Whom Does America Trust?

In a recent Pew survey (March 11-21, 2010), most Americans (71%) said they trusted small business. Almost the opposite was true for big business–64% did not trust them. And Banks? A mere 22% of us trusted them!

Congress was down there at the bottom, too, and Federal Government only rated a 25% positive rating.

I wonder what this says to you entrepreneurs?

You have everything going for you. But it is easy to lose a reputation, so you should guard it jealously, by setting and maintaining the highest ethical standards in all your transactions.

Vermont Benefit Corporation Act

The goal of for-profit companies is, naturally enough, to make profits.

Legislation has been introduced in Vermont that would allow companies to exist for other reasons — providing a social good for the community while returning gains to investors. Such companies would register as a “beneficial corporation.”

“This bill proposes to allow new and existing for-profit corporations to elect status as a for-benefit corporation with the purpose, among other things, of creating public benefit,” the proposed legislation says. The measure is called the Vermont Benefit Corporation Act. The bill views a public benefit as “a material positive impact on society and the environment, as measured by a third-party standard, through activities that promote some combination of specific public benefits.”

Other States that are discussing such legislation–much of it inspired by B Corporation thinking (WorkSavvy LLC is a founder BCorp) include California, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Colorado and Oregon.

Elizabeth Isele’s Blog, Savvy Seniors Work is dedicated to Seniors aged 60+ who have all the talent, skill, energy and experience they need to land the job of their dreams but who have crashed head-on into the Age Bias barrier.

Elizabeth is a social entrepreneur and based in Maine, provides insights, tools, and resources harvested from libraries and the web, as well as notes, reflections and tactics from others striving to get out of the trenches and over that barrier.

She says, “I have dedicated my life to making social change happen: helping individuals find their voices and celebrate their cultures; creating innovative programs for those living at the edges of society so that they could become more self-reliant and active participants in their communities; and building innovative cross-sector collaborations to maximize social impact.”

Her blog offers concise advice and is deceptively simple. She goes straight to the point and offers lots of links for those who want more, but the posts themselves offer super support to energetic and enthusiastic seniors who want to work. Apart from anything else, the blog’s fun to read and won’t keep you too long from the pressing business of the day.

Age is no barrier to adVenturing. Tom Lackey, 89, continued to embrace adventure late into life, in his case as a way past the grief of losing his wife to a heart attack 10 years ago.

Mr. Lackey took up wing-walking. Last summer, he strapped his feet to the top of a single-engine biplane, like the daredevils of aviation’s early days, and flew across the English Channel at 160 miles per hour, with nothing between him and the wild blue yonder but goggles and layers of clothing to fight the wind-chill.

As with adVenturing, business venturing is not something to stop with advancing years. I am far from alone in starting my latest venture at a mere 67. Recent data (GEM National Entrepreneurial Assessment for the USA. November 2009) shows that 8-9 per cent more people in the 45-98 age group started businesses by comparison with the year before.

Startups by veterans have the side benefit of keeping you young and vigorous, even if wing-walking is not your thing. You are likely to have the experience and wisdom not to be profligate with your energy.

Of course, you need to keep your neurogenesis going, by exercising your brain as well as your body, maintaining healthy lifestyle habits and and doing the necessary to revitalize your flagging immune system. Social intercourse – and the other – are part of it, too!

In the information age, presence in the minds of customers is becoming more important than being present physically. Access to goods and services can take place by many different means and through  multiple channels. Grabbing mindshare, or engendering repute and purveying knowledge has hence become critical to business success.

Mindshare, or seeking a share of the space available in someone’s head is like being heard over the cacophony of a busy Manhattan street. The message has to be striking; simple; brief; colorful; coherent.

Watch out for  creating ‘bam, and then it’s gone’ in the brain or body of the receiver. Avoid impact without a meaningful message. Communication sherbet only begets more stimulus with no call to respond. Visual or verbal bites are can be effective in claiming mindshare, but only if they carry meaning.

If we want attention value, then the mindshare we get has to stimulate action. The new media give us that opportunity, but the competition is severe. To get a finger to press the video game controller’s button requires a highly distilled message. It has to be the alcohol, not the fruit.

To overcome inherent sluggishness, the business has to

1. stay awake, finding ways to instill mindfulness
2. turn on a dime, responding to stimuli as a way of life
3. be human rather than institutional, allowing for frailty
4. create meaning, convincing participants of its reality
5. carry through constantly, ensuring that words and music match.

Google Caffeine is likely to be a major revision of the way that Google ranks web pages.

Google has not revealed the details of Google Caffeine yet. Rumor has it that the following factors may play a role.

Slow loading websites may not get high rankings; broken links may have a negative impact; a lot of links from known spammers will will probably be even worse than now; the new algorithm is likely to be concerned about the total quality of websites.

You will probably need good optimized content, good website design with a clear navigation, good inbound links, a low bounce rate, as now. Social bookmarks may also play an increased role. Factors like the age of a website, its past history, and authority will still play a role in Google’s new index.

Though Google’s Caffeine update is not yet released, there are some things that you can do to increase the chances that you will get good rankings, like:

• Remove all spam elements.
• Improve website design and make sure the navigation is clear.
• Get inbound links from social bookmark websites.
• Do not link to what look like spammers. Focus on quality links, rather than quantity.

There is now a huge amount of work going on in the field of sustainability innovation, but much of it is hidden behind closed doors and under the wraps of patents. Much of the work relates not to stuff that is tied to product features that obviously need protection, but to processes that can have wider benefit beyond company’s doors and gates.

GreenXchange is a means of facilitating sustainability innovation sharing in a controlled way, using the creative commons approach, using a platform for the creation and adoption of technologies that have the potential to solve important global or industry-wide challenges.

Nike and Creative Commons are calling upon other companies and stakeholders to bring the network efficiencies of open innovation to solving the problems of sustainability. GreenXchange will seek to bring together stakeholders in working groups to discuss strategies for advancing the commons by exploring ideas such as using patent pools, research non-assertions, and using technologies that support networked and community-based knowledge transfer and sharing.

Traditional collaboration is face-to-face. However, increasingly, modern collaboration, powered by the Web, is distributed. Examples of distributed collaboration include the Google search, the Wikipedia article, and the eBay auction, all which bring together disparate and distributed sources of information into a collaborative network mediated by common rules.

The American Dream expresses the aspiration for a “better, richer, and happier life.”

Hmm…

The minimum wage in New York currently stands at just under $15,000 and the national average wage stands at about $31,500. By contrast it is forecast (NY Times, July 15) that Goldman Sachs employees “could on average, earn roughly $770,000 each this year or nearly what they did at the height of the boom.” This average includes every banker, trader, mailroom and janitor at the firm, or over 50 times as much as the minimum wage or nearly 25 times the national average wage.

Interesting to note, too, that Goldman Sachs paid out $4.8 billion in bonuses in 2008, a year when profits only totaled $2.3 billion. Getting paid more for making less is what happened in a year when the company received $10 billion of taxpayers money, even though it has since repaid the Government on our behalf. This would seem to be bad business and more like an American Bad Dream, than a good one.

At least 4,793 bankers and traders were paid more than $1 million in 2008 NY Times, July 30), or more than 30 times the national average annual wage. Put another way, more than 1,000 times as much as the poorest three billion people on the planet who live on less than $2.50 a day (World Bank Development Indicators 2008). In 2005, the wealthiest 20% of the world accounted for 76.6% of total private consumption. The poorest fifth just 1.5% and the gap is widening.

To put this in some perspective, consider the global priorities in spending in 1998:

And compare that to what was estimated as additional costs to achieve universal access to basic social services in all developing countries:

Do these figures suggest what happens in the US financial sector has any morality? They rather suggest that we are living an American Bad Dream one one that corrupts us all by ignoring the stark realities.

Ethonomics is a word that will that spread, so don’t be freaked out by it. Most recently used by Fast Company magazine to mean a hybrid of technology, design, and social responsibility that is about ethics in the marketplace.

Progressively the concept of the triple bottom line will become the quadruple bottom line – in my opinion. The fourth element will be about ethics, or the state of being. If the motivation for dealing with profits, people and the planet does not come from the heart, then the purpose of the business will be off the mark. John Ehrenfeld continually reminds us about the vital importance of the three primary areas of caring:

• The human, or caring for oneself
• The natural, or caring for the world
• The ethical, or caring for others.

Not that he starts off with ‘me’, for if your inner values are unclear, an approach to the other areas will be equivocal. Many major corporations are claiming concern for the triple bottom line, but they have simply jumped on the bandwagon and are happy to discover that they can make more money that way.

In the world of entrepreneurship, it is much more difficult to hide real motivations. No corporate smokescreens exist. Transparency goes with small business, except in very few malevolent cases, or among fraudsters. The entrepreneur necessarily runs a ‘personal’ business and has to deal with his own demons or he is likely to trip himself up in his business relationships.

Ten interesting game changers are profiled in the latest issue of Fast Company: take a look!

Internships are harder and harder to find for young students interested in business. At the same time, many startups have a tough time justifying taking on new people on the payroll. Bootstrappers have always known how to get work done by means of begging, buying or borrowing labor.

Students who might have been drawn to the idea of big business as being able to provide greater opportunities for learning than small business, can now see how working in an entrepreneurial environment can give them a much wider breadth of experience.

The entrepreneurial student will always be able to find opportunities, though with the economic downturn even they may be less able to find opening. I have come across two ‘middle men’ to help bridge the gap.

Enternships provides ambitious and dynamic students and graduates with an opportunity to learn about business and enterprise through work placements in entrepreneurial and innovative environments, from start-ups to global venture funds around the world.

Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs (WEP) offers programs and resources for entrepreneurial-minded students who would prefer to pursue an internship or career at an early stage company rather than a position at a large investment bank or consulting firm.