How do you teach entrepreneurship to high school students?

by Rocco Tarasi

How do you teach entrepreneurship to high school juniors? In only one hour?

I had the privilege this summer of speaking for an hour to students at the Neighborhood Academy, a college prep school in Pittsburgh for low-income students, about being an entrepreneur. “Being an entrepreneur” is certainly a broad topic, and you could choose to focus on a number of different areas. I decided that I would have three goals: make it simple, make it inspiring, and make it practical.

How to Sell Yourself -- Carefully

Self-promotion, done well, increases your visibility and advertises the value you deliver to your team and your company. But mastering the delicate art of self-promotion isn't easy. Overdo it, and you're a grandstander; duck it, and you miss out on the credit--and visibility--you deserve. The following points draws on the wisdom and experience of management experts to give you useful tips on effective self-promotion.

1. Offer information about your accomplishments by weaving anecdotes (that include others besides yourself) into the flow of discussion
2. Build a network of appreciative colleagues and bosses by taking on tasks for them and following through
3. Prepare a brief and informal "bragalogue" to have at the ready when the CEO or senior-level executives ask you about your work
4. Be sensitive about the timing of your self-promoting remarks. With forethought and practice, you can increase your skill in subtly drawing others' attention to the contributions you make to your organization.

Be Strategic in 15 Seconds

It’s a really good thing to be tactical. It’s important to have a bias for action, to focus on getting things done.

Write the strategy, build a plan, sure. But spend most of your time in execution mode to make things happen.

Of course, the down side is that it’s easy to be so focused on execution day to day, that we don’t step back and ask the strategic questions to make sure we’re on track, and make sure we’re not missing more significant opportunities to achieve and exceed our goals & expectations.

Stepping back from execution to be strategic is everybody’s job, and it doesn’t have to take longer than 15 seconds to give your work a gut-check. Here are a few questions to ask yourself every once in awhile to make sure you’re on track:

• Why are we doing this?
• What’s the objective? What does success look like?
• How will I know this is successful? How will I measure it?
• Has anything changed (at the company, in the market, with our customers) since we last decided this was worth doing?
• Would our customers think this is a good idea?
• If I started this project from scratch, is this still how I would do it?

How to motivate your employees

By Misty Belardo

For those of us who are employed, we know there are things that motivate us to work and really give our best to the company we work for. I am just lucky I guess that I love my work. I also love the things my company has given me in terms of training and benefits which go along with working there for almost 3 years now.

For our readers who are employers, or who are considering starting their own business, there are some things you need to consider in order to achieve a good volume of work and productivity from your employees. Maybe you think that the employees you currently have are a problem, or hard headed. Maybe you should consider that they just need a nudge or need to be motivated.

I found a video that I hope can help you. This video discusses some valuable steps that can truly help you motivate your employees:

Step 1: Motivate 'YOU' first

Step 2: Get to know your employees

Step 3: Use smarter goals

Step 4: Delegate authority

Step 5: Work out a reward system

The Nine Rules of Innovation

by Braden Kelley:

Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend. Deep down we know that people have different passions, skills, and potential, but even when it comes to innovation, we expect everybody to have good ideas.

I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.

Here are the nine innovation roles:

Top 10 Speakers at the World Business Forum 2010

by Mike Myatt

The video above recaps the final day of this year’s World Business Forum in New York. In yesterday’s recap of Day one, I gave a detailed breakdown of each speaker presentation, but today I thought I’d do something a bit different…Since everyone seems to like a list, I decided to rank the top ten speakers from both days. So the list that follows is my ranking of the Top 10 Speakers from World Business Forum 2010 as well as my logic behind the rankings.

1. Nando Parrado- Nando was the only speaker at the conference to receive a standing ovation, but this is not why I ranked him #1. Nando earned the top spot on the list because his presentation simply raised the bar to an entirely different level. He recounted the miracle of surviving 72 days after his plane crashed high in the Andes. After being unconscious for 3 days and being counted among the dead by other survivors, Nando awoke to find his mother, sister and a number of his rugby teammates had died. They had no food, water or winter clothing. At an elevation above 12,000 feet and with temperatures that reached -35 below zero, Nando not only survived the initial crash, but a broken skull, being buried by a subsequent avalanche, eating the flesh of the dead, and then hiking for 11 days covering 70 miles across the Andes in street clothes to get help. This was one of the longest human survival accounts in history and was later made into the book Miracle in the Andes and then into the movie Alive. As a result of Nando’s efforts 16 people were rescued after 72 days in the Andes. Nando is an exceptional human being whose philosophy can be boiled down into two of the quotes given in his presentation: “I fought so hard for life that I decided to have a life” & “life is success.” Nando’s presentation simply put things into perspective for a world sorely lacking perspective. Bravo Nando…

The Leaders talk on Day 1 of the World Business Forum 2010

By Mike Myatt

I had several requests for a detailed breakdown of my observations on the first day of the World Business Forum – careful what you wish for. Day one of the conference was headlined by a highly esteemed group of speakers who didn’t give me nearly what I had hoped for – While there were a few shining stars, and some great sound bites, I wasn’t challenged nearly as much as I hoped to be. There was a lot more common thinking than critical, innovative thinking. I have live video above, and in the text that follows I’ll share my opinions on the best and the worst of WBF Day 1…

How To Stay Focused On What’s Important

Remember, Time is a greedy player who wins without cheating, every round! It’s the law. — The Clock – Charles Baudelaire

Focus on getting things done faster

One of the biggest challenges small businesses face is time – there’s never enough to get it all done.

In fact, I often advise businesses to create and promote features that save time and make use more convenient over any other when marketing to small businesses.

As a business owner one of the things that robs you of your time is lack of focus. It is so easy to get distracted by the thing that is calling the loudest, no matter if it’s the thing you really need to do today.

If throughout the day you have a finite amount of time and an infinite list of things on your plate, then it’s crucial that you develop a habit of focusing on the most important things on that list on a consistent basis.

Here are some tips by John Jantsch for staying focused and getting the right things done.

Students: You may not be Mark Zuckerburg, so stay in school!

By Vivek Wadhwa, Guest writer at TechCrunch

Instead of another boring lecture, last week my students at UC-Berkeley got quite a treat: a lively discussion with TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington. I once described Mike as a cross between Oprah Winfrey and Howard Stern; so I was ready for a little controversy. But he ended up lighting such a big fire, that I’ve been bombarded with questions from students about their education and careers. The questions aren’t just coming from Berkeley; after the discussion was posted on TechCrunch, students at Duke asked me to discuss this at a keynote I am giving at their entrepreneurship symposium on Wednesday; and students at other schools, from as far as India and Singapore, have asked for advice.  So I’ll just respond here in the hope of quenching this fire.

The 7 Habits of Highly Innovative People

Its been an unending venture to find out what actually makes a person innovative. Some speak about how leaders communicate and inspire, the passion for work, the insight they have on the market etc. However, I believe that these following habits are quite common among most innovators. If you wish to be an innovator, I would simply suggest to learn yourself well and blend into your favorite environment.

Habit 1: Be Passionate. Finding your passion is not only the key to happiness, but also the key to business success. As Steve Jobs once said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.” (Be Proactive)

Habit 2: Do Something. You don’t always know where it’s going to lead, but it’s always better to do something than to suffer analysis paralysis. Legendary oil-man and entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens has a way of quickly sizing up a situation, coming up with a plan, and acting. There’s no sitting around or endless analysis and debate. It seems to have worked for him. (Begin with the End in Mind)

Habit 3: Put First Things First, Second, and Third. Covey says prioritize, but I’ll take it one step further. Whoever said, “don’t sweat the small stuff,” was right, and I’ll add, “don’t do or even think about the small stuff.” Every successful innovative person I know jumps on hot opportunities and critical issues like they’re the only things that matter on god’s green Earth. (Put First Things First)

Ideas and Intellectual Property – The New Product?

by Jeffrey Phillips

As my final sally into the intellectual capital topics introduced by Mary Adams in her book Intangible Capital I wanted to respond to one other question that Mary posed. She asked:

“What’s the relationship between innovation and intangible capital?

My answer to that is to paraphrase Keynes by saying we’re all innovators in the long run.

In today’s economy every business is an idea business. Think about it carefully. Is there a business you can think of that isn’t constantly trying to improve its operations, cut costs, increase market share? From the most automated manufacturer to the firms that make a living spitting out ideas for other firms, every firm is in the idea business. It’s simply a matter of how the ideas are used. In many firms that would scoff at the concept that they are idea businesses, the focus of idea generation is on improving productivity and efficiency. Yes, firms that use concepts like Lean and Six Sigma are generating and applying new ideas – they may not consider themselves “innovative”, but the ideas they generate are meant to improve the bottom line or the top line. Firms that have specific innovation functions are clearly generating ideas to differentiate, disrupt other markets or create organic growth. Firms that have deep R&D skills are creating ideas to add depth to intellectual property, patents and trade secrets, which adds value to the firm. Service industries that generate ideas to radically improve customer experience are generating ideas to differentiate in a completely different space, but those ideas are no less important or valuable.

Redefining Failure

by Seth Godin

We think we know what failure looks like. Products don’t get purchased. Reorganizations make things worse. Shipments aren’t delivered. Speeches don’t get applauded. Things explode. These are the emergencies and disasters that we have nightmares about.

We think that failure is the opposite of success, and we optimize our organizations to avoid it. We install layers and layers of management to eliminate risk and prevent catastrophes. One surefire way we’ve found to avoid failing is to narrowly define what failure is—in other words, to treat almost everything that happens as a nonfailure. If the outcome of our efforts isn’t a failure, there’s no need to panic, is there? Failure creates urgency. Failure gets you fired. Failure cannot stand; it demands a response. But the status quo is simply embraced and, incredibly, protected.

Given our strong cultural bias against failure, this probably won’t win me any fans, but I think we have no choice but to aggressively redefine the concept to include far more outcomes than our current definition does.

Every day, there’s a line (sometimes 10 minutes long) to use the ladies’ room at Grand Central in New York. This is a failure. It’s a failure of design, of gender relations, and of resources. Because it’s not currently treated as a failure, it doesn’t get addressed. We’re fine with the status quo.

The Power of Ignorance

If desperation is the mother of innovation, then ignorance might be its father. In the early stages of a company, being protected from external influences can be a powerful stimulant for creativity and innovation. Why? For the same reason that we often see some of the most creative and entrepreneurial insights coming from younger people. Wisdom and experience help to grow and sustain a company, but generating novel ideas requires a certain amount of naïveté. In the context of entrepreneurship and idea generation, ignorance equals open-mindedness. An empty mind is an open one — it is empty of bias, empty of past experience, and empty of external critique.

Being unencumbered by external opinions allows two critical entrepreneurial traits to thrive: creativity and conviction. The former is most important during the early think-big stages of a company, and the latter is vital to mobilizing the team to execute with excellence.

Richard Branson: Five Secrets to Business Success

I am often asked if I have found a secret – or at least a consistent answer – to successfully building businesses over my career.

So I’ve spent some time thinking about what characterizes so many of Virgin’s successful ventures and, importantly, what went wrong when we did not get it right. Reflecting across 40 years I have come up with five “secrets.”

No. 1: Enjoy What You Are Doing.

Because starting a business is a huge amount of hard work, requiring a great deal of time, you had better enjoy it. When I started Virgin from a basement flat in West London, I did not set out to build a business empire. I set out to create something I enjoyed that would pay the bills.

There was no great plan or strategy. The name itself was thought up on the hoof. One night some friends and I were chatting over a few drinks and decided to call our group Virgin, as we were all new to business. The name stuck and had a certain ring to it.