Category Archives: Current Affairs

Who Speaks for Small Business?

Current Affairs, Entrepreneurship, , , , , , , , , ,

As a small business owner who was once a journalist, when I read Taking Mom And Pop To The Cleaners on the Huffington Post, I think I know how that happens, why it’s bad, and why it’s also unlikely to change.

(Aside: I’m happy to see Huffington Post and reporters Zach Carter and Ryan Griffin are out there generating investigative journalism, actively researching and reporting on this topic. This may be one answer to what happens to investigative journalism as the print media declines.)

The story is about how the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), has become the voice of one side of the political spectrum:

… for the past two years, the NFIB has been less an advocate for small businesses than an arm of the Republican Party. When the interests of the GOP and the needs of small firms have collided, the NFIB has repeatedly sided with Republicans, jeopardizing billions of dollars in credit, tax benefits and other federal subsidies that are critical to the small enterprises that form the backbone of the U.S. economy … the NFIB has maintained a lower national profile, and is still routinely referred to in the media as “the small business lobby.”

No group actually knows what small business thinks or wants because small business doesn’t exist as a group. The thing small business owners have most in common is not having very much in common. By definition, they are nonconformists. They did their own thing when they started that business. My anecdotal sense is that they don’t join groups unless they have to. They’re busy. They’re focused on the business. And they are an extremely diverse group.

Journalists, meanwhile, aren’t supposed to have opinions; they have to ask for opinions. And politicians even more so. Therefore, when they look for what small business thinks, they look for a spokesperson. You or I might be that spokesperson, maybe; but then it’s hard to find just anybody; so they go for somebody. And end up with the somebody they called last time. Somebody who sounds like he or she represents small business. And that ends up as NFIB, and the like (see below: the Huffington story, to its credit, also points to groups representing the opposite point of view, like Main Street Alliance)

Nobody’s really to blame for it. It’s just the way it happens.

What annoys me about it is all the people supposedly talking about it are grinding their own political axes. They define what small business wants as constant whining about taxes and regulations and very little else. What about the bigger picture? What about looking up at what the government can do for the economy in general, like regulating the financial chaos, funding education, sponsoring innovation, and hey, maybe just infrastructure, like fibre cable and freeway bridges? Is it bad to protect employees from predatory employer practices? Not to me? Would we be better off with more open policy towards immigration? I think so.

But the journalists are going to ask the groups that turn up first on their speed dials, cell phones, and google searches. Not you and me.

Does anybody care? Well, they had 3,661 comments on that post by this morning. Hmmm …

And I have to make two late additions to this post:

  1. Over at SmallBiz Labs Steve King has an interesting take on the same Huffington Post story, noting that there’s another group, Main Street Alliance, that is as identified with the Democratic Party as the NFIB is with the Republicans.
  2. Meanwhile, and probably much more important, the Obama White House announced its Startup America Partnership yesterday with some very slick online video streaming, some serious financial commitments, and the good sense to lead with real entrepreneurs including Steve Case and Brad Feld, and real information provided by the Small Business Administration and the Kauffman Foundation. That was a great start.

Twitter and Problogger to the Copyright Rescue

Creativity, Current Affairs, Social media, Technology, , , ,

OK, this is cool. The web makes copyright stealing so incredibly easy, and it’s extremely annoying when it happens to you. And it happens all the time. So you have to like this example.

Here, to the right, is what Darren Rowse, blogger extraordinaire at problogger.net, @problogger on Twitter, decided to do about it. He posted it on twitter where his 117,809 followers can see it.

No, I don’t know the facts in this case. If it turns out I’ve become a pawn in some foul plot, unwittingly ganging up with Darren against an innocent photo business, I apologize. It sure looks like United Photo Press is linking to Darren’s work and presenting it as theirs. Right?

I’m jealous. I still remember when a competitor took a GIF my son had done, painstakingly combining all the logos of all the magazines that had reviewed our product, and posted it on their website. I would have loved to have been able to publish that on Twitter.

And while that one is old news, all the time now fly-by-night blogs pick up my stuff, often from here, and post it as their own, presumably for spam or SEO gains. That’s happening now, today, often.

In this case, though, the alleged culprit in this case, United Photo Press, isn’t flying by night. It’s been around since 1990, and one can assume it’s staying around.  So maybe this really works. I hope so. If it’s true, I hope Darren’s tweets get it to stop.

Darren, United Photo Press, can we get an update, now that the problem has been published on Twitter? Was the problem solved?

The Best Way to Promote Entrepreneurship Is Good Public Education

Current Affairs, Entrepreneurship, , , ,

I just posted Y’want Jobs? Small business? Then fund Education on the Huffington Post. I didn’t mention in that post how angry I am at the local schools problem, starting with our public schools in Eugene OR but including the funding-the-school disaster all over Oregon, California, and, as far as I know, most of the United States.

The Eugene town council met last Monday asking for public input. The public schools face a budget deficit of something like $30 million out of something like $130 million. They’re thinking of creating a city income tax to help.

Budget problems aren’t new here. They’ve already cut kindergarten to 10 hours a week. They’ve reduced school days to 168.5. But  that was before the big cuts they’re looking at now.

We should know better. This is a university town. The largest employer is the University of Oregon.

This isn’t just us, this one town in Oregon. Apparently all of Oregon and California as well are locked into state constitutional provisions, created in a burst of public selfishness in the early 1990s, that cripple funding of the schools (Prop 13 in California, Measure 5 in Oregon). I assume that’s happening in most states.

Also, some say public schools are overburdened with higher-than-market compensation and retirement plans that make what spending they are able to do less effective.

Can both of these assertions be true? Does cutting spending on schools make them better, forcing them to spend more effectively? Or does it just make them worse?

On the post at Huffington I quoted Kevin Swan’s Entrepreneurship is a Passion, Not a Program, and  Vivek Wadhwa’s A Better Formula: Connecting Risk Takers. They’re both writing about how governments can promote entrepreneurship and small business. Vivek concludes:

There is nothing to prevent there being many Silicon Valleys and nothing to stop most regions in the world from innovating. The focus just has to change from investing in real estate to investing in people.

So how do we invest in people? Education, perhaps?

With all the political posturing about small business, there’s not much governments can really do. Education is something they can do. And something that, frankly, they aren’t doing.

Who Took Sports Out of Spectator Sports?

Current Affairs, Rants, , ,

Monday night I watched the college football national championship game with great interest. My home town team, the Oregon ducks, was in the championship game for the first time ever. And to say “with great interest” is an understatement. I was glued to the couch.

Tuesday morning a 7-year-old grandson asked me about the game. I said:

It was a great game. The ducks played their hearts out and almost won.

He answered:

Why are you happy if they lost?

You do see what’s wrong with that, right? I hope so. Just in case, let me explain. And before I do, it’s not him, nor his parents. He didn’t watch the game, he went to bed. His parents aren’t football fans. He and his mom got the results from me the morning after. I use this story because his reaction is typical. He gets it by osmosis in first grade.

I wasn’t happy that the ducks lost. But they played their hearts out in a great game, came back from behind to tie it up with just a couple minutes left, and then lost on the very last play. Sure, I wanted them to be the national champs, I’ve rooted for them for 40 years. Furthermore, I live in Eugene OR a 5-minute walk from the University of Oregon campus, I have a master’s degree from there, so does one of my daughters, and I’ve taught there as an adjunct for 11 years. Go ducks. But it’s a sport, not real life. And the Auburn Tigers won, fair and square.

I was raised to be what my dad called “a good sport.” That meant playing hard,  winning and losing gracefully, and liking the game.

Am I a fan? Hell yes. I love football. I loved to play football when I was young, always loved watching it with my dad and brothers, and still love a good game, especially when I’m watching it with family members who also care.

But there’s something really wrong with the way we deal with spectator sports these days. This is just my opinion of course, but what I see is …

  • It’s just wrong to watch a great game and be sad because the team you like lost. Not when it was a close game and they played really well. It’s sports. It’s supposed to about the game, not just the win or loss. Be disappointed a bit, okay, and more so if they played badly.
  • I hate it when the stadium boos the visiting team. And it gets worse than booing sometimes, what with the chanting, throwing things, verbal abuse and harassment. That’s so ugly.
  • I hate the fact that stadiums aren’t appropriate places for preteen kids anymore because of all the bad behavior they see.
  • I hate it when fans of the loosing team obsess on some referee call or bad break. Referees and bad bounces are part of the game; it’s called sport, not science. A really bad call that determines the outcome of the game bugs me too, but hey, a sudden gust of wind can determine the outcome too.
  • This whole thing starts way too early. Have you been to a kids’ game lately? Have you seen parents in stands and on sidelines shouting stupid things like idiots? Some parents seem dead set on teaching the opposite of sportsmanship.

Ask yourself this: when your team loses, does that spoil the time you spent watching? Is it no longer entertainment? Is it not fun? Does it spoil your day, evening, week, or what?

Thanksgiving: Gratitude is Good For Your Health

Advice, Current Affairs, Reflections, ,

Today is the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. It’s supposed to be about getting together and giving thanks.

My contribution to the Thanksgiving holiday is to recommend a Google search on the correlation between gratitude and health. It turns out that there are indications that being thankful is good for us all.

Of course that’s not just for today, the holiday. That’s all year.

And here’s my picture for the Holiday, courtesy of Shutterstock photos, by Inigo Cia. This is a view of Half Dome from Yosemite Valley.

Do We Give a Damn About Public Schools?

Current Affairs, Economics, , ,

Last Thursday I attended an evening meeting at a local public school that’s on the close-down list as our school district (4J in Eugene, OR) reels in shock over massive budget cuts. I have a 7-year-old grandson in first grade at that school, so I joined his mom at the meeting.

It was a sad meeting. There isn’t enough money. Schools are getting closed, kids and teachers getting shuffled around, we’re heading towards fewer schools with more kids in every classroom, less support, fewer school days, more decline in public education.

The public schools have already jammed more kids than ever in classes, and cut the hours, and the school days, and given up everything they think they can.

I hesitate to write about this in this blog because it is so hopelessly political, outside my normal areas of discussion, and just plain doomed to frustration and, sadly, predictability. Complaining about public education in this country is trite. There are choruses of articulate and well-educated voices crying out against what’s happening to education in this country.

You can find lots of statistics, and lots of research, and lots of people ready to blame somebody: one political party or another, parents, teachers, politicians, teachers’ unions, administration, coddling the kids, equality through mediocrity, and on and on.

If we really cared, as a society, we’d make it a priority. Do we really care?

When I was a kid, in the 1950s and 1960s, education was an accepted national priority. Sure, maybe it was because we were afraid of the Russians, or worrying about the space race … but it worked. And maybe it was because we were comparatively wealthier then than now, in the aftermath of World War II, as competing nations’ industrial base had been destroyed. And maybe we weren’t so polarized politically.

And while we’re bickering over whether it’s Democrats or Republicans or liberals or conservatives or too many administrators or teachers’ unions or voter revolt or government waste, teachers and kids are stuffed together in impossible situations already, and public school budgets decline further.

Do you relate to national pride? How does it feel to live in a country whose public education is second or third rate?

Do we care? Or is politics more important? Or is good education just too expensive for this society?

(Photo credit: Paul Carter/The Register Guard)

Politicians vs. Small Business vs. Truth

Current Affairs, Entrepreneurship, ,

On Monday I posted True or Not? Top 10 Election Talking Points on Small Business, a slide show with reader voting, on the Huffington Post. Here’s how that turned out – the talking points listed in order. A score of 1 would have been all true, and 10 would have been all false.

1. The government favors large business over small 3.8
2. The government can keep U.S. jobs at home. 4.2
3. Raising minimum wage helps struggling families 4.4
4. Small business drives economic recovery 5.4
5. Government policy makes or breaks small business 7.0
6. The government protects U.S. business from foreign competition 7.1
7. Hiring goes up when taxes go down 8.1
8. Small business owners vote as a block (bloc) 8.1
9. The government gives free money to start a business 8.5
10. Immigration hurts small business 8.6

I notice the imbalance in the results. People leaned a lot more towards false, the high numbers, than true. I managed to catch myths that nearly nobody believes – those four bottom points ranked higher than 8 of 10.  I think that’s because I set the points up with a high degree of skepticism from the beginning.

The closest statement to truth, as voted by Huffington Post readers, was that the government favors large business. Frankly I was surprised to see so many people thinking points two and three were true; I don’t.

The biggest surprise here, in my opinion, is that slightly less than half the readers believe small business drives the economic recovery. I would have thought that was true. I’ve seen research showing that small business generates most of the new jobs in our economy.

Another thing that interested me about this post was a pair of comments asking for the facts. One said:

No links to hard data on each issue? Facts are not a matter of ‘HOT’ or ‘NOT.’

And the second:

some good questions, some questionable presuppositions, and no information, not even links to research

They are right, there are no links to data. That is on purpose and by design. Because, if you think about it, supposed facts and data are the first victims of politics the way we do it in this country. Here’s what I answered:

what makes you think we live in a world where the facts or the links to facts come riding into the scene like the cavalry in bad movies, to save us all with the actual real truth? More and more now, in our public political debates, slogans and half truths are presented by both sides as facts, and, worse yet, facts are virtually manufactured to match slogans. All the talking points, on both sides, are backed by alleged research. Which side do you like? You can find research to support it. That’s one of the points I wanted to make.

So much for getting the facts straight.

(Note: if this looks a lot like what I posted on Small Business Trends yesterday, I apologize for the redundancy. I started with the same list, but I’ve had time to reflect more on those comments about facts and links; that wasn’t in yesterday’s post.)

Water: A Real Problem Getting Worse

Current Affairs, True Stories

This is from Guardian.co.uk, from just two months ago. Presumably it’s fact, not opinion:

When the 1948 universal declaration on human rights was written, no one could foresee a day when water would be a contested area. But in 2010, it is not an exaggeration to say that the lack of access to clean water is one of the greatest human rights violation in the world. Nearly 2 billion people live in water-stressed areas of the world and 3 billion have no running water within a kilometre of their homes. Every eight seconds a child dies of a waterborne disease, in every case preventable if their parents had money to pay for water. And it is getting worse as the world runs out of clean water. A new World Bank reports says that by 2030, global demand for water will exceed supply by more than 40%, a shocking prediction that foretells of terrible suffering.

(The rest of this post is a repost from 2007. I don’t mean to compare this in any way to the suffering so much of the world goes through for water. But it’s about water, and loss of water, and it’s something I know and experience. So I’m reposting.)

I have to admit that it’s a bit disheartening to think that we were talking about environmental issues back in 1964 when I was a sophomore in high school in suburban California. So much of what Al Gore has finally convinced a lot of people is true was already there. My family joined the Sierra Club in 1964, in part because of an annoying 15-year-old (me) who wouldn’t shut up.

I’m happy to see that the latest blog action day is focusing on water. Later is better than never.

So much has changed for the worse in so little time. Here’s one simple example. My wife and I used to take our kids, now grown, into the high Sierra mountains in California every summer. Backpacking88We rented a burro at the Tuolumne Meadows stables in Yosemite, and went up into the mountains where we would be two or three days hike from the nearest road. You see the stream in the background in the picture here? We drank out of it, used it to cook our food, without any worries about salmonella or parasites or anything. That picture was taken in 1988. We didn’t carry bottled water, we didn’t carry iodine pills, we didn’t boil the water, it was clean runoff from Sierra snowmelt. It tasted so good. It was deliciously cold, clear, and completely clean.

In fact, we used to carry aluminum Sierra Club cups on our belts. Instead of lugging water, the cup would bang Sierra_club_cuppleasantly along with the beat of our walking pace, keeping time to the hike, there in an instant. Streams came along at perfectly reasonable intervals, every half hour or so.

I just Googled the Sierra Club cup. They’re producing them again, but as a tribute to the past. They had been discontinued for at least 10 years. After all, what good is an aluminum cup for dipping in streams? Just get a plastic water bottle with a section top.

So that’s just a detail, I know, but details are the only way I can get a handle on this. Those days are gone now. It hasn’t been that long. Our grown-up children, the oldest of them now in their 30s, remember that well. Our younger children, now in their 20s, have no such memory. The idea of drinking water straight out of a stream sounds like some scratchy old black-and-white storyteller from the distant past.

When my kids are the age I am now, what else will they be telling their kids about? I guess polar bears and penguins are already doomed. “They used to live in the wild, dear, not just in zoos.” Will they be telling them that there were streams running down the mountainsides, fed by melting snow? Yosemite Falls? The San Francisco Bay?

Women in Entrepreneurship and Controversy in Blogging

Current Affairs, Weblogs, Work Life Balance, ,

It’s pretty much common knowledge that there are far fewer women than men running high-tech high-end (meaning visible, getting buzz, getting investment) startups. That’s bad news, right? I thought it was obvious. 

But apparently it’s not obvious. Say, what?

Well, for example, there’s Penelope Trunk’s Women Don’t Want to Run Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children, posted over the weekend on TechCrunch. She wrote:

There’s a reason that women start more businesses than men, but women only get 3% of the funding that men do. The reason is that women want a lifestyle business. Women want to control their time, control their work, to be flexible for their kids.

So having a life is a feminine trait? Work-life balance is a business failing of women? I think not, but she says:

For men it’s different. We all know that men do not search all over town finding the perfect ballet teacher. Men are more likely to settle when it comes to raising kids. The kids are fine. Men are more likely than women to think they themselves are doing a good job parenting.

Wow. Do we like stereotypes? At least she’s giving us equal opportunity stereotypes, insulting both genders at once.

I think Penelope Trunk writes stuff like that for the same reason that blowhard talk radio idiots say the dumb stuff they do: it works commercially. Exaggerated opinions on radio generate listeners, and controversial blog posts generate traffic. Penelope Trunk is very smart, very successful, a ground breaker, a great blogger, and she loves controversy.  This is the same woman who posted Get married first, then focus on career as if that were her advice to young women. And Forget the Job Hunt. Just Have a Baby Instead. I like her writing too much to believe she’s serious. Do you think she moves to the absurd to make the opposite point?

What do you think? Do you think gender difference explain why women are under represented in high-tech startups? I don’t.

Read Vivek Wadwha’s thoughtful Men and Women Entrepreneurs: Not That Different on TechCrunch yesterday. You should read it. It’s nice to see common sense backed by research.

Yes, sure there are gender differences. Thank heavens there are. But they don’t justify unequal opportunity. They don’t explain the startups gap.

Vivek, on the other hand, makes two specific suggestions: first, when hiring, interview at least one woman. Second, include one woman on the recruiting team. He concludes:

These are pretty simple remedies. I am not advocating that companies institute any kind of affirmative-action programs or stack the deck against men. But we need to recognize that negative stereotypes such as the ones highlighted in TechCrunch can be harmful and lead to discrimination. Let’s not blame anyone, but let’s act proactively to fix a problem that we all know exists.

I second that.

What do you think?

An Older Entrepreneur’s 10 Takeaways from the Facebook Movie

Current Affairs, Reflections, Social media, , ,

I saw The Social Network last Friday night, and enjoyed it thoroughly. When it was over I was surprised. “What? Two hours already?”

Here are 10 (mental) notes I took as I watched:

  1. This movie is fun. Aaron Sorkin (of West Wing and Studio 60) does a great job making entertainment from reality.
  2. The plot feels real. I have no first-hand knowledge of Mark or Facebook, but I’ve done angel investing, raised VC money, and was a founding director of a software company that went public. And it feels to me like how these things happen.
  3. The Mark character rings true. He’s brilliant, obsessive, extremely productive, abrasive, selfish, and driven. I’ve known some people like that. They get things done. They bump people around on the way, more from blind obsession with their goals than on purpose. They’re not real good at seeing two sides of any question. They build empires.
  4. Ideas have little or no value. Implementation is what matters. Facebook grew out of some similar ideas that others had first. Mark took them and made them Facebook, and those others didn’t.  When reminded that others had a similar idea first, the Mark character points out that if it had been left to them, it would never have grown into what Facebook became. I agree. The race goes not to the alleged originator of the idea, but to the person who took that idea and built a business out of it.
  5. This movie is not bad for Facebook or for Mark Zuckerberg. We should all be so lucky. What happened with Facebook is a one-of-a-kind business phenomenon and this movie reinforces that. And the Mark character isn’t bad guy or good guy, he’s techie nerd obsessed business founder. It won’t hurt him at all. Mark can cry all the way to the bank. I like Ben Parr’s Mashable post on the real Mark Zuckerberg’s feelings about the movie after it rolled out. And I like this NYTimes.com analysis (you may have to register to see it, but registration’s free) of Facebook’s lack of legal options to do anything but watch.
  6. I don’t feel sorry for the three guys who came up with the original idea. The idea was obvious. They didn’t implement it. Mark stalled them with misinformation, which isn’t nice, but then ideas aren’t owned, so they can’t be stolen; just implemented.  (Corollary to note #4)
  7. The guy who wrote checks has a better argument. There are at least two sides to his story, and I doubt that the movie tells his side very well.   It doesn’t add up right. I do believe that writing checks into a business early on gives you some real ownership.
  8. Always get it in writing. There’s a lesson for entrepreneurs everywhere: sure it’s awkward among friends, but even if it’s not a legal document write it down and sign it. Maybe it’s just a reminder for you and partners later. Maybe you keep it in terms you understand. Ideally, you work with a lawyer to make it legal. It’s very important to do this early, before success or failure, because that keeps motivations cleaner.
  9. You have to protect yourself, not trust in friendship, good will, or ethics. Good intentions and verbal promises get lost in the shuffle. Business is like that. Never trust what somebody tells you a legal document says; read it. When somebody else is working with an attorney, get an attorney.
  10. The real world is full of great stories. It doesn’t take a space fantasy or super hero to make a great movie plot. Real people, the real world, and even real business can be very entertaining. And hey, if we get a few lessons along the way, everybody wins. Right?

For the record, the notes here were mental notes only. I didn’t get my phone out and type into it during the movie. So movie goers, don’t worry. That wasn’t me.