Business Wise number 2 in Business Books

BusinessWise is a revolutionary new business book which distils expertise from 19 authors, with more than 300 years of experience between them. Each is a professional in their field, and imparts advice gleaned from successful careers and hands-on experience. The £9.99 price is a fraction of the value of the saving businesses of all types will make, from errors usually learnt too late. The content covers, vision, marketing, sales, finance, collaboration, and people management.

The book was launched on the 25^th May and went straight to number 2 in the Amazon Business Books Chart.

This was a real example of on-line collaboration in action – the 19 authors agreed among themselves that approaches to people on Ecademy would be done centrally by Ecademy press while the individual authors were to contact their own mailing contacts with a centrally agreed list of offers.

The offer list with the attendant email is shown in the text of the previous blog entry.
As it happened, this co-ordination was enough to get the book into the top 20 bestsellers on Amazon on day 1 and to number 2 in the business books.

If you would like a copy of the book you can buy it at this link. While I can’t offer you the full range of offers, you can certainly have a free copy of my Market on-line e-book worth £15 if you send me a copy of your Amazon invoice before June 30^th.

Live R&D Buy BusinessWise on 25th May on Amazon.co.uk.

As one of the 19 authors of BusinessWise ( I wrote the chapter on marketing) , I would like to tell you about this offer from Ecademy Press which will give you extraordinary value - over £200 worth of bonus products and services - for only £9.99 + postage. Here are the details of the offer.

On Friday 25th May for one day only, we are launching a new book, BusinessWise, with a special promotional offer that will be available to anyone who purchases the book on Amazon.co.uk on that day.

BusinessWise is a revolutionary new business book which distils expertise from 19 authors, with more than 300 years of experience between them. Each is a professional in their field, and imparts advice gleaned from successful careers and hands-on experience. The £9.99 price is a fraction of the value of the saving businesses of all types will make, from errors usually learnt too late.

Brian Chernett, Founder and Chief Executive of The Academy for Chief Executives says of BusinessWise - "Starting up in business is fraught with pitfalls and problems. The rewards of a successful business, however, outweigh the risk. I want to see many more successful Chief Executives and this book provides valuable help from a number of entrepreneurs that have succeeded. "

When you order this book from Amazon.co.uk, on Friday 25th May and only on that date, we will add to your purchase a set of bonus items and offers that take the value of your purchase to over £200. All you have to do is to follow the simple steps we set out below.

So what are these bonus items and services?

6 months free Business membership of Business Scene worth £30.
Business Scene is a combined effort between local Organisations. Their main focus is on quality events and helping people to build new and improved business relationships. They have activity across the UK, Australia, Germany, India, Pakistan and USA.

Personal Webhosting Package worth £49
Marieke Hensel offers a great value webhosting package including 50 MB webspace, 2000 MB traffic, 20 email accounts, a PHP/MySQL database and a free .com domain name. Guaranteed uptime of at least 99.9% with great support staff 24/7.

Internet Marketing Action - Plan A - One year's subscription worth £66
Ecademy Press Webmaster and BusinessWise author, Barbara Saul offers a wealth of information for and about your website and the Internet - whether you're taking care of your own website and Internet marketing or getting someone else to do it for you. The Internet Marketing Action - Plan A provides you with access to constantly reviewed and updated information and tools for anyone with a website. Included: design tips and templates, usability guidance, search engine optimisation (SEO) actions, online forum and support, and more. All in plain English, useful and enabling you to take action yourself. More details at www.internetmarketingaction.com.

"MarketOnLine!" ebook by Alan Rae worth £15
MarketOnline! is a 97 page e-book about using the internet to appear bigger than you really are. The e-book shows you how to use pay per click to establish what key-words people are looking for and then how set up a web of placements on the internet which point back to your home web-site. Based on our own online trading businesses we show you how to combine PR, offline and online marketing into a powerful strategy. We cover tools like Squidoo, and how to set up a blog which you can spread far and wide via RSS (really simple syndication) feeds. It's full of practical tips and examples to help you get started.

BusinessWise Collaboration SkypeCast worth £25
Join our collaboration specialist, Tom Evans, for a very special lunch hour without leaving the comfort of your own desk - the BusinessWise Collaboration SkypeCast. These sessions are very lively and interactive and you will be guaranteed at least one new priceless business connection. Maximum 20 attendees.

"Don't Publish Your Book!" ebook on publishing options with a £9.95 value.
Publishing a book is something that most people dream about. The fame, the fortune... at least, this is the common myth. It's true that bestselling authors today can make serious money and attract attention from the media. But first you need to find a major publisher. The vast majority of aspiring authors spend months and even years just trying to find an agent to represent them and sell their book to a publisher. The reality? Even after years of rejection letters, only one percent of all books submitted are ever accepted by traditional mainstream publishers. Help is at hand! In this short, insightful book, Mindy Gibbins-Klein (also known as The Book Midwife) walks you through the three main publishing options available today and gives practical advice to help you with your decision.

One Hundred Years of Ermintrude audio and musical ebook worth £4.99
Listen to the inspirational story of a woman's life in your next coffee break. Written by our collaboration specialist Tom Evans.

"A Friend in Every City" ebook worth £5.99
A Friend in Every City is an inspirational and practical guide to the art and science of networking. The book looks first at the forces shaping the new ways of working, then at how online networks, such as LinkedIn, Open BC (now Xing), Ryze and Ecademy, are evolving to provide support for them. The authors look at how an individual worker can leverage these changes to their best effect.

Mike Southon, Co-Author of 'The Beermat Entrepreneur' and other business books says of BusinessWise - I've been an entrepreneur for many years and believe in encouraging more people to find their passion and pursue it. I'm pleased to see this book also encourages the idea that entrepreneurs can succeed and provides practical advice to help them do that. As a long-term supporter of Ecademy and a life member there myself, I'm delighted to recommend this book.

How do I get these bonuses?

Simply purchase BusinessWise from Amazon.co.uk on Friday 25th May, 2007 and send us a copy of the receipt for your purchase to info@ecademy-press.com*. We will then send you a link to a special download page** from which you will be able to access all of the bonuses set out above. These bonuses have a combined value of over £200. The business wisdom and information in BusinessWise alone justifies the investment of £9.99 plus postage and the additional bonuses are our way of saying thank you for helping us make the launch a success.

Buy BusinessWise on 25th May on Amazon.co.uk.

If you wish to include your network in this offer foward them this email***.

Make sure you purchase the book on 25th May to qualify for the bonus offers.

Thomas Power, Chairman, Ecademy.com comments "I have always believed that if you put people together, magic will happen. The right people will find each other and work together. New ideas and projects will be born. This book is proof of that. The authors met through networking on Ecademy and have used mostly electronic communications to develop this collaborative book. Each of the authors is brilliant at what they do - together they have produced a formidable business book."

If you have received multiple copies of this email from your network, please accept our apologies. It means that several people in your network think you would appreciate this new business book and the special promotion.

All the best

Alan Rae on behalf of Mindy Gibbins-Klein and Andy Coote

Publishers - BusinessWise

www.ecademy-press.com

* Receipts need to be received by us by midnight on Tuesday 29th May, 2007 to be included in this promotion.

** The weekend following Friday 25th May, 2007 is a Bank Holiday in the UK. We will use our best endeavours to provide access to the download page promptly. However, there may be a delay in providing this information.

*** A copy of this email will also be found at the Ecademy Press blog at www.ecademy-press.com/wordpress.

What will it take to be competitive in 2020

The DTI and the Regional Development Agencies are (rightly) concerned about the perceived inability of UK businesses to extract the same productivity out of IT as our transatlantic cousins and keep citing the paper which demonstrates that productivity comes from treating the troops robustly according to the McKinsey principles.

Me, I think part of the problem is the lack a tradition of analytic thought in the English Culture. Only here is the phrase too clever by half taken as an insult.

However common-sense would suggest that being competitive in 2020 would mean being fluent in how to use IT to structure, restructure and present information and knowledge to achieve some kind of competitive advantage no matter what route to building your business you take.

You would imagine that getting this right would be fundamental to the UK's continuing success and that the government should be developing a strategy to deal with it.

Well they are - sort of. The Treasury and the Ministry for the Prevention of Learning have recently commissioned a report chaired by a Mr Leitch (who's incidentally head of Zurich Insurance).

The key recommendation is that since the education system is churning out 20% of people who can't read and write then we should make industry sort it out by encouraging them to do level 2 NVQs (i.e. O levels) which we will fund.

We'll 50% fund "apprenticeships" which in practice means doing some vocational courses which lead to an NVQ level 3 (A level standard)

Anything else - which would include how to use IT to effectively grow your business won't be publicly funded apart from a bit of entry level leadership which might be extended down to companies employing 10.

Since the growth of the economy is in knowledge based service industries one would have thought that focusing on making them more effective would be what world class would be about. The impact of channelling most of the adult education budget to remedial reading and writing instead of things like marketing diplomas ( I declare an interest here - I sit on the CIM's Professional Body Board) and courses on practical skills like qualifications for plumbers and electricians doesn't seem to me to be the way to go.

I'd like to ask you what skills you think your businesses need to stay competitive and where do you think you might get them from.

I'm currently doing some work with a couple of Business Schools so if we get some constructive replies here we might well try and recycle them into something useful

All the Best

Alan

Is disobedience a core competency?

I've always been interested in what makes some people able to take the decision to "walk on water" and just get on with trying to make something happen while most are looking for a set of rules to follow. I set up the Free Spirits Club in Ecademy to discuss these issues.

In a discussion on Ecademy, one author took the view that we are hardwired to seek conformity and rules - the simpler the set the better. It's true that if you study the way the brain works you tend to come to the conclusion that it's a machine to take 2 and 2 and produce 5. It's driven to produce patterns from insufficient data and these become persistent, rigid and infective. Much religious dogma seems to fall into this category.

However there does seem to be an opposite tendency for individuals to recognise that they are trapped and to strike out on their own. Sometimes blindly, sometimes calculatedly, sometimes in a conscious attempt to achieve a balance of self expression but not at the expense of the group. Level 7 - the yellow zone in spiral dynamics. Dudley Lynch's book Mother of all minds is an account of his own journey.

What interests me is what can be done to facilitate and sustain the independence from group-think that's needed to make real progress. Or is this just a meta set of rules because the only truly independent thinkers get sectioned?

This seems like a discussion worth having over Easter as it touches on many of the recurring themes we get in here. How do we build a sustainable business (which usually doesn't involve following someone else's simple formula), How do we stay true to ourselves, How do we steer our course between gross materialism on the one hand and utter wishful thinking on the other.

My own view is that we need to learn how to be disobedient for the common good.

I realised when I was 10 that if you played the game according to the rules you were going to lose. It's a casino, the deck is stacked against you. Big industry and government regulation are always making life harder for the independent. But somehow we all survive in growing numbers. It's a key competency to understand which things you can ignore and which things you can't.

A successful operation needs just enough structure - one thing Jonathan and I agreed on completely. What we're told to do is generally over-engineered and will result in slow death - euro-necrosis

So - how do we keep the vital spark alive?

Over to you guys. If you want to see the full discussion follow the track back link

Alan

Are we all hybrids now

This was written in response to a question that came up in my howtodobusiness club on ecademy. It was posed by Mark Wiggins who was asking the old technical salesman question in a different guise - can you combine analytic and hunter-killer skills in the same person.

This was my reply

If you are running a small company you need to be able to do everything - you need to be a visionary, a salesman, a team leader an analyst - you have to be able to do the numbers. In my work I use a tool called the brainmap which analyses how individuals think. (It was devised by Dudley Lynch, author of Strategy of the Dolphin who is one of my favourite business authors.

So much so that I distribute his products in the UK.



This Profile is typical of many small business owners who's profile is somewhat visionary but close enough to the centre to cover all the bases.

For companies operating in the networked economy, the ability to combine systems and people skills, and to integrate left brain and right brain activity is a key competency. It's necessary to deal with the complexity but this approach is probably only effective in the hunter gatherer space (ie under 10 employees) and where dealing with technology is part of the businesses stock in trade or where its necessary to develop a completely integrated business model for proof of concept purposes.

To go past this requires the kind of division of labour approach that Mike articulates. If you want to make some serious money out of a business ( and we know from the stats that only a small number of people actually do) then you need a team to drive the business up to the next threshold - 50 people and several million turnover in round figures - at which point you can cash out.

People who do that tend to take the "Big Picture" approach and outsource anything tedious.

People below the magic 10 barrier probably love integrating and aren't prepared to let go of that. So the business gets stuck. The moral is - if you're a creator get it into existence as a working model and flog it at that point. You won't want to do the growing to 50 stage as you're probably more interested in the what and the systems than you are in the people.

We could discuss all this in terms of Dudley Lynch's models or Mike Southon's or even Wealth Dynamics - they all have something to say on the subject.

However the reply is based on my own experience - I spent years stuck at that hunter gatherer stage because really I enjoyed the challenge of modelling the next business model too much

Very interested to hear other people's views and experiences

Publishers and Web 2.0

Interesting discussion in Rome on Friday night. I was giving a talk on maximising internet performance to some publishers and the conversation turned to the role of the publisher in the new world of Web 2.0. I suggested that the first publishing house to help facilitated on-line publishing for non-traditional publishers might have a first mover's advantage.

The response was in terms of quality control. One of the traditional publisher's activities is to act as a gate keeper - to ensure that what is published has some quality and accuracy.In common with many people in their industry, they are concerned about the lack of standards in the quality of info on the web.

I suggested that the online world can to some extent be self policing -after all wikipedia seems to work quite well - particularly as areas of contention such as the Palestine-Israeli situation are clearly flagged as being - well contentious. What's needed is peer review - not necessarily formally as with a scientific paper but the kind of thing that happens in an online social business network such as Ecademy. If someone posts bad advice they'll get jumped on and the error will be corrected - sometimes quite vigorously.

So the role of the traditional publisher might be to find ways to sponsor and monetise a role as an honest broker or at least to maintain the forums where this type of informal peer review can occur.

What opinions do others have?

2007 - the year of organic transition (1)

Well we have cleared out 1/4 of an acre and are officially in transition with the soil association towards organic status. We have 50 beds of 20 metres each in this glass house and we have 3 planted up and lots of plants germinating on the potting benches.

I'll tell you about the private vs public leadership competencies tomorrow