Going Deep?
Juanita Weaver's "Creative Zone" piece (July) was
right on. Too few companies recognize the strategic value of
creativity, which separates the leaders from the copycats.
I'd like to add one additional tip. Because there's a
lot of information out there to assimilate, it's important to
focus on "shallowness." Being shallow means getting
paper-thin snippets of a lot of things rather than developing
significant depth-initially, at least. Creative ideas come from
synthesizing something new from multiple things you've already
been exposed to. To maximize the number of toys you have to play
with, you have to be efficient and shallow.
There are lots of great tools for developing shallowness. The
best tools are book summary services, of which I prefer getAbstract
(www.getAbstract.com), to replace book reading. For $299 per year,
you get a five-page synopsis and review of a business text sent to
you in PDF, Palm or MS Reader format, in addition to unlimited
downloads from their library of more than 2,000 titles. I read 200
book summaries in six months that way.
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Other efficient tools include newsletters (such as
Communications Briefings or The Organized Executive), magazines
that have executive summaries of articles (e.g., Harvard Business
Review) and online portals like Yahoo!
Becoming shallow allows the entrepreneur to be more creative
than his or her peers, while sacrificing little, if any, precious
time working in the business.
Eric A. Sohn
Chief Idea Officer
IdeaFountain
Business Resources
Stamford, Connecticut
The Great
Outdoors
A friend gave me a copy of your April article on the benefits of
outdoor advertising in this economy ("Marketing Buzz").
Many of your points were on target. Transit media, airport, mall
and other nontraditional forms of outdoor advertising are often
ignored in media plans put together by ad agencies that simply
don't know the medium as well as they know radio or TV.
My company helps businesses and marketers determine their best
outlets for outdoor media. Because we don't own billboards,
like the companies you listed, we offer nonbiased quality marketing
advice to our customers. They have rewarded us with 50 to 100
percent growth every year for the past five years. I keep
scratching my head about this "bad economy" I always hear
so much about.
Justin Allen
Vice President, Sales
Findasign Advertising
www.findasign.com
Sweet
Anticipation
Every time your magazine comes, I read business tips that become
crucial to my business' success. Whether it's marketing my
business, managing my business more efficiently or finding new
business streams, your articles make me money, save me time and
motivate me to see new possibilities. I'm always learning
something new or being reminded of a great technique I forgot.
My one complaint is that I read through Entrepreneur in just a
few days, spend the next few days reviewing, and spend the rest of
the month in desperate anticipation for your next issue.
David Notowitz
Owner
Notowitz Event Video Production
Los Angeles
Mixing Business With
Education
I recently read your April article "Can Entrepreneurship Be
Taught?" Yes, it can be taught across the curriculum, from
kindergarten with picture books to graduate school. Anyone who
graduates from high school, college or graduate school and is only
prepared to be an employee is like someone hopping around on one
foot. To have both feet on the ground, a student needs to be
prepared to be both an employee and an entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurship awareness can be woven into math, science,
social science and language arts. It can be part of a math word
problem or a poem. Each student could create an entrepreneurship
portfolio.
When a student enters college, he or she will be looking for a
business to start. A teacher can be an entrepreneur. An artist can
be an entrepreneur. An engineer can be an entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurship awareness is to the business community what
health awareness is to the medical community.
Cheryl Moore, Ph.D.
Baltimore
School Spirit
I just wanted to tell you that I enjoy every issue of your
magazine. I have my own consulting company and am in the process of
hiring people, and I feel all the information you provide is very
good. I also enjoyed the April issue with the Top 100
Entrepreneurial Colleges and Universities ("Can
Entrepreneurship Be Taught?").
But I was sad to see that my alma mater, Johnson & Wales
University, in Providence, Rhode Island, was in the third tier. The
education this university gave me was second to none. I went to
Eastern Europe with the university's Entrepreneurship Center.
We saw dozens of start-up companies. We saw the problems that most
start-ups face and how they combated them as well as the
post-communist problems that occurred.
This university has just started a business module that allows
the seniors to operate their own businesses, providing them with
the infrastructure needed. The education I received there was given
by ex-CEOs and true businesspeople. All the faculty members taught
from what they experienced, not what they learned.
Kevin R. Baranowski
Executive Vice President
Enterprise Projects LLC
Tabernacle, New Jersey
Update: Tucson Ventures, a company that appeared in
July's 3rd Annual VC 100 listing, has now merged with Valley
Ventures of Scottsdale, Arizona. Their new Web site is www.valleyventures.com.
Correction: Michael Minelli, media and entertainment business
manager for SAS Institute Inc., has averaged $2.5 million in
annual, not quarterly, sales ("The Art of the Sale,"
August).
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