, was worried because they had marketed their perfection and reliability. They recalled the cars and while the owners waited, Lexus washed them and filled them with gas. Owners who lived 100 miles away from a shop received a visit from the mechanic at their home. Lexus even flew to one place to fix the car. This pleased the newest owners of Lexus so much. Plus these new enthusiasts were Mavens. They turned around and marketed Lexus for the company. It was the most impactful callback ever- impactful for the benefit of the company. There are ways to find the Mavens or get them to come to you.

Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities

Purpose:
How will virtual communities change the business world?
How can companies faciliate the organization of communities and extract value?

Central Message:
The Internet changes the power from the vendor to the customer because the customer has access to more perfect information.
Owners of the customer will be champions of the customer.
Companies that avoid the virtual community market may find their business is seriously threatened by small upstarts willing to learn and change.
Companies help a community grow by focusing on membership acquisition and the stickiness of the site (which is largely fueled by member-generated content).
Companies extract value through subscription services and member fees, advertising and transactions within the network.

Validations:
Amazon was using book reviews to build member generated content.
Motley Fool was beginning to gather a large membership able to attract the interests of investment and brokerage companies. Attracts any investment oriented individual, group or business.

Applications:

Value:
The author feels very strongly that membership fees and subscriptions should be very carefully weighed against the need to grow membership and gain marketshare. They encourage extracting value from transactions and advertising.

Key Lists and Summary of the chapters:

Part I: the real value of virtual communities

Chapter 1 – The Race Belongs to the Swift
Power to the customer
1. Distinctive Focus
2. Capacity to integrate content and communication
3. Appreciation of member-generated content
4. Access to competing publishers and vendors
5. Commercial orientation
Profit to vendor
1. Reduced search costs (find customers)
2. Increased propensity for customers to buy (less risk in the virtual environment)
3. Enhanced ability to target (profiles)
4. Greater ability to tailor and add value to existing products and services
5. Lower capital investment
The Challenge of Change
1. Members must be given tools necessary to wield their new power.
2. Members must be given ample opportunity to wield their new power (competing vendors info).
3. Members must be given the chance to maximize the value they receive from information about themselves.

Chapter 2 – Reversing Markets
Virtual communities arise from need for interests, relationships, transactions and fantasies. The power of the virtual community is that they can all build into one powerful brew. There is a fundemental shift in power in the community as consumers…
1. aggregate their purchasing power
2. receive the information advantage (no longer are vendors the wielders of information)
3. vendor choice
4. a reward for the intermediary who puts together the first three (speeds the process)
The vendor’s dilemma is why help make the shift in power?
Well, first of all it’s going to happen even if one fights it. The time will come when vendors can’t afford not to participate. Those who participate early will have lower costs in building the community and will have number of members on their side.

The positive outcome is that lowering of prices to the consumers advantage in the shift in power could push the supply and demand up, increasing the size of the entire market. Traditional vendors and business men would see the community more as the value that comes to the competing vendors and their profits. The community organizer sees the opportunity in the transaction and advertising opportunities. The community itself is more valuable than the products and services of the competing vendors.

Chapter 3 – The new economics of virtual communities
The community organizer who understands virtual communities and their potential see them in the economics of increasing returns. Like Microsoft and Federal Express, the community struggles to grow quickly in the revenues early on, but when the ball gets rolling the growth can be more exponential than flat. Static spreadsheets don’t work. Communities will not make the real profits until they reach a critical mass of members, member profiles, advertisers and vendors, transaction profiles and transactions. When these critical masses are met, then the new business opportunities emerge.

Sources of Revenue for Virtual Communities:
1. Subscription Fees – Fixed price for participation
2. Usage Fees – Charge based on number of hours or pages
3. Member Fees – Content delivery fees for downloads and Service fees for automatic reminders, etc.

Four Dynamics of Increasing Returns
1. Content Attractiveness (marketing and churn) -> hours online -> member relationships -> more content -> more attractive
2. Member Loyalty (customized interaction and relationships) -> hours online -> lower churn -> more content -> more members
3. Member Profiles (data gathering capabilities) -> targeted transaction opportunities -> more transactions -> more profiles
4. Transaction Offerings (bring vendors to community) -> member willingness to spend -> more attractive to vendors -> more vendors
Each of these has a dynamic loop that builds value into the community and increases the returns. Organizers should focus on facilitating these loops.

Organizing Stages
1. Attract Members (marketing, free, great content)
2. Promote Participation (engaging member-generated content, editorial or published content, guest speakers)
3. Build Loyalty (member-to-member relationships, member-to-host relationships, customized interaction)
4. Capture Value (transaction opportunities, targeted advertising, fees for premium services)

“In a nutshell, the dilemma for the virtual community organizer is that the most accessible revenue sources in the near term will be the least attractive from the viewpoint of driving growth. On the other hand, the revenue sources that are most attractive are likely to be beyond the reach of the community organizer in the early years of community formation. The result will be limited revenue generation from the virutal community in the near term.”

However, the costs are just going to get higher for those who wait to enter the market and build the community in the beginning.

Chapter 4 – The Shape of Things to Come

Stages of Evolution	Description	Key Assumptions
Virtual Villages	Communities are highly fragmented but profitable businesses, each containing multiple small subcommunities.	Low barriers to entry. Many entrants Vendors participate across multiple communities. Network users sample across multiple communities.
Consentrated constellations	Concentration of core communities, and development of affiliate relationships with niche communities.	Increasing returns lead to concentration within core topics, such as travel. Niche communities benefit from affiliating with core communities.
Cosmic Coalitions	Core communities aggregate across complementary core topic areas.	Members find value in formation of coalitions, around common user interface and billing, for instance. Coalition organizers realize economic value by integrating marketing programs and member/vendor profiles across topic areas.
Integrated infomediaries	Communities and coalitions evolve into agents for members, managing their integrated profiles to maximize value to members.	Members themselves represent the most efficient location for the capture of profiles. Members assert ownership over their profiles. Specialized infomediaries can organize and maximize value of member profiles.

Part II: building a virtual community

Chapter 5 – Choosing the way in
First thing to do is examine the type of community that will generate the most value as well as your organization’s ability to execute on building the community.
Indicators of economic potential
1. Size potential: means taking the demographics, the size of related associations and estimating how big a community will become.
2. Relative value of being on-line: How many people how begun exploring online in the previous group? Why?
3. Value of being in a community: The need among the demographic to build relationships, explore their interest, transact and experience fantasies will determine the value of being in a community. New parents are intensely interested in community to learn about how to raise children.
4. Likely intensity of commerce: what is the transaction volume of the existing demographic in your interest area?
5. Fractual depth: How much can you segment the community as it expands?

Community Types
Consumer-focused communities
1. Geographic: Total New York: where new york hits the net.
2. Demographic: parents
3. Topical: interests
B2B communities
1. Vertical Industry: Physicians online, Agriculture online, etc.
2. Functional: Built around a specific business function. For example, marketing or purchasing. (MarketingSherpa.com)
3. Geographic
4. Business Category: small businesses community
Indicators of Long-Term Expansion
The fractal breadth is the most important indicator of long-term expansion as the community needs to be able to subdivide into powerful subcommunities as it grows. Topical communities may provide less fertile ground for long-term growth.
Assessing your ability to execute
Brand, existing customers and content are a good start but assets aren’t enough. Skills are as important.

Chapter 6 – Laying the foundation.
Community must be in place before commerce can begin. Speed and preemption are the key as getting ahead in growth will give the leaders an advantage. The stages to successful entry are:
1. Generating traffic: Enter quickly, get people to pass through, use the power of network to get started, generate awareness and partner for preemption (consider distribution partnerships, commercial partnerships, a content partnership and potential competitors before they become competitors). Start with a great directory or resources. Traffic is more important here than return visits.
2. Concentrating traffic: Engage the members. Ask them what they want. Track their usage. Enhance the offerings to the community. Make it easy and attractive for vendors to approach and participate in the community. Extract value.
3. Locking in traffic: Foster personal relationships between members. Accumulate and organize member-generated content. Improve the community functionality. Tailor resources to individual members’ needs.

Chapter 7 – The Gardener’s Touch
It is important to make the community scalable as it grows. This means
1. that people will not loose the sense of community even though there are millions of members. However, the organizer must maintain the benefits of scale because the economies of scale give the membership added value.
2. that you let go and create franchises and empower the members to shape the future of the community. Take an organic management model.
There are various positions to be filled in a community:
Hosts, archivists, community editors, customer service managers, information systems managers, community developers and community architects. However the two most important are the Information analyst and the community merchandiser. Their work extracts the value.
Even though organic management is better, it’s crucial to set and capture key metrics.

Chapter 8 – Equipping the community
Don’t worry about technology. Just focus on the needs of members of the community in choosing technology. This chapter focuses a lot on the challenge to choose between proprietary and standard technologies. This is not as much of an issue today.

Part III – positioning to win the broader game

Chapter 9 – Rethinking functional management
Management is turned on its head because customers have more power. It’s crucial to think about their increased power in marketing. Marketing becomes individually tailored in a virtual community. Focus on product not brand.
Implications for marketers
–
1. Reduce emphasis on value of vendor’s branding
2. Facilitate price comparisons
3. Allow comments to be made on product/service in public, not in confidence.
4. Increase volume of information to be analyzed.
5. Change the rules of advertising and promotion to leverage the customer’s ideas in promoting them.
+
1. Expand demand for product or service.
2. Increase word of mouth promotion of product or service.
3. Stimulate customer feedback.
4. Generate richer information on customers, markets.
5. Eliminate separation of advertising and transactions.
6. Allow advertising to be seen as helpful, not intrusive.

Chapter 10 – Reshaping markets and organizations
“Virtual communities redefine markets by expanding demand. They also redefine markets by focusing on customers rather than on traditional producer-driven notions of ‘industry.'” (page 204)

Purpose:
How can one add value to a career or industry in an economy where things and values change so quickly?

Central Message:
1. Showing love, or sharing your intangibles for the benefit of others, makes you valuable in our rapidly changing world!
2. Intangibles are your knowledge, network and compassion.

Validations:
Knowledge and understanding of the world around us through good books makes us walking libraries. We become valuable in many settings and accross multiple companies.
People matter more than corporations. Corporations used to be a stronghold but folks change jobs so many times in life today that corporations are no longer a stronghold. Relationships transcend organizations. They become a stronghold.

Applications:

Value:
Nice guys don’t finish last. They rule!

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It

Purposes:
1. Why Don’t Most Small Businesses Work?
2. How do you make them work?

Central Messages:
1a. People work IN their business rather than ON their business mostly as Technicians and as a result their businesses cannot grow.
1b. Most small businesses do not make it past Infancy and even fewer past adolescence and those that make it to maturity do so because they do things differently.
2a. People who work ON their business make their business work for them rather than work for the business.
2b. A business succeeds by balancing the Technician, Manager and Entreprenuer in each of us and balance comes naturally when we envision and work towards a Turnkey business – otherwise known as the Business Development process.

Validations:

• The E-Myth is that Americans think that small business are started by Entreprenuers even though most Small Business are started by technicians, people thinking that they can run a business because they have a skill, they can do something.
• The businesses don’t work because when the owner finds him/herself balancing the Managerial (order based on the past), Entreprenuerial (forsight and planning for the future) and Technical (Doing what needs to be done in the present) aspects of the business, the technician in them usually wins out. They get caught up in doing, doing until they become a slave to their business and can never move the business into maturity, usually dying in infancy or maybe adolescence.

Applications:
This book was written to be an example of application as it follows the “All About Pies” experience of a friend. “All About Pies” is a business that grew, tried to move from infancy to adolescence and then fell back. The owner learns from Gerber principles that get her excited about working on her business rather than working in it.

Value:
Entreprenuers who succeed do so because they have an insatiable desire to know and get it right. This nation needs a new group of entreprenuers who don’t allow a curtain to fall between themselves and the world. We need to see ourselves as who we really are. We are usually the problem. But if we find the courage to lift the curtain and really engage the world, we will grow and adapt to the world as well as make our business work for our primary aim in life.

« go back

About

My name is Neal Harmon and I write here so that I don't forget what I learn. Hopefully, a few others can learn as well. More about what makes Neal tick.

Recently Written

• Dream Work-flow with Sony Digital Paper and CloudHq
• VidAngel – now I can let my kids watch YouTube!
• Kickstarter versus Indiegogo versus Amazon (Lockitron style) – Tracking
• Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate
• Mobile Ecommerce Trends – Less Typing
• True Ventures Founders Camp
• Solved My Problem Rooting a Nook Simple Touch
• Fixing Our Sink
• Interface Android Cell Phone via Amazon Kindle Touch (androidscreencast.jnlp)
• Kyobo Launches a Mirasol Display eReader

Categories

• Business Ideas, Resources, Principles, etc.
• Education and Love for Learning
• Entrepreneurship
• Family Publishing
• Favorite Books
• Free Book Summary – Online
• Freedom, Government, Politics, etc.
• Genealogy to Family History to FamilyLearn
• General
• Home, Family and Church
• Ideas and Thoughts
• Search Engine Marketing
• Technology
• Uncategorized
• Utah Real Estate

Archives

• December 2014
• November 2013
• November 2012
• October 2012
• September 2012
• March 2012
• February 2012
• November 2011
• September 2011
• July 2011
• June 2011
• May 2011
• February 2011
• August 2010
• July 2010
• May 2010
• April 2010
• March 2010
• January 2010
• December 2009
• November 2009
• September 2009
• August 2009
• April 2009
• March 2009
• February 2009
• December 2008
• November 2008
• October 2008
• September 2008
• May 2008
• April 2008
• January 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• July 2007
• May 2007
• April 2007
• March 2007
• January 2007
• December 2006
• September 2006
• June 2006
• July 2005
• June 2005
• May 2005
• April 2005
• March 2005
• February 2005
• January 2005
• December 2004
• November 2004
• October 2004
• September 2004
• August 2004
• July 2004
• June 2004
• March 2004

Blogroll

• Ben Crane
• Daniel Harmon
• DearMYRTLE
• Dick Eastman
• Jeffrey Harmon
• John Jonas
• K Satyanarayan
• Mark Cuban
• Michael Eager
• Paul Allen
• Seth Godin

Admin

• Log in
• Wordpress
• XHTML