How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior?
We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don’t read that book the boss lent us.
The contradictions never end. When someone shows up and acts without contradiction, we’re amazed. When an athlete just does the sport, or when a writer just writes the words, we can’t help but watch, astonished at the purity of their actions. Why is it so difficult to do what we say we’re going to do?
The lizard brain.
Or as Stephen Pressfield describes it, the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer’s block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn’t stay on the same page long off to get something out the door.
The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That’s because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.
The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because her lizard brain told her to.
Want to know why so many companies can’t keep up with Apple? It’s because they compromise, have meetings, work to fit in, fear the critics and generally work to appease the lizard. Meetings are just one symptom of an organization run by the lizard brain. Late launches, middle of the road products and the rationalization that goes with them are others.
The amygdala isn’t going away. Your lizard brain is here to stay, and your job is to figure out how to quiet it and ignore it. This is so important, I wanted to put it on the cover of my new book. We realized, though, that the lizard brain is freaked out by a picture of itself, and if you want to sell books to someone struggling with the resistance (that would be all of us) best to keep it a little more on the down low.
Now you’ve seen the icon and you know its name. What are you going to do about it?

2010 presents itself as a great opportunity for business, especially with the FIFA World Cup being hosted in South Africa. However, the opportunities lie not in the way people expect them as the following book review spells out. To us ecopreneurs, the opportunities lie with South Africa being accorded 1st world status by being chosen as host for the games. With the eyes of the world on South Africa, Ecopreneurs will get a better shot at promoting their services and products for future export. The opportunities lie in the future, not as the so many people expect – during the 2010 World Cup

There will be no economic bonanza, according to a new book, and if experience matches the last World Cup in Germany, spending by visitors will be less than the South African government shelled out preparing for the tournament.

“The next World Cup will not be an aircraft dropping dollars on South Africa,” authors Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper write in the book Soccernomics.

The caveat comes ahead of tomorrow’s World Cup draw in Cape Town, 188 days before football’s showpiece tournament.

Using data analysis, history and psychology, the book punctures dozens of assumptions about what it takes to win, and who makes money in football – and in sports in general.

“The problem for South Africa was that they had to spend quite a lot to build stadiums,” Szymanski said in a telephone interview from London.

“Germany could afford this, and it had stadiums anyway. But South Africa is a nation that can ill afford to fritter away a few billion on white elephants.”

Following the 2002 World Cup, for instance, South Korea’s K-League had difficulties filling the 10 new stadiums built for the tournament at a cost of more than $2-billion.

The book’s argument is that hosting a World Cup or Olympics is an inefficient way to revitalise a city, or enrich a nation – especially one like South Africa, where a third of the population lives on less than $2 a day. It can boost a nation’s morale or image, but not much else.

“If you want to regenerate a poor neighbourhood, regenerate it,” Szymanski and Kuper write.

“If you want an Olympic pool and a warm-up track, build them. You could build pools and tracks all across London, and it would still be cheaper than hosting the Olympics.”

Szymanski, an economics professor at Cass Business School in London, and Kuper, a sports writer living in Paris, challenge plenty of accepted wisdoms. They even talk of opening a consulting firm for leagues and clubs, promising to improve performance and save money.

“We are not trying to take the magic out of soccer,” Szymanski said in the interview. “But we want to understand the patterns, because they are not completely random.”

Getting the words out that your business is “green” is proven to be a smart business move – Is it only a marketing ploy or a real environmental-changing business campaign?

Go green issues has been hot in small business and entrepreneurship, especially in the last couple of years. In every business sector, there is highly probable a niche that is green-related: green real estates, green cars, green web hosting providers, green printing, green jobs, green business cards, green offices, etc.

To learn more, as usual, I use Google Insights to get a bigger picture on a topic from the Internet.

Just type in “green business” in Google Insights’ search box and you’ll see what I mean:

Green business trend

Going green drives plenty of interests. According to Google Insights, the top interest on “green business” is the United States, followed by the United Kingdom. It’s probably safe to assume that the US and the UK are two of the countries whose people are having a strong awareness on environmentally-friendly practices in business.

Given the prospects and trends, a question arises: Is going green in business only a marketing gimmick?

The answer is cliche: yes and no.

To some, green business is just a marketing gimmick

With the green energy certificates and renewable energy credits available for businesses to instantly green their business operations, I’m not sure buying those will instantly make the business green. Carbon neutral – yes; green – no.

RECs (renewable energy credits) can aid a business to go green by nullifying its carbon emission, but they will not make a business more effective and energy efficient in its business operations.

In my opinion, going green in business is more about business practices than simply neturalising the carbon emission released in any business activities.

Going paperless, use daylight lighting system, optimising the use of air conditioners and using energy-efficient light bulbs are some of the activities that make a business greener, despite not necessarily carbon neutral.

So, yes – To some business claiming that their business is green but is not practicing green business operations, despite the plausible business action, going green is probably more a hyped marketing move rather than an environmentally-changing move.

To some others, green business is real life-changing business

To some other, going green takes the business beyond their operational comfort zone.

Some examples: A green business plants a tree for every joining customer; A business allows (even insists) the employees to telecommute to reduce carbon emissions created by traveling to and from the office; Another business even build its own wind turbines to power its business operation with 100% renewable energy.

Some green business mix-and-match green business practices with the purchase of RECs (and other green certificates), virtually making them green and carbon neutral.

Nevertheless, every green-related activity counts

A marketing gimmick or not, green businesses are, indeed, the front-runners in creating a more environmentally-conscious society, worldwide.

Their decision in going green is highly appreciated. And as long as what they do in their going green efforts is positive, enjoying residual financial and branding benefits from the “go green” business campaign is entirely fine with me.

How about you? Please let us know your opinion by commenting on this article.

Ivan Widjaya
Green business rocks
Image by greenforall.org.

There was a time when we all fought for Google Wave invitations. The anticipation was terrific, far greater than a new operating system, a new cell phone release, a major software upgrade that none of us could possibly exist without!
I run a course in cutting edge social media marketing, based largely on my own research and emperical evidence. I have so badly wanted Google Wave to succeed, to overcome all the shortfalls in Twitter, Facebook, You Tube etc by integrating them all under one platform … and then some.
And now, having one of the first Google wave invites, and being able to spread my enthusiasm to others close to me, my family, my friends, my business partners and students; by being allowed to invite others to the Beta version of Google Wave, I find myself questioning the lack of organic energy that’s supposed to build up to a new release of technology, certainly of what I have expected of GoogleWave.
There seems no follow through. My friends (or they used to be) have dropped the enthusiasm and contact and reverted to the good old email, twitter and other social media – Google Wave didn’t seem to make any king of wave in their lives. Could I have strange friends, or have I misled my friends, because my own expectations were not that real?

If your business needs money, it seems as though you have two choices:

• Get a loan from a bank
• Raise equity from an investor, giving up part of your company in exchange

Banks are everywhere, so the idea that they can loan us money seems obvious. And venture capitalists and the companies they fund are in the news all the time… and making a billion dollars sounds like fun.

Here’s the thing: for most businesses, most of the time, neither is a realistic option.

Banks aren’t in the business of taking risk. Which means that they make boring loans to boring companies for boring purposes. They do everything they can to be riskless. Which means you need to guarantee the loan with your house or with assets worth far more than the loan. Which means that a good idea is not a sufficiently good reason for a loan.

And equity? Well there are two problems. The first is that the number of investments that professional VCs can make is microscopically small compared to the number of businesses that want them. A bigger reason is that if there’s no obvious and reliable exit strategy (like going public or selling to a huge public company) then there’s no rational reason for someone to make an equity loan. The entire upside comes when you sell, and if you can’t easily sell (which is most businesses–they’re even harder to sell at a profit than a used car) then there’s no VC investment to be had.

But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck. I’d like you to consider the idea of selling part of your income.

It works like this: you have an idea, a fledgling business or a new market to enter. You find an amateur investor (a wealthy dentist, a retired executive) and raise the money to bring it to market. And in return? The investor gets $xx for every unit you sell. From the first one until forever.

No fancy bookkeeping, no board meetings, no worrying about the accounting. Instead, you pay a royalty on income. The rest is up to you.

Of course, this is exactly how the math of book publishing works. The publisher puts up money and keeps 80 or 90 percent of the income. You get the rest.

It could even run on a sliding scale, with early royalties to the investor being lower, or with a buyout once a certain amount was earned back… If you needed $5,000 for some tooling, perhaps you could offer an investor $100 for every until until you sell until you’ve paid her $10,000, than $40 a unit forever after that.

Need to raise money for a restaurant? It’s hard for an investor to figure out how to win by owning equity (because it’s so easy for the owner of the restaurant to manipulate profit). But if the investor gets 4% of every check paid, that’s money back starting on the first day.

Investors are as irrational as the rest of us. They buy a story and expectation about risk. They buy the excitement of upside. They buy an opportunity to turn one thing into another. Banks want a boring story. Other investors might like this alternative story quite a bit.

My general bias for entrepreneurs starting out is to bootstrap their business, because raising money is so hard and so distracting. But if you’ve set out to do something that needs cash you can’t raise any other way, this is worth exploring. Tell a story to an investor that wants to hear it, and create a cash-flow scenario that makes the investment worth it for both of you.

So, if it’s true that to a person with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, the really useful question is, “what sort of hammer do you have?”

At big TV networks, they have a TV hammer. At a surgeon’s office, they have the scalpel hammer. A drug counselor has the talk hammer, while a judge probably has the jail hammer.

Maybe it’s time for a new hammer…

One study found that when confronted with a patient with back pain, surgeons prescribed surgery, physical therapists thought that therapy was indicated and yes, acupuncturists were sure needles were the answer. Across the entire universe of patients, the single largest indicator of treatment wasn’t symptoms or patient background, it was the background of the doctor.

When the market changes, you may be seeing all the new opportunities and problems the wrong way because of the solutions you’re used to. The reason so many organizations have trouble using social media is that they are using precisely the wrong hammer. And odds are, they will continue to do so until their organization fails. PR firms try to use the new tools to send press releases, because, you guessed it, that’s their hammer.

It’s not just about new vs. old. Inveterate community-focused social media mavens often bring that particular hammer to other venues. So they crowdsource keynote speeches or restaurants or board meetings and can’t figure out why they don’t have the impact others do.

The best way to find the right tool for the job is to learn to be good at switching hammers.

Seth Godin

Successful organizations spend a lot of time saying, “that’s not what we do.”
It’s a requirement, because if you do everything, in every way, you’re sunk. You got to where you are by standing for something, by approaching markets and situations in a certain way. Sure, Nike could make money in the short run by licensing their name to a line of wines and spirits, but that’s not what they do.
“That’s not what we do,” is the backbone of strategy, it determines who you are and where you’re going.
Except in times of change. Except when opportunities come along. Except when people in the organization forget to ask, “why?”
If the only reason you don’t do something is because you never did, that’s not a good reason. If the environment has changed dramatically and you are feeling pain because of it, this is a great reason to question yourself, to ask why.
The why factor is really clear online. Simon and Schuster or the Encyclopedia Britannica could have become Google (organizing the world’s information) but they didn’t build a search engine because that’s not what they do. Struggling newspapers could have become thriving networks of long tail content, but they chose not to, because that’s not what they do.
Why?
That’s the key question, one that organizations large and small need to ask a lot more often now that the economy is officially playing by new rules.