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| Broadcasting -
Information -
Communications (Telecom)
- Education -
Publishing
Systems |
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The Producers
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Everybody's going
to become a producer! Five talents will soon be all rolled up in one and we
will all have become producers! Every business owner, from the smallest to the
largest, will become an expert in these five industries – each defines a
facet of who we are, what our business does, and the anticipated future between
them. We will all be developing our b-i-c-e-p-s. It'll take focus yet it'll get
easier each day because all five will increasingly use the very same
infrastructure backbone, the internet. |
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THERE ARE ACTION ITEMS BELOW.
Click on the
words below the five subheadings. |
| Five areas of
focus: |
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1. Broadcasting
Podcasting-Broadcasting |
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Within ten weeks
of the first broadcast of the first episode back in September 1994, the
producers of SmallBusinessSchool opened a simple web presence (just a few
pages). By December 1994 viewers were being advised, "Get your own email
address -- that is YourName@YourBusiness.com and register your domain name and
begin developing a web site." Just two months later in 1995, the first episode
dedicated to studying this new phenomena was focused on Bill Tobin's PC Flowers
& Gifts (the
rest of the story); they had just grossed over $5M from their web sales
alone! |
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| The new insight
for these days: Everybody is becoming a producer! Start with your own story
of your life's work and passion. Dig into the ways your business creates value
and how it all just started with an idea. Go from podcast to
broadcast. |
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| Podcasts:
Some will develop podcasts, short segments that could be part of the episode,
and those podcasts will stream right here. |
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| To that end, this
website will support a process of empowering thousands of local episodes per
year whereby the best 52 are selected for the national and global broadcasts of
the show. |
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 Small
Business 2000: The Index of
all businesses in the queue for a local episode of the show. Each are nominated
by an advocate. The owner (and employees) register and answer questions just
like those in prior episodes of the show. A transcript is created. And, then
your local community begins to decide whose story is told next. |
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2. Information
Systems &
Technology |
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That is the new
content generated each week for the broadcasts include a homepage, an Executive
Summary (Overview/Profile), a transcript, a case study guide, and often
streaming video. |
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| Now, the site is
being opened so all good small business owners can create content too. Besides
registering and getting listed, visitors can answer the same questions asked
during each episode of the show and develop the same types of pages that are
done for each episode. |
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| We are adding
natural language query tools to sort through all the information. |
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| By providing levels
of security and validation of the information by local small business
advocates, SmallBusinessSchool will open the web site so good people can
create content and get on path to be profiled within an episode of the show.
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| The open goal,
continuous improvement, is to provide access to key questions in the shortest
amount of time. This site should demonstrate and empower digital workflow and a
systems discipline. It should always be introducing our visitors to
leading-edge technologies. |
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| Once produced and
validated, even the video streams of a small business should be hosted on the
SBS web and these should be easily updated by owner at any time. |
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| It should evolve as
a community of trust and goodness. |
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The goal is to have
200 nominations for every episode completed. Once the goal of 4000 episodes per
year is reached, that would be a listing of over 800,000 per year for several
years -- a sorting mechanism to filter out the bad and encourage the
good.
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3. Communications
All Telecommunications |
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From the simple
to the sublime, communications becomes ubiquitous. The show will provide
simple, automated weekly email to the registered with a short description of
the forthcoming episode of the show market-by-market just 36 hours prior to the
show's airing. As text messages, you could receive them anywhere by cell phone
or PDA. As a short-brust streaming videoo encapsulation, you could have it
waiting from iTunes or your PDA. |
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In this domain The
sublime will be an invitation to an online collaboration event by geography, by
industry, and by interests. After each local broadcast of the show ends, the
discussions begin. In this way the broadcasts and this site increasingly become
a business-to-business portal.
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4. Education
All Lifelong
education |
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Each profile of
a business adds no less than eight and as many as eighteen answers to key
questions that small business owners face. That information becomes part of the
question-answer array, validates prior answers, particularizes answers by
industry type, and even raises new questions to be answered. |
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Since 1997 this
information has become part of the curriculum of the best-selling business
textbooks. SmallBusinessSchool works with the finest publishers and
their authors so students in our business schools see the real thing. Clips
from many episodes have been incorporated in dozens of these textbooks and are
used daily in classrooms around the world.
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5. Publishing
Web, newsletters,
magzines, newspapers,
books |
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If you have a
web site, you are a publisher. Work is nearing completion whereby your answers
to the same questions that have been asked of the small business owners all
become Interactive Questions. Not only can you populate templates to get on
track to be profiled for an episode of the show, the additional templates will
create automatically a business plan, an SBA loan-doc, an offering memorandum
for private equity placement, ESOP qualification documents, a Small Corporate
Offering Registration (SCOR), and more. |
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Comment:
Businesses within this environment will be considered among the most ethical
and trustworthy, genuinely good business with which to do business.
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Also, all these
businesses immediately become 24x7-global. We believe we may have introduced
that term; we remember wrestling with how one summarizes this phenomena that
embraced all time and all space. We used the term in an episode of the show in
December 1994 and throughout the year, 1995.
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Systems |
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Take all five
together and you have systems technology and philosophy! |
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| ACTION ITEMS. THE TO-DO LIST: |
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| 1.
Broadcasting: Before we blink, every web site
will have streaming video. We are all definitely going to become producers.
First, get to know
your
station. Second, ask them to have a course on production for everybody who
joins their
Producers' Club. Third, give somebody the job
of capturing high moments (and even low moments) around your business. Find the
person with the best video camera with the best sound recording and even
Final Cut (or some other video editing suite) at home! You'll see their
eyes light up like you have never seen before. Lights! Cameras.
Action! |
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2.
Information: We are all information workers. The
next step is to become knowledge and insight workers. Have everybody in the
business study these episodes and discuss them. Have everyone make suggestions
on how your business can become an e-culture:
a. Study "E-culture - What is it and how do I get one!"
and Protect Your Priceless Data."
b. Study "Knowledge
Management and Continuous Improvement" and "Innovation and insights."
c. A sample
business: "California Kaizen - Drucker for
Dummies."
d. Teach integrity: "Protect
your Ideas"
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3.
Communications (Telecom)
a. Study the episode about "Smart
Houses" and "WiFi" and mobile computing.
b. Study this
episode about
Time
Technology and learn about
collaboration.
b. Bring your team to the
Capitalist School. Everyone needs to empower
or provide
leadership. |
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4.
Education
a. Weekly, Online Event Each
Week: In most every broadcast area in the country, there are no less than
30 Chambers of Commerce within a broadcast area. The goal is to have a weekly
collaboration event in each local market
cordinated with the local broadcast of Small Business School. These local
events, open to everybody, will be lead by the leadership of one of the local
Chambers of Commerce. They'll have the support of people from the Better
Business Bureau, SBA-SBDC-SCORE, Economic Development, Workforce Initiatives,
key professors of business from the local schools, plus other small business
professionals focused on the topic being discussed that week. That is
continuing education! Though the initial focus will be that week's case study
guide, the overall focus is to attempt to answer the question, "How do we apply
these insights here in our community and our business?"
b. Extending the
Educational Model: We are working with every business school in the
country, particularly those author-professors with textbooks from Thomson
Learning, to provide the best possible case studies for the students to learn.
The nest step is to encourage continuing education for all our small business
owners so together with their CPAs, we all learn how to read our financial
statements and follow our key critical ratios so we know exactly how our
business is doing.
c. Chambers of Commerce: Study this episode to get
involved with your
Chamber. |
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| 5.
Publishing: Do you have a web site? Yes, of
course. Then you are a publisher. Your writings are out in the public for
anyone's consumption. If you rely on somebody else "to do" your website,
take it
back and take over your web site. Bring it inhouse on its own DSL line on a
static IP with a Netscreen or similar firewall. Have everybody in your
business
update it and keep it current. You can use this web site as a development
center where by answering questions, you develop content for your own web site
and you have referential content and links from this site to yours. |
| For
more.... |
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