Entreprenurial
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The Value in Wowing Your Customers - Fred Reichheld - Harvard Business Review
A friend of mine in Dallas loves the local Chick-fil-A restaurant. The reason? An employee named Jose once asked my friend's three-year-old to help with the mopping — and proceeded to give the boy a ride around the restaurant on the mop. For my friend, this was a "wow!" experience , the kind of out-of-the-ordinary event that you want to tell people about — and that inspires you to recommend the business that provided it.
Lola Olley: Work Experience Revisited
There's something to be said of those who go a bit unconventional and jump off that traditional corporate employee path. What makes a person leave something familiar to go to something uncertain? How many people are actually employed doing something they feel like they were born to do? How many people with plans to execute business ideas actually do so? How many people are actually following their dream and would the world be a better place if more of us did so?
The 6 Near-Fatal Mistakes We Made In Year One, And How We Built A Company Anyway | Fast Company
Launching a startup is like firing off a rocket ship, then trying to hold it together with duct tape. Simply surviving feels like success. The goal, in fact, of most new enterprises is to hang in until a scalable, repeatable, or comfortable path is found. Celebrated entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen calls this “product/market” fit .
Use new school, digital means to initiate contact with the groups and individuals you're interested in approaching before tackling the in-person encounter. Networking doesn't have to feel like a sale. Or an awkwardly ostentatious forum for egotistical schmoozing and one-upmanship. Networking should feel more like socializing—finding common interests and then sharing ideas and solutions to problems—especially in Portland's diverse but cooperative small business culture. So-called networking "events" shouldn't even necessarily be formal affairs or paid conferences, but rather a real, honest encounter where you can develop professional collaboration or even a friendship .
How Small Business Owners Should Be Networking | Neighborhood Notes
Five Lessons To Do What You Love...And Succeed | Fast Company
Entrepreneurs come from all over the world, but most share an innate passion for questioning the constraints of ideology and discipline, and identifying practical solutions to problems by combining ingenuity, resourcefulness, and dogged determination. You Never Know Where a Good Idea Is Going to Come From. I'm fascinated by the different types of people I meet in the world and the way their personalities show in what they do. People with passion, energy, ideas, and an unquenchable thirst for life inspire me the most.
9 Steps To Quitting Your “Have To Have" Job And Pursuing Your Dream | Fast Company
This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert's views alone. Fast Company wants you to have your best year yet in 2012; click for more advice and tips on how to work smarter, manage your career, and lead a more meaningful life. How many of us have dreamed of leaving our current jobs to do what we really want to do? And yet, not many of us have actually left the safety of what we do daily unless forced out by layoffs and downsizing. I’d like to share the concrete steps you need to take before you make your move.There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there’s a third team, the linchpins. These people invent, lead (regardless of title), connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.
10 Books Every Entrepreneur Must Read From 2010 | Under30CEO
Helping Intrapreneurs Break Free Of The Sustainability "Ghetto" | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation
We love stories of entrepreneurs who have defied convention to build new businesses. But change doesn’t just come from the outside. Some of the best ideas are developed by “intrapreneurs” at big, established companies.
Are jobs obsolete? - CNN.com
Editor's note: Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist and the author of "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age" and "Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take it Back." (CNN) -- The U.S. Postal Service appears to be the latest casualty in digital technology's slow but steady replacement of working humans. Unless an external source of funding comes in, the post office will have to scale back its operations drastically, or simply shut down altogether. That's 600,000 people who would be out of work, and another 480,000 pensioners facing an adjustment in terms. We can blame a right wing attempting to undermine labor, or a left wing trying to preserve unions in the face of government and corporate cutbacks.
Dr. Judith Rich: What to Do When You Don't Know What to Do Next (VIDEO)
Recently, I was asked to contribute a chapter for a book called "What To Do When You Don't Know What To Do", compiled by Tendai Jordan. Her topic is very timely and important, especially now, when we humans are facing change at such an extraordinary level and pace. We're often left overwhelmed, not knowing what to do next. When I query people in the personal development seminars I lead about their purpose for attending, a majority of participants respond with some variation on the following: Sound familiar?In 1974, Robert Pirsig—a Korean War veteran, a philosopher, a former writing instructor, a survivor of shock treatment, and, by all accounts, a talented author of technical manuals—published “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values.” It is a novel, but only barely (Pirsig didn’t bother to change the names of his friends), and it follows the narrator as he rides West with his young son, from Minneapolis to San Francisco. Readers hoping for advice about motorcycles, or about meditation, found something else entirely: picturesque anecdotes and ominous reveries, interrupted by dense seminars on the “self-defeating” nature of technophobia, the malignance of inferior workmanship, the “ugliness” of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics, and the importance of a quality called Quality. The book, gnomic but good-natured, eventually sold about five million copies, spurred on by some extraordinarily positive reviews.
Fast bikes, slow food, and the workplace wars : The New Yorker
Why Aren’t You Doing What You Love? | Everyday Bright
If you have a truly toxic job that causes you to question your sanity: be thankful. Eventually you’ll leave that job, either because your misery will help you find the courage, or the men in little white suits will come to take you to a pleasant little asylum. Lucky you.With a keen interest in the future of our global community, What Women Make showcases and celebrates the freshest, most original female designers, artists, and innovators (in technology, business, science and media) around the world along one or more of the following criteria: aesthetic excellence; cultural and social relevance; sustainable practices; problem solving; innovation that includes successful experimentation with new materials and methods; and last but not least, a sense of whimsy and playful originality.