Recently there has been a bunch of press about the growing threat of recession coming to the US.  Today’s front page article of the New York Times tells a story that all of us as entrepreneurs need to start preparing for called “As Lenders Tighten Flow of Credit, Growth at Risk“ From the article there [...]

The following New York Times article “Personal Assistants on Call, Just Not in the Next Office” is further evidence of a growing trend of entrepreneurs hiring, at a few hours at a time, personal assistants to lower the “80 percent of their time on the trivial 20 percent of tasks”. As I mentioned in a [...]

Here are signs of the Attitudinal Shift that I mentioned in this previous post: Meet Your Future Employee And the up-and-coming generation puts a premium on work/life balance, having seen firsthand the toll working around-the-clock took on its parents. As a result, they tend to shy away from jobs that demand the 40-hour-plus workweeks typical [...]

Here is a quick preview of the conceptual shifts that I am wring about in my forthcoming book Exponential Entrepreneurship: Building Business Ecologies for the 21st Century.  Marla my editor has been kicking butt (mainly mine and taking names  as we refine the trends that I see shifting the way work is being done.  Please [...]

Web2.0 TV interviewed me about what I thought about how “Web2.0″ is shaping the Internet.  My interviewer was very nice- and you will see that I went ahead and prompted him a little bit about how the Web2.0 phenomena is not just about a new way of building web applications (which was the focus of [...]

Dee Copland recently posted a question on the Bootstrap-Austin mailing list asking about the implications of Google’s OpenSocial to social networking and small and medium size business. Following is my reply to her and the network. The implication for small and medium (and large!) business of platforms like Google’s OpenSocial are going to be quite [...]

Here is a small example of how entrepreneurs are organizing, leveraging social software and social networking to shift the previous power structures that venture capitalist have held over entrepreneurs.  It is a funny read, especially if you have ever been in a funded startup.  (Four of the seven startups in my career have been funded;  [...]

As I have recently come back to Austin after sequestering myself away for writing my forthcoming book, I have been out networking a lot again- and getting questions of “what are you up to”. Sometimes I just give short answers… but a number of y’all are asking, and so when Naomi asked for details earlier [...]

A recent set of articles from some of my favorite publications- the Wall Street Journal and from the Economist have me scratching my head and saying- how is it that such brilliant writers are totally missing the point of the phenomena happening with social networking…  WAKE UP!  First let’s see what they are saying… The [...]

The world is shifting too quick to try to keep up with the labor-mentality of the past. It is time to escape the matrix. Let me try to explain… When I mentioned “Superempowerment of the Individual” in my blog recently, several collegues immediately were drawn to think of the lower cost of production being what [...]

Today is Blog Action Day- where thousands of bloggers unite in blitzing green tips across the Internet. What is happening is a small group of bloggers have started a veritable movement of social action asking the question What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day? Today’s issue: [...]

As I have mentioned- I am writing a book… and with the framework that I have produced, I am going to start posting here to get your feedback on this material. Together we will produce a better book, and analyze deeper together what is happening. I will post every few days on how events that [...]

The following is an email that I sent out to a number of friends and collegues, some of whom I know through Bootstrap Austin’s Web Group.  Given that there are a number of people that I would like input on this, (many that are not in Austin, much less not in the web group) I [...]

As many of you know I am in the process of writing a book- a field manual of how social networks can be used to facilitate getting real work done, with my personal focus being about how to support fields of entrepreneurs build their businesses together. Well… the great thing from having y’all help me [...]

In memory of September 11, I thought I would share some quotes about making peace.  These were assembled together in a book called The Right Moment p. 146.  It just did not seem like I could let this day pass without doing some small token gesture.  If you have other quotes to share about peace, [...]

Over the last few weeks of silence here at my blog I have been working on a book about how to apply social networks for organizing entrepreneurs- called Peer Production.  The world continues to see the flattening of most organizations- where knowledge and decision making happen at the edges of the organization.  This especially happens [...]

Lest there be any question about the potential power of the Internet, the One Laptop Per Child Project , and the work that we are doing coordinating entrepreneurs through Enterprise Teaming, see this video. At 14 years old, Malawian inventor WIlliam Kamkwamba built an electrical generator out of some wood, plastic pipe, wire, and a [...]

My friend and colleague Leonardo Maldonado recently pointed out a great problem in the way that most of the social networking websites look at connections among people online. I believe that Leonardo sees this as a viewpoint from the USA, and after my travels, I can understand why. Leonardo says: No somos Gringos!!!! (“We aren’t [...]

Out of the research that I have previously done on different economic development models, one of my favorite comes from the Sirolli Institute. In fact, as I have talked with some of you about- the notion of building an Aikido style network of entrepreneurs supporting entrepreneurs, part of my grounding in these ideas came from [...]

Frank Fullard’s recent comment on this blog brought me some interest to check out who is checking out my blog (ain’t the blogging world grand ). In reading about his recent post about Women’s Vision For Their Future and his notes about Enterprise Ireland, I was reminded of some of the research that I did [...]

Several people have asked about the article that BusinessWeek wrote about Bootstrap Austin- so I figured that instead of continuing to email it out to everyone, I would post it here.  The article starts with an example about how I leverage Bootstrap Austin, and expands into several other bootstrappers, with a feature on Bijoy.  Enjoy [...]

One of the things that we do a lot inside of Bootstrap Austin is sharing information between the members of the network- getting feedback perhaps before software or ideas or business process has been well developed… This is a powerful aspect of the network- given that all of us are “experts” in our own areas, [...]

Recently, I came across a tool for every entrepreneur’s toolbox…  the  One Page Proposal.  The whole idea here is that most proposals can be delivered in one page, following the format that Mark Fox details at the link above.   This methodology of writing a one page proposal can be very powerful especially when communicating to [...]

I have noticed that as I have started taking this whole idea of blogging more seriously, that I have tended to hold off till I have a thought fully thought out before posting… as if I was going to have a full PhD level defense behind what I am thinking/ writing / saying.  Well enough [...]

One of the common themes has been coming up in a bunch of the work that I have been doing (in personal development work, in reading, as well as answering some of the questions on the business side of entreprenuership… e.g. what is your personal brand / competitive advantage). The theme is this… the answer [...]