The moral underpinnings of being or becoming an entrepreneur include: 1. take care of your business, 2. so your business can take care of your family, 3. so your family can take care of you, 4. so you do not become a burden on your fellow human being or the state, 5. so you are in a position to help your fellow human being and 6. so they can help your business.
When you give a person a fishing rod instead of a fish, you have started him or her on the road to self reliance which is the sine qua non of entrepreneur ethics.
by ProfBruce April 21, 2011
Get the entrepreneur ethicsmug. There is truth and smart truth. In a media-saturated world where each word is parsed by many looking for scandal, it is more important than ever to tell the smart truth. Lawyers, especially criminal law lawyers, understand the difference.
“Coca-cola proudly announced some years ago that it was introducing vending machines that would raise the price of their sodas when the weather got hot. The announcement was widely panned in the media—just when a consumer needed a break most, the company would be raising its price. The smarter play and the smart truth would have been an announcement that the company was introducing vending machines that lowered the price of their drinks when the weather got cold. It is the same thing yet it isn’t—the smart truth would have had radically different (and much more positive) PR repercussions. The end result—the vending machines never left Coke labs…”
by ProfBruce October 31, 2009
Get the Smart Truthmug. This is an acronym for 'Do It Right The First Time'. It is a new movement focused on getting people to increase their productivity by doing tasks right the first time. If we could get the proportion of tasks performed right the first time someone turns their attention to it, we would see a significant improvement in national productivity.
When your Bookkeeper forgets to make a bank deposit on the first of the month and one of your mortgages goes NSF, you send him or her a note. All it has to say is 'DIRT-FT'.
by ProfBruce October 03, 2009
Get the DIRT-FTmug. Selling in pairs or other combinations and for more than one year at a time, thereby decreasing the absolute number of deals required to sell out your inventory as well as increasing your efficiency and productivity.
If there are 200 signs in an arena and you sell them to sponsors in pairs for a term of two years each then you only need to make 50 deals per year to sell out your inventory instead of 200 per year--thus, you have reduced your workload by 75%. If you can further increase the number of multi-year deals for pairs of signs you can do per annum then your sales will increase at an ever increasing rate-- that is non-linear selling.
by ProfBruce April 20, 2011
Get the Non-Linear Sellingmug. PB4L stands for Personal Business for Life. The question is: should everyone on the planet have a PB4L? After all, it wasn't government five year plans that brought India and China out of poverty; it was the unleashing of the entrepreneur class.
Maybe we should each have one micro business that we hang onto for life; that never gets shared with anyone, where we take no partners and never pledge it to a Bank for a loan and, thus, have something that is uniquely ours that we can fall back on in troubled times. “You need an iron reserve.”
There are so many changes going on in the local, national and global economy and so many things can and do go wrong, that it might not be a bad idea after all to have a fallback position.
Maybe we should each have one micro business that we hang onto for life; that never gets shared with anyone, where we take no partners and never pledge it to a Bank for a loan and, thus, have something that is uniquely ours that we can fall back on in troubled times. “You need an iron reserve.”
There are so many changes going on in the local, national and global economy and so many things can and do go wrong, that it might not be a bad idea after all to have a fallback position.
A PB4L does not include things like the guy who tells you: “I can show you how to make a million dollars! Just send me ONE dollar, and I will tell you how.” And, of course, the answer is: “Get a million fools to each send you a dollar to tell them how to…”
A PB4L is a real business with real cashflow. Perhaps you are selling high-end, acid free paper or you have a series of organic food recipes that you sell at food fairs and in specialty stores or you have an online dino comic strip that you publish daily that becomes a hit.
Ideas are endless. Maybe you could look in the Encyclopedia Britannica circa 1932 for inspiration and public domain ideas.
A PB4L is a real business with real cashflow. Perhaps you are selling high-end, acid free paper or you have a series of organic food recipes that you sell at food fairs and in specialty stores or you have an online dino comic strip that you publish daily that becomes a hit.
Ideas are endless. Maybe you could look in the Encyclopedia Britannica circa 1932 for inspiration and public domain ideas.
by ProfBruce October 24, 2009
Get the PB4Lmug. Where consumers band together online to influence, collectively, the price of a good or service, a form of social shopping.
A website or mobile app that, reduces its price for every like or tweet that potential customers generate as a group or where customers can get enough of their friends to buy ecommerce coupons, are engaged in forms of social commerce. In effect, consumers are banding together online to influence the price at which they are willing to buy and companies are paying their customers to do some marketing for them.
by ProfBruce April 20, 2011
Get the Social Commercemug. Reverse marketing happens when an organization’s planned marketing campaign results in negative consequences for their brand. The reason a brand is important is, in part, that it creates trust in that organization, which, in a for-profit business, results in higher sales. Reverse marketing works in the opposite direction.
“Coca-cola decided some years ago to introduce New Coke and stop producing Coke Classic based on blind taste tests that indicated younger consumers preferred the sweeter taste of Pepsi. What they didn’t take into account was the loyalty of Coke buyers to the classic formula. The result was a rapid climb down by the Company and massive reverse marketing.”
by ProfBruce October 31, 2009
Get the Reverse Marketingmug.