We’ll be talking about designing and crafting narratives for non-profit and for-profit, small to enterprise level businesses.

And we’ll do it in 50 minutes or less.

Please contact me if you would like a copy of my slides.

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I am feeling different about my life and my prospects for it. I’ll elaborate . . .

I do enjoy being lighter and more healthy. I eat better, run and work out regularly and have literally never felt better in my life.

I am beyond excited at marrying my new bride. She is a beautiful writer, teacher and partner. The greatest indication I have that my life is moving in a powerful direction is the fact that a woman of her quality said yes to marrying me.

I started the Vaughan Practice because the situation is ripe for small businesses to seize territory. The cost of rapidly evolving technology has never been lower. Small businesses must leverage social media, mobility, and search technology in order to compete in the global marketplace and grow their business.

These are just symptoms of a more significant change. My most important change? I have committed myself to further education. You should hear about what I’m doing.

In April of 2009, I joined a discourse for Business Professionals,The Aji Network out of Silicon Valley California. They offer a two year course as well as face to face workshops. They also offer a way to learn exclusively online.

They are selective. Those selected are taught about the concerns for business. But instead of learning only from lecture and books, as in academia, this discourse is teaching business from a completely different perspective. The majority of students are already ambitious businesspeople and owners. In addition to business, students invest their time learning about physics, biology, language, history and philosophy.

The discourse has been taught at one of the most prestigious private corporate business universities in the United States, GE’s Crotonville in New York.

I’m a little over half way done with the course and just returned from the Aji Network Conference in San Francisco. It was a three day celebration with almost 200 other business leaders. I met fellow students from Wal-mart, Sprint, GE, Google, Symantec as well as fellow entrepreneurs like myself. What I found most valuable? Learning with them and from them about topics like Designing and Making Offers to Building Powerful Organizations.

The Aji Network delivers on its promise for learning unlike any other business course or university class I have taken. I do not benefit in any way from making that statement. I receive no referral fees should you sign up with the Aji Network. I have simply not found ANYTHING like this in the marketplace and HIGHLY recommend this to ambitious businesspeople who know they must have a competitive advantage to survive in this new economy.

What are you doing to stay educated?

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Symptomatic of the times, in 2009, General Motors Company found itself in a situation as many other large companies. They were failing. Unable to compete because of an industrial culture, high cost and bloated process, from 2005 – 2009, General Motors Company lost 88 Billion dollars.

That same year, GM accepted a 50 Billion dollar bailout from the government and the presence of a non-executive chairman, a man by the name of Ed Whitacre. Having once led another traditional industry stalwart, Southwestern Bell, who acquired AT&T, before retiring, Whitacre remarked to a few GM dealers after taking the on the role,

“We’re going to get this turned around and if current leadership can’t fix the company, we’ll find someone who can.”

Within three months of accepting that bailout, Whitacre recommended the firing of then current CEO Fritz Henderson and grabbed the reins himself. Fritz Henderson, the former CEO, who only logged 143 days as the head of GM, but had worked for GM for years, couldn’t be trusted to be the agent of change the company needed.

Whitacre took this large traditional company and started running it like a small business. He organized his company around moving and making decisions quickly. How did he do it?

1. Change the Culure – He fired more execs who also had worked for GM for years and replaced them with executives who worked for the likes of Microsoft. Some of which had never led organizations near its size prior. Why was this valuable? They were loyal, passionate and brought in to make change.

2. Accept Failure and Move Quickly – Many leaders can’t admit they were wrong. Immediately after becoming CEO, Whitacre reorganized Sales & Marketing and, after three months, realized that his program wasn’t working so he reorganized it again.

3. Focus the Message – He changed the message to be about the cars and not about pitchmen or imagery. GM also is leveraging social media to be open and transparent.

4. Scale back the product line – He sold Saab. He buried the Hummer. This allows the company to reinvest in the cars central to the historic brand, Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac, and GMC.

5. Have Integrity and Be Accountable – In April, he paid back 8.4 billion that he owed to the US and Canada that was originally due in June. The US government still owns 2 Billion in preferred shares. Whitacre indicates that GM will buy the shares back and go public in 2011.

6. Develop Relationships – He visited the front lines where other GM CEOs never dared to go. He sought advice from everyone, no matter their level. He also held employees accountable. As one exec said, “It was always blaming the untion, the government, or the economy. What we were doing didn’t work. The time of providing for everybody, no matter what their performance, is gone.”

GM is seeing results. Car sales are up over 17%. There are still challenges. Competition remains fierce. The cycle to produce a new car is around three years. Other companies are crowdsourcing the design of new cars and shipping them within months. It remains to be seen if GM can really be successful in this radically evolving economy. If so, it would signify an incredible turnaround and signify that a large business can do what many leaders are afraid to do . . . transform their company for the purpose of saving it.

What mistakes are you seeing that large companies are making that thwarts their ability to transform?

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The global marketplace has experienced the equivalent of “after-shocks” with the invention of the personal computer and the Internet. The seismic activity within the global marketplace has created a tsunami of historic consequence for business. In no other time in human history have we seen that established businesses are now threatened by small and medium sized competitors.

Businesspeople are not recognizing the consequence that this earthquake and its aftershocks have created. Businesses don’t see the fault lines in the foundation upon which their own companies are built.

They don’t see that inflexible and bloated processes are thwarting the ambitions of owners and shareholders.

They aren’t seeing that it costs too much to engineer their products and services.

What they DO see is that their mind share, market share and profits are eroding.

They act by laying off employees because that always worked in the past. They act by focusing on beating the competition because it worked that way in the past. Sometimes they act by trying to bullshit the marketplace, because that used to work too.

Bourne out of the earthquake the micro-chip created, there is now a tsunami that is crashing down on the global marketplace. It is a tsunami caused by a computer-driven marketplace. When its done, many of the traditional brands and companies will either be weakened, or washed away. Instead of trying to find the “right” solution, I suggest businesses focus on the consequences of the various choices they face.

They can ignore what’s going on and continue to think and act as they have. This will not make the tsunami go away. The company will just live peacefully and weakly UNTIL the water crashes overhead.

They can batten down the hatches and reinforce spaces in their business where they are weak. They can’t prevent the tsunami from hitting but they can “hope” they survive. This will be very costly in time, energy and money. If they are wrong about any of the choices they’ve made in shoring up weakness I speculate they will suffer the same fate as the company that did nothing.

There are other options. One option I teach companies to do is to transform their business. Get on a surf board and ride the wave of computer-driven tools instead of getting hit by it.

Tomorrow, I’ll write specifically about how I help companies tranform.

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As someone who, up to this point has declined to “wear the ribbon” of Saving Folgers in Kansas City, might make those who do scratch their head a bit and wonder why not? Doesn’t Vince care about jobs? Does he hate coffee? Families will suffer because of this, Vince, aren’t you aware?

Vince, wear the ribbon. If you don’t, you just don’t care.

If anyone is interested I will explain why, to this point, I have declined to wear the ribbon. I view it as an opportunity to talk philosophically about something I care about and also help my readers notice something that they might previously have not seen before.

A metaphor was used with regard to this situation. It has been said that this situation, while on a much smaller scale, is similar to the situation in Haiti. I’ll bite my tongue a bit but am happy to use a different metaphor in which we now have more information and see if its valid.

We live in a world in which forces act without concern for human beings. Weather is a perfect example. Case in point, in 2005 South Louisiana endured one of the deadliest hurricanes ever to reach American soil. 1800 people lost their lives, businesses were overrun and thousands were displaced and homeless. The suffering was highlighted and enhanced by the interpretation that the US, state and local government response was largely neglectful and incompetent.

People took to the blogosphere and traditional airwaves to denounce the government efforts. Petitions were drawn for the victims. Because of the widespread criticism, the numerous breakdowns experienced, and the lack of satisfaction produced by its citizenry, FEMA is challenged with, according to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace within Stanford University, to:

transform itself from a civil defense agency into a natural disasters agency.

It may be a challenge but at least they have the power to take action because of the criticism.

For background’s sake, it is interesting and obvious to note that no one protested or aired any grievance at the hurricane itself that actually caused the destruction. Why? Because hurricanes don’t care what humans think. As humans, we know it does no good to scream at weather. That’s why we blame the weatherman.

In the movement to Save Folgers in Kansas City, there are also forces at work that we have no control of.

We live in a global marketplace. This marketplace has grown exponentially in the Internet age. Manufacturing, programming, call center and other jobs that can be shipped remotely, typically are. As such, salaries for these types of jobs have become priced by overseas talent. Companies, not just big companies, but EVERY company is looking to operate as efficiently as possible. The commoditization of labor is a real problem for laborers who seek to earn a living and live a good life.

Because the cost of labor is plummeting, it poses a different set of challenges for large companies. Small companies can now compete with large companies for profits that were once unheard of. Micro-breweries are competing with larger beer distributorships. Boutique businesses can impact the bottom lines of Enterprise-size companies. To further illustrate, 11.9M viewers saw the last episode of The Sopranos. To date, 55M viewers have seen David After Dentist. The Internet age is a threat large companies must deal with.

Large businesses for the first time, because of the Internet age, see smaller businesses as huge threat in their industry. Folgers might not admit it, but it is scared to death of companies like The Roasterie. Every one of them are eating at the profits companies like Folgers used to enjoy.

At first glance, it might look like Folgers is the big bad corporation hopping on board the bandwagon to screw the American worker. In truth, the American worker is screwed by the global marketplace. But even that’s not true.

The global marketplace doesn’t care about the American or the Kansas City worker. It is indifferent because both the American and Kansas City worker can’t provide any marginal utility over a worker in Mexico, Brazil or, in the case of Folgers, New Orleans. In many ways, Kansas Citians could think fondly that these jobs aren’t headed overseas. I speculate that they could very easily.

The global marketplace is why you can search on any topic in the world and come up with a result. It is why knowledge is at a premium and hard work is at its all time low. It is why profits from the Roasterie have grown every year since 1993.

The flaw in the Save Folgers KC movement? Delicious aromas will still exist, they are just moving to a different neighborhood. Folgers isn’t the first company to lay off an American or Kansas City worker and they won’t be the last. Folgers isn’t doing so because they have no heart. They simply decided to operate more efficiently as a response to their owners — the shareholders of Smuckers Inc. If you were CEO, you might choose a different plant to close but, no doubt, you’d have to choose one.

To protest the Folgers plant leaving Kansas City is like protesting against Hurricane Katrina. It provides no benefit. Forces, like the global marketplace, and other laws of physics, exist without concern for humanity.

I have no suggestions over what you should protest instead. Maybe you can go to one of our lovely coffee shops in Kansas City and think about it for awhile.

Or . . .

Maybe you would like to make the world a better place. If so, I have a cause that I would like to talk to you about.

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Why aren’t more businesses doing this today? Why haven’t companies caught up to the revolution happening in the consumer marketplace?

Traditionally, companies make decisions for their employees about what devices they’ll support and applications they should use. The mobile device revolution is making companies think differently. According to a recent Forrester report, in nearly one-third of all firms, over 50% of employees use a mobile phone for work. IT could never keep up with the research necessary to be able to choose which devices to support.

That isn’t stopping them from trying. In some good news, according to the same Forrester report, more companies are beginning to include end-users in their decision making process.

In these type of applications businesses hope to use capabilities already existing on current devices and use them in, but most importantly FOR the Enterprise. As he illustrates, the accuracy of data can increase from a space around 10 meters to a few centi-meters.

I speculate that the demand for this type of accuracy will only grow. As demand grows, companies will be shifting their decision making process from more of a “command and control” paradigm to something a bit more centralized.

Enjoy the video.

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