If I don't die by Thursday, I'll be roaring Friday night.

8/12/03

Riding the train from San Francisco to Santa Barbara. Great
scenery but oh so slow!

Thoughts on the E-myth books: (E=entrepreneurial)

• The mundane tedious little day-to-day items will make or break
  the eventual success of the business - no duh!
  
• Why do so many small businesses fail?
  The technician starts a business because they "know" how to
  do something, but what they don't know is all the other 'jobs'
  that it takes to run a small business.
  
• There's a three way battle going on inside the entrepreneur:
  Entrepreneur vs Manager vs Technician - personalities within
  the individual that have seperate interests, needs,
  motivators, etc. Entrepreneur lives in the future, Manager lives
  in the past and present (mostly) and Technician lives in the present
  
• A balance between the three is optimal but usually the small
  business owner is 10% E 20% M and 70% T - a recipe for business
  disaster (not to mention the effects on personal lives.)
  
• Most businesses are run according to what the owner wants
  not what the business needs!
  
• Technicians do the tactical work but often fail to pursue the
  strategic work that also needs to be done.
  
• If your business depends solely on you, you don't have a
  business you have a job, and it's the worst business in the
  world because your boss is a lunatic. Your stuck. If you don't do the work,
  who will? Who would buy the business - nobody wants to buy a
  job!
  
• Beware: Management by Abdication replaces Management
  by Delegation.
  
• Maturity is the third stage in a company lifecycle. But
  companies don't end up being mature. They are born that way. It
  has always known where it is, where it's going and what it needs
  to do to get to the next step.
  
• "without a clear picture of the customer, no business can succeed."
  Sounds obvious untli you think about it. A technician will focus
  on the product to be delivered - not about who it's getting
  delivered to...
  
• Business Development Cycle: innovation, quantification, orchastration
  
• Orchastration is the elimination of choice at the operating
  level. If you do something different each time you do it, you
  create chaos not order. "If you haven't orchastrated it,
  you don't own it."
  
  Business Development Program
  
  • Primary Aim
    
  • Strategic Objective
    
  • Organizational Strategy
    
  • Management Strategy
    
  • People Strategy
    
  • Marketing Strategy
    
  • Systems Strategy
    
  
  
  
• Marketing Strategy: it starts, ends, lives, breathes and dies with
  the customer. It's absolutely imperative that what the 'company' wants is
  not part of it; it's unimportant. It's what the customer wants that's important.
  What the customer really wants is probably different from what you think
  s/he wants. Find a perceived need and fill it. What must the company be in
  the mind of the consumer so that they choose your company over another.
  

E-myth related thoughts on Linuxcare:

Linuxcare got caught in the adolescent stage of "Going for Broke."
As quickly as it grew, the chaos grew even faster. The result was a
predictable catastrophe. The explosion rocked so many peoples' lives
that most of my former collegues that I met at Linuxworld are still not
back in full-time jobs - 2 years later. "Going for Broke" was the
Silicon Valley equivalent of Russian roulette only we didn't even
know the gun was loaded. What was lacking was growth in a predictable,
healthy, proactive way - not 'leaning into the wind.'

E-myth related thoughts on the job situation:

Where's the written plan? You need a clear picture of what the next
situation will look like. At the end of each day ask yourself
how well you did in terms of the plan and the picture, discover the
disparity between where you are and where you're committed to being then
get up the next day and make up for the difference. Life is an endless
reel of film; each moment is but a single frame; the next frame is wholely
dependent on what you do in the moment.

Quantify everything you do during the day. How many phone calls did
you make. How many resumes did you send out? How many followup letters
did you send? etc. With the numbers you'll find meaning. What are
you doing that works? What's a waste of time?

The job search is not the primary order of business: YOU ARE.What
do you value most? Who do you want to be? What do you want your life to
be like?

Lift the curtain that stands between yourself and yourself, the
curtain that seperates you from your life. Recognize that while you
don't understand everything about someones else's business, neither do
they. No one knows what they believe they know. The world is nothing
like what you believe it to be.

"I know that my spirit is waiting out there in front of me on one of
any number of a thousand paths, and that it's up to me to choose that
one path on which my spirit waits, and to step out on it brightly, without
hesitation,to pursue the I, which is the greatest one I can possibly be."

On potential companies:

strategic plan

company philosophy

reason for being

Job Hunt Benchmarks

1. Identify job types of interest
   
2. Identify companies that have those job types
   
3. Visit company web site
   
4. Identify contact (preferably a hiring manager)
   
5. Email contact (script this)
   
6. Followup (email or phone)(script this)
   
7. Interview (real or information)
   
8. Followup interview
   
9.