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Cash flow

February 01, 2012Posted By Michael Doneman

 If I'm a business educator and I'm trying to convince you that an MBA is worth two years of your life and AUD30,000, it's in my interest for you to understand business as complex, difficult and arcane, isn't it? The truth is (at least for the small and micro enterprises we deal with at Edgeware) that business is actually quite simple. It's succeeds or fails on cash flow.

Here's Dickens, in David Copperfield: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds,
annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. 
 

Your business as your baby

January 25, 2012Posted By Michael Doneman

 

Starting up, emerging entrepreneurs need mentors, coaches and critical friends. We can think of these as the uncles and aunts to the growing baby. (Edgies so often claim they feel that their *business is their baby*, with all the frustration and heartache and untrammelled joy that infers.) 

 
Babies can get different parenting. Some parents want their baby to grow up faster, smarter, richer than the other kids, some want them to grow up to be loving, compassionate, generous, maybe even happy, some want all of those things. 
 
We're interested in the mummies and daddies who want their...

Happiness comes from experiences, not things

January 13, 2012Posted By Michael Doneman

From the blog Neuronarrative

Not only are people happier experiencing than possessing, but they are also happier having the experience of thinking about possessing something than actually getting it.
 
Understanding that bit of knowledge about ourselves goes a long way toward explaining how advertising works. It’s largely about making the anticipation of buying something a fantastic experience. You can see yourself driving the car and it feels great. It’s a tremendous experience simply envisioning how wonderful it will be to own it. Then, when you do own it, that experience fades and you begin...

Decisions on intangibles

January 06, 2012Posted By Michael Doneman

 

Intangible values (e.g. brands, data bases, expert knowledge, leadership, productivity) are increasingly important in markets – at least if we use the instrument of stock market valuations rather than the those of accountants. How might we consider them in our planning? Tamara Plakalo suggests we can categorize intangibles in three ways – as ‘structural capital’, ‘relational capital’ and ‘human capital’. To download her whole article, ‘Untangling Intangibles’, go here.

Thinking/doing good

January 05, 2012Posted By Michael Doneman

 

“Doing good makes us feel good. Altruism enhances our self-esteem. It gets our eyes off ourselves, makes us less self-preoccupied, gets us closer to the unself-consciousness that characterizes the flow state”  (1).

 In other words, caring for others creates a psychological momentum and a sense of self-competence that makes us happier.  Brown argues that giving buffers stress, and involves complex hormones, such as oxytoxin and vasopressin, as well as a brain-emotion-immune nexus.

 The evidence is quite consistent that altruism, so long as it...


How trees grow

January 01, 2012Posted By Michael Doneman

 

It sounds counter-intuitive that, while a tree is rooted in the ground, it actually feeds on what it extracts from the air. I think this is a compelling metaphor for business (and life, if it comes to it): we need to be grounded, based, authentic, and at the same time we have to be aware of our environment, of the threats and opportunities borne along by capricious breezes (or cyclones)

Love signals real

December 28, 2011Posted By Michael Doneman

 

 In this Age of Metaphor, love will be the signal of real. One of the ways we will know when a thing has passed from “as-if” to “is” is when it earns unalloyed love from humans. Kevin Kelly, As If

In the developed world we are increasingly trading in intangibles. Think of love marks


What do accountants count?

December 24, 2011Posted By Michael Doneman

 

 

We think we make rational economic decisions. We don’t. Our decisions are driven by intangible values of which we may not be aware, or about which we may not care.

‘Radical accountant’ Baruch Lev, along with others, is proposing that accepted GAAP accounting has to evolve to evaluate and incorporate intangibles in a company’s accounts.

Can accountants...


After a certain point, money is meaningless

December 17, 2011Posted By Michael Doneman

 

 

Just for fun, here are some thoughts from much better heads than ours …

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business. Henry Ford

After a certain point money is meaningless. It ceases to be the goal. The game is what counts. Aristotle Onassis

If ever again our nation stumbles...


Networks, niches, hives, tribes

January 03, 2011Posted By Michael Doneman

 Maybe you've seen the formulaic scroller websites that harvest your email address in order to receive something 'free' and go on to sell you strategies for making a million on the internet. Pretty lowest common denominator stuff, and it works. No one, said P.T. Barnum, ever went broke by underestimating the American public.

 
A lot of networking events and strategies work like that as well. The best way to make good contacts is to make lots of contacts. It's exhausting, but it works.
 
A lot of networking events and strategies are also facile, kitsch and venal. So...

Podcast on Ethical Entrepreneurship

August 26, 2009Posted By Michael Doneman

 

I'm pretty new to the world of podcasting, but I found this interview refreshing in that Cameron Reilly, the owner-operator of the G'Day World Podcasting Network, allowed time to really explore and flesh out ideas in a way that other forms don't tend to allow, in favour of more clipped and sound-grabby formats. I found this particularly useful in trying to discuss the 'bigger picture' context for my practice and the Edgeware business generally. People have been telling me for a while that short audio clips are useful ways...


Speaking at the Hive

July 17, 2009Posted By Michael Doneman

 I was asked to give a short talk at a Brisbane networking function called The Hive on 30 June 09, on the topic of 'entrepreneurship'. The talk was filmed, and video is now on Youtube, but to save the bother of looking it up, here's the talk, in three sections.



Business Ethics

July 12, 2009Posted By Michael Doneman

Business ethics is an important field for Edgeware because it’s in the ‘change the world’ bit of our DNA.

You don’t ‘adopt’ ethical practices; you can’t operate without ethics, even if you couldn’t name them and you don’t have a code. We make moral judgements all the time and they’re the basis of our actions a lot of the time whether we recognise it or not. The question is: are these good ethics or not so good ethics, is this action which is good or action which is not so good? And this ‘good’ concept, that’s...


Coach as Cartographer

May 20, 2009Posted By Michael Doneman

 

Everyone is coaching or being coached; there are life coaches, career coaches, personal coaches, fitness coaches, executive coaches, coaches for getting out of bed in the morning and coaches for getting to sleep at night. Why do we need coaches so much and so often?

Could it be that the old, well-worn and predictable pathways - any path to anywhere and every path to everywhere - are dsiappearing, the maps no longer even remotely relating to the territory? Are coaches our conceptual cartographers?

I'm not a great fan of mind mapping, but I find the...


Generosity

February 15, 2009Posted By Michael Doneman

I can think of four things to say about generosity.

It's a quality of behaviour which requires very little in the way of resources but which has enormous power to influence and change things, beginning with yourself.

Firstly, generosity is an accessible behaviour. A generous act can be as small and simple as giving someone ten dedicated, alert minutes of your individied attention. The generosity of a thought or an act is not scaleable; its source is the intention to give. 

Secondly, in order to think and act with generosity you have to...


The Value Proposition

September 18, 2008Posted By Michael Doneman

 "... The fundamental mission of a business (is) not profit, but value creation. It sees profit as a vital consequence of value creation - a means rather than an end, a result as opposed to a purpose."

Frederick F. Reichheld, Director Emeritus, Bain & Company, "The Loyalty Effect"

You know you have a business when there is a Value Proposition: 'what is it I have to offer which has a value so compelling (in the eyes of a potential customer) that s/he is willing to exchange something of value...