Team Meritocracy? Team Diversity? ~ Can the former be achieved if the latter is a constraint?

Posted on July 16, 2010 by Intrepid Business Venturer

“Lessons Learned: Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business)”

First let me acknowledge that the above subtitle has been taken directly from the title of a blog posted originally in February 2010 by Eric Ries ~ @ericries the guru of #lean in web start-ups ~ that came back into focus recently; an event that was the stimulus to write this blog and which led to the choice of wording for the primary title for this blog. More about this below.

In the course of this edition of the MISSIcom blog, and in the context of the title and sub-title, I want to discuss with you some of the related issues underlying such key staffing considerations as I perceive them: Recruiting and Maintaining the best and the brightest; what are the factors to be considered in the effort to achieve a Meritocratic team comprised of an appropriately Diverse group of recruits? Is the goal of building a meritocratic team even capable of achievement if diversity has also to be achieved or are these actually mutually exclusive objectives? What do we mean by meritocracy and what do we mean by diversity?

In regard to recruiting processes, this discussion is not just about being, or even about attempting to be, politically correct in our choices of candidates or even about functioning appropriately under the directives of Affirmative Action nor is it about discrimination or avoiding discrimination per se albeit that we are naturally obliged ethically and morally as well as legally to bear such issues in mind when making recruiting choices. This is about how, in reality as individual human beings charged with responsibility for putting together a team, we most often tend to go about achieving what we individually consider to be a well balanced team of the best, brightest, appropriately most capable staff for most effectively achieving the objectives we have at hand while knowingly functioning within the bounds of these various constraints. Continue reading →

Posted in Business Master, Employment & Employees, Management, Objectives and Purpose, Startup | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | View Comments

A Growing Business Is A Smarter Business ~ It Seeks Answers Via In-Bound Marketing!

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Intrepid Business Venturer

Nothing Ever Happens Without Sales:
And Sales cannot, and will not, happen – first and foremost regardless of any Marketing and/or Sales efforts or how wonderful you think your product is – unless your business is providing a reliable answer to “pain” or “need” and unless your target market is aware of your solution and has an easy way to acquire that solution.

That simply means:

    a) Unless your product or service provides a clear and ready solution to a specific, clearly identifiable, need or issue and
    b) Unless you have brought your solution to the attention of your potential customers in a way that really draws them in to find out more about your solution and
    c) Unless you make it easy for them to commit to buying (investing in) your solution.

Building a successful business has always been, and most likely will always be, about finding a universally recognizable “pain-point” or need, something that is literally calling out for an answer or fix, and quickly providing an attractive, cost-effective, reliable, dependable, safe solution, or at least a very significantly better solution than any other currently available solution, to that demand.

Of course, philosophy aside, building a successful business, at its core, is also ultimately about building resultant profits and growing the net value of the enterprise both of which depend, amongst other factors, upon providing a solution that generates sufficient relief and interest to an ever growing audience that also results in a trend of increasing Sales: In other words, “Nothing Happens Without Sales“. In fact, the IRS does not consider any activity to be a “business” unless it is purposeful about making a profit, assuming the business is not intended to be a non-profit, hence building sales must be a primary objective for the enterprise or otherwise it is nothing more than a hobby. Naturally, revenue from sales must also exceed costs at some point in the life of a business but that is part of another discussion to be had later under the title “A Growing Business Is A Smarter Business ~ It Seeks Answers in Supply-Chain Processes!”.

Continue reading →

Posted in Business Master, Marketing and Sales, Startup | Tagged , , , , , , , , | View Comments

Communicating with your clients: Skype v WebEx v GoToMeeting

Posted on May 22, 2010 by Intrepid Business Venturer

At MISSI (Management Information Systems Solutions & Initiatives) for the past several years we have been using “GoToMeeting” very reliably to provide direct technical support of clients as well as for other more general communication pc-to-pc purposes such as for webinars and have found it easy and very effective for our purposes.

It is, perhaps ironic, that we arrived at the choice for GoToMeeting after first using WebEx for a while in conjunction with a software vendor. We also tasted AccuConference through connections with a past client and looked at a couple of other options. In an admittedly rather un-scientific manner, though cost was a consideration, we ultimately decided that GoToMeeting offered all we needed in terms of supporting and connecting with our clients – or rather, the combination of GoToMeeting together with our Skype account gave us the full scope of inter-communication functionality that we needed for our business in servicing our clients ~ the only reason that we exist as a business in the first place!

Mark Suster (@msuster) has just posted a very informative blog based upon his own experiences in this realm and prompted by the recent announcement of a $10M funding for “Huddle” which, according to Continue reading →

Posted in Communications ~ Options, Tools, Systems, Objectives and Purpose | Tagged , , , | View Comments

Clever “Adobe Risk Management” Fake Alert ~ Do not be fooled!

Posted on May 7, 2010 by Intrepid Business Venturer

The above title for today’s cautionary tale was lightly ’stolen’ from the blog of our good friend Bill Houle, Director of IT for Verari Technologies, Inc.

There have been frequent rogue exploits by the cracker community to use references to Adobe Flash and suggesting that there is an update that must be applied as a simple, almost believable, foil to spoof people into doing things that would compromise their computer systems but a recent significant advancement in “social engineering” to con the recipient into unwittingly adopting the conclusions and actions promoted in the offending email have reached a level of sophistication that makes avoiding making a drastic mistake even harder to do. As time goes by we all need to be increasingly vigilant against making the mistake of falling for these spoofs for everyone that blindly goes where angels fear to tread makes the web world generally more hazardous for all of us.

With that introduction, we heartily recommend that you carefully read Bill’s blog with the above title at The Dark Side Geek: Interesting name that Bill has chosen for his blog given that he is one of the smartest white side geeks we have come across in many a year; his observations are very well worth considering, his advice well worth taking. In this instance, Continue reading →

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Is (packaged) Business Intelligence (BI) Software Coming Up Short?

Posted on April 30, 2010 by Intrepid Business Venturer

The article quoted below was written by David Needle and published April 29, 2010 on the ”IT Management” website at: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/datbus/article.php/3879316

The article directly addresses a principle limitation of BI tools: The information presented to Decision Makers typically begs addition questions that then require asking IT for further reports to clarify the underlying issues so that intelligent decisions can be made based upon facts rather than intuition. This is exactly the kind of support that MISSI provides to our clients; The article does a good job of explaining why even if you already have BI tools available, you still additionally need the kind of business related knowledge and experience skills and services that we provide to help you make profitable decisions. Our people work directly with your people to provide the kind of BI you need to achieve profitable results. This all fits perfectly within the scope of our passion for growing business: It’s part of the strategy of mapping out where you are so you can compare with where you want to go and where you actually may be headed which may not be where you actually want to go. Without clear data, there can be no way to reliably chart your course and stay on course moving towards your goals.

“Business Intelligence software can play a vital role in helping IT and knowledge workers get a handle on increasingly huge warehouses of customer data and other information critical to their sales and overall business. But does that go far enough?

In many cases, the answer is no. Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Technical | Comments Off

Business Intelligence (BI) is Crucial to Profitable Decision Making

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Intrepid Business Venturer

This begs the question as to whether or not self-service BI is the answer for capital and manpower constrained small businesses or is this option just another temptation leading ultimately to yet another cash-drain, effort distraction and problem in waiting.

The following are extracts from an article that originally appeared in the February 2010 issue of TechTarget’s “SQL Server Insider e-zine”.

“In fast-paced businesses, the ability to gather and analyze data quickly can be an advantage over your competition. Additionally, being able to see that a product or service would prove to be a losing venture in the coming months allows you to shut down a product line to save millions. It stands to reason that the more people you have looking at data, the faster you will be able to come to some useful conclusions.

In theory, self-service BI is great, but is it practical? Continue reading →

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Never enough hours in the day when following ideas!

Posted on February 9, 2010 by Intrepid Business Venturer

So many things to accomplish; so little time to accomplish them: How to manage use of time is key to successful accomplishment of objectives.

Nothing beats having a plan apart from creating a plan BEFORE diving into the next big objective:

  1. What is it that you want to accomplish?
  2. By when?
  3. What resources do you need: 
    1. People?
    2. Materials?
    3. Funds? 
    4. And how are you going to obtain them?
  4. How will you know you have successfully achieved your objective?

Plans come in many different degrees of complexity from scribblings on a napkin at the dinner table to full blown project plans using tools such as Microsoft’s Project Management software.

While “complexity” does no more guarantee successful outcome than does the simple “napkin” version, the greater the clarity, or readability and understandability, of the resultant ”road map to the target” the greater the chance of actually arriving at the target destination. 

At the same time, this does not mean that a plan, to be successful, may not be updated as new information comes to hand ~ in the course of every project there will be some situation or circumstance revealed that could not have been anticipated before hand and adjustments must necessarily be made to deal with those issues ~ however, the direction of the plan itself must not be changed or forgotten if the originally stated target is still the ultimate destination or that destination will either not be reached or otherwise may be reached only after incurring serious cost and time overruns.

Obviously there is much more to this topic but this is enough for an opening gambit.

Posted in Business Master, Management | View Comments

Once more into the breach dear friends!

Posted on January 22, 2010 by The Venturing Adventurer

Well; this is it. Launching into to strange world of sharing thoughts and ideas about building business and working with people in the process of exploring ideas and developing plans, strategies and tactics to successfully implement those ideas. Great fun but not without its moments of frustration and sometimes even grief but a keen sense of humor and the willingness to see, and the ability to laugh at, the absurd can get us through any challenge. /psb


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