Workin' Girl

Northampton, affectionately known as NoHo, and Western Massachusetts wouldn’t really seem to be a hot spot of economic activity…but apparently it is!  What a nice surprise

You can see the promotional video here: Western MA a Place to Work

As we all know, the economy is in pretty terrible shape and the U.S. Government Stimulus Package may help to keep it from getting worse. To that end, we thought everyone would find this article from Yahoo of
interest, “Stimulus Job Watch: Collected Tips and Opportunities for Job Seekers”

There’s a good bit of information in it about sectors that are being stimulated:

• Money has been released by HUD for energy efficieny projects (maybe now is the time to start a small scale home improvement company?)
• Wind Energy had a big bump up in funding
• Big-money transportation projects were announced in Maryland, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, California, and Colorado (perhaps the construction firms there are hiring?)
• There is a $4 million piece going to the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), which includes funding for adult employment and training activities and training for jobs in high-growth and emerging industry sectors.

Read all about it at Yahoo Hot Jobs here: http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/career-articles-stimulus_job_watch-794

Life just got a whole lot more complicated as my company, finally, had to succumb to the pressure of the current economic thing-a-ma-bobish recession er MACRO-micro economic thing we are in. It was inevitable. Being a small firm with valuable technology we are valuable but we are also easy to push around. So as we sat in the meeting room today, our chief scientist cleared his throat (”ahem”) and became one for whom stroking one’s beard is a nervous act hiding as one of wisdom and he spaketh unto us …..

“I have some good news and some, well, less than good news…statistically speaking of course”.

Those of us tech-marketing weenies looked about and said to ourselves, “wow, even WE didn’t understand that but it was good; we didn’t know this guy was that good at creating copy”. But he continued.

And we all got kinda puzzled seeing charts, graphs, scattergrams, hockey stick graphs, deep valley graphs and then realized…oh crap we really ARE in trouble!

My first thought was, so typical, “My freakin’ hair removal budget down the drain”. Said through clenched teeth under my breath my blonde hair’d friends words echoing through my ears, “The hair Becki, it’s always about THE HAIR”. Many of our kind readers will remember her refrain, so captured in “Hair Removal Horror” … and here it was again. But my fretting and dark clouds soon had a silver lining as I learned about workshare. And that was a treat.

Share my job? Oh hell ya! I’m all about that and so I really DID feel joyful upon learning that my company would join many others in New England to spread the hurt a bit and help us all keep our jobs to make it through the tough times.

Jo Landers, President of Jo Lander’s Business Services, captures the essence of this program best on her site, when she writes,

The WorkShare Program, run by the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance (formerly the DET), is a way to ‘partially’ layoff employees during a slowdown, without having to let them go or shut your business down completely.

The program is a boon on many levels for companies who are being assaulted by the difficult business climate. Among the many benefits are:

1. The company putting Workshare into place doesn’t lose it’s super skilled labor.
2. The employees aren’t hitting the bricks to the unemployment line, they are working, just a little less for a little less pay
3. Workshare payments count against a company’s state unemployment account but because a company is paying only partial benefits, the impact is much less
4. Workers (like me) do see a paycut, but, if one were to be laid off, the reduction would be significantly larger and in this economy who knows for how long.
5. Employees continue to keep their health care and other benefits during a Workshare arrangement

You can read Jo’s excellent summary on the Massachusetts Workshare Program at her professional services site here. You can read all about it from the employees and the employer’s perspective at mass.gov at this link here.

So, if the firm you work is having some challenges keeping the ship aright, suggest a Workshare program. Everyone sharing a little can keep the boat afloat giving everyone valuable time to make things right for the long term.

(Photo courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Flickr Photostream)

If your transgender and unemployed, or just plain old unemployed regardless of who you are, sometimes things can look pretty bleak.  That’s especially true given today’s job market.  John Buckman has an answer: Start your own company.   And he’s got some very in your face advice as well.

John’s bio is interesting.  He is the founder of Magnatune, a Berkeley, California-based record label he founded in 2003 and which is known for its commercial application of Creative Commons licensing and overtly artist-friendly business practices.  He’s been profiled by Forbes, Inc. Magazine, and The Economist. You can read his full profile at Wikipedia here.

John gave a talk at LeWeb 08 about entrepreneurship which was provocative, simple and poweful.   If your on the fence about starting your own firm, John’s presentation may help you re-think what you are doing.  You can view his talk recorded at Le Web at UStream TV here.   If you just want to check out his slide deck, you can download it from Slide Share here.

None other than the Harvard Business Review is covering transgender workplace issues.  This is pretty big.  The best place to go for the links to follow this are at The Billerico Project Post, “Harvard Business Review Weighs in on Transgender Workplace Issues”

At that post, written by Dr. Jillian Todd Weiss, of The Transgender Workplace Blog, you’ll find links to:

• Links to the HBR blog article written on the topic
• Info on the HBR issue being published with the coverage
• Info on a recent study by Schilt and Wiswall on the gender wage gap, using data about transgender workplace experiences

All in all, very exciting to see!

The Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) now offers job listings of known jobs that are transgender friendly. Certainly all jobs should accept you based on what your performance is in benefiting the company for whom you work, but, sadly, that is not the case (hence the reason for HB1722). So, to see some job listings that are transgender friendly, mouse on over to MTPC’s Trans-Friendly Job Listings to see what’s around.

Oh, if you know of a job that is trans-friendly, consider posting it at MTPC’s board to spread the word on the opening!

Beck’s Cafe also covered another list of transgender friendly jobs at our article, “Simply Hired and Transgender Friendly too” Go take a peek to see what you can find. Also, Southern Comfort Conference, on September 30 - October 5th, 2008 will be featuring their Second Annual Career Expo (a national event) in collaboration with Out and Equal Workplace Advocates. Exhibiting companies include GM, Raytheon, IBM, and many others

Your transgender, your unemployed and now your looking at your options. Should you just work for anyone and hope no one finds out your transgender? Should you just go find a job and just not worry about it unless the issue comes up? Maybe you don’t present as the gender you really are at all but it’s who you are and you need to take some action eventually and yet you still need to work. What do you do?

These are all very personal questions and effect each and every transgender person, regardless of if they are transitioning or if they’ve found a life balance that allows them to live productive, healthy and happy lives.

One resource that you may want to consider is from a relatively new job search engine called Simply Hired Job Search Engine. Simply Hired has coupled their search engine technology with the Human Rights Campaign list of companies the have studied that support LGBT employees (see HRC Corporate Equality Index Human Right Campaign Corporate Equality Index). It’s easy to do, you simply do a search with the Simply Hired LGBT filter on and out pops the jobs!

You can reach the Simply Hired Job Search Engine with LGBT Filter at their site HERE.

Also, don’t forget to checkout the SCC Transgender Career Expo or the Washington D.C. Transgender Job Fair. Finally Dr. Weiss over at Transgender Workplace Diversity has some excellent articles on this topic in general that are well worth a read over a tall, cold iced Americano.

Well, if one job fair weren’t enough for transgender folk, now there’s two. While the Southern Comfort Career Expo focuses on a national theme, the Transgender Career Day in Washington D.C. has a more local flavour and it’s happening on two different days. In the words of the organizers,

The purpose of these events will be to bring together representatives of government agencies, corporations and private businesses with interests in the District together with members of the District’s transgendered community for the expressed purpose of finding jobs and job training opportunities for them.

And what a list of organizers there are. It looks like people are rallying around the concept of getting people jobs. And for those of us in the transgender community this is great news. You can get a job, a new start, a bright future.

So here are the dates for our readers in Washington D.C.:

• August 18th, from 1PM-6PM will be cover topics such as resume writing, interviewing, dressing for job success, and the DC 2000 application.
• September 29th, from 1PM - 5PM will be a job fair with representatives from government, the nonprofit community and corporate employers.

You can get more details on the Washington D.C. Career and Job Fairs by visiting the District of Columbia’s LGBT affairs office at this link HERE.

Fenway Community Health did something similar in Boston in February. You can read about it at this post at Beck’s Cafe here. JobNET Boston led the career part of the Fenway Transgender expo in Boston. So don’t be afraid to contact them here in Boston for some help!

Southern Comfort Conference (SCC) is one of the most important Transgender Conferences in the United States. This year they hope to top 1000 attendees. I’ve had the immense pleasure of meeting some of their organizers such Lola Cola (in person, what a treat!) and CAT (only on the phone, but a delight none-the-less). They are so helpful in fact that both of them were important consultants to First Event 2007. How’s that for being a friend!

Both Lola and CAT are dedicated to making SCC fun, friendly and helpful. And the helpful part is something you don’t hear to much about but they blaze a trail of social justice that every trans-person should take note of and emulate even in some small way.

This year SCC’s innovative approach to helping the transgender community extends to finding a job! The Transgender Career Expo at Southern Comfort Conference. The Career Expo will run from 9:00AM until 4:00PM on Friday, September 14th (closed during lunch). It is an open event sponsored by SCC and The Human Rights Campaign and one need not be registered for the conference to gain value from this function.

The Transgender Career Expo is exemplary on a number of levels, from it being the first of its kind to the type of companies that are exhibiting. Here’s a partial list. Some will have actual HR Recruiting Managers present while others will simply be sending representatives as a show of support and to supply information Its a who’s who of corporate America:

• Alston & Bird LLC
• American Airlines
• Deloitte Ernst & Young
• GLAAD
• Hewlett Packard
• Human Rights Campaign
• Intercontinental Hotel Group
• JPMorganChase
• Lambda Legal
• Microsoft
• NCTE
• New York Life
• NGLCC
• Powell Goldstein LLP
• PriceWaterhouseCoopers
• Sprint / NEXTEL
• The Point Foundation
• The Mosaic Identity
• Turner Broadcasting

How important is the Transgender Career Expo? Let me quote Lola Cola and Kristin Reichman both of SCC:

Please be sure to spread the word to promote and support this extraordinary event. It is critical that we, as a community, step up and create our own place in the world just as these companies have stepped up to the realization that hiring and retaining quality employees is based upon talent and abilities and that being Transgender is irrelevant.

[information courtesy of Lola Cola, Kristin Reichman; Southern Comfort Conference]

Donna Rose was interviewed by Fortune magazine as part of their coverage on transgender folks in the workplace. It’s interesting reading with some very helpful references included. You can catch it at CNN by visiting their site at this link HERE.

Among the cool tidbits are:

• A bit about what Donna has been doing professionally
• A list of some companies that now include transgender protections
• Some reasons why corporate America seems to be moving to support the transgender individual

Well worth a read I’d say.

Dr. Jillian Todd Weiss has posted an aritcle on her blog, “Transgender Workplace Diversity” that is sobering. Entitled, “National statistics on Transgender Unemployment”, the article has some chilling facts for all of us:

• There is a 35% unemployment rate among transgender persons due to discrimination
• Of those employed, 60% are earning below $15,000 per year.
• Unemployment runs about eight times higher than the national average and the poverty rate is five times higher

But Dr. Weiss wisely asks the question, “how was the data collected”. Let’s face it, even in the transgender community the massaging of numbers and the tilting of data is not above some activists approaches. And Dr. Weiss is asking the hard question, “how did you find your subjects”? Her question is valid and her conclusions are well worth a read. You can read the full article to see what is going on at her Blog, “Transgender Workplace Diversity” at this link on her site HERE. You can read the full study, as done by Richard M. Juang at “Trans Group Blog” by visiting the story at this link HERE.

Finally, such an article as this begs the question, what do I do about being employed if I’m trans? Well, there are a number of strategies, but one that pops to mind is the Career Expo being held at Southern Comfort Conference. Companies such as Microsoft, Deloitte, JP Morgan, Starbuck and Turner among many other national firms will be there exhibiting at the Career Fair. It’s well worth a look see. You can visit the Southern Comfort Conference web site at this link here.

Beck’s Cafe has a bevy of coffee swillers, ne’er-do-wells, vagabonds, glam girls and handsome men as patrons, one of our fav’s is a genteman from down South. He sent along what is probably the most unusual, but certainly memorable business card promoting a photography business that I’ve seen in a long time, “Brides to Bitches”.

Now, how can the name of a photo studio called “Brides to Bitches” NOT stick in your memory? What ideas can you think of to make your business memorable?

I couldn’t help but laugh reading a recent article in The Inquirer regarding the effects of going global when one nation observes Intellectual Property protection laws and another does not. Seems that Korean company, Lucky Goldstar’s (LG) Chocolate phone was such a hot item, yet slow in getting it into the Chinese market, that pirates copied the phone and beat LG to the Chinese market with their own product but with a twist. The Chinese pirated copy was a better phone than the original!

You can read the ramifications of that by reading the original story at The Inquirer site at this link HERE.

Product quality and I’d say product experience, whether it’s a service or a thing, matters. LG didn’t quite get that here for some reason, but each of us providing a service or product need to. Tom Peter’s, the WOW guru for business, has alot of valuable (and free) thoughts on this topic for your reading pleasure. You can get to Tom’s list of design blog articles by clicking to his site at this link HERE.  Business Week has an excellent article as well on Why Design Matters, you can click to Business Week’s article HERE.

(Picture courtesy of Olav.Mueller Photos, used under license of Creative Commons)

There are a number of outstanding updates on the whole area of workplace diversity at the Transgender Workplace Diversity blog site. In the words of the blog’s author, Dr. Jillian Todd Weiss:

This blog is for HR and Diversity professionals who are faced with issues of “transgender workplace diversity.” Here, every working day, I discuss resources, news, and issues of importance specifically for HR and Diversity professionals who need to know the latest on this fast-developing new category of employees.

Some of the new topics covered and well worth a read are:

• Kodak Corporation update trans health beneftis
• West Chester Pennsylvania Council moves gender identity ordinance forward
• Dear Abby weighs in on bathroom question, and what that means to us who are transgender
• Draft Agenda for Co-worker meeting regarding transitioning on the job and giving advice on what to do and how to do it
• Proposed Homeland Security Rules and what the effects could be for you should you transition

Dr. Weiss’s site is choc-a-bloc full of very valuable information on this critical topic for all us workin’ girls and boys - whether you are transitioning or not. Go grab a nice iced cappucino and have a read at the Transgender Workplace Diversity blog by clicking HERE, you’ll be glad you did.

(fish photo courtesy of Greenhem’s Photos, used under license from Creative Commons)

In Part I of this two part series on the HUBZone program, we covered what the HUBZone program is, how it works and how to tap into it. In Part II we’ll look at the HUBZone in action and the experience of those on the program.

HUBZone in action, experience of those using it now
What are some real life examples that this even IS an advantage to small business and not just a paperchase (or do loop if your a software geek)?

One firm, in Massachusetts, EComp, reported that they had to work extra hard to get their HUBZone designation. They still have to work hard to get government contracts, but, EComp feels that that their HUBZone designation will give them an added value with their large customers. Every large company fulfilling federal government contracts has to meet a HUBZone requirement, if some of them do business with EComp for electronic components they will be able to do just that. So EComp is looking at their HUBZone designation to help them either with government contracts or with larger companies who do business with the government, thus giving them two ways to win the business.

Other companies, such as Keylogic Systems in West Virginia had reported no success with government contracts since they had obtained their HUBZone designation. Keylogic is very successful as a small business, well respected and sought after. But their limited success with HUBZone is related to lack of awareness about HUBZone by contracting officers, a sense that only very simple work can be contracted to HUBZone certified companies, and the ease with which contracting officers can use alternate procurement vehicles.

The secret seems to be in making the marketing of HUBZone, once you have the designation, as much a part of your marketing plan as marketing your product. The HUBZone Contractor’s National Council had these tips to offer (you can down load their presensation at this link here):

• Market to your current customers
  -help them solve their “HUBZone goal challenge”

• Encourage team involvement
  -leverage team partnerships to win tasks

• Educate customers about HUBZone program requirements
  -help them solve “goal problem” by creating solution

• Make all your partners “HUBZone Enabled”
  -provide access to market & contracts previously unavailable
  -market & pursue HUBZone opportunities

• Proactively help your clients meet their HUBZone Goals
  -Previously been a challenge for agencies COs & OSDBU’s
  -Often agencies welcome an familiar & proven solution as they are low risk, easy, comfortable
  -Move new/existing contracts to HUBZone rather than loose to other small business programs

• Steer New Opportunities to HUBZone Program
  -Access opportunities that may otherwise go to other programs
  -Use rule of two – when appropriate
  -Reduce competition
  -Give clients HZ credit

The bottom line seems to be that while HUBZone has been enacted and can help you be more competitive. However, you have to market and use the tool for yourself as you would any other tool to make your small business thrive. The payoff? Tapping into some of that $62.7 billion dollars in prime contracts AND helping depressed areas of your community.

Some resources for further study:

• Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship
• USA Small Business Association HUBZone Site
• How to get on the U.S. Government General Services Administration contracts

Let’s face it, business is a pretty tough racket. That can be especially true if your a small business, you need every advantage you can get. This has been seen in cases where Walmart has moved into town or a big mega-mall plunks down and starts to eat into a the retail district of a downtown. But what if there was a very large market potentially available to you that could open a new revenue stream and had a way for you to compete in it that the big companies didn’t have access too? And what if it helped your community out as well?

The U.S. government, in 2004, spent the following in just a few sectors that are potentially open markets for small businesses (all dollars are billions, data from U.S. Government Printing Office, Budget of the United States Government: Historical Tables Fiscal Year 2006):

• Education, training, employment, and social services $ 87,945
• Health $240,134
• General science, space and technology $ 23,053
• Administration of justice $ 45,535

If we drill down into the details a bit, a very positive story emerges. According to the April 5, 2004 issue of Federal Times,(as posted at the U.S. Department for Housing and Urban Development news site at this link HERE), a quarter of the U.S. government’s prime contracting dollars were awarded to small businesses. That means that small businesses won $62.7 billion dollars in prime contracts, an increase from 2002 of $9.7 billion.

Whatever market size your serving now is likely small in comparison to what these market numbers represent. So finding those opportunities is a big market opportunity and keeping them once you have them is a good business practice. One tool in the small business person’s toolkit to help find these markets and compete in them is the HUBZone Empowerment Contracting Program. This program gives preferential treatment to small businensses. Here’s the particulars from the HUBzone web site:

The HUBZone Empowerment Contracting Program stimulates economic development and creates jobs in urban and rural communities by providing Federal contracting preferences to small businesses. These preferences go to small businesses that obtain HUBZone (Historically Underutilized Business Zone) certification in part by employing staff who live in a HUBZone.

You as a small business owner, get preferential treatment to contracts for helping a disadvantaged area of your community out. Sounds like a win-win to me but how does the program work, how do you tap into it, and what’s the experience of some who have?

How does the HubZONE program work?
First, your company must be considered a small business by SBA size standards (see the SBA for more info at this link HERE). Second, your company or a primary office have to be located in a HUBZONE, (we’ll talk about what that all means in the next section). Third, 35 percent of the staff of your company in the HUBZone have to be living in the HubZONE, the point being that your helping out a disadvantaged part of your city by doing this. Fourth, your business must be owned and controlled by one or more U.S. Citizens.

Tapping into the HubZONE
Tapping into HubZONES requires first that you actually be in one or be willing to relocate a primary office to one. Note that’s not your headquarters, just a key office. As defined by the program a primary office is one:

where the greatest number of employees at any one location actually perform their work, except for construction and service industries, which have exemptions based on their occasional need to assign employees at the contract location

To find out if your in a hubzone or if some target areas near you is you can use the handy tool located on the HubZone site. You can reach that tool by clicking on this link here.

Once you’ve found and are in a HUBZone location then you’ve got to get access to the contracts and start bidding on them. You can get help with doing that by going to the SBC contracts site by clicking to this link HERE.

Some neat points about the program are that:

• HUBZone set-asides considered before HUBZone sole-source or small business set-asides. These set-asides opportunities are only for HUBZoned companies (thus limiting the competition)

• Contracting Officer (CO) may set-aside acquisitions exceeding the Micro Purchase ($2,500) and below the Simplified Acquisition Threshold ($100K)

• A HUBZone firm can displace the apparent low offer of another bidder (other than another small business) if the HUBZone firm’s price is not more than 10% higher than the otherwise lowest, responsive and responsible offer [factor applied to ‘base offer’]. Just get close with your bid and practice good customer service and you’ll win in other words!

• For most large contracts (over $500,000 or $1 million construction), large business contractors must create a subcontracting plan reflecting HUBZone firm participation. So, your market size NOW involves bidding directly for contracts AND working as a partner with larger firms who need you, the small business owner, so that they can win bids. This opens up more opportunities for you, not a bad deal!

• “Rule of Two” - When 2 or more qualified HUBZone companies request a procurement be set-aside for HUBZone, the Government Contracting Office must release as HZ set-aside.

Next week, in “HUBZone Your Small Business, Part II” we’ll look at the HUBZone in action and the experience of those on the program.

Have you ever thought about your job in the negative sense being positive?

I can here you saying to your screens now over your latte’s “Becki, lay off the sauce”. Hey, I’m serious here!

Let’s take a look at some recent examples then you tell me, are negatives in marketing really positive in disguise, or do they go too far to get attention?

Culprit #1
As reported in the June 12, 2006 Wall Street Journal, the Dixie Chicks are postponing as many as half the 42 dates announced for their coming “Accidents and Accusations” concert tour that was reported to start on June 21st. The article digs into some apparent disagreement that the band is having with it’s traditional fan base (country music) as it finds it is having more broad appeal, in Europe of all things. The key thing I want to highlight though from the article is this; they are getting press and visibility and that for free due to the bands friction. I wonder how many people are being reached to think about or to investigate the Dixie Chicks who might not otherwise have? Sounds like a negative win to me.

Culprit #2
Who would think the “Fresh Maker”^(TM)“, Mento’s Candy, would cause such a stir. As if you didn’t get enough zip from your rum and cock, two enterprising “inventors” have come up with a mentos and coke for a smashing good time (see story about them at the Boston Globe here). In a nutshell, the two invented a way to make geysers out of combining Mentos the candy with Coca-Cola. The result is quite explosive as you can see on this video of the event at this link HERE. Do you know what Mento’s did when they heard of this rather unusual use of their famed candy? They put the video up on the Mento’s main web site! That’s right. Instead of sueing the inventors or issuing a press release that such use of Mentos is improper, they highlighted it. Guess who’s got lots of sweet mindshare from what might have been a negative message on what to do with their candy? Mentos of course.

What does this all mean?
Well some types of negative marketing are good and working with it can actually draw more people, eyeballs, minds and money to you rather than push them away. So what negative things have happened to your company’s message that could actually be a positive? Have you reacted to embrace or embellish the negative to advantage your company, organization or group or have you tried to distance yourself, and why? These lessons work for non-profit and for-profit companies alike. Look carefully at those negative messages though. Like magnets with opposite polls set together the negative message may bring positive results to your bottom line.

(negative photo courtesy of Saudi Photo, via Creative Commons License)

I’m not exactly a pro when it comes to customer service but of this much I am sure, when a customer is angry, it’s always better to listen to them. Angry customers will say things to harm you, maim you and generally make you feel bad. They may be mostly wrong BUT their hearfelt and raw input is just the thing you need to make your business, service or organization of any kind more customer responsive and successful. It’ll hurt in the short term but help you in the long term.

Some companies can’t hear that though, and so resort to bizarre means to shield themselves from the customer onslaught and then mask it as being more attentive to the customer. The primary means of this is either technology that makes it appear (at least statistically) that you are getting better service or by offshoring and throwing poor souls trained only to follow a script at the problem.

I think the best most recent example of how not to hear your customer’s though is found in this post at the Inquirer about Sutton & East Surrey Water. In their own words:

LONDON’S second-leakiest water company has installed paradigm shifting leading edge award winning new technology that promises to do absolutely nothing to help the poor, dehydrated suckers who make up its customer base.

You can read the story for yourself by clicking HERE

(super cute photo courtesy of Shopping Diva used under Creative Commons License)

In part one (see link here) of this two part series we covered what an organizational ecosystem is. In part two we’ll cover how to make them and give some example of how they could work for you. We’ll choose a societal need for our example; there are already lots of examples of high tech ecosystems (see link at Intel HERE or at Microsoft HERE )

What are some points to consider in building an organizational ecosystem?

* Every organization that is a part of the ecosystem needs to get an equal shot at a slice of the pie (be that funding, revenue or accolades), but how an individual organization makes that happen is up to an individual organizations ability. That’s determined by an individual organization ability to deliver it’s service or provide an excellent product. In the case of VME, some companies had better or more sought after products than others while some chose a niche strategy. In the case of cranberries, some farms were bigger or more productive than others and that determined what they would receive.

* The core service or technology that everyone rallies around must answer a real need. You can see this with the cranberry growers needing an association to promote the use of cranberries or in the case of VME solving an industry problem of what to standardize on in terms of a flexible high speed bus architecture. If the core service or technology doesn’t answer some fundamental need in an industry or community then it’s not likely you can get other companies to come behind it for it’s success and the success of the individual companies.

* If the coordinating organizational is a voting organization for standards or approaches, each member organizational gets one vote. So, if you setup an ecosystem that is based around solving a community’s need to feed people who need that assistance and each company that is a part of that ecosystem is voting on decisions within that ecosystem, then each company or organizational, not an individual member, gets a single vote. That makes for a level playing field for decision making regardless of organizational size.

* While two or three organizations may start an ecosystem, usually you have to sell other members on the benefits to join it. Having others join can increase the acceptance of your ecosystems mission within your target audience. In general, the more who join the greater validity of the cause or concept. In many cases, whatever an ecosystem is advocating is more likely to be more accepted than what an individual company is promoting.

But how do you get there?
You get there first of all by seeing a need and determining if your individual organizational has the economic ability or not to make the need happen. In the case of the cranberry growers, it wasn’t possible for them all to be successful individually, and yet, they all had a crop that had economic viability. By coming together they could tackle the problem. But what does coming together mean?

Come together right now…
Coming together is about contributing resources financially and otherwise to create another umbrella organizational that will focus on the larger picture and message such as cranberries are good for you or VME provides for cheaper, more standardized compute hardware over proprietary hardware. The new organizational acts as an umbrella organizational and can fill the following roles:

• Has a director or general manager who can take the organizational helm and, for the benefit of the members, promote the vision of the organizational.
• Establishes meeting times and sets a framework for the member organizations to work together to cast a vision and a mission.
• Insures that there is a legal charter for the organization that all member companies will abide by. It really facilitates this as member companies have their representatives actually do this.
• Sets the policies for the larger umbrella organizational in terms of what issues they will tackle and what they will not but submits to the vote of the members as to what they will actually do.
• Promotes the vision with a variety of public relations means such as magazines or magazine articles, web sites, etc.
• Acts as a networker to establish connections with other allied organizations that might have a parallel path but not the same vision or mission.

So how about an example of how this might work?
So let’s try looking at a societal problem for our example. You can see high tech examples in the links above as well as the examples in part one of this two part series regarding cranberry growers and the VME industry.

One nagging problem in many inner cities is health care for the poor. How does it get done? Many times independent agencies will spring up some funded by churches, hospitals, or by a government or private grant. In some cases those organizations will start small (pediatric checkups for example) then gradually gain a larger footprint as they add more services to expand and improve on their mission. But by developing an ecosystem instead of a monolithic organizational an alternative approach can be considered:

• Smaller independent organizations pull together under an umbrella organization known as Community Health
• Community Health is the primary vehicle driving forward with the promotion of health prevention and treatment in the community, setting standards for how patients are treated, liaison for the group with area hospitals, assists with accreditation work, aids in helping on billing and potentially helps with fund raising
• Smaller independent member organizations such as the dentist, pediatrician, diagnostic lab, even physical therapist focus on what they do best; providing care to the patients who most need it. They also focus on their individual practice so that they can be efficient and profitable enough to serve their patients.
• The umbrella organizational essentially creates a model or standard approach for other new health care providers to plug into to provide more services to the community

So what are the pluses and minuses of this approach

Glad you asked! The down sides may include: possible inefficiency of use of high tech equipment lab or diagnostic equipment (too many organizations have the same equipment), potential for not being able to get funding or large enough block funding as individual organizations are too small, inefficiency in billing resulting in higher overall costs.

The pluses need to be considered too such as: potential for increased competition among the smaller organizations leading to lower costs for the patients, smaller organizations providing a more personal care for the patients, perception by patients that the smaller organizations are more approachable so they seek preventative care (always a less expensive option) more frequently, and job creation from many smaller organizations starting up.

Ecosystems work in nature and they work among organizations too. All they take is a little effort but the benefits gained can help your company and the others involved and, most importantly, your customers.

Intel does them well. eBay/Skype isn’t so bad at it. Wordpress knows how to knacker this about. What is it? Its organizational ecosystems. Organizational ecosystems are amazing entities that can help you reach your goals as a company or organization more easily. They help to reduce your costs and allow for more entrepreneurial and independent thinking for an area that might otherwise be dominated by a single company vision.

Let’s define what an ecosystem is though first. An ecosystem, according to the University of Illinois Department of Natural Resources is:

An ecosystem is an interacting system of plants, animals and humans and their surrounding physical environment. An ecosystem contains living and non-living organisms that each provide or contribute to a unique service or function that other organisms depend upon.

Sounds simple enough (if you’re an gnat or perhaps a wallaby) doesn’t it? Now let’s apply it to organizations:

An ecosystem is an interacting system of companies, consultants, and educational institutions in their surrounding economic environment. An ecosystem contains for profit and non-profit organizations that each provide or contribute to a unique service or technology conceptthat other organizations come to rely on.

So an ecosystem of companies makes it possible for multiple companies or organizations to effectively work together to meet their own individual goals while insuring that a larger goal is achieved - which in turn helps everyone as well. Such co-working makes it possible for a tide of sorts to rise bringing with it each company. Oh, and if the larger goal that is across the different companies or organizations is not met, guess what? No one succeeds individually either. See figure for a layout of what I’m getting at here:

Now you might be thinking, “isn’t this like what the chamber of commerce does when I join it or another professional organization?” Not really. Those organizations generally promote a concept known as networking and they help to insure that a profession is viewed well at large. That’s a good thing for sure, but it’s not the same as an ecosystem.

You also might be thinking, “Didn’t Joseph Stalin dream something like this up?” No, not exactly. Socialism infers a central control by a government. An ecosystem is a banding together of independent companies for their own self-interest and the greater interest of the group involved - since both are intertwined.

A good example of an ecosystem in technology is the VME market. VME stands for Versa Module European and is a long standing modular computing architecture for a wide variety of applications such as communications, industrial, and military/aerospace. VME has been alive for 25 years and show no sign of losing its usefulness. Using our definition of an ecosystem above, VME as a technology is the rising tide and approximately 240 companies encourage that market to grow. As each company works to promote the market, contribute to the technology, and work to see it grow, each company in turn is promoting its own agenda so that it too can be successful in its own right.

In practical terms it means that there is a trade association (known as VITA) that each member of this ecosystem supports that insures the technology continues and is promoted for it’s own sake - not to meet any one particular company’s objectives. Each company however moves toward it’s own goals with the technology as they see fit.

Another example is in the area of cooperatives, such as cranberry growers. In this scenario, such as with Ocean Spray, each individual cranberry farmer can’t really be successful by themselves. They have a great product (cranberries) but what do people do with them? Eating a handful of cranberries is not on most people’s list of culinary delights. Ocean Spray answers that issue though, promoting cranberries, processing them for bottling in juices and other edibles, and generally making it possible for you and I to enjoy something we might not otherwise be able to. This in turn makes a small segment of the farming industry sustainable.

So how does one create an ecosystem, and why should you and should you at all? We’ll have to pour another cup of cocoa for that one and cover that in part II.

I have the honor of being the primary helper to my Granmother. Helper is the operative word really - though I’m not sure who is helping who. At age 89 she still works 25 hours a week, drives where she wants, and actually helped me when I was near death. She’s quite a woman. So when she asked me to help her find a new car, how could I refuse?

We went shopping and eventually found that Toyota Camry fit the bill, an older, very basic one. With low mileage, a great used car warranty and a very friendly service staff (proved out by how they dealt with people I knew from both genders and a span of ages) I knew she’d be in good hands. So then we drove it home. Happy yes?

Then the phone calls started…

“How do you make the lights turn on?”

“How does it start, it’s locked and I can’t get it to start”

“You know, I couldn’t find out where to open the gas from”

…and so on it went until she looked at me and said, “why don’t they teach you how these things work anyway?”

It’s funny, a simple version of a car you’d think would be no issue to operate became a big issue. Now my Granmother is smart. She can talk politics, remember where her keys are, and whip up a mean batch of fried chicken. But sometimes no matter how smart you are, even the simplest of new equipment or services can be confusing. And that confusion can lead to dissatisfaction by customers for your product or service. So what to do?

Training! Also better known as “hand holding” could have made the difference in how she felt about her car, her purchase, and the person she purchased it from. Indeed, all three things are keys for customer satisfaction and for repeat business and referrals. Never forget that business is really about people. People buy from people.

You can do a simple, optional training program for any service or product really. Even the simplest of services or products could be enhanced in such a way. The key pieces for such a program are:

1. An overview of what the thing or service is - even if you’ve told them already what it is when you sold it to them, repeat it. Repetition helps learning
2. Talk about the key features and how best to access them (is there a button to push, a number to call, a special code word to use?)
3. Talk about some hidden tips on how to get the best from those features, or from that service. Letting people feel they are on the inside track, privy to some secret info on how to get the most from the product or service they bought, makes them feel valued. Valued people buy more, come back again or tell their friends to come to you.
4. Finally, talk about what to do to get help from your company if they are dissatisfied. Give them YOUR card and number, then your managers. Let them know they have advocates on their side. They didn’t just buy something from you, they bought you!

I’ll be doing that training for my Grandmother of course. But had the dealer done it she would have smiled more broadly when she walked out the dealership door. Help your customers walk away with a smile too, you’ll feel better about your job and the customer’s will feel better about buying even more from you.

Okay quick question - how many of you brainstorm best when your (a) hunched in front of your computer (b) in a room with a whiteboard and markers or someplace quiet like a library with a pad of paper and pencils?

If you answered (b) your taking a low tech approach and that may be a key to doing better and thinking smarter when you need a breakthrough. Jeanne Sessum over at Blogher wrote about this at this link here, and the original article was posted at Working Solo, which you can read here.

The thoughts they share on using low tech to make a breakthrough is worth giving serious consideration too. In fact, when working out this blog, I used *gasp* PAPER and PENCIL to outline:
* layout
* my publishing schedule (YOU have a publishing schedule Becki? uh Huh *cough* a loosely defined one)
* And how I wanted the flow to feel.

And I’m doing the same on my next blog too (ahh if only php and html were that simple!…)

And for stuff that people actually pay me money for (read: work) I use a HUGE white board (the size of a wall actually) to draw and make lines and arrows…because when you sit back and see the big picture you can actually think about the problem at a high and more integrated level. This is very important to solve a host of issues in your job - and in life. Going low tech allows you to see connections and patterns you wouldn’t otherwise. In some ways it actually empowers your brain to think “outside of the box”. That’s something we can all use as jobs get more competitive and creative solutions more needed.

…..”Now what does this mean???”

Just when you thought you’d heard enough jargon to choke a horse in business, here’s the new buzzwords so you can impress your boss and befuddle your colleagues, (source material courtesy of the March 27, 2006 Wall Street Journal).

• Delayering - The process of reducing organizational layers by firing the middle management
• Web 2.0 - Second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate, and share information online; generally the applications “feel” more like desktop applications. Using it in your business plan is also a nifty way to get some venture dough!
• Knowledge Acquisition - Hiring people who know how to get the job done
• Unsiloing - Being able to cooperate across departments, share resources, cross-sell products and basically learn to work as a team in an organization, one department or business unit to the next.
• Execution - Used to be known as strategy, which was the endless talk of planning to do something to execute. In todays world, we skip strategy (andthinking) and just execute.
• Volume Sensitive Business - A business with massive fixed costs (and no way to cover them). Niche Strategy - Perhaps should rightly be worded, “niche execution”, it simply means your company is a small, insignificant player.
• Limited Downside - code word for “things can’t get much worse”

This workin’ girl has been traveling way too much lately, so much so I’ve not had time to do much writing.  However, whilst sipping blazing hot, strong coffee this morning in the cafe I happened upon this article HERE, penned by Jory Des Jardins on her blog, Pause. 

It’s well worth a read.  I think the quote that sums it up best from her post is this:

Competence has become a commodity.The only way to differentiate yourself in the business world today is to insist on being yourself. Ironically, it takes some of us years to come full circle back to the place we were, before we tried to be someone else.

Interesting eh?  I’ve noticed myself that as I come to grips more with who I am, with being transgendered, that I’m able to me more authentic.  And, wonder of wonders, people respond to that positively (or are confused enough to just respond nicely, I’ not sure now that I think of it!).   It’s an interesting side benefit that I’d not anticipated frankly.   So as I don’t lead anyone astray here, I’m not out at work at this time.  However, the current effect is an interesting personal experience.   It sounds like all of us, whatever your walk in life, would benefit well from just being yourself.  And if your a leader or serve in a leadership position (whether business, civic or religious) it sounds like the key for you to do even better is to be authentic.  Read Jordy’s post and enjoy!

I had a chance this week to spend time with some amazingly smart people at this amazingly little company that specializes in telecommunications equipment.  There aren’t more than 50 people in this company tops.  Any of the engineers could stand in their own sted at any company, but they chose to work here at a small firm (that has been that way for 6 years). A further conversation with the CEO dredged up how financially efficient this little place was.  I came away impressed, if not a little envious as to where they worked.

As I was doing my nails that night, I started thinking through some of the lessons from my visit, and how they might apply to any small company - or even small non-profit organization that has a big vision to help or change a sector of our society.

What are some of the Lessons Learned?

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