As some of you know I really dig fashion. It always seems to shock people when they are out with me that I am picking out the shoes people around me are wearing, or occasionally being overly critical of someone else’s outfit. I don’t even really know where this passion sprung from, possibly from growing up with my mother and my sister and all her friends. Lots of Vogue’s and Marie Claire’s around, and I guess I just soaked it up. Years later, now really, I discovered that I was incredibly influenced and moved by the world of fashion: by the dedication and artistry involved in haute couture, by the impenetrability of fashion, by its otherness. It’s such a distinct world, and over the past few years as I’ve met more and more people involved in that world, whether its working with small fashion lines, or occasionally dating a fashion editor, my interest was piqued. I don’t know why but fashion, both the personal (what i buy, how i dress, what i covet) and the impersonal (the world of fashion, the art and history, the intense scrutiny, the business) somehow redound on my own creativity. I get really inspired by it, so I finally thought I would officially join that community.

To that end, I started a fashion blog a few months ago, and decided to use Tumblr as the medium. I maintain several tumblr’s and one of the things I noticed was that the fashion and style contingent on Tumblr was very high. Maybe it is the ease with which people can share and re-share other peoples visual goodies, maybe its a community thing, but the fashion world has completely taken to Tumblr as a platform. That’s not to say there aren’t some high profile fashion sites and brands that aren’t down with Tumblr and have bigger budgets and technological knowhow to build something truly unique, but for a certain kind of influencer, a certain kind of aesthete, Tumblr was, and is, the way to go.

Up til now, my fashion blog has mostly included images and items that I’ve found personally captivating. But as is my wont, that usually isn’t enough and I like to dig deeper into the various worlds that I find myself interested in. It’s happened in the food world, it’s happened in the art world, and now, its happening in the fashion world. Once I survey an industry, gathering intelligence for a period of time, I’ve gotten quite good at unearthing the critical touchpoints, the fulcrums if you will: those areas where the business, creativity and passion all seem to come together.

One of the easiest ways to do that is to find people on the front lines. I’ve often found, probably due to my experience with my mother and her retail operation, that retailers in any industry are great sources of knowledge. They have to be for a number of reasons, foremost being that their livelihoods depend on them being as knowledgable and up to date as possible with the goings-on in their industry. On top of that, it is often shopkeepers that have the most passion, dedicating their lives to helping others dress well. This is true across many industries.

Anyway, I recently interviewed a series of mens retailers around the country and will be sharing those interviews over on my Tumblr: Here is an excerpt from the first interview I conducted with Darren Gold of Alpha, a men’s store in West Hollywood helping discover new brands and unabashedly staking a claim in the world of men’s fashion. Here is an excerpt:

What brands or lines do you feel are absolutely essential right now?

Riviera Club, Gitman Brothers, Life After Denim, Onia, Copy, Original Paperbacks, Splendid Mills. I’ve made a real switch lately to some smaller brands that have it going on as opposed to the usual suspects that can be found at every men’s store and are in GQ every single month.  I love the element of discovery.

Any brands that you’ve discovered that you believe deserve more attention? Why?

Publish, a local LA brand that started as more of an action sports line, but is so fashion sometimes I think he is way ahead of the curve!

What is one trend in men’s fashion you could do without?

Plaid.  Done and Done.  But it’s not going away.  When I shopped for Fall I couldn’t believe how much of it was still being shown.  Companies that had only done T-shirts before were showing plaid wovens to jump on the band wagon.  I think my customer is way over it.

You can read the rest of the interview here

The Unknown Tension

What can you get away with not knowing? Even asking this question sounds a little dangerous. We are taught to soak up as much information as possible and synthesize it into a workable understanding of the world around us. Especially in business, it can be downright irresponsible to NOT know certain things. Imagine a business owner who actually doesn’t have a good handle on what they are actually earning. Scary, but it happens all the time.

Now of course I am not suggesting that you should not pay attention to your P & L whether as a business owner or responsible citizen who doesn’t want to end up in debt. But I do think there are things that we just simply don’t need to know. Especially if you are working with a team.

Right now I am figuring out exactly what I need to know, and what I can just forget about. This after a long long stretch of time when I felt the overarching requirement to be read up on almost everything that was going on: in my personal life, in my business life and in the lives of the people around me.

This isn’t about information overload, which is a topic that lots of people write about every day; how to survive with all the streams of information begging for our attention, how to deal with that overflowing inbox, how to capture business that you are allowing to get away from you.

This is about getting comfortable with the idea that you don’t need to know what you think you need to know.

So What Don’t You Need to Know?

We already know what we don’t need to know. It is right there staring us in the face like a sharp dagger. We just aren’t capable of giving up the control. But it isn’t control. It is the idea of control.

Here are some of the things that I don’t need to know, even though to be honest, I really want to know them.

1. That when things get done, we don’t need to know HOW. Whether the work is done by partners, or associates or family members, when it is done it is done. The need to understand the how and why and who and where? It is extraneous and not worth the effort. Live with the product not the process.

We often want to, and we convince ourselves that it is important that we understand process but in the end, we don’t need to know. If it is done, it is done. All that energy spent on wondering how it got so, well that is for the birds. So leave it.

2. We don’t need to know the future. As long as fortune telling remains an obscure act of skulduggery, the future cannot be known.

How often do you think about where it is all going? Now how often is that thinking anxiety-laden? Most of it right?

• Will we have enough money?
• Will we be happy?
• Will we be healthy?
• What friends will we have?
• What relationships will we be in?
• What is the future of my business or career?

Start to understand that your handle on your life is tenuous at best. Start to contemplate how nice it will be when you acknowledge what you can’t know. Give up on that perception of understanding and control, it is fake anyway.

Start to expand what you can’t know.

Image courtesy of realSMILEY on Flickr

Two divergent forces at work in our culture today have recently been drawing my attention. The first is the social media revolution that has at its core the ability for millions of citizens the world over to express themselves and find their native communities. Unfortunately, the second force I have in mind is almost the exact polar opposite of this first trend. And that is the consolidation and revanchist behavior of many large institutions including government, quasi-government (think the UN) and multinational corporations. These institutions are only growing in size and power relative to individuals and yet because of social media we are fooled into thinking its not happening, that we have a voice, that our concerns and desires are being taken into consideration.

They aren’t.

It shouldn’t be surprising at all really to know that at the precise moment when the citizenry of this country, and the world, were given the tools to flatten society, the institutions that would suck that power from them are slowly consolidating their own power.

Has anyone witnessed the growth of the government in the U.S. lately and thought to themselves, “that’s ok, because I can speak truth to power on my blog and through my Twitter feed?”

Has anyone seen the massive lobbying efforts by the most toxic industries (energy, healthcare, banking, military contracting) and thought that the rules and regulations being inserted into thousand page bills could be reversed by a Facebook group?

Check out this particular heinous example from the Times:

In a remarkable season of lobbying, business is booming for the Podesta Group, already one of Washington’s biggest players. It has become particularly lucrative for firms like Mr. Podesta’s that are skilled at wielding influence in Congress, the center of epic debates on health care, bailouts and financial regulations.

On the eve of a critical Congressional vote last week on the sweeping financial regulation, for example, Mr. Podesta met with one of the lawmakers to go over some final language and discuss the effect it could have on his many corporate clients.

Once that was over, Mr. Podesta pivoted back to another client, BP, to help the company navigate Congressional waters and, in short, try to prevent an ugly situation from getting even uglier.

For lobbyists, the Obama legislative agenda has been a veritable full-employment program, with 2,500 working just on financial regulation alone.

The results are often buried deep in the fine print.

Social media has done so much to empower so many in our society: individuals, small businesses, local government, activists and grassroots communities. But social media also means that while all these groups are busy tweeting and blogging and sharing their lives and loves and passions and concerns, the wool is once again being pulled over our eyes. We may tweet at Pepsi that their Pepsi Refresh campaign is pathetic and that no matter how much money they give back they are poisoning our bodies with their chemical-dependent sugar water. But they aren’t listening. Are they about to change their entire business? Nope. No matter how toxic their products are to their own customers and the environment.

What is my solution then? I don’t have one, other than to simply say pay attention, and don’t let your own increased importance blind you to the fact that so much of our society is not changing along with us. For many of the worst offenders, those entities that would leech our power as citizens away from us in the name of profits and shareholder value, the social media revolution is nothing but a gnat flying about their faces, ready to be swatted away while they get back down to business.

Image courtesy of Juliana Coutinho on Flickr

It’s been awhile here. 2 weeks since my last blog post. How many blog posts have you read where the blogger was apologizing for not blogging more frequently, for neglecting his blog?

Well, this isn’t one of those blog posts. I am most decidedly NOT sorry for being gone so long. I am most decidedly thrilled even, to have taken a bit of break. It wasn’t planned, but it was necessary. The truth is I am expanding, my business has spiked beyond what I can handle and I’ve decided to bring in some employees.

For the past 10 months or so, I’ve been very slowly building my business, my base of clients. I’ve been working on-site with all sorts of small businesses and new brands. Restaurants, financial advisors, psychotherapists, fashion houses, art galleries, musical acts. I’ve pitched and pitched and pitched. I’ve evolved my strategies, taking out the fluff, and boiling down my services to exactly what my clients need.

Whereas once I used to talk about what social media can do for you and your business, it’s become more about how social media can achieve YOUR goals. It is both a subtle and enormous shift in thinking.

So, what’s next?

The next few months are going to be interesting. Eventful to say the least. I’ll be working with someone new, under the current umbrella at first, and then, if things go right, we’ll be launching a new firm together. And that company is going to look and feel a lot different. Because this person and I, and we’ve been talking for many months now about what a new firm might look like. What our responsibilities would be like, where our individual strengths lie, and our weaknesses. This person is much smarter than I am, and more driven. It is going to be an interesting match. We very well might conquer the world.

It is going to feel different as well.

10 months ago I started a journey, I founded a company with no idea whether there was a business to be had. Whether I could thrive or even survive in a world I knew very little about. 10 months ago, I started something that is now the chief passion of my life. Sure, I’m still writing essays all over the internet, and doing cool art projects, and I am still collaborating with artists and musicians who inspire me. And I still talk talk talk, to anyone and everyone. But what was an experiment has now proceeded to full level testing. We are getting our approvals to go out to the world and shake things up.

The only difference now is that I am BUSY. Good busy. So, no I am not sorry for not blogging lately. Because this little break is exactly what I needed to do for the given time. Things are good, things are going to get better. It is going to be exciting and I am certainly going to turn the ambition notch up a level. Because there is room for it. There is room for me to change things, to change people, to work on some very exciting projects with people and firms that I believe in.

Image courtesy of MShades on Flickr

Everyone seems to think that social media is a great leap forward. The collective unconscious now brims with the wisdom that social media is a keystone, marking a new dawn whereby the marriage of technology, personal expression, business necessity and community will finally flower, unimpeded by the forces of reaction.

The first internet boom saw day-trading grandmothers and pimple-faced millionaires. The second internet boom–the social media boom–promises higher ideals than an entire nation getting fake-rich quick. This boom is the real one. The one where everyone gets what they want.

• Businesses get their customers
• Brands get their “equity”
• Bloggers get their readers
• Politicians get their legislation
• Journalists get their story
• Marketers do whatever it is marketers do (I’m still fuzzy on this one)

OK so perhaps the world won’t be so perfect as all that. But I do think that there is one major misconception with the above conjecture. Social media is less a giant leap forward than a calculated step back.

A step back

• in rebuilding personal relationships
• in solidifying the frayed ties that bind our communities
• in reconnecting businesses with their customers
• in reclaiming our democracy
• in controlling more of our own lives

One of the earliest memories of I have of total and complete powerlessness was in the mid to late 90′s and, of course, it involves a cable company. (I could easily have told you a story about childhood, which in many ways is defined by powerlessness, but its not relevant here) At the time, and to this day, Time Warner Cable of New York was the primary cable company in Manhattan. You simply didn’t have a choice. You could either live without cable, or you signed up and submitted yourself to all manner of indignities. Terrible and nearly non existent customer service, ridiculous wait times, incompetent technical support, inflated bills, etc..

I remember being without cable, and for a near-total introvert, video-game, TV and movie-addicted adolescent, there was no more sheer torture than the cable going out. And Time Warner thought so little of their customers, and many would argue still don’t, that they had clearly calculated that they could invest as little in possible in fixing their customer’s problems, without it ever getting out. All those lit up households in New York City, all those people sitting on their couch’s decompressing from their whirlwind days, seemingly disconnected from one another, unaware of the trials and tribulations present in the next apartment building over. And here I was, a single soul in a sea of humanity, and my pain was mine alone. I could not and did not share it with anyone. The only entity I could share it with was…Time Warner Cable. And they didn’t care.

I first realized the power of social media when I realized that people were expressing their frustrations, looking for lifelines, looking for support for the pain they felt or the problems they perceived. We used to have those support systems. Our society, the entire Western World was built on community. On their being steam valves so that people didn’t literally tear each other apart.

Robert Putnam called this “social capital” in his landmark book, “Bowling Alone.” Bear in mind that the book was published in the year 2000 when reading this quote:

Putnam draws on evidence including nearly 500,000 interviews over the last quarter century to show that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We’re even bowling alone.

And yet, every time our nation has faced this exact predicament, we’ve had a restoration. We’ve had a period of intense civic engagement that has reset the all important cultural institutions that bind us to one another. In short, we now know who else is suffering from our lack of cable TV. And as silly as that sounds, when you know you aren’t the only one who is without TV tonight, or who feels intimidated by a telecommunications company, or whose complaints and letters to their Senator or Congressman go unanswered, or a thousand other ways in which the people of this nation have allowed themselves to be abused, it is connective. It is the connective tissue of our society to be able to bitch and moan in unison. Because a community that complains is also one that celebrates.

Right now I think its clear that Americans have been abused. That we’ve allowed ourselves to be abused with our apathy, and our disinterestedness and our unwillingness to keep our communities strong. Or even to know what our communities are and where they might be found. But don’t get me wrong, this isn’t some naive call to action. I’m far too old (turning 30 next month) to blindly believe that all our ills can be cleverly managed.

All I am saying to you now is that social media doesn’t need to be some great leap forward in human progress. It doesn’t need to be a fad, a trend, a bubble. It can, should and WILL be something far more important. It will be the force that reconnects our lives, our cities and towns, our culture as a whole, to the things that really matter. Each other.

If it wasn’t already clear, I don’t really believe in the traditional conception of careers and professions. I don’t think that humans were made to do just one thing, for a long time, over and over. Isn’t that what our conception of a career is? You enter an industry, you join a firm and what you hope for is to advance in that industry, slowly accruing more experience, respect, financial rewards and stability. This was the ideal of the Post-War era. It is what led to the amazing growth of the middle-class in America, allowing us to prosper as no other nation or society has ever prospered before.

That ideal is now breaking down. The reasons are as varied as: The loss of traditional manufacturing jobs and outsourcing, the growth of a knowledge and service economy, the financial engineering of large corporations that prioritizes cost-cutting among other factors. But I think the unwritten reason for the breakdown of the traditional professional career ideal is that we have evolved. We’ve evolved to the point where we know that what makes people happy is not to do one thing, but to do many things.

One of the reasons I left my career in the financial world was because I couldn’t imagine my life where 2/3 of my time was spent behind a coterie of blinking computer screens. No matter what the financial rewards would have been, I knew it wouldn’t be enough for me, and that before long I’d be regretting my career choice. But what I also noticed was not that I was just in the wrong profession, but that any profession that required most of my time, would not be ideal.

Now imagine how lost I felt in a country that prizes financial success above everything.

I guess I’ve got this feeling that the 21st Century is opening so many new doors to people, that, well, we won’t need to focus all our energies on just one specific profession. Now of course, the criticism of this is that when you don’t have just one thing, you end up making less money. For now, I think that is true. But I also think that is preferable. Especially coming off the crisis of confidence that our current system just spasmed through, frankly, I am happy to make less money doing the things I want to do. Because although my bank account won’t reflect it, I’ll be a happy and healthier person for it and money won’t be the only determinant with which I judge, and allow others to judge, my life.

Not gonna be easy, but in interest of continuing to provide a peek into my own life, lets review some of the “hats” that I wear.

1. I run a boutique consulting firm. I spend about half of my time on this part of my life. About 20 hours a week. If the need arises, I can always scale up those hours for the right kind of compensation or if a client comes along that really suits what I want to do. Those 20 hours include weekly client meetings, strategizing, monitoring campaigns, business development and responding to RFP’s.

2. I write! Book, film, music and art reviews, usually for publication on my own blog, although I love guest posting on other blogs (and getting myself in front of audiences different than my own) and just recently I’ve begun writing articles for a pretty cool magazine. Most of the time this writing is unpaid, though I have been compensated in the past, and will be in the future as I continue to do this kind of thing. You see, I write because I love to and because I need to. Not because I expect to get paid for it. Or because I need to. I think the best writing comes when it is done not out of financial necessity, but out of creative and spiritual necessity. And writing is the best thing I can to sharpen my skills for my consulting business.

3. Collaborator, Eater, Friend, Dilettante

I work on fun projects, I eat at lots of good restaurants. I spend a lot of time with my friends, and I get to indulge all my interests. If I want to take a morning off and go to a movie, I do it. If I feel like biking around New York City on a beautiful summer day, I do it. This, I am convinced, is the right way to run life. And yet I am always fighting off the feeling that somehow I am being naive. That I won’t grow up, that because I like to do lots of things, that I won’t have one thing that will provide balance or stability throughout my life, that I won’t ever earn enough money to support myself, a family, a retirement. Honestly? I’ll figure all that stuff out as it comes. I don’t believe in coldly calculating my way through life. Call me reckless if you will, the truth is I’ve been called a lot worse.

I think I realized long ago that, just as I could not follow my path in the financial sector, I could not expect to pursue a career in journalism or creative writing full bore. No, that wouldn’t do at all. Not only is it impossible to make a living this way, it just doesn’t suit me. Perhaps there will come a time when it will, when I will want to wake up and just do one thing and only one thing and I’ll want to do that one thing so well that I will expend as much energy as I have at achieving success however it should be defined at that time.

But that time is certainly not now, and with all the opportunities open to me, and to all of us, I just can’t operate with a single goal in mind. There may come a time when I want to go full-bore on a project. For instance, startups interest me greatly and the thought of building something that can effect culture, that can change people’s lives interests me greatly. For that reason, the entrepreneurs I meet are really my heroes. The guys and gals behind firms like Twitter and Foursquare, basically the entire company at Google, and hundreds of more firms and operations that I simply respect.

But the time is not quite right for me to do that kind of thing. And for now, I am happy to wear a lot of hats. I’ve got the space in my closet anyhow.

Image courtesy of Theodore Scott on Flickr

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What color is your social media mood ring?

Mine is ocher, going on brown. Let me explain.

Social media is starting to get a bit on my nerves. Of course, its perfectly normal that every now and then we get a bit exhausted with our habits. And as I come upon nearly a year of being fully engaged with social media in an analytic way, I’ve got to confess to a bit of exhaustion with it all. And by “analytic” I simply mean that the way I engage and think about social media is different than most people because it is also my business. I make my living with social media. Of course, it could be my mood and sure enough, tomorrow morning I’ll wake up, check the 100 or so emails in my inbox, begin heavily caffeinating and doing it all over again. I’ve got work to do and clients to service. I take that very seriously and that isn’t going anywhere.

But as a user of social media, I am just a bit tired of it all. So I made a list:

• I am tired of checking in on Foursquare.
• I am tired of downloading Google Analytic spreadsheets.
• I am tired of checking follower counts on Twitter.
• I am tired of scanning Tweetdeck looking for the good conversations.
• I am tired of ignoring friend requests from Facebook friends I don’t know.
• I am tired of staring at my RSS feeds and wondering where all the good content is.
• I am done with stumbling, digging, bookmarking, scheduling and monitoring.
• I barely interact with Facebook at all.

What does all this mean?

Not sure yet, and actually the interesting thing for me is deciding if whether what I am feeling is something that the broader culture will begin to feel sometime soon. I am not saying social media is going away, or that its not useful or powerful, or that businesses and brands shouldn’t be engaging and experimenting with it. I believe they should and furthermore I plan for a time when we don’t even use the term social media anymore.

But what I do have to plan for is how my current and future clients need to roll my internal barometer about social media into their own plans. What does this mean for them? Not sure yet, but perhaps it will result in urging clients to move a bit more slowly or to pare down the number of networks and communities they join and engage. Maybe this is all about finding quality. We had to see it all before we could know, once again, what we had no interest in seeing ever again.

So a simple question to my readers. What color is your social media mood ring?

Image Courtest of Team Dalog on Flickr

What are you putting out into the world today? What are your plans for injecting society with a bit of yourself tomorrow and the next day?

Right now, at precisely the time when so many people are struggling, is the time to be giving something extra. In New Orleans, where I lived for many years, they had a name for this: Lagniappe. A little something extra, free of charge. In many ways, Lagniappe is the antithesis of New York, where everything has a firm price. We structure our lives here in New York around what we can and cannot afford. 2 Bedroom on the Upper West? It’s 2 million to even begin the discussion. And you know what they say! If you have to ask…

But it occurs to me that this forced rationing and reasoning that goes on in so much of our lives leaves out the things that cannot be calculated. What does a gift really cost you? And what do you get in return?

Look, I am not talking about karmic reputation or being mindlessly sacrificial because you have nothing else to do. And I am not talking about mentoring or volunteering. What I am talking about is giving something valuable away. Something that actually costs you something.

As long as I am an independent consultant, the most important commodity I possess is time. Time is money and as difficult as it is to earn a living for myself, not a week goes by that I am given the opportunity to give my time away to someone. Sometimes it is just an hour, sometimes its three weeks. And when I give that time away it means I have less to pitch new clients, to service as well as I would like my existing ones. But give it away I must.

And don’t get me wrong. It’s a struggle. Often the person or company I have to help is way down on my list. Someone or something I simply don’t want to deal with. Something that I anticipate will be, frankly, a pain in the ass. Someone who wants my help but won’t listen to it. Yes even that.

It seems silly to engage in this. But what I know is that I have the opportunity to shake up someone or some business’ life. I can rattle them. I can start the process of shaking them loose from the bonds and strictures that are hampering them from doing as well as they can, however they describe that. Because of our conditioning, for most people this comes down to how much money they are making. Everyone wants more. More More More More.

But I don’t think that is what they are really after. I think that is the only way they know how to express something they cannot articulate. By engaging them, the only thing that I can ever hope to achieve, since I ain’t getting paid!, is that I might provide them an introduction to a new vocabulary to think and talk about their lives and business with themselves. I won’t be around to see what happens whether. Whether I have an effect or not.

These are the gifts that I am giving. Every day, every week, every month. I am a few months shy of being in business for an entire year. It’s been the most instructive year of my life, because I am doing, everything is on me. And if I have learned one thing throughout this year, it is that you have to keep giving. Not because you get anything in return. Sometimes you simply don’t. But you have to keep giving, constantly, because it is the only way to shake up our measurement system for how we value our own lives. Screw with the formulas you’ve been taught. They are not as reasonable and rational as you believe them to be.

You want a takeaway?

Figure out what the most valuable thing you have to give away, and then make a plan for how you are going to start giving it away. Not all of it. Just some of it.

Image Courtestyof MarcinMoga / Lolek on Flickr

Yesterday, we talked about the disruptive forces that are the barbarians at the gates of your business. These disruptive forces come in the guise of technology, financial utopianism, the demands of human resources and the changed nature of customer relations. But every time I criticize something, I make a pledge to offer solutions. So in the interest of at least trying to pay lip service to my promises, consider this the opening salvo in a new direction here at ZAC.

How To Think Differently About Competition

Competitive forces keep business owners awake at night, and on-edge throughout the day. Every customer or potential customer I talk to worries about their competition. But they are missing the point. There is no competition anymore. At least not in the way that we’ve all been trained to think of competition. Zero Sum competition is over. They Win, I Lose, I Win, They Lose? That is over. That is the 20th century in all its failed beauty and simplicity. It is easier to think of things that way. But its lazy and it doesn’t begin to even imagine a world where you are succeeding. Because even if you win at that game, you are still losing in the long run, chasing client after client in a nihilistic merry go round of silent suspicion. Is this the best that I can do? Is this what I wanted when I went into business? Is this how I want my legacy to look?

How To Think Differently About Planning

The fault lines have been exposed in business. On that side of the trench is pre-recessionary America. A time of gaudy consumerism, ironic detachment, faux-sophistication and bold, naked branding for branding’s sake. On that side of the trench was business that so wrapped up in growth that it forget to ask what it was growing into. Was it growing into something worthwhile? Was it growing into something that you would be proud of?

On this side of the fault line lies a world where all of these questions need to be confronted now, before you even begin to map out the next ten years of your life, of your business. Where will you be in ten years? Where will your business be? And your industry? What about the community of which you are a part? Do you think about what your community needs? What are you doing to see that it gets it?

If you are like every other business owner I know then you aren’t planning for a future you want. You are planning only for the future you think lies before you. But right now all the rules are being rewritten. They are being rewritten with or without your participation. And what your industry, what your community needs right now is for you to pick up the pen and join in the process of that rule making. It’s like we are sitting in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776. The convention is in session, the delegates are all here. And just like that historic summer, no one knows what is going to come out of this. All they know is that the British are coming. The future is here, is now. And the only responsible thing to do is to step up to the plate and put the pen to paper.

What kind of planning will you need? What kind of costs are associated with them? Is your current line of thinking incorporating the next great disruption?

How To Think Differently About Staffing and Human Resources

What kind of employees do you want with you? Are they the ones that you have? What are you doing to ensure you have the help that you need?

Most business owners refuse to learn this lesson. All they wonder about is how much are they going to cost. Thinking like this boils the most important elements of your business into an equation. This isn’t a formula for success. It’s just a formula. Stay away from the reasonable and the rational. Is that the world we live in? Is business reasonable and rational? Are politics? Is the weather?

When you boil staffing and human resources down into a discussion of money, you are automatically short changing yourself. You are forgetting to calculate the incalculable. How much does it cost for someone to anticipate what my business might need before I do? What is the cost of someone who grew up in a culture where technology wasn’t just present, but was essential to their everyday lives? How differently does that mindset work than your own?

You want to have a different business for yourself? You want to build something lasting and sustainable, something that you can be proud of? Then you are going to have to challenge all the assumptions you’ve built that business on. The assumptions of the last generation are broken. You can still get by with them, but that is all you’ll be doing, getting by. You wont, most decidedly, be succeeding.

Next up for tomorrow is sustainability and profits. These are the elements that if you get right can shepherd your business. Get these right, and you’ll be on track to streamline everything else.

Image Source Courtesy of Howdy, I’m H. Michael Karshis on Flickr

Hi! How are you? What’s new? How are things? OK yeah! That’s all great. Guess what though?

Everything you know about your business is about to change

If you are lucky and smart, then you are probably already aware of it. You have intelligence on the changes in your industry and you know all too well what doesn’t work in your business. You know where the soft underbelly of your business is. Maybe its keeping talented staff on board when paying good people to stick around means getting less for yourself? Maybe where once overseas producers helped you increase your profit margins but are now shifting their strategies by competing directly with you? Maybe your simply paralyzed by the amount of change you know you need. This last one is particularly common.

The 21st Century way of doing is business is here, and whether or not you are ready for it, if you are running a business, almost everything you know or any assumptions you’ve made along the way have to be recalibrated. It is shocking to me to see how many industries feel they are immune to this. How many 20th Century industries need to be disrupted until you realize that you are next?

I talk to business owners day in and day out. They all know they need to change, they can all sense that tinge in the air that tells them the paradigms are shifting. They want to do better. They want to move beyond spreadsheets and profits. They want to rebuild the relationship between themselves and their customers. And yet they just can’t. Can’t What?

They can’t plan, prepare, process

This is because everyone is stuck on stupid. All they want to do is go back to that wonderful time before the recession tsunami tumbled in and washed away their profits, the wealth and behavior of their customers and the rest of what they knew. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it presupposes that the Pre-Recessionary America is a place we want to go back to. But is it? Do we really only wish to a return to a time marked by ostentation, mindless consumption and financial utopianism? Or do we want to instead build something new and better? Don’t you want to build a business that  can weather the financial dislocations of the future? When will the next one be? In 5 years? In 10?

What if it were tomorrow? What if tomorrow you woke up and your industry was rocked by a scandal. Or a new invention that streamlined your production? Or new governmental regulation? We like to believe that we can only handle so much unexpected unfairness. No one expected the recession to rock America (and indeed the world) in the way that it eventually did. So business owners expect things to just magically get better. Because they’ve already experienced the pain. They can’t possibly be in for anymore.

This is the kind of ego-centric that ends up destroying business once and for all. You are not immune. Your business is not immune. If you are in pain, prepare for more. Instead of believing yourself to be immune, and why not probe your immune system and figure out how to strengthen it?

Tomorrow, I am going to show you how thinking differently about your business, about competition, about planning, about sustainability, about technology, about staffing and about yourself can lead you to CREATE the world you want, not return to one that wasn’t working in the first place.

Image Source Courtesy of Waifer X on Flickr