Enklings Studio

The Age of Consumer Capitalism - Roger Martin

I've written before about the dangers of an economic system based on shareholder value. Finally this month in the Harvard Business Review, Roger Martin has a piece called "The Age of Consumer Capitalism" where he debunks the idea that businesses are more profitable when run with shareholder value as the top priority. I'm no economist, but this is just common sense.

Here's a quick quote:

"For three decades, executives have made maximizing shareholder value their top priority. But evidence suggests that shareholders actually do better when firms put the customer first."

And one more:  

"It's impossible to continually increase shareholder value, because stock prices are driven by shareholders' expectations about the future, which cannot be raised indefinitely."

Here's a link to the article excerpt, if your not a subscriber you can purchase the whole article or better yet just pick up the magazine this month, it's stocked full of great ideas for reinvention and HBR's list of 10 solutions for a better world. 

To have your focus on providing customers higher value seems obvious, but if you spend much time in finance, you see that even the accounting principles that run the business focus executives on shareholder value rather than customers. It's time for wholesale change. The focus on the customer is a step in the right direction.

Provide a valuable product or service to a customer at a reasonable price and do the most good in the world you can do. There's a recipe for a business that will likely survive even the biggest economic downturn.

Simply,

Tim

What's Tim Up To?

Here's what's new!

I just accepted an offer to work with Letters&Arts to focus on marketing one of their businesses, Sharefaith, to Churches and Christian ministries in the U.S. Totally excited about this!  The company is in Ashland, OR, but I'll be working from SLO out of my home office for now. 

Sharefaith is the leading company in the U.S. for quality Church media and effective digital templates delivered online to over 12,500 Church and ministry members.  Sharefaith is growing at a rapid rate due to the high quality of products we offer at a very low cost.  Churches, from 50 members to 50,000 members are finding that our videos, worship backgrounds, bulletin art and templates for newsletters and flyers are the best on the web at the most cost effective price.  For around $8 a month, a Church or ministry can have access to over 30,000 of the highest quality digital designs to use in services and communications.

Letters&Arts also has several other sites that have the best quality digital media for Parents, Restaurants, Brides, and Businesses along with sites that focus on Education, Holidays, Gardening and Scrapbooking.  All easy to use and very cost effective to get effective and beautiful art and designs for just about any occasion!

More later about my role, but if you're interested in partnering with Sharefaith or Letters&Arts or have opportunities to help me connect the dots in the industries we serve, particularly Churches and Ministries, shoot me an email at: tblair@sharefaith.com.

I'll still be working passionately on hunger related issues in my spare time to promote hunger awareness, Food Banks and Hunger Relief Organizations through #twitterforfood and learning the ropes as a new board member for The Friends of Prado Day Center.

simply,

Tim

What Would Google Do? - one sentence worth the price of the book

Competitors who learn to target customers - by relevance, not by content or demographics - will increase effectiveness and efficiency and lower cost."

Jeff Jarvis, "What Would Google Do"

This one sentence was well worth the price of admission.

More on this book later!

Simply,

Tim

Ecofficiency.org - The Model

I love this model for Ecofficiency from www.ecofficiency.org.  This puts a picture to what I've been thinking over the past couple of years.  Ecofficiency is a new organization I'll be following closely over the next few months to see how they implement their thoughts.

Simply,

Tim

Enklings Studio - What's Tim Up To?

Just a quick update on the world of Enklings Studio.

New tools I'm using:
Dreamweaver - CS4
Photoshop - CS4

What I'm reading:
What Google Would Do - Jeff Jarvis
Memorial Day - Vince Flynn

What's Ripe at the Blair Urban Ranch:
Apricots - almost done - hundreds of pounds this year, fed the neighborhood and the raccoons
Plums - pounds and pounds a day - feeding the neighborhood
Apples - Anna apples ripe and ready
Tomatoes - mostly Sweet 100's
Lemon Cucumbers - two huge plants that are going crazy!
Blueberries - a handful a day keeps, well, no one away, but they're really good
Lemons - too many to count - lemonade anyone?
Strawberries - sharing these with the critters, but the ones we get are beautiful

Current Work:

REALLY enjoying working for Sharefaith!  New contract through the end of the year working with them as a freelance writer, SEO guy, Social Media maven and marketing manager.  Lots of stuff to do there and huge potential - this will be a big chunk of my time through the end of the year.  Looking forward to working with them for a long time.

Working with an author to help them self-publish a book in the "grandparenting" category.  Too much fun seeing how this will turn out.  More later.  Publishing, website, social media and blog.

Just finished a small gig with a cool company in SoCal helping them decide how to get some social media love out to their members.

Doing some work with Fillerup Marketing Communications - social media, blog, web design and marketing consulting.  Not too much going on just yet, but it's coming!

Solstice - Green Directory.  Just started selling ads and helping Margaret over at the Solstice Green directory with the online presence and social media.  These are fun folks.  Deadline for getting an ad in is this week for the fall/winter directory - give me a call if you're interested.

Still being Tim, the farm laborer, on Saturdays with my son-in-law and daughter's organic farm - SLO Grown Organics.   Cathy and I did the whole deal this weekend from picking to selling while Darin was out of town - pretty darn fun and all the free veggies we can eat.  Well, at least the ones that don't sell!

Loving the interaction happening on Twitter For Food!  I've met SO many heroes in the the hunger aid world.  August 1st, we're working on taking twitterforfood offline and doing a tweet-up food drive here in SLO.  Hopefully others will happen all across the country.  Very rewarding stuff personally!  If you want to help locally with a tweet-up food drive or just want info about what's going on email me at: twitterforfood@gmail.com

Still volunteering with SLO Green Build as their social media guy and just got asked to help a local candidate with his online presence during election time.

Still have some time to help you or your company figure out what works best, both online and offline, to attract, keep and delight your customers.  Give me a call at 805-544-7169 or e-mail me at tblair@enklings.com.

Simply,

Tim

Plan to be in the Top 2%

A little encouragement for you in leadership today:

Now, more than ever, leaders need to have a plan and stick to it.  While all the world around you seems to be inexorably shifting, the successful businesses and people will have a plan and work that plan.  Without it, you'll be swept along with the shifts in the economy and end up where you didn't expect to be.  Plus those that follow you will have no clue what to do if they don't see the path straight ahead.  A plan strengthens them.

My brother Daniel (the one with his Doctorate from USC in Human Performance) gave me this little piece of information 15 years ago. (yes, I was listening Dan)

2% Plan their work and work their plan.
8% Work a plan under duress.
90% Must be driven to accomplish a single task.

My encouragement for you is to: Plan to be in the top 2%.

simply,

Tim

Three Kinds of Meetings - Seth Godin

Yesterday, Seth Godin gave one of the clearest and to the point posts I've read about meetings in a long time!  He says there are three types: 

1. Information. This is a meeting where attendees are informed about what is happening (with or without their blessing). While there may be a facade of conversation, it's primarily designed to inform.
2. Discussion. This is a meeting where the leader actually wants feedback or direction or connections. You can use this meeting to come up with an action plan, or develop a new idea, for example.
3. Permission. This is a meeting where the other side is supposed to say yes but has the power to say no.

Take a look on Seth Godin's Blog.  He explains these well.

BTW, please don't have a meeting to discuss these. : )

simply,

Tim

and now...

for something completely different...Enklings Studio presents the work of Carl Willat!

Seriously, this guy is really creative.  Take a look at this Trader Joes piece he did - they should really use it as a real commercial!

Check out Carl's  website for more.

Shout out to the MortarBlog for this, love those guys too!

simply,

Tim

p.s. The "and now for something completely different" is a shout out to the pretty new Monty Python Youtube Channel.  (though they don't have my personal favorite: "The Cheese Shop")

Simply Twitter

I've got the luxury right now to voraciously learn.  Normally I spend a fair amount of time soaking in new things, but taking advantage of down time can give you the opportunity to try out new things, learn new skills and possibly open doors to new opportunities.

This week has been Twitter week for me.  I've immersed myself into the Twitter nation and found some surprising things:

You can waste a lot of time with Twitter if you want to.  There are an incredible amount of people out there not accomplishing anything with the time they spend.  "I had chicken for lunch" is not something of value.  "I had the most incredible fish at The Acoma in Butte, MT" is something of value (if you're ever in Butte.)

You can gain a lot of value if you want to.  It depends on how you learn.  If you are a viral learner - one idea leads to another, to another, to another - Twitter is probably the place for you.  With the vast amount of information flowing, it's like watching a brain work.  For me, doing some research on new business, the amazing quantity of data that flows every second on Twitter could be overwhelming, but with a few tools you can master it.

#hashtags - I posted about this earlier, but this does allow people to focus in on being a part of or collecting information and finding people who are interested in the same things.

Twollo - automatically "follows" people of like interests.  Twollo makes it a bit more manageable and less time consuming to find people you want to interact with.  It's certainly not foolproof, but can save you some time if you're interested in trying Twitter out.  Caveat here: Don't just follow - interact.  Look at the people Twollow signs up and interact with them - thank them if they follow back and actually look at their profiles.  Unless you're an egomaniac and think everyone is just holding their breath waiting for your next tweet (or you actually are one of those people everyone does want the next tweet from like @guykawasaki ) which most of us aren't, it's best if you stop Twollo at intervals that let you look at the people you are following and adjust.  Currently I have 900 I'm following and plan to stop Twollo at 1000 and take a look at who I'm following before I start it up again.

Digsby- This is a desktop client that will bring you updates from various social networks.  You download Digsby and give it your user names and passwords for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. and it will give you pop-ups of the updates on each.  The settings are pretty flexible so it doesn't become intrusive.

If you google "twitter tools" you'll find millions more, but after a week of twittering, these three tools have been the ones to help me understand and follow the right people. (and actually make some new friends!)  There are also a lot more extensive guides to Twitter, but you know me, I always try to keep it simple!

Happy tweeting.

simply,

Tim

P.S. You can find me on Twitter here.

 

Have a Heart - Help "The Least of These"

Something different for Valentine's Day.  A River Rock Heart crafted by a fair trade group out of Haiti and imported by Trade As One - a very cool website with a lot of fair trade gifts.

Here's what they say on their website about the crafters of this heart:

Comite Artisanal Haitien, Haiti
Location: Port-au-Prince, Haiti

The non profit group CAH (Committee Artisanal Haitien) , or the Haitian Committee of Artisans, has promoted and exported crafts made by a wide variety of artisans, co-operatives and craft groups.

In a country with around 70% unemployment the opportunity to be in a fair trade relationship- with fair prices, and regular orders- makes a huge difference.

All the artisans rely on CAH as their route to market, and for marketing and promotional expertise, and practical training and support.

I love the idea behind helping "the least of these" in this way.  Gifts with meaning is better than a box of chocolates any day!

simply,

Tim

P.S. I'm not affiliated with these folks, I just think they have a really cool mission.  I love their sisters or "three friends" pin made out of soda cans!