How I Went From Zero to 380,000 Twitter Followers Without Spending a Dime

As social media is becoming more engrained in our everyday lives, it is becoming imperative for businesses to get on board. And Twitter is huge for companies, as it provides a place to share news, engage with loyal customers and attract new ones. But it isn't easy.

While some opt for quick fixes, like buying followers (something I have never done), I don't see the point in these sketchy tactics. It may offer short-term spike, but it doesn't provide the kind of engagement that organic followers do.

When I joined the social media movement in March of 2009, I was just an observer for the first six months. But by remaining consistent and sticking with daily-following methods, my account began to grow. Now with more than 380,000 followers, people often ask me for advice on growing a following on Twitter. 

Here are a few very simple ways to grow your following (along with the process of what I do on Twitter) that you could also implement on your other social channels.

Return favors. Follow people that retweet or favorite your tweets, especially when they take the time to read articles you've written and share a comment with you. Also take the opportunity to engage when possible. The more you reach out, the more folks will return and reciprocate -- by following or making comments.  You can apply this across all your social networks.

Remain active. Follow new people every day even if you can only afford a few minutes on each network.  I usually do this on my phone while I am waiting on someone. 

Widen your net. People say quality over quantity?  True, however, I would rather have both to maximize your reach.  You must continue to build your community -- whether online or offline.   I've met many of my community contacts from my tweets or share.

Make retweeting a habit. Although I have many followers to focus and respond to, I make my rounds every day to retweet at least one new person a day.  This sometimes will give you a fan for life.  You can apply this same exact method to grow your following and community on any of your networks.  I love Instagram, I spent a month focusing on following, in no time my social media presence grew there very quickly. That said, you must be consistent in harvesting your following and engaging with others on a daily basis.

Pay attention. Keep your eyes open for those who retweet you often or share your blog.  Favorite a tweet to let the individual know you see them.  At a later point in time, perhaps return the favor as time permits.  How does this help with your following?  The more people see that you appreciate their efforts, they will more likely retweet you whenever online. The more visible your brand or Twitter handle lands on other pages, the more likely you will generate more organic following.

Stay focused. Tweet relevant and high quality content.  People will regularly visit your page to share your tweets.  When people are excited to pass along your message, additional branding and visibility to your account.

Keep networking and engaging. Take it offline. These days, people share their love of food, nature and other passions. For instance, if you are passionate about photography, organize a photo walk. When you take social media offline, people will share photos of you along with your Twitter handle to their audience, in turn you will get more followers. This is a great way to start a conversation online and offline. 

Showcase your skills. Twitter is a great place to show off your talents, especially writing and photography. If you are a writer with informative, pertinent content, put it on Twitter. Same goes for amazing photos.  People will share your articles or images and this will give you visibility to more admirers.

Find influencers. Reach out to other thought leaders and feature 10 people on your blog.  They will be happy to share your content to their readers and this will also grow your readers as well as followers.

Diversify. Do not put all your eggs in one basket. With this last point, apply these ten tips in other social channels where the methods may fit to grow your network.  Technology changes very rapidly, it's smart to keep a pulse on the current social world.

I hope that these ten points will help you grow your brand.  Remember the more seeds you plant, the larger the harvest.  An hour a day focusing on following will give you a robust community.  Please leave me a comment, question or suggestion.

“I Don’t Want to be a Loser.”

Fear of failure, self-worth, and our need to succeed

When he got up from the table, I knew something was wrong. His steps were too quick, his smile too forced. He just wanted to get away.

“Hey, buddy,” I said. He stopped, his face half obscured by the kitchen counter backsplash. He wouldn’t make eye contact. “Did you have fun?”

He nodded, and there was that forced smile again—a half smirk tinged with pain.

He turned to go, but I called out to him again. “Come here,” I said, and putting my arm around him, I asked, “What’s the matter?”

And just like that, the levee broke and the tears came in a torrent. My sweet 7-year old, Liam, was bawling in my arms as he choked out the words, “I wanted to win so bad.”

“You played really well,” I said. “Why all the tears?”

“I don’t want to be a loser.”

And there was the heart of it. It wasn’t losing the game that caused so much pain—it was that losing reinforced his self-perception that he was a loser in life. Heady stuff for a 7-year old who is bright, funny, kind, lovable, and who should feel on top of the world right now.

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We live in an atychiphobic culture. We avoid loss and failure like the plague. This fear of failure is built into us from an early age. Whether it be from our parents, school, work, or something else, most of us, either accidentally or overtly, have been trained to derive our self-worth by our successes and accomplishments. This generally results in two types of responses.

On one hand, the pressure to succeed is so great that it produces anxiety and a withdrawal from risk. Rather than try and fail, it becomes easier to simply not try at all.

On the other hand, some people take on a predatory attitude, projecting their failures onto others, stepping over the competition and doing whatever it takes to win.

Both are a symptom of a deep-seeded need to protect and create self-worth—and both are a prison.

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For my son, I see this in the way small failures cause him to become passé about things he was previously excited about. My house is filled with the relics of passions past—skateboards, drums, books, puzzles—all abandoned when things became too hard, when Liam had to risk failure in order to grow.

And I see the dominance mindset in how some of the young boys at Liam’s school interact with others. When I asked my son why he would self-identify as a loser just because he didn’t win a game, he said a boy at school called him that after beating Liam at a playground game.

I called bullshit on that boy’s words.

“Losing a game doesn’t make you a loser,” I told Liam. “You’re smart, funny, and loved. You’re valuable because you’re you, not because of what you accomplish.”

In fact, I told him, the surest way to become a loser in life would be to avoid failure and the lessons we learn from it—or to begin running over others in an attempt to win at all costs and make yourself feel better.

In a moment of brilliant insight, Liam brightened and said, “That’s why the boy called me a loser. He wanted to feel better about himself because he feels like a loser.”

Bingo.

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The Internet is littered with step-by-step guides on how to overcome our fear of failure (like this one). The irony is that these supposed cures are steeped in the same mentality that gives rise to the problem in the first place.

Overcoming your fear of failure is rooted in the mindset that winning is the most important goal in life. These steps usually include breaking down big tasks into smaller, more manageable tasks so that you can get easy wins. This involves some form of goal setting, strategy for attacking those goals, tactics, and execution. It’s divide and conquer.

Yet, these steps to overcoming fear of failure are still based in the context of building your self-worth out of your productivity and what you can accomplish. Missing is the concept of inherent self-worth apart from accomplishment.And when theses systems break down, fear of failure isn’t cured, it’s reinforced.

This is not to say that setting goals and making things manageable is bad. It’s actually good. But where it becomes dangerous is when we base our identity in them instead of something more lasting, our value as a human being regardless of our accomplishments.

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There is another way to live: to embrace failure and to recognize it as a necessary and permanent part of life. As FDR famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Failure is a valuable feedback mechanism. Through failure we learn, and failure is a simple fact of life that can seldom be avoided. It’s time to change our framework as a culture and individually about failure in life. No longer should we define ourselves by our successes or our failures. Instead, we should define ourselves by our growth.

There are valuable lessons to be learned from both success and failure. If we take the time to contemplate the lessons learned by each, we become better people and professionals. When we approach life in this way, we no longer have to fear failure (or success) because we embrace it for how it can enrich our lives. Understanding that both failure and success are part of the rhythm of life frees us up to stop focusing on them as the end all and to look at the totality of our life as the place from which we derive our value—not just our present and often overwhelming reality.

Living this way allows us to move beyond defining our reality by wins and losses, and to reshape it by pursuing what we love and are passionate about, regardless of the result. It is freeing in a way that trying to overcome our fear of failure or success can never be. R̶a̶l̶p̶h̶ ̶W̶a̶l̶d̶o̶ ̶E̶m̶e̶r̶s̶o̶n̶ Aerosmith got to the heart of this when h̶e̶ they wrote, “Life is a journey, not a destination.” And both success and failure are part of that journey.

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After our conversation about losing the game and how it made him feel like a loser, this was the advice I gave to my son, “Give some thought about what worked and what didn’t as you played the game. And next time, whether you win or lose, you’ll be a better player.”

His response: “Can we play again tomorrow night?”

I think that should be our response too.

Source

Leadership Branding on Social Media

People who aren’t known for something haven’t done anything.

“How to Build a Brand,” was the title we settled on for a recent presentation. It included social media content and making money using your online presence.

Leadership brand building:

On the negative side of brand building, I know leaders who are “save the day” leaders. They love being the hero. Others are backstabbing asses. Still others feel threaten by the success of those around them.

What you’re known for determines the way people talk about you. The way people talk about you is your brand.

You’re known for what you contribute even if it’s negative. Ultimately, positive brand building is about giving not getting.

1. Building your brand is about bringing value.
2. Repeated behaviors create brands, negative or positive.
3. Competency creates positive brands.

Five questions for leadership brand building:

1. Who am I? You must know who you are before you can get where you want to go.
2. What am I great at?
3. Who do I want to be?
4. How am I known?
5. How do I want to be known – in ways that align with who I am?

These questions apply to both individuals and organizations.

Brand building has a slimy reputation because of manipulators and facade builders. Forget it! Be who you are or you’ll empty your soul and destroy yourself with stress. I’m a reformed people pleaser, I know.

Leadership brand building is contributing positive value, authentically.

There’s more to leadership brand building than five questions. What other factors contribute to effective leadership brand building?

The Leadership Shift toward Exponential Success

The fringes of leadership are populated with problem-centric leaders.

Leaders are born when they shift from self to others. Leaders begin leading when they shift toward solutions. The first is a beginning - the second represents success.

The problem with problems:

Seeing problems places you on the fringes of leadership. Somehow it feels important to point out deficiencies; in one sense it is.

The problem with problems is seeing them is an easy beginning to an arduous journey.

The second shift:

Courageous leaders shift from problem-centric to solution-centric leadership. It’s the difference between floundering and success. Seeing problems is like falling off logs – Crafting solutions is climbing mountains.

Shifting toward solutions:

1. Courageously identify challenges, problems, and failures. “If there is an elephant in the room, introduce him.” Anonymous. If you can’t admit where you are, you’ll never get where you want to be.
2. Name problems without distracting, self-affirming condemnations; it’s not who’s right but what’s right.
3. Reject leader as savior models. Never take responsibility to fix someone else’s problem. You degrade them and inflate yourself when you become a fixer.
4. Affirm the vision of others while protecting your own. Jim Collins suggests, “Embrace the genius of ‘and’.” Everyone has a vision for you and your organization. At best, you’ll get lost following someone else’s plan. At worst, you’ll feel pushed around.
5. Help others own their own solutions. If others aren’t willing to get skin in the game, don’t waste your time. Be polite but let it go.

Bonus: Develop small steps not perfect solutions. Perfect solutions are myths, progress is real. Solution-centric leaders move forward while problem-centric leaders hide behind perfection.

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How can leaders become solution-centric in a problem filled world?

How can leaders be realistic about problems and hopeful about solutions?

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What to Do When Your Biggest Obstacle to Success is YOU!

You Gotta Have Faith

Building a business requires logic, dedication, and the ability to implement ideas. Besides these practical characteristics, you’ll need the assistance of something a little less tangible; a hearty dose of faith.

Without faith in your ideas and yourself, you won’t have the drive to actualize your vision. Your faith is the catalyst that ignites your passion.

Excuses, Excuses

It’s incredibly simple to talk yourself out of attempting something difficult. This holds true in all aspects of life, not only business. If you’ve ever tried to stick to a regular fitness routine, you know the power of excuses. It’s raining, the gym is too crowded at this hour, you worked out yesterday so you can skip today, and so on ad infinitum. The truth is, you’ve made your decision not to go to the gym before you start making excuses. The excuses are simply a form of backward-rationalization; an attempt to make yourself feel better about a decision you realize is inadequate.

Surround Yourself With Positivity

Negativity can be a powerful force if you let it be. Plenty of people are unsatisfied with their positions in life. They live lives full of regret; regret about missing opportunities, regret about not taking risks. If you’re not careful, or you surround yourself by these kinds of people, this negative thinking can infiltrate your thoughts and send you down an excuse-filled path that ends in regret. You’ve made a promise to your vision plan. You have a responsibility to nurture it.

Surround yourself with successful people that you’d like to emulate. They don’t have to be rich. Success means a lot more than having a large bankroll or attractive portfolio. Successful people are full of movement. They don’t wait around for the right time to take action. They create the right time through their actions. Even if they fail, they can look back on their lives without the burden of regret.

Perpetual Motion Machines

The search for free energy has captivated the minds of inventors since the beginning of history. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and energy must come from somewhere. But you do have access to one source of nearly limitless energy. The fire within you will fuel your actions until you reach your dying day. This fire, this reason, is what separates you from people looking for the easy road. This burning desire to realize your dreams will last you a lifetime as long as you keep it lit.

Unreasonable Reasoning

So how do you keep your fire burning? How do you nurture your one reason that will overpower the thousands of excuses that are jockeying for position? By being unreasonable. By rejecting logic and pragmatism and focusing instead on a little bit of faith.

You don’t need to be religious to have faith. Have faith in your ideas, your vision, and your ability. But the elusive nature of faith, an indefinable quality that can’t be pinned down by words or thoughts, will provide you with an unstoppable reason to keep on going.

Why Brand Ambassadors are Underutilized by Businesses

According to Wommapedia, a leading Internet resource on Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM), 72 percent of people claim that reviews from family members or friends exert a great deal or fair amount of influence on their purchasing decisions. This is just one of many statistics pointing to the importance of word-of-mouth endorsements from people who trust your brand.

Yet in light of how vital these influencers are to any business, brand ambassadors remain highly underutilized assets, but why?

1)    Many companies don’t know who their brand ambassadors even are or how to recognize them. Whether they’re employees, loyal customers, fans, or even friends of fans, finding and tapping into your star brand ambassadors can be a challenge, but one of the most important things you do to boost your business. A good place to start is by simply looking at your pool of customers who are repeat buyers, or employees who have served for your company for more than a year. They are likely to be your biggest supporters.

2)    A company’s army of brand ambassadors is difficult to organize. In other words, it’s one thing to hope for a positive review from a happy customer, and quite another thing, to ask them to do specific things to support your brand. You need to tell your customers and fans what you want them to do in order to get a desired outcome. For instance, if your goal is to grow your fan base on Facebook, then invite your brand ambassadors to share a photo or testimonial on your Facebook page, or invite their Facebook friends to like your page. A specific action will lead to a tangible result.

3)    Everyone is busy. Even if your company’s best supporters have good intentions and want to share their positive experiences with your products and services with other people they know, getting them to find the time and do something about it is not always easy. A couple suggestions are to reward them with something they will appreciate and making it easy for them to take action.

Every business has its own valuable pool of fans, supporters, employees, customers, etc. who have the potential to make a difference. So find them, utilize them and nurture the relationship.

Olivier Baudoux is the founder and CEO of DrivAd, a unique customer engagement program that matches organizations with their ideal brand ambassadors, turning them into motivated influencers for their products, services or causes in exchange for valuable rewards and a great sense of pride.

DrivAd was born in 2012 from Baudoux’s vision to create powerful and cost-effective ways for businesses to tap into their natural and most loyal brand ambassadors, who are typically under-utilized.

Entrepreneurship in Pakistan

Entrepreneurship is viewed by economists to be a combination of innovation and risk taking. When such activity thrives, high growth rates are achieved as well as opportunities offered to all segments of society, including the poor. The latter benefit form growth and employment as well as through opportunities for entrepreneurship. In Pakistan innovation and risk taking is severely inhibited by the intrusive role of government in the marketplace. From the early days of planning when protection and subsidy policies determined winners in the market place, entrepreneurship has been diverted to seeking government favours. Government economic policy also seeks to promote growth through a basically ‘mercantilist’ approach where domestic commerce through seriously neglect is heavily regulated. This sector either employs most of the poor or offers them entrepreneurial opportunities. Hence deregulating this sector could be a priority in and anti-poor strategy. The paper also argues that land distribution and city zoning and management have also evolved to further reinforce the prevalent rent seeking path to success. The result is that cities are by design not allowed to become clusters of commerce that will be entrepreneur friendly. These clusters of dense urban commerce are magnets of employment and opportunity for the poor. To develop an entrepreneurship culture in the country, the system of incentives (laws and policies) that promote rent seeking will have to be dismantled. This paper presents an analysis of the state of entrepreneurship/rent seeking prevailing in Pakistan. This analysis allows us to obtain and understanding of the kinds of reforms (including legislative changes) that are required to develop entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship: The Ultimate White Privilege?

A new study finds that future entrepreneurs score high on measures of teenage delinquency. They're also disproportionately white, highly educated, and male. Here's why that might not be a coincidence.

One of the great privileges that comes with being born wealthy, white, and male in the United States of America is that you can get away with certain youthful indiscretions. Indiscretions like, oh, smoking prodigious quantities of marijuana, for instance. If you're an upper-middle-class caucasian, chances are the cops aren't going to randomly stop and frisk you in the street under dubiously constitutional pretenses. And if you do somehow get caught baggie-in-hand, your parents can likely afford a decent lawyer to help plea bargain your way into some light community service. It's a cushy setup. 

Today, I'm finding myself wondering if that leeway --  that societal room to do a little law breaking, punishment free -- isn't part of the reason why so many of the successful entrepreneurs in this country are, yes, white guys. 

Sorry if that sounds a bit out of left field, but let me explain. Ross Levine, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Yona Rubinstein, a professor at the London School of Economics, have released a fascinating working paper exploring the demographics, personality traits, and earnings of entrepreneurs. Among their findings, they conclude that:

A) Entrepreneurs are "disproportionately white, male, and highly educated"; and

B) As teens and young adults, they're far more likely than the average American to have partaken in "aggressive, illicit, risk-taking activities," such as skipping class, smoking pot, gambling, and shoplifting. 

It does not strike me as a coincidence that a career path best suited for mild high school delinquents ends up full of white men. That, again, is part of white privilege; youthful indiscretions have fewer consequences that might, say, keep you out of a good college.

That said, while Levine and Rubinstein's findings hint at the role race might play in entrepreneurship, they don't flesh it out fully enough for us to draw hard conclusions. So with that in mind, let's wade into some of the details about precisely what this study does and doesn't tell us. 

We'll start with the demographic data, shown below based on the census figures from 1994 to 2005. The group we care about here are the self-employed workers with incorporated businesses, at the far right of the table. Why just them? Because they're who we traditionally consider entrepreneurs, as opposed to everyday small business proprietors. Unincorporated businesses tend to be tiny operations -- think of a bodega, or a carpenter who works alone out of a pickup truck -- with little chance of growing. As Levine and Rubinstein find in their study, the people who run them tend to earn less than salaried workers. Incorporated businesses, on the other hand, are actual companies (yep, with 1st Amendment rights and everything). They can be anything from a chain of gyms to an accounting firm to a small tech startup. But the important thing is they're independent legal entities and are often set up to attract investment and grow. 

And, as you'll notice, 84 percent of the incorporated self-employed (people who, for the purposes of this piece, we'll just shorthand as "entrepreneurs") are white, compared to 71 percent of the whole prime working-age population. They're also 72 percent male. 

Source

Entrepreneurship in Pakistan

An Entrepreneur is the one who takes on the risk of starting their own enterprise or investing in other start-ups. Successful entrepreneurs are known for finding innovation and market gaps for new products and services. Entrepreneurs have the ability to take business to the point at which it can sustain itself on internally generated cash flow. The future of entrepreneur is to reform and revolutionize the pattern of production. 

Entrepreneurship spurs improvements in productivity and economic competitiveness, and with technological advances and economic liberalization, the assumption that nurturing entrepreneurship means promoting a country's competitiveness which today appears more valid than ever. Entrepreneurship development has the potential to create jobs through the formation of new business ventures; utilization of available labor and resources to create wealth, stimulate growth, boost the economy and increases a nation's GDP, and reducing dependence on social welfare programs. Entrepreneurs create new businesses and new businesses in turn create jobs, intensify competition, and may even increase productivity through technological change. High measured levels of entrepreneurship will thus translate directly into high levels of economic growth. While it is easy to see that starting a new business to exploit a perceived business opportunity would lead to economic development, it is also possible that necessity entrepreneurship may not lead to economic development. Being pushed into entrepreneurship (self-employment) because all other options for work are either absent or unsatisfactory can even lead to under development.

According to many, the two widely acknowledged causes of small business failure are 1) lack of knowledge about the business, and 2) insufficient capital to sustain the venture through break-even and profitability. The issue of knowledge can be overcome by given proper instruction, most entrepreneurs can learn the basics of running a given business. Information and learning can be obtained through traditional schools, franchisors, books, consultants, or on the job training as an employee. Than is the matter of capital, with a bit of intelligence and careful planning, a venture can be started with limited means and grown as finances, time and ability permit. However, the actual root cause of entrepreneur failure is the non-existence of two things. There is not a passion for the work involved and/or there is not a quality, personal fit with the venture. The root cause of business success or failure is not due to a lack of knowledge or capital, it is due to a poor fit between the owner and the chosen venture. The successful entrepreneur always enjoys a good relationship with the business.
In case of Pakistan, the entrepreneurs face many challenges and problems. The factors for such low levels of entrepreneurial drive lie within our culture, bureaucracy, financial hurdles and academic perceptions of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is associated with small and cottage industries; there is a stigma with failure and a general resistance to new ideas; businesses are rooted in traditional and low value-added sectors such as textiles, rice and leather. Also, younger business communities, often educated abroad, do not have the requisite experience or financing to establish businesses, family-owned businesses are slow to adopt professional modes of management; business culture is excessively male dominated with very few women entrepreneurs or business heads. 

Other factors include corruption at practically all levels, high taxes and stringent government regulation creating unnecessary hurdles for entrepreneurial businesses. On the private sector front, multinational corporations and international banks have rapidly expanded their presence and they provide good, salaried opportunities to young professionals. The typical aspiration of an MBA student graduating from a Pakistani business school is to secure a stable job with a multinational or other large corporation where they can advance through a stable, prosperous career. However, with the growing population and fewer job openings, traditional avenues of employment are limited.

Other hurdles towards establishing independent businesses include financial barriers to entry. The venture capital industry is almost absent in Pakistan. Despite reforms initiated by the State Bank of Pakistan, access to equity and formal debt financing have not improved. Access to finance is a recurring constraint to enterprise development in Pakistan, especially in the case of new and small enterprises. 

The other major constraints in entrepreneurial growth are with regards to tax administration and tax rates, electricity, and access to financing, security, housing, capacity building and infrastructure. The list of less constraining issues includes crimes, access to land, labor regulations, and telecommunications. The issues related to financing costs, economic policy uncertainty, corruption, macroeconomic stability, customs and trade regulations, anti-competitive practices, business licensing and operating permits, skills and education of the labor force, energy efficiency and transportation are cross cutting in nature and affect all sizes of enterprises. But regarding tax issues and electricity, medium firms express the strongest complaints, followed by large firms, small firms, and micro firms. However, small firms complain most about for access to the finances. 

In such scenarios the government should eliminate the barriers to entrepreneurship by providing infrastructure, defense, land, education. Such set ups should be provided which encourage start-ups and support existing small and medium size enterprise by enabling them to adapt innovative strategies and technologies and thus compete more effectively at the global level. The educated, young, and emerging entrepreneurs need to take the lead and be encouraged to become the vanguard of Pakistan’s economic growth.

BY Anum Batool first publish at HWeb

6 Tips For How Businesses Can Make Themselves More Generous

As the lines between corporations and nonprofits blur, the work environment is becoming more collaborative, transparent, interactive and entrepreneurial. Corporations and consumers alike are more often motivated by passion and a desire to make an impact. Our most generous marketing geniuses are at the forefront of spreading the word about the movement, creating platforms to highlight good works and opportunities to effect positive change in local communities and beyond.

“Ideas more than ever can make the biggest difference in the world,” says Droga5 CEO and founder David Droga. “We’re communicators, we’re problem solvers and we’re lateral thinkers and there’s nothing that can’t be improved with that.”

These problem solvers are using their creativity to break down barriers to ensure their work makes a difference beyond selling products. “That’s the best that we can do,” says David Sable, global CEO of Y&R. “Not just take a brief and do a nice thing for charity and have people sit around and cry and feel bad. But how can we help the organization in its change as it looks to go to the next level, as it faces the next challenge.”

1: BEING GENEROUS IS NO LONGER A CHOICE BUT A RESPONSIBILITY.

Their focus is on purposeful creativity that helps align a company’s behavior with what consumers are demanding. “We have an amazing power to use that creativity and almost I’d argue, an obligation,” says global CEO of Havas and Havas Worldwide David Jones, “to use creativity to change people’s behavior around some of the big issues facing the world.”

2: GENEROSITY AND SOCIAL GOOD SHOULD BE WOVEN INTO THE FABRIC OF THE COMPANY. 

Founder of Woodwork Lane Wood has helped corporations like Warby Parker do just that. “It was a good moment for social enterprise to see that you could be unapologetically focused on products and build a really great company and build your customer base,” says Wood. “And all the while have the charitable component as part of the DNA, the by-the-way moment that there’s much more here than meets the eye."

“If you’re going to be powerful, think of yourself as a citizen and consumer.”

3: WITHOUT A COMMITMENT TO SOCIAL GOOD, COMPANIES WILL FIND IT MORE DIFFICULT TO SURVIVE IN THE FUTURE.

Co-founder of Motive and Whole World Water, Jenifer Willig helps companies find sustainable, responsible social solutions aligned with their missions. “You have to be willing to be the big thinker but you actually have to be willing to do the hard work, too,” Willig says. “You don’t have time to just talk. You’ve got to make it happen.”

4: CONSUMERS ARE AN INTEGRAL PART OF THE CONVERSATION AND A MOTIVATOR OF CHANGE.

“If you’re going to be powerful, think of yourself as a citizen and consumer,” says Alex Bogusky, former head of Crispin Porter + Bogusky. “Vote with your dollars and vote with your vote. If you try to do either one exclusively you are not going to be effective.”

5: BEING GENEROUS CAN ALSO MEAN JOINING INDIVIDUAL FORCES TO ADVANCE THE GREATER GOOD.

By bringing together unique talents or simply mobilizing sheer numbers, many of these experts are making an even greater impact. David Jones is inspiring the next generation through One Young World. Stephen Friedman, president of MTV, is harnessing the power of entertainment to educate and mobilize youth. “We are doing a disservice if we don’t at least ask the question,” Friedman says. “Is there a pro social angle that can enrich the connection we have with our audience? Our audience expects it. Activism is woven through their life.”

Dan Wieden, co-founder and chairman of Wieden+Kennedy, has created communities where his employees and inner city youth can grow both as individuals and as part of a larger team towards a greater collective goal. “How do you create a culture where people are encouraged to be fully and absolutely themselves to explore all the attics and corners in their minds and hearts,” Wieden says. “And at the same time work alongside a lot of other very strong personalities to solve problems.”

6: A COMMITMENT TO COMMUNITY AND CREATING A BETTER PLACE FOR COMMUNITY MEMBERS CAN HAPPEN FROM ANY PLACE, AT ANY TIME.

Cathy Rigg Monetti, founder and partner of Riggs Partners, started a now-nationwide 24-hour pro bono creative blitz, CreateAthon, from South Carolina. “Great ideas can happen anywhere,” she says. “You have to let it grow and you have to nurture it. And you have to be willing to share your great idea.”

Susan Smith Ellis leveraged her talents, her network, and the power of marketing for social initiatives. “Go to places where you can effect change from the inside. There’s not one job description for that,” Ellis advises the next generation. “You have the ability to drive the change because you won’t work any other way. Use your voice.”

Entrepreneurial Expertise - on the Role of Rules in Startups

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

- Søren Kirkegaard

In a recent post Chris Dixon quotes American pragmatist William James on the reduction of conscious content when moving from being a student to achieving wisdom:

As the art of reading after a certain stage in one’s education is the art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. The first effect on the mind of growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed by a single act. …

But in the psychological sense it is less a condensation than a loss - a genuine dropping out and throwing overboard of conscious content. Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics in such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard to say which grows the more perplexed - he or the pupil.

I haven’t been blogging before, but this got me thinking about the nature of expertise and, more specifically, the role of rules in entrepreneurship. I will probably turn these idas into an academic paper at some point, but for now a blog post seems to be the right format.

The lean startup literature is largely concerned with rules: state your vision explicitly, translate the vision into falsifiable hypotheses, design efficient experiments to test hypotheses, prioritize experiments, run experiments, evaluate results, decide wether to continue, revise or quit. The same focus on rules is found in many academic entrepreneurship theories, including Saras Sarasvathy’s popular theory of Effectuation.

Compared to the alternative approaches to entrepreneurship (just execute or just adapt), the introduction of rules and heuristics guiding an incrementalist and hypothesis-testing approach to entrepreneurship is a leap forward.

However, while rules are essential for novices they are seldom used by experts. And to help put the role of rules in startups into perspective, I find it useful to consider Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus’ five-stagephenomenology of skill-acquisition. This model describes in stylized fashion the qualitatively different stages (novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, expert) one goes through on the path toward expertise, and has been observed among chess players, air force pilots, army tank drivers and nurses to mention a few. I will briefly recapitulate these stages before discussing implications for entrepreneurship.

1) Novice

The novice is taught how to recognize relevant features in her task environment. These features are context-free and can be recognized without any previous experience in the task environment. The novice is also taught rules for determining what to do on the basis of these features, much like a computer following a program.

For instance, a student automobile driver learns to recognize speed (using the speedometer) and is given rules such as shift to second gear when the needle on the speedometer points to ten.

2) Advanced beginner

As the novice gains experience by engaging with real situations, she begins to note examples that indicate meaningful additional aspects of the situation besides those she was taught. After encountering a sufficient number of such examples, the novice learns to recognize these new aspects in the activity.

For instance, the driver uses (situational) engine sounds as well as (nonsituational) speed in deciding when to shift. She learns the heuristic: shift up when the motor sounds like it’s racing and down when it sounds like it’s straining. Still, learning is carried on in a detached, analytic frame of mind, as the action follows instructions based on rules and distinct situational elements.

3) Competent

With more experience, the number of potentially relevant elements that the learner is able to recognize becomes overwhelming. To cope with such overload, the advanced beginner starts (through instruction or experience) to devise plans that determine which elements of a situation are important and which ones can be ignored.

By devising such plans, both understanding and decision making become easier. However, it also introduces uncertainty, judgement and hence emotions into the process. Choices are no longer straightforward, and if something goes wrong, the competent performer can no longer blame inadequate rules but has to take personal responsibility for outcomes.

For instance, a competent driver leaving the freeway on an off-ramp curve learns to pay attention to the speed of the car, not whether to shift gears. After taking into account speed, surface condition, traffic, whether she is in a rush etc, she may decide that she is going too fast. She then has to decide whether to let up on the accelerator, remove her foot altogether, or step on the brake, and precisely when to perform any of these actions. She is relieved if she gets through the curve without mishap, and shaken if she begins to go into a skid.

The more emotionally involved one gets, the more difficult it is to retreat to the detached analytical or heuristic-following mode of the advanced beginner. This emotionality of judgmental action is critical to further learning.

4) Proficient

Only if the detached and rule-following stance is replaced by emotional involvement, is one set for further advancement. If this happens, the resulting positive and negative emotional experiences will strengthen successful responses and inhibit unsuccessful ones. With enough such experiences, the person’s explicit theory of the skill, represented in rules and principles, will gradually be replaced by tacit situational discriminations. Only if experience is assimilated in this intuitive, embodied, atheoretical way will automatic reactions replace reasoned responses.

However, after spontaneously seeing the important aspects of the current situation, and what goals should be achieved, the proficient performer must still decide what to do to achieve these goals. The proficient performer is thus characterized by intuitive understanding followed by detached decision-making based on rule and heuristic-following.

The proficient driver, approaching a curve on a rainy day, may feel in the seat of his pants that she is going dangerously fast. She must thendecide whether to apply the brakes or to reduce pressure by some specific amount on the accelerator. While valuable time may be lost making a decision, the proficient driver is certainly safer than the competent driver who spends additional time considering the speed, angle of bank, and felt gravitational forces, in order to decide whether the car’s speed is indeed excessive.

5) Expert

The expert not only sees what needs to be achieved. Thanks to a vast repertoire of situational discriminations she also sees immediately what to do. Thus, distinction between expert and proficient performer lies inthe ability to make more subtle and refined discriminations. The expert has learned to automatically distinguish those situations requiring one action from those demanding another, which enables intuitive situational response.

The expert driver, not only feels in the seat of her pants when speed is the issue. She knows how to perform the appropriate action without calculating and comparing alternatives. On the off-ramp, her foot simply lifts off the accelerator and applies the appropriate pressure to the brake. What must be done, simply is done.

The Dreyfus model is arguably quite general, having been validated with chess players, air force pilots, army tank drivers, nurses, second-language learners etc. Still, it has some potential limitations in the context of entrepreneurship.

First, one may argue that the entrepreneurial situation is by definition so uncertain and endogenous (i.e. dependent on the actions of the entrepreneur) that expertise can never fully be a matter of intuitive situational coping. When experts in any domain face novel or unfamiliar situations (what Dreyfus, following Heidegger, would call a “breakdown”)they are jolted out of their absorbed state and forced to retreat to a state of detached analysis of the situation. It may be argued that in entrepreneurship, such novelty-generated breakdowns are the norm (either due to unexpected external events or the entrepreneur’s own actions), and that conscious and detached reflection must always be viewed as part of entrepreneurial expertise.

Second, one may argue that entrepreneurship rests on such a broad set of potentially relevant skills (e.g. consultative sales, product management, UX design) that any generic notion of “entrepreneurial expertise” misses the point. Specifically, an entrepreneur may be expertat some skills (e.g. consultative sales) but novice at others (e.g. product management).

Despite these potential limitations, the Dreyfus model can help clarify the role of rules among novice and expert entrepreneurs. This is nicely reflected in the following observations by Steve Blank and Marc Andreessen.

Novice Entrepreneurs

Steve Blank is well known for Customer Development/Lean Startup, which is essentially an set of startup rules (“The Startup Owner’s Manual- the step-by-step guide for building a great company”). However, when novices first try to apply such rules, they are likely to misunderstandthem (especially if the rule set is complex) and they are also likely to fail to adapt the rules to the messy realities of specific situations. Consider this conversation between Steve and a former student:

“We did every thing you said, we got out of the building and talked to potential customers. We surveyed a ton of them online, ran A/B tests, brought a segment of those who used the product in-house for face-to-face meetings. Next, we built a minimum viable product.”

…

I offered that it sounded like he had done a great job listening to customers. And better, he had translated what he had heard into experiments and tests to acquire more users and get a higher percentage of those to activate. But he was missing the bigger picture. The idea of the tests he ran wasn’t just to get data – it was to getinsight. All of those activities – talking to customers, A/B testing, etc. needed to fit into his business model

Steve Blank - Killing your Startup by Listening to Customers

This novice entrepreneur was clearly trying his best to rigorously apply the rules he had been taught. However, by failing to complement his rule-based knowledge with more contextual and holistic situational understanding, he remained stuck in the novice or advanced beginnerstage. Steve then suggested the following:

“I offered that getting acquiring users and then making money by finding payers assumed a multi-sided market (users/payers). But a freemium model assumed a single-sided market – one where the users became the payers. He really needed to think through his Revenue Model (the strategy his company uses to generate cash from each customer segment). And how was he going to use Pricing, (the tactics of what he charged in each customer segment) to achieve that Revenue Model. Freemium was just one of many tactics. Single or multi-sided market? And which customers did he want to help him get there? My guess was that he was going to end up firing a bunch of his customers – and that was OK.”

Steve Blank - Killing your Startup by Listening to Customers

Combined with continued experience, Steve’s advice above - on how to interpret situational contingencies, how to go beyond detached rule-following and instead device and prioritize among action plans that cut through the information overload - is very much in line with how novices may be helped to progress toward becoming competent performers.

Expert Entrepreneurs

Besides being a champion of Customer Development, Steve is also the first to admit that rules and tools are not enough and thatentrepreneurship is often more art than science, more synthesis than analysis, more intuition than rule-following. This is illustrated in a conversation with a CEO from an I-Corps startup:

“I’m feeling guilty because I was using Customer Development and the Startup Owners Manual until I had that insight. But there was nothing in your book that prepared me for what just clicked in my head. I just saw our entire new business model in a flash, all of it at once. I’m now having the company execute on what came to me in the shower. A small part of me is confused whether I’m doing the right thing, but mostly I’m just convinced it’s as right as anything I’ve ever done. But there’s no chapter in your book or anyone else’s on this.”

…

“What you had was no accident. You were collecting enormous amounts of data on one side of your brain, but it was the other side that recognized the pattern.”

Steve Blank - Blinded by the Light: the Epiphany

This is clearly not a novice trying to apply a set of situation independent rules. These are insights afforded to a proficient performer or an expert, someone who has a deep holistic grasp of the specific situation at hand and simply notices what needs to be done without much analysis.

In a recent HBR interview, Marc Andreessen generalizes this point in an observation of the qualities of great founders. According to Andreessen, these individuals are deeply embedded in the relevant aspects of their domain of operation, which allows them to make good decisions without much cognitive effort or awareness.

“The best founders are artists in their domain. They operate instinctively in their industry because they are in touch with every relevant data point. They’re able to synthesize in their gut a tremendous amount of data—pulling together technology trends, their companies’ capabilities, their competitors’ activities, market psychology, every conceivable aspect of how you run a company.”

Marc Andreessen - In Search of the Next Big Thing

Summary

While I have been thinking about rules and expertise in entrepreneurship for a while (e.g. here and here), I have not yet had time to systematically relate the Dreyfus model to the discourse on entrepreneurship as process (e.g. Customer Development, Lean startup, Effectuation). Based on the above discussion, I do however believe the following to be true.

• Valuable aspects of what entrepreneurs do can be summarized in rules. Indeed, this is exactly what Customer Development and Effectuation has done.
• Such rules are extremely valuable to novice and advanced beginner entrepreneurs, both directly to guide venture development and indirectly to guide the entrepreneur’s personal development toward expertise.
• However, the experts themselves do not use “their own” rules to guide actions. Instead, they rely on holistic situational awareness that cannot, even in principle, be fully described using rules.
• This means that theories and pedagogies that focus solely on rules and heuristics can only deal with a limited and quite simple part of what constitutes entrepreneurial knowledge.
• Pedagogically, this can be dealt with through experience-based pedagogies and mentoring.
• Theoretically, the limitations of rule-based theories of entrepreneurship need to be acknowledged.

[revised june 3 2013]