This technique was started in Japan by Toyota and it has an amazing application. When you answer all the five whys in sequence the root cause always seem to be human error or mistakes. For example a manager not paying attention to making sure that employees are properly trained could cause some incompetent mistakes further down the road. There are many examples where this tool could help to achieve a positive outcome. For example if you are heavily in debt, use the five why tool to get to the bottom of that instead of blaming the government or your employers.

You can read more about this tool on wikipedia – Five Whys.

If you really want to be successful at what you do, there is always a constraint that is holding you back from that breakthrough. We tend to blame the world for such hindrance when its our own action that is causing this. Use the five whys on any situation that you face and you will be very surprised on the root cause.

1. Things not to eat – The general consensus is eat less sugar and refine carbohydrates. Pretty much all weight loss programs seem to accept these facts. The main things that fall in this category would be rice, flour, bread and many of our standard heavy food out there. Of course any sugar is bad, so reduce its intake as much as possible.

2. Good to Eat – Its very good to eat lots of vegetables as these provide your body with the essential nutrients and if you follow this religiously, you have to lose weight unless you have some other ailments. Good levels of protein and calcium is also go in the process. Also drink lots of water in the process.

3. Exercise – This one goes without saying. Of course the intensity will vary depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

Between those basic premise, there are many variations but if you follow the core of those you will do well. Lets be honest, if you need to lose weight you will need to be stricter than if you simply just wanted to main your current weight. Eating vegetables can be a challenge and could be considered boring for the most part but there is no doubt it is very good for you. There is a solution to that.

The solution is called Vegetable and Fruit smoothies. Basically, you get fresh vegetables with fruits and blend them into tasty smoothies for any meal. If you want to be aggressive in getting results, it just means you will do this more often and in fact for all meals in a given period. Even Montel Williams is promoting this concept on TV recently. A great book to read more on this topic is “Eat to Live”.

Please comment on what you think of this overall concept.

Once you have a so-called brilliant idea, it is worthless until you can prove that potential customers find it useful. This brings me to the point that true business practice has a lot in common with engineering. The reason I say that is in the process of developing a business, the ideal approach is to test and make changes as you discover. This is basically how the scientific side of engineering works; You have an hypothesis which you test out and based on those results, you improve, discard or make any worthwhile adjustments.

The term use mainly at the Stanford University business school is Customer Development. This involves customer discovery, validation and so on.  The philosophy is that you discover an idea then you make some assumptions on the value it would create for a specific group of potential customers then you test out those assumptions. The idea of testing has the benefit of ensuring that the customers really have an interest or whether you need to make changes to the initial product idea.

In general language, you find an idea, then perform market research to establish whether there is any need for the idea.  Once you have sufficient data from the research phase, you need to validate whether that is indeed true. One simple way could be doing surveys with potential customers or preferably interviewing people to get a proper feel on the interest level for your solution. In the end, your goal is to solve an existing problem out there. A simple example of solving a problem is to make an battery only car. Does the car running on battery has any real benefit to the average consumer? Maybe not in the short term but for those whom are more environmentally conscious, they would jump at the idea immediately.

The moral of the story is that you can have a very successful business life but you have to focus on how to deliver value to the market place. This process is actually the most critical to have a business in the first place and this means you have to be willing to test and make adjustments in an agile fashion.

The next book I will review here, covers many of these points and its called “The Lean Start-up”

Here are a list of things you can do to setup your business Internet presence, the aim here is to keep it very low cost.

1. Domain Name – Its highly recommended that you get a domain name for your business. Typically, this would be <companyname.com>. The cost for this is about $10/year to maintain. Alternatively, you could get a free site from wordpress.com or blogger.com. The disadvantage to those is that you would naturally have a longer domain name and less control over your site in terms of content. Check out godaddy.com or similar company for domain name registration.

2. Hosting – Once you have a domain name, you would need to have hosting in place to run your site. Nowadays, you can get hosting from about $5.00/month with lots of extras. Alternatively, you could connect your domain name to the free sites mentioned above and eliminate the basic monthly charge but you would have limitations in doing so. Hostgator.com is a great hosting company to consider.

3. E-mail – The next important thing would be an e-mail address that is professional. If you got the paid domain name your e-mail address could be like yourname@companyname.com. This is very good for interacting in the business world instead of using @gmail.com or @yahoo.com. You can get a very good service to manage your e-mail called Google Apps for small business. The basic service is free but you can upgrade to others later.

4. Social Networking – This can be open ended as there are so much options you could consider. The main sites to consider are facebook.com, twitter.com and linkedin.com. The use of these sites will depend on the type of business that you. In terms of facebook.com, you will not need a new account for the business, you would just need to create a page for the business on your existing account.

5. Site Setup – With the basic infrastructure in place, you now need to setup your site and add content in respect to your business. This site becomes like an online brochure which could be use to promote the business as well. If you are not too technically oriented, you could outsource the entire process to a local web company or go to elance.com or guru.com to find a qualified person. Make sure you list out all the requirements you have for the site to ensure speedy satisfaction.

6. E-mail List – Anyone providing services should seriously consider having a mailing list. You could use twitter.com for this but not all persons are up to date on this technology, so you will need to have a traditional e-mail list service to get this done. There are several companies such as aweber.com that offers such service for about $20.00/month but you could get cheaper services if you shop around. Be careful on which provider you use as your mail could end up in someones spam folder which does not help you.

Conclusion

This is a basic skeleton of what could make you a reasonable web presence. As mentioned earlier, consider getting business cards with this information on there. It could help with the information flow especially when you attend meetings and conferences.

Now to the book “The Idea Hunter”. This book has some very important factors that will put you on the right track. It does not present a lot of formulas that you can use to come with a million dollar idea but it lays the foundation on how you could uncover many new ideas. They actually presented a simplified system called “IDEA” which I will explain below.

1. Focus – Before we jump into the IDEA steps, you need to have a focus area that you want to pursue. In other words you need to pick an industry then pick a mission within that industry. For example, you like a clean environment but in doing so you feel that renewable energy is one important area to pursue. Within renewable energy, you could break things down even further based on your specific interest.

2. Interested – The first step in the IDEA formula is the concept of being interested. You have your focus area ready, so now you need to really seek out and be aware of things happening in this field of choice. Always be taking notes on the topic. This basically means to take initiative to find new ideas.

3. Diversify – While you have a focus area of where you want to develop ideas, you need to look into how things are done in other fields as well as look at multiple sources to get ideas. It could mean to meet with experts but also talk to the common consumer as well. Do not rely on any single means to find good ideas.

4. Exercised – To be a good idea hunter, you need to practice the craft. Meaning you need to be always out there looking for ideas and observing things. The more you do this just like an athlete, its the more you become proficient as an idea hunter and developer

5. Agile – Once you collect ideas on the go, you need to be active in bringing them to fruition. An idea may not be great initially but by exploring and mixing things up, its very likely that a better idea could emerge in the whole process. Basically, it means you have to be active and continuously brainstorming what you find to develop further.

Conclusion:

While this book is not glamorous, it does give you a system to become a serious idea hunter and developer. It focuses a lot on developing an mindset of idea seeking and refinement which in the end will get you that break through. In the end, the best point for me, is the concept of focusing on a cause in order to be successful. If you are too scatter as I have been to be honest, you will get stuck at the start all the time.

Always have a system record new ideas whether its a smartphone, postit or small note book.

Here is a great discussion on the topic from Success.com – The importance of Clarity.

Once you get clarity sorted out then you need to focus and execute to achieve that goal of yours. That three prong attack is really a winner if applied for your personal success.

The key to creating and making wealth is effort or good old hard work. One may ask; what about leverage and other tools? Regardless of what you use, the harder you work at it, the more results you would get. For example if you had $100M in the bank and you want to increase the amount, it would be hard work to researching options, making decision and execution that will make that happen. In fact, if you leave it to others alone to do it, you could end of up with less money in most cases.

Lets get back to my main point and the thrust of my argument. I am aiming this at people who have nothing or very little.  Here is a sequence for someone that needs to improve their lives.

1. Education – While formal education is important in this step,I am mostly interested in education that presents you a balance approach to life and how to contribute. In the end, you would need some skill or another. You could learn from someone, go to some government training program or just read and educate yourself. In the end, its important to have good moral character in this process. It will drive you to play your fair part in society and not become some kind of cheat.

2. Contribute – There is no reason to not perform work in some ways. Even if it means to just clean up your community. The excuse that you have to find a specific job is probably the biggest reason we have so much poverty in some communities. Just do something whether you are paid or not. While doing that, try to figure out which areas you could perform work to earn an income but you could volunteer to help someone in the mean time.

3. Value – Lets say someone had some land or a house but very little money initially. They could do whatever they can to improve that place. In fact regardless of where you are if you make it better the value will jump significantly. Think of what we call Ghettos or squatting settlements. If people decide that they will work hard to make these better it actually helps them both short and long term. The same principle applies if you have a job, the more you put in, the more you get over time. Maybe that job will not work out but your effort will help you find the ideal job.

4. Relationships – Once you have the right attitude to contribute to society, you will build friendships with people from different backgrounds. This will be an important piece of moving your desire to create wealth forward. People want to work with someone that adds value to the conversation and the situation. Also, you can work with your close friends to build something bigger than what you all have now individually.

5. Give – Giving is an integral part of human nature. When we start to get selfish, it will cost us long term. Giving can be as we mention volunteering or it could mean to contributing goods or money to a cause. In fact you can build even better relationships when you do this.

Conclusion

This conversation could go on for awhile but we need to leave these for people to digest and understand the bigger meaning behind them. The point is that wealth comes with effort. Even if you fail several times at ventures, its your willingness to contribute and be positive that will ensure your success eventually. When the bigger deals come around, it will only be for those whom are trusted and have the best work ethic to get things done. In fact when you put forth effort you can call the shots every time.

The main issue I had with the board at Nortel is that for a technology company, almost no one on the board had any experience in technology at all and that was a big problem which turned out to be a key factor in Nortel losing its advantage in the industry and finally cease to exist.

What should we expect of a board? In my opinion, the board should set or approve strategy then monitor and correct over the course of time. This means they need to understand the industry of the company, have the CEO present the strategic plans, make recommendations for changes as needed then approve the final plan. They should get updates at least quarterly or monthly to ensure that the company is fulfilling the agreed metrics.

The board of directors should not just be about profiling and prominence but about being the compass for the organization and its success. Maybe, its worthwhile studying the composition of various company boards to see which ones have well aligned boards and their relative success.

1. The Basics – make sure you have a good business idea that you research in the market place and have a chance for success. Even if you will finance it yourself, don’t take this step lightly. Learn how to write business plans and there are lots of free small business courses online to help with this process.

2. Credit Reputation – In this current economy, no one is giving out loans or investment so easily, so you need to make sure you have good credit score for you and your business if you already have one. With good credit, you could speak with your local bank for help to get started.

3. Government back loans – The first layer of external financing you could use if your business need less than about $250K in funding are government type loans. In the US, the SBA is the agency responsible for these programs. They would review your business plan then provide a letter of guarantee for a regular bank to issue the loan. Its basically, a form of collateral.

4. Private Equity – This is probably the best option nowadays but the business idea will become the center piece. You will need to have a business plan in place to present to angel investors or venture capital companies. In the US, the SEC Regulation D funding rules maybe your best start as it has a mechanism to present your idea to accredited investors.

5. Partnerships – This is probably option #1 in practical terms. You can either get partners that will contribute skills, financing or combination of both.  This approach will be dependent on who you like to work with and the legal framework you put in place for ownership.

Summary:

There are always some means to finance your business idea but you have to be persistent and work the process until you succeed. I am sure there are venture capital firms today that missed out on investing in companies like Google, so you have to ignore failures and press on.

This is an important point in the global economy to consider business as a means to succeed as the whole model of employment is changing especially in the developed world. But there are opportunities for new industries and ideas to pursue.

There are tons of offers out there to learn marketing on the Internet but today, I want to introduce you to a very good option to get this information for totally free. This course will be starting September 1, 2011 and even if you missed the start today, you can join year round and get the same information.

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