Tips for Entrepreneurs – Focus on Execution Intelligence

“Every time I’m asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement I see a huge red flag pop out that says Warning!”

Rob Adams has likely listened to as many new business ideas as anyone on the  planet, and one of his first tips for entrepreneurs is to never tell a potential investor you’ve got an original idea.

“Wake up,” he says, “Good ideas are not scarce, they are a dime a dozen.” If you don’t believe so, Adams suggests an online search of key words describing your idea. “You’ll find ten companies doing it, or thinking of doing it. You can drive yourself nuts searching for a unique idea, but that is not the point.”

The point, as he describes in his book A Good Hard Kick in the Ass, is execution intelligence, the ability to compose a team that can operationally execute a business plan with sustainability, flexibility and resilience, to dominate rather than define a market space.

Why Investors Hate the Nondisclosure

“Every time I’m asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement I see a huge red flag pop out that says Warning!” Adams asserts. “It screams out, ‘I’m stuck on my idea,’ it means you’ve spent too much energy obsessing about the idea and probably haven’t thought enough about the team, which is what the investor is really interested in. It implies you haven’t given much thought to your customers, or to the market.”

Getting to market first with a new idea doesn’t mean anything in Adams’ experience. “Netscape’s browser was out long before Microsoft Explorer,” he recalls. “Creating a new category does not necessarily spell success, but I can think of plenty of businesses that entered an existing category and proceeded to stomp all those roaches to pieces.”

Ethical Behavior Unwrapped by New Video Series

Jack Abramoff went to jail to learn the importance of business ethics. You can just watch a video.

In 2000, I was running a small brand consulting firm when I landed a choice piece of business in Houston. The client was a promising startup in the new sector of online energy trading, Altra Energy. At the time there was an 800-pound gorilla in the market, Enron Online, and we all knew that beating them at their own game would be challenging. This TV commercial at the time perfectly expressed Enron’s presumed dominance in the energy trading world.

Unbeknownst to this lowly Don Quixote, as Altra and I polished our spears for battle, a self-inflicted disease was already killing the beast from within. On August 22, 2001, Enron Vice President Sherron Watkins delivered a letter to chief executive Ken Lay sharing her concerns that the company might be an “elaborate hoax.” The ugly train wreck that followed has become a case study on unethical business conduct, and Enron became an exclamation point for the call to do a better job teaching ethics and corporate social responsibility in our schools.

Ethics Unwrapped: Beyond Business Ethics

Fast forward a dozen years and McCombs School of Business has just launched Ethics Unwrapped, a charmingly effective free video teaching tool designed to stimulate thought and discussion about ethics and corporate social responsibility in university and high school classrooms. Director Cara Biasucci says she hopes the series will make teaching ethics more attractive to professors.

Joe Paterno Fired for Absence of Courage

 ”We give ourselves license to play a little faster and looser than we normally would.”

Paterno in Happier Days

College football fans always wondered when Joe Paterno’s football career would begin to slow down. The answer came this week with a sudden, whiplash-inducing crash. From USA Today:

A little more than a week after legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno got his record-setting 409th win, the view of his storied, 46-year career suddenly is undergoing a stark revision — tarnished by a child sexual abuse scandal at Penn State involving a former assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky.

Paterno initially announced his decision to retire at the end of the year, but that was not soon enough for the school’s board of trustees, who announced late yesterday that college football’s winningest coach was fired, along with Penn State President Graham Spanier.

The following morning brought news of nightime riots, as thousands of Penn State students took to the streets to protest the firing. “Joe Paterno broke no law,” said one rioter. (Curiously, the students decided to smash street lamps and turn over a television news van in order to make the righteous case that no laws were broken.)

The Stock Market Listens to Your Twitter Brand

“The chatter changes and the stock price changes.”

Citing results that surprised the researchers, a new study claims that Twitter conversations about a company or product have a direct relationship with the firm’s stock price. If online chatter goes up so does the market valuation.

While previous research had demonstrated a positive relationship between Twitter conversations and sales, this was the first time a strong connection to stock price was shown.

From Texas Enterprise at The University of Texas at Austin:

“It surprised the daylights out of me,” McAlister says of her latest analysis of chatter’s effect. “I had thought it might have something to with sales. I thought sales might have an impact on brand equity. And there might be a remote impact on firm value.”

But the relationship was stronger and faster moving than that. “It’s immediate,” she says. “The chatter changes and the stock price changes.” This sort of information is of interest to investors, and some hedge funds have already begun using online chatter to guide investment strategy.

If you’re looking for ammunition to convince your executive team to take social media seriously, these experts just handed you a sky rocket.

Read the full story at Say What? Research Reveals Impact of Web Talk by Mark Henricks, writing for Texas Enterprise.

Why Social Media Relationships Matter in B2B

It can bring great minds together, and give marketers daily opportunities to learn.

Aaron Strout of WCG

Social media is great for Coke, but what about JSR Micro? One has billions of thirsty customers worldwide, the other makes customized chemicals for a small cadre of high performance chip manufacturers. How much online socializing do you need when you can shake the hand of every one of your key customers during a two-day trade show?

Statistics gathered by Social Media B2B show that B2B firms have been slower to adopt social media and online marketing, with 36% of executives saying they had low interest in social media, and 46% believing social media is irrelevant to their company. “Nobody talks business on Facebook,” they say.

Aaron Strout, interactive group director at WCG, begs to differ. ”It is actually easier to have one-to-one relationships with B2B customers, where you might know by name the 100 buyers who matter the most to your company,” he asserts.

In his view, social media need not be a high-numbers game, but can effectively be used to enable relevant interaction between a customer and the people within the organization who have value to offer to that customer.