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Fear and greed, it has been said, are the two primal emotions that have propelled human civilization. Of course, both have their dark side, too.

Greed is positive and productive when channeled toward personal and professional improvement. But it turns ugly in pursuit of a single-minded or selfish outcome. When fear delivers important information it’s not only useful, it’s essential. But it can also morph into paranoia, or cause inaction.

As I’ve discussed recently in this space, at this very moment, the nature of fear and greed is changing. For 10,000 years, the only form humans have known has been analog. This means any leveraging of them was likely mechanical, moving no faster than the speed of sound.

But today, we’re fully across the digital Rubicon and there’s no turning back. In this new universe, fear and greed are being leveraged with a force that moves at the speed of light. And the new rules of this paradigm shift – transitioning from analog rpm to digital GHz – are putting pressure on our ability to keep up, armed only with ancient analog ethics.

But fear and greed are not our only productive motivators. In fact, six others not only contributed to human development alongside fear and greed all those years but have also had a more consistently positive impact on the marketplace. [Continue Reading]

On my radio program, beginning in 1998, I started interviewing telecom experts on something called broadband Internet connection. It would be the replacement for dial-up over POTS – plain old telephone service. At that point, like the Internet itself, the “big pipe” was so new that less than 4% of households and almost no businesses had broadband Internet connection.

Reporting on this emerging capability, I made the easy prediction that the world would change when broadband became ubiquitous and broadly adopted – which it did. But the harder prediction – which I didn’t make – would have been that the real game-changer would take the form of mobile computing on the tiny screens of magic wands we call smartphones. Today, with mobile networks delivering fourth-generation connectivity – 4G – almost everywhere, and 5G on the way, mobile computing has disrupted the marketplace in unprecedented ways by giving consumers exciting new expectations.

But perhaps what caused mobile computing to make a quantum leap is found in this slogan: “There’s an app for that.” Anyone with access to paved roads and/or electricity knows this refers to an application that converts content otherwise consumed with a browser on a PC, to a hand-held device, like a smartphone or tablet. Mobile apps have proliferated because they’re almost always handier – and sexier – than their website counterparts.

A generation before my broadband prognostication, a real prophet, John Naisbitt, published his landmark book, Megatrends (Warner Books, 1982), in which he prophesied, “The more high tech we have, the more high touch we will want.” I’ve termed that quote, “Naisbitt’s Razor,” and it foresaw a kind of unlikely equilibrium between digital technology and analog humanity. This will be on the test: For a small business to find success in The Age of the Customer, Naisbitt’s Razor must be at the heart of your business strategy.[Continue Reading]

If you don’t like making decisions, small business ownership will not be your cup of tea.

If just the thought of having to choose between two undesirable alternatives gives you a headache, don’t quit your job.

If you obsess about which direction to take because you know you’ll have to live with any mistake you make, be sure to clock in tomorrow and thank your employer for the job.

Clearly, making decisions is easier for some than others, and it’s human nature to put off hard decisions. But there’s nothing easy about being a business owner, including having to make lots of decisions that are difficult, frightening, and sometimes even professionally and financially perilous.

Not only do business owners have to make many decisions, but in his book, Tough Management, my friend Chuck Martin proposes that one of the seven principles of effective management is the ability to actually force tough decisions; to cultivate a management practice that gets the toughest decisions right out front and dealt with as soon as possible.

But in his research, Martin discovered that the difference between what management thought they were doing with regard to effective decision-making, and what their subordinates felt their bosses were doing, made it look like these two groups weren’t watching the same ballgame. [Continue Reading]

Since humans are capable of abstract thought and sophisticated language, our behavior often blurs the lines between black and white into what is known as “the gray area.” Consequently, the desire for order in the marketplace promotes 1) the establishment of ethical standards to encourage acceptable personal behavior; 2) contracts to establish legal behavior; 3) courts to sort things out when a final authority is required.

When it comes to ethics, the so-called professionals have lots of help. Attorneys, CPAs, doctors, architects, investment professionals, etc., have established and published very specific ethical and professional standards, plus monitoring entities with sanctioning authority. Indeed, their education includes, and sustained certification requires, knowledge of that profession’s ethical standards and practices.

But when small business owners find themselves in the gray area with a customer or other business relationship, there is no rule book we can call on for guidance. We’re on our own because The Universal Code of Small Business Professional Conduct and Ethical Standards doesn’t exist. Yet.[Continue Reading]