Alicia Castillo Holley

… (continued from last posts) … why we do need to add more ‘action’ learning to our ‘thinking’ learning and form new professionals that will be able to manage their three largest professional changes: the role of the professional in society, the sense of self, and self-determination.

The second change relates to our sense of self. We are less and less like ourselves and more and more like everybody else. A new way of approaching a sense of self, therefore, has a different comparative point. There is no point in being better than anyone else; comparing ourselves with others generates a source of external control that hinders the development of the individual: we are always better or worse than others, and the results of these comparisons rest outside of the individual control. A healthier and more valid alternative is a focus on our self-development[1]: We must be better than ourselves, not others. When a student manages to separate her successes and failures of her value as a person, she is developing personal self-worth. This does not imply that we do not grade our students, but rather that failure is accepted as part of life. Only when we do this, we can stimulate continuous self-growth and decision-making. For example, a low score can be interpreted in two ways: “I think you’re capable of more, be strong” or “You’re not as good as others.” The first interpretation favors internal control, the second favors the external control.

We create better professionals when we allow students to understand that success and failure are not opposites, but they are two consequences of taking action. Then both failure and success become learning tools, not a measure of the value of the person. Most successful students do not become successful professionals because they don’t know how to deal with a rejection of their ideas. Most failed students that interpret failure as a way to learn become better entrepreneurs. In order to accept failure, we need to also encourage responsible criticism in the classroom, such criticism must come from their peers and themselves, instead of the academic that has a power of authority and whose role should be to facilitate these discussions.

Next week: self-determination.

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[1] These different views of comparisons are based on Carol Dwecks’ work on gifted children.

At the onset of 2012, I fly back home via the US… crazy… from Aarhus, Denmark to Perth, Australia in 12 days, via Boston, Houston, and San Francisco…  Along the way, I reflect on my last presentation at Aarhus University: Co-creating the class, and I’ld like to expand into why we do need to add more ‘action’ learning to our ‘thinking’ learning and form new professionals that will be able to manage their three largest professional changes: the role of the professional in society, the sense of self, and self-determination.

The first change concerns the role of the professional in society. New professionals are no longer going out to ‘find’ work but are required to ‘create’ jobs. Jobs that allow for a decent livelihood based on a combination of effort and achievement, according to what each individual wants. It requires a different mindset that shifts leadership as recognized by peers, to internal leadership, in the sense of being aware of the impact of our actions on the community. When professionals view their role in their firms as co-creators of their jobs, they assume more responsibility and express more proactivity; when professionals view their role as co-creators of other jobs, their sense of responsibility expands into other realms that are not easily measured by financial performance and that constitute an intangible element of wealth: respect for others, for the environment, ethical behavior, and so forth.

Next week: our sense of self.

We tend to think that entrepreneurship is always positive. Entrepreneurs are inspiring and admired, but it is not always as good as it seems.

As I speak to my daughter about spending the day organizing their new office and having their daughter playing around through boxes, I wonder on what children of entrepreneurs learn. They learn about accountability, determination, and competitiveness, they learn that parents are busy more often than not… most importantly, they learn that we can make our future by taking action.

To really understand entrepreneurship, we need to balance the light and the dark side of it. I don’t think we need to compromise but to understand how do we create a better world, for everybody, not just us…

I can’t think of a better way to go over this than by sharing Shaker Zahra’s keynote speech in Bodø, Norway, last Friday. Zahra is fantastic recapping the current situation of the field of entrepreneurial research.  I hope you enjoy it

http://www.serialive.com/watch.php?id=42152

I arrived yesterday at this small Norwegian town for the Rent conference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodø

We’ll be spending few days sharing ways to improve our understanding of entrepreneurship, and HOPEFULLY sharing the few hours of sunshine.

Yesterday we started by talking about how academia is merging with the commercial world, in one place 8 out of 10 doctoral students are going back to consulting… Hopefully that means industry gains, but there was a gloomy side that academia was losing. Then I wonder IF we can build bridges. In academia, curiosity, skepticism, and objectivity are needed to create knowledge. We – researchers- are on the constant look out for the next new thing, even if it kills our last new thing… In industry, we need to be focused, believers and passionate, so we can defend our points of view.  I wonder how we are building those bridges… then of course comes the whole issue of value, use and payback, but that is another blog entry…

I will add few more comments as the days drag alone…

I just got a note from an author that took a quote from an old interview I gave for the book “Life on your terms”. I had forgotten about it, but it is as valid today as it was few years ago… hope you enjoy it:

LETTING GO OF FEAR
Find the inspiration in adversity. Make a commitment to improve your situation. Even when the odds are daunting, you’re still involved in creating the life of your dreams.

Alicia Castillo Holley, CEO, Wealthing Group

From an interview for the book Life in your terms few years ago
http://www.nonstopawesomeness.me/2011/11/43-inspirational-ideas-from-life-on-your-terms/

I woke up to the news that Steve Jobs had died. Seldom do we feel so sad when a business leader leaves. He was still young and he had had a impact in so many people. Maybe we’ve created a idol of a person, yet indeed, the feelings he managed to inspire in others were fantastic.

I’ve read and spread his Commencement speech “Connecting the Dots” so many times that, as a tribute to his legacy, I’ve decided to include it fully here.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much. Steve Jobs.

Related articles

• Thank You Steve! (projectmanagementessentials.wordpress.com)
• Steve Jobs: “Death Is The Destination We All Share” (techcrunch.com)

Crowdfunding provides a unique and interesting way of getting funds you need from people you might not know. two sites stand out: Kickstarter and Indiegogo. They are focused more on creative projects and help visionaries bring their projects to life. A project being basically something which has a clear beginning and end result. The support of lost of people providing small amounts of funds beat other forms of funding.

Kickstarter was created in April of 2009 by Lance Ivy in New York. The idea began as a way to help almost anyone find funding for their creative projects. The site sets up rules that help protect everyone involved and encourage successful fundraising. The mission remains the same: to help ambitious, creative minds bring their concepts to life. Does it work? well, what about over $60 million for 24,000 projects.

Kickstarter can be used for all creative project:  big, small, serious, funny, traditional, experimental, and anything in between. Most of the projects raise $5000 or less. Every Kickstarter project must be fully funded before the expiry time or no money changes hands.  Projects are made by real people with a passion for doing something they love, something fun or at least something noteworthy. The project ideas and stories are revealed through blog posts, videos and pictures for the final end product.

Kickstarter Features

• Post an idea or a project  to request funding.
• Promote it. Link facebook and other social sites.
• Monitor funding progress to see how far they have come and how much more to go.
• Others pledge money to an idea they support and can get updates on each project followed.

IndieGoGo was founded in January of 2008 by Slava Rubin, Eric Schell and Danae Ringelmann. The founders hoped to build a network that allowed people to support one another through crowdfunding. Donators could choose projects they liked or felt strongly about while receiving something in return (determined by the person funding the project). Does it work?  users from over 200 countries manage more than 40,000 campaigns which raised millions of dollars in funding. The site currently supports projects in a variety of interests and industries, from music and visual arts to computer programming, activism, publication and fashion design. Unlike Kickstarter, IndieGoGo allows users to keep the funds generated from their campaigns regardless. This gives the user more flexibility, although it may turn off some potential.

Indiegogo Features

• Users can sign up and connect with a Facebook profile
• Ideas can be funded using the power of a large group
• Projects can gain popularity and increase exposure
• Comments can be made to encourage idea discussions
• Campaign hosts can offer special perks to those who donate to their idea

To get the best of crowdfuncing: SELL YOUR IDEAS!

Connect with others. A video makes all the difference — make it personal and high-quality.

Whether you use IndieGoGo, Kickstarter, or your own website, you should produce a video to introduce people to your project and ask for donations. Even if you only appeal to friends and family, having a video can make all the difference by giving you a real face behind the voice and it is usually more personal which people like.

• The key to your success is to make it personal.
• Put yourself in the video and appeal for people to help you out.
• Don’t just post a trailer — do something special when asking for contributions even if it’s just a personal introduction to the trailer!
• Treat the video like a compelling work of art in its own right — make it clever, engaging, visually stunning and add a soundtrack to affect the viewers’ emotions. Basically, make it amazing so people WANT to watch it and show others.
• Bring on the cast and crew to talk about why they are involved and what the donors’ help will mean to them.

As I finish this note, I’m watching a series of hand-made watercolor minipaints I got by supporting an artist at Indiegogo.  She managed to get her idea up and running, and instead of asking without returns, she sends supporters a mini watercolor paint. I love it! It works!

For Spanish speaking use www.idea.me if you know of any other sites, drop us a line!

Related articles

• Slava Rubin: The CrowdFunders: IndieGoGo’s Most Extraordinary Campaigns (huffingtonpost.com)
• HelpersUnite launches a charitable Kickstarter of sorts (thenextweb.com)
• IndieGoGo Raises $1.5 Million For Its Crowdfunding Platform (techcrunch.com)
• IndieGoGo aims to be the go-to for crowdfunding (gigaom.com)
• How I Launched My Crowdfunding Campaign (businessinsider.com)

Greetings from Århus, Denmark’s second largest city, a pretty harbor looking East. When the weather is good, it is heaven. I’ll be working out of here for the next three months, finalizing my book on Funding – and a paper on “UN-funding”,  working on models to turn research into prosperity, and learning another way of life.

Denmark has been a revelation, pretty, stylish, lean. I was here when the country elected its first female prime minister – I guess it is becoming the norm and not the exception. Good. Why not?

As usual, my conversations on entrepreneurship evolve around economic development, and the creation of wealth, for everybody, not just us. When we think about expanding opportunities to others, creating or expanding markets, building new jobs, and paying more taxes, not because we increase the rate but because the economy is prospering. We get better results when explore how to increase our economy and not how to share it.

This entry has been on incubation since July, when I met Josep Miguel Piquer, head of Barcelona 22@  (http://www.22barcelona.com) in Stanford and we spoke about Born Global business. In Europe, history weights people down… Few months ago, when I was in Portugal and Spain, I was surprised about the lack of entrepreneurial energy in the young people. Yeap, those protesting around for jobs where young… the kind of people I would expect to challenge the system and come with overwhelming energy to make changes… and protesting for lack of jobs, instead of creating them!

No longer can we think small, we are all connected, and connected fast. Through skype I have a glocal number – global and local – just like my email, crowdformation – both on production and information- gives me heads up on what is happening, what I might look for, what is needed, what is provided. I can download the latest book on kindle or ipad in seconds, dissolving tasks and risking jobs, yet opening a huge market for those who would no longer have access to books.

In these days of microintegrations, we can enjoy the rippling effect of technology to reach out and we can GROW, instead of survive.

The trick here is to think about entrepreneurship as a state of consciousness that allows us to gather the information to start up a company, to grow it, and to let go.

STARTING UP

To start up we no longer need capital, fingers up to banks and venture capitalists… people fund our ideas through indiegogo and kickstarter; suppliers enter into bartering or exchanges; and market research is some bubbling tweets away.  As starting up is easier, so is failing up.  Businesses are disposable and dynamic. They are no longer the tall trees that took years to form but sprout here and there sometimes spontaneously sprouting like old forgotten seeds.  Starting up therefore is easy and fragile.  It is not by filling our economy with start ups that we build prosperous economies.

GROWING UP

It is by growing them up.  Our effort now should be on growing these businesses up.  We need more people exploring how to use their energy and resources to build companies up, creating new markets, improving profit margins by reinventing how we do business, expanding into other parts of society that can now have access and capacity to pay for our offers. Barcelona 22@ is reshaping a geographic area and turning a boring zone into an exciting hub for opportunities, not for local reach but for global. That is the beauty of it…. Because there is nothing inspiring in thinking small. Let’s pick up those falling businesses and build them up!

To grow up one has to focus on the market: what is useful and valuable… and then on our own strengths and weaknesses: what can I offer.  And work from there. It is a series of iterative reflections, trials and errors.  We need more of that. SURPRISE me!  Seems to be the message from the market.

LETTING GO

The last lesson in today’s world is to let go. We can’t do it all, and why would we want to do it all?  Yes, chances are that it is not going to be exactly as we want it. But we cannot keep up on full steam for ever.  Thinking about designing and implementing an exit strategy makes us think professionally, we are not only building businesses for customers or shareholders but to the next generations…

The new rules of engagement in entrepreneurship therefore are: start up, grow up, let go.

Related articles

• Innovation and Entrepreneurship ( Peter F. Drucker) (khurambukhari.wordpress.com)
• 2011 State of Entrepreneurship Address (kauffman.org)
• How to Keep Going When You’re Growing a Business (blogher.com)

Who isn’t talking about Steve Jobs these days?  the orphan kid that reshaped the world through a continuous rollercoaster of innnovation, the same guy who make raving fans wait hours for new products, the guy who formed passionate mac’kers (the other MAC), and that showed that yes, failure and success dance tango together… Only that, they shift roles.

Steve, the visible tip of the iceberg. Apple, the millions of drops of water sustaining the dream, the goal, the change.

I wondered, after spending sometime in Stanford, about this idol culture in the US. and I wonder if that is what more of us need to be thinking of. It reminds me of the studies my friend Joan Strassmann did, on social amoebas, where, in times of hardship, the group would get together and form a tiny pin, where only those at the top survive and the rest would starve themselves to death to pull up the leaders.  No, I don’t mean that others die for Steve to survive, but rather that those idles are the tips of the pin that stoutly supports them.

The tip of the pin is then a hero, an idol, someone worthy of admiration, and usually praised, the icon that other’s want to emulate, a driving force because, who doesn’t want that level of recognition. In some other countries the tip of the pin is to be smashed, criticized, and pulled down. Going up means killing a way up. That might be the reason why so many highly visible entrepreneurs abound in the USA.They are loved and respected… and in return, they give back.

In the mean time, dear Steve leaves an extraordinary legacy, building a company as a drop out, failing as an entrepreneur (in a very public dispute he was forced out of Apple), started over again, and came back.  For those of us now typing on apple computers, the times where we thought they were going out of business is over – the main reason amoebas’ Joann got an apple and I had a pc, until this year, fed up with vaio I also switched.

After palms, androids and tables, I can see myself sucked into the iphone soon too. In the mean time, Steve Jobs, thanks so much. Tim, my hat to you.

The adventure continues….

Related articles

• Slide show: 11 pivotal moments in Steve Jobs’ career (bizjournals.com)
• Steve Jobs hands over the reins to Tim Cook as Apple CEO (macmusings.wordpress.com)
• Steve Jobs and Apple: A pictorial timeline (digitaltrends.com)
• Tributes to Steve Jobs from business executives start pouring in (venturebeat.com)

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