Small business owners are putting less on the line, but feel more optimistic about the future. Are they seeing through rose colored glasses?

Small business owners say things are looking up, according to the latest Citibank Small Business Pulse survey.

This year's query of 750 respondents revealed only 14 percent feel business conditions are poor--the lowest level since the survey launched in 2010. Nearly half of the small businesses (48 percent) say conditions are good or excellent, up 24 percent since 2010. Fifty-four percent say they expect 2014 to be even better.

A possible cause for the shift might be that fewer owners are having to bootstrap, or finance their venture out of pocket.

While fewer business owners fund their ventures with personal savings--37 percent compared to 62 percent in 2012--about a third mix the two together. Nearly 14 percent of all business owners say they use personal credit account for their business, the survey found.

But the past year has also been kinder to small business owners in general. The percentage of owners taking less profit to support their business fell from 78 percent to 64 percent, while that of owners who took on more responsibility--often because they couldn't afford to hire staff--similarly dropped from 67 percent to 54 percent.

"As conditions improve, many small businesses are planning to add staff despite some still reporting a ‘skills gap’ in the U.S.," said Jerome Byers, head of Citibank Small Business, in reference to the 16 percent of small business owners who claim they cannot find quality help.

"Plans for physical expansion are in the works too, including the possibility of small businesses crossing international borders--and well they should. With global services and resources to support them, no business is too small to consider international options to find suppliers or customers."

In fact, 13 percent said they plan to add more locations, while a quarter would consider expanding to markets abroad.

The start-up acquisition madness continues, this time with Twitter buying Spindle, a location-focused social discovery engine.

Yahoo isn't the only tech giant going on a shopping spree this summer.

Twitter announced Wednesday it acquired social discovery start-up Spindle. Twitter will shut down the service and Spindle's team will relocate to San Francisco. No terms of the deal were disclosed in either company's press release.

In case you're unfamiliar with Spindle, All Things D's Mike Isaac, who broke the story, calls it a "social startup (sic) focused on the location and check-in space, and discovering local places of interest nearby."

Put simply, Spindle hyperactively filters useful data streamed through sites like Facebook and Twitter to make local discovery quicker and more intuitive.

Rather than simply display where you are, Spindle shows you what's happening where you are, using data such as the time of day, points of interest like restaurants, and actual keywords found in a business' status update.

No word yet on how Twitter plans to put Spindle to use, but expect the micro-blogging platform to get a lot more location savvy.

The only way alliances will strategically grow your business is if you pay attention to the details on an ongoing basis.

Business partnerships offer unparalleled opportunities to build your business with the strength of others. They can be low-cost, high-yield, and therefore smart strategies. But only when you work out the specifics and you can be confident the brands fit.

Plenty of people are puzzled that Oprah Winfrey's network OWN is partnering with actor Tyler Perry whose trademark humor regularly mocks and denigrates assertive black women. Partnerships are great but they also produce enormous opportunities for phenomenal brand conflict--and not only the obvious ones between Winfrey and Perry. Any seasoned marketer will tell you that all brands must conform to the three 'C's: consistency, consistency, and consistency. So if you want to wreck a brand, it's simple: just be inconsistent.

A Case Study in Partnership Wreckage

If you want a master class in how to do this, look no further than the British Airway alliance with American Airlines. The upshot of this is that when you book with BA, you may find yourself on a flight operated by AA. Highly-seasoned travelers will know to look at the fine print but everyone else will be duped.

Until the day of travel looms. They'll find that they can't check in with BA; they get shoved over to the AA website and have to agree to data-sharing. Then, because it isn't clear really whose flight this is, which terminal it leaves from isn't obvious either. Don't assume you know--you don't. Finding the information you need can take a long time.

Already you're confused. And when your flight begins, you're baffled. BA's transatlantic flights have a huge selection of current and vintage movies; AA has a small selection of movie flops. BA has a library of great TV shows; AA has found a few you've never heard of. Drinks are served. On BA the drinks are free; on AA, wine is free but spirits incur a charge. That is, unless you have conscientious cabin crew who once told me they didn't charge because they thought the policy was stupid and wrong.

On BA you'll get a decent meal; on a BA flight operated by AA, you might get a meal, and it might be edible. On BA you will probably get helpful service; on AA, you can watch as the cabin crew run away from struggling passengers.

But remember: this is a BA flight--right? I couldn't tell you. The brand confusion is so profound, the messaging so inconsistent that, when I book with either, I have no idea what I'm paying for.

How are your partnerships doing? Let me know in the comments below.

Greatness doesn't just happen. The best leaders take steps to ensure that when they do something, they do it better than anyone else.

You're good. You wouldn't be where you are if you weren't. But you know you're capable of better than good. You're capable of achieving truly great things.

Problem is, days go by, then weeks, months--maybe even years--and you're still cranking out good. You've yet to design that unbelievable product, write that great novel, dominate that market. Everyone admires you, but you've a growing sense of disappointment in yourself.

How do you change that dynamic? How to you move from delivering good, to delivering Holy Cow! every time? Try these five steps:

1. Prioritize.
First things first. If you want to achieve something great, best decide what it's going to be.

This may seem like a flash of the blindingly obvious, but I've noticed an interesting and consistent positive correlation between those who know what they want to achieve and those who achieve great things. As my mother used to say, "If you aim at nuthin', you'll hit it.".

Can you jot down on a notepad the two or three great things you want to achieve? No? Then start there.

2. Plan ruthlessly; execute relentlessly.
The highly successful leaders I work with distinguish themselves from the merely competent by one thing: They have a plan, they work the plan, but they aren't trapped by the plan.

While this sounds like a simple mantra, merely competent leaders stumble in its execution--specifically, they either design a plan, but don't work it; or they work the plan, but shudder to a halt when they reach a barrier or uncover a problem.

The answer? Once you start implementing, don't stop until you've finished. Adapt on the fly, improvise as best as you can, but unless something truly horrendous will happen otherwise, keep going.

Here's a small example of what I mean: I deliver a lot of online webinars. Some of them are "canned" (recorded in advance) and some of them are live. I've noticed that with the canned webinars, I'll often start and restart many times, unhappy with my choice of words or the tone I've struck. With the live webinars, once I've started, I've no option but to keep going. And guess which webinars almost always turn out to be more vibrant, and better received? The live ones.

3. Get out of your inbox.
Leaders in thrall to their inbox, once only apparent when you visited someone at their office, now, you can see it everywhere: peck, peck, peck; on airplanes, at lunch, during rest room breaks. Any where, any time there is a minute to spare.

Here's the thing: if you're in thrall to your inbox, you're working to other people's agenda, not your own (a view I was intrigued to see shared by one surprising individual).

It may be over-promoted and it's often over-complicated, but the ability to achieve Inbox Zero (or something close to it) isn't optional for great leaders. If you're serious about achieving great things, you need the time and space to do it, and if you're using every break available to scroll through your inbox (or your social media stream), then I have news for you--you ain't doing great things.

4. Get out of your office.
You truly want to achieve great things? Get the heck out of your office.

Not just because it removes you from all the interruptions and distractions that being in your own environment makes you subject to, but because it takes you out of the comfort zone of maintenance activities.

Your office desk, chair and computer monitor is where you do the 80 percent of merely good work, day in, day out. Find a retreat space, a unique corner somewhere, where you can specifically go to work on your major achievements. It may be a conference room down the hall, it may be the local coffee shop, it may be a broom cupboard--doesn't matter--just find a space that isn't the place where you do 'normal stuff'.

5. Review, revise, adapt, push on.
It's day two. You've made a start on your great project. What to do today? Try this formula I arrived at in achieving one of my own big goals: Review what you did yesterday; revise anything that looks a little off; adapt your overall plan as necessary, and most importantly, push on.

Download a free chapter from the author's book, "The Synergist: How to Lead Your Team to Predictable Success" which provides a comprehensive model for developing yourself or others as an exceptional, world class leader.

The key to outstanding customer service? Don't just listen--take action, says White House Black Market president Donna Noce.

The key to outstanding customer service is listening to your customers--and acting on their feedback, according to Donna Noce, president of the retail chain White House Black Market. The upscale clothing and decor company--an offshoot of women's fashion retailer Chico's FAS--operates 351 boutique stores and grew 40 percent in the last year.

Noce attributes much of the brand's success to its close-knit relationship with customers. She explained White House Black Market's strategy for quality customer service in a video interview with the Wharton School of Business earlier this month.

Here are four tips to improve your customer service--and develop a loyal fan base--from Noce's interview. You can also watch the video in its entirety here.

Be authentic.

Don't use privacy settings as an excuse to distance yourself from customers.

"If your customer is your top priority, she needs to be your top priority in every touch point you have with her. I think you have an obligation to insure that you engage your customer the same way regardless of whether you're speaking to her in person or through a different medium," Noce said in the interview.

White House Black Market, for example, allows its followers to post on the company's Facebook wall. Noce admitted that this is unusual for a retail company--most business owners are wary of spam and negative cyber feedback--but she insists the pay-off is worth it.

"Our customers are very engaged with us because we allow them to share," she said.

Tackle both good and bad.

Another social media mistake: Sweeping bad reviews under the rug.

"When somebody has a bad experience in one of our stores... not only do we respond on our Facebook page openly, because I believe in being very open, but I or my head of store operations also call the customer personally," said Noce. She attributes much of White House Black Market's customer loyalty to this hands-on approach.

Ask questions.

You have the customer base, now ask them what they really want. Noce cited a poll that she conducted last year asking White House Black Market customers what color line they would like to see that the company had not yet produced.

"The No. 1 response was purple," she said. The company subsequently developed an immensely popular purple product line. "That's what we delivered, and they remembered it."

Take action.

Simply asking questions isn't enough--you have to respond to the answers you receive, said Noce. She once opened an entire store on this premise.

I logged into our Facebook page and I saw these posts coming up, 30 of them, all from women in Billings, Montana. I started reading through them and the gist was: "Oh my God, we don't have a White House Black Market in Billings, Montana. Why don't you come to Billings?"

So the next morning, I went to the office and got on the phone to the head of real estate. I asked: "Why don't we have a store in Billings, Montana? Find me a space." Sure enough, he found me a space. And this September, we had the grand opening of the store.

A recall is never good news for a car company. But founder Elon Musk has handled the situation with smooth moves.

On Tuesday night, electric car manufacturer Tesla announced it is recalling a slew of Model S sedans manufactured between May 10 and June 8. The cause, according to a blog post by founder and CEO Elon Musk, is a faulty mounting bracket in the car's backseat.

"This reduces our confidence that the left hand seat back will be properly retained in the event of a crash," Musk wrote. Musk didn't specify the exact number of cars being recalled, but a filing with the National Highway Safety Administration reports that 1,228 vehicles could be affected, though Tesla estimates only about 20 percent actually are. (Telsa forecasts selling 21,000 vehicles by the end of 2013.) Requests for comment by Tesla were not immediately returned.

A recall is never good news for any company, but I suspect this particular one will hardly slow down the car manufacturer. For one thing, the number of recalled vehicles is tiny, especially when you think of the 2.7 million Jeep vehicles Chrysler is now recalling due to crash protection issues in their fuel tanks. Unlike Chrysler, which received a recall request from the National Highway Safety Administration on June 3rd, the Tesla recall was voluntary. According to Musk's post, no customer complaints or injuries have been reported and no seats have actually detached.

This is not the first time Tesla has issued a recall. In 2009, the company recalled 345 Tesla Roadsters due to an issue with the rear hub. A year later, the company recalled 439 more due to fire safety issues in the electrical system. Neither of these issues have done much to tarnish Tesla's near spotless record, which includes a Consumer Reports score of 99 out of 100, making it the magazine's top-rated car on the market.

Unlike Fisker Automotive, a failed electric vehicle company that issued recalls and suffered from a reputation for spontaneous car fires, Tesla's troubles are considerably less dangerous. And from a communications standpoint, Musk has managed the situation expertly. He got to the story before his customers did and explained clearly and concisely the nature of the problem. More importantly, he outlined exactly why there's no need for "undue alarm." And, unlike other car companies, which require customers to bring recalled cars in to a dealership, Musk also laid out a gameplan that's favorable to its well-heeled customers: "Tesla will pick up the car at a location of the owner’s convenience, provide a Model S loaner if needed, perform the work and bring the car back to the owner a few hours later."

Judging by the size and scope of this recall, relative to the millions of cars that are recalled each year, this small bump in the road seems unlikely to do much damage to Tesla's glowing reputation.

Sometimes, words are not enough. Rather than talking in circles around your client, use visuals to recapture their attention.

There is an old saying that a picture is worth one thousand words.

Most people consider sight to be the most important of their five senses--so it seems logical that visual aids are more likely to hook your customers' attention than words alone.

Indeed, the crowdfunding site Kickstarter has stated that fundraising projects with videos are 20 percent more likely to succeed than those without. And according to Lee LeFever, author of The Art of Explanation: Making Your Ideas, Products and Services Easy to Understand, visual aids become especially important when you're dealing with a potentially confusing service or product.

In a blog post for the Harvard Business Review, he explains:

We're communicating in the YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram era to audiences who are more visually literate than ever. Though often more difficult and expensive to produce, infographics, videos and diagrams can do the heavy lifting of making explanations work. Videos offer potential funders a simple and compelling way to understand a new idea and why it matters.

Think of it like the difference between drawing a map and issuing verbal directions, writes LeFever. "It may seem counterintuitive, but more information won't help someone who's already confused."

To get the most bang for your advertising buck, consider using an explanatory video, animation, or infographic. According to--what else--an infographic on infographics produced by the marketing agency Customer Magnetism, high quality infographics are 30 times more likely to be read than text articles.

Now more than ever before businesses have tons of data on what customers want. Too bad they don't have a clue what to do with it.

Compiling massive sets of data and analyzing them--so-called big data--was supposed to be a boon for business. (And a PR nightmare for the NSA.) But according to a survey from digital marketing software company Lyris and conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, many companies are well behind the curve, as well as national spooks.

According to the survey of 257 marketing executives, 45 percent said that they lacked the capacity to analyze big data, while a full half didn't have the budget to pay for digital marketing and database management. A lack of competence in analyzing data was cited as a major obstacle to implementing more effective strategies according to 45 percent of the executives.

Those who could afford the analysis and had the skills to pull it off, at least in theory, found that, in fact, they didn't get much bang for the buck. Only 24 percent said that they always used big data for "actionable insight." And only 27 percent said that "they always integrate customer data from different sources into a centralized customer database." As Lyris put it, marketing executives often ignore big data because they find it confusing.

Because of the confusion and lack of knowledge, marketers are missing the boat in some big ways with consumers:

• Email is underestimated--Email is dead, right? Nope. About 37 percent of consumers ranked email as a top channel for pre-purchase decisions, while 52 percent said email was most important for post-purchase interactions. However, companies put more of their budgets toward websites, not email.
• Mobile and social are overhyped--Talk to marketers and pundits and you'll hear a lot about how mobile and social networks are incredibly important. And they are, in terms of learning and investing for the future. But for now? Consumers said that the two had the least influence on purchasing. Executives, on the other hand, ranked social responses as the third most important key performance indicator, following only sales and response rates. Although 62 percent of consumers liked social for product promotions, they like to learn about products via company websites, email, or third-party websites.
• Personalization is overdone--About 63 percent of consumers find marketing personalization pervasive enough that it has become useless. The surprise and shock factor are gone. A third of consumers said that personalization was one of their top annoyances and 70 percent say that the practice is superficial. And yet, personalization was the number two marketing strategy.
• Marketers don't get privacy--The use of data collection and analysis bothers consumers and 49 percent say that they're concerned about threats to their privacy. Marketers, though, think only 23 percent of consumers are concerned.

Not only don't marketers get data, they don't get what consumers want in communications. Until they sharpen up, you can count on more spending--with lackluster results.

There's a big difference between somebody who runs a business and a true entrepreneur. Three factors to help you tell the difference.

A few years ago, I went on a date with a girl I'd met online. She was nice, but there was no romantic chemistry, and our talk turned to Internet dating war stories. She shared a hard-won insight:

Just because a guy says he's an 'entrepreneur' doesn't mean he actually owns a business.

Truer words were never spoken! It also goes the other way:

Just because somebody owns a business, doesn't mean he or she is actually an entrepreneur.

This exchange leaped top of mind this week as I've followed the SBA's Small Business Week events. Small businesses make up a whopping 99.7 percent of American firms, and account for 64 percent of net new private sector jobs. It's an important topic.

But so often, people use words like "entrepreneur," "business owner," and "founder" interchangeably. I think we might be losing something and giving aspiring entrepreneurs some bad guidance in the process.

So what is entrepreneurship anyway? The best definition I keep coming back to is:

Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.

First coined by a professor at Harvard Business School, it's really instructive. It's much more about a way of acting than it is about a result. There is nothing inherently in the definition about money, or even business.

So, with that in mind, here are three factors to consider in deciding whether you're acting like an entrepreneur, a business owner, or both.

1. What Opportunity Are You Pursuing?

Let's start by breaking down the definition. If being an entrepreneur starts with the idea that you're "pursuing opportunity," can you describe the opportunity you're going after?

Another way to approach this is to ask yourself what problem your business solves. (Bonus points if you can truly say it's a "deeply felt customer problem.")

In fact, as one of the most interesting entrepreneurs I know insists, your answer to this question is the best predictor of whether a new ventures will fail. Again, this doesn't have to be a money-making opportunity, per se. There's an entire category of social entrepreneurs who are among the best examples.

Bottom line: Are you solving problems and trying to improve the world, or are you just going to work?

2. What Opportunities Are You Giving Up?

It stands to reason that true entrepreneurs have lots of options--precisely because they're in the business of creating options. That in turn means that they have to give up a lot of opportunities as well.

Maybe this is best illustrated by using two examples:

First, let's think of a woman who walks away from a promising job to start her own firm, because she sees how her old bosses meet their customers' needs and realizes she can do better. She might not succeed, but she's probably an entrepreneur.

Second, think of a man who grows up expecting to inherit his parents' business, and who, after they leave it to him, runs it basically the same way that they did. He might turn out to be a fantastic executive, but he's probably not an entrepreneur in as pure a sense.

Bottom line: Are you pursuing this opportunity because it's the best conceivable one for you, or have you simply picked the best of what's familiar and in front of you?

3. How Exciting Are Your Solutions?

Entrepreneurship goes hand-in-hand with innovation, but it's not a direct relationship. Entrepreneurs are like Goldilocks: They need exactly the right amount of innovation. Too little is boring, but too much can be a problem, too.

We all know stories of entrepreneurs who get so wrapped up in technology, for example, that they lose sight of its utility. Or else, we hear about entrepreneurs who try to introduce solutions that are just too disruptive for customers to be comfortable with. (When we're being polite, we say they were "ahead of their time.")

Luckily, there's a measuring stick: How exciting are your solutions? Even better, how excited do other people get about your solutions?

Sure, innovation can be a part of that, but the measurement goes directly to the definition of entrepreneurship, above: "without regard to resources currently controlled."

Bottom line: Take a cold, hard look. Is your venture really the best possible use for all of the "other people's resources" you need--not just money, but also their time, their trust, and their passion? Is it truly exciting to you, and to them?

(Like this post? Check out Bill's weekly email.)

You can learn a lot from this employee's awful experience with her manager.

"We're pressed to do more with less, compete globally, and meet ever-rising expectations against shrinking deadlines." --Stephen Covey

Sometimes we're also burdened with extremely difficult bosses--people who can make going to work a daily combat zone instead of a pleasant, productive work environment. Yet even the worst bosses can end up teaching valuable lessons that can boost careers.

RELATED: 7 WAYS TO FIX YOUR BIGGEST MANAGEMENT MISTAKE

Monica Jones (not her real name), a journalist in New York City, had an experience early on that she still draws on. "I wrote an important process memo at my manager's request," she says. "I worked really hard on it, making sure all critical points were included--and went out of my way to solicit input from senior team members who had more experience than I did."

Jones spent days refining her memo, on top of her regular duties. "I wanted it to be as clear and instructive as possible."

But after she turned it in, she was met with a deafening silence. Her boss didn't respond at all. "I understand that people are busy, and we were a large staff with so much going on--so I got it. But I was confused by the non-reaction."

When Jones diplomatically mentioned she'd submitted the memo, there was still no reaction. Finally, two weeks later, Jones arrived at work one morning to find a post-it note on her desk: "A major disappointment," it read in her boss's handwriting.

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Below that, the boss had left a scathing critique of Jones's memo. "She said it was too long. It was too detailed. She had crossed out big chunks of the memo and written in the margins, 'No! Absolutely not.' And she didn't like that I'd gone to other staff members for input."

The boss's perspective is what counts, of course--and Jones acknowledges her memo "had its imperfections." But what irked her most was the poor communication. "A friendly face-to-face chat would have helped enormously," says Jones. "She could have pointed a few things out, given me the chance to revise. I gladly would have done a new version. I wanted to succeed."

The boss took the memo away from Jones, however, and gave it to another staffer to "fix"--and then let it be known that Jones's draft had "failed."

The experience was so devastating, Jones says, she vowed to do things differently when she became a manager, which she did a few years later. She learned the following tips:

Be very clear about what you ask for. Clarity is critical for all parties to accomplish the goal at hand.

Be quick with feedback, or as quick as you can given other priorities.

Give feedback verbally--not through stealth notes left on desks overnight. If a face-to-face meeting isn't possible (because people are in different locations), talk it through by phone, at least generally, then follow-up with details by email.

Give constructive feedback. Sometimes employees need more direction and thought to accomplish a task than initially envisioned.

Give credit where credit is due. Even a draft of something shows effort and thought. Be appreciative.

"You can't make anyone else change," advises career counselor and executive coach Michele Woodward, "no matter how smart and capable you are. You can only change how you react to that person." So even though it can be "crappy to work for a jerk," she says that in reality, "some bosses are fearful, some have blind spots, and some lack leadership and communication skills"--though we all wish our managers were perfect.

"Bad bosses teach resiliency," says Michael Gurian, author of Leadership and the Sexes, among other books. "They test our personality assets and liabilities. In that sense, they are a gift.

"So if we can weather them and grow from them--by trying to see what they actually do right and learning to take nothing personally--we can gain a lot."

Gurian adds that "nearly every 'bad boss' actually does see something in us they're trying to fix--some weakness or another--so their attacks or negligence are not actually worthless."

In Monica Jones's case, once the memo fiasco blew over, she focused on her day-to-day productivity. Eventually the boss moved to a different division of the company--but Jones carried the lessons with her. "I work hard today at strong communications with the people on my team," she says, "because I remember the hell I went through when someone didn't."

RELATED: THE 7 WORST JOB INTERVIEW MISTAKES PEOPLE MAKE

Even the most successful leaders get stuck in their careers. Here's a surprisingly simple way to break through and achieve your goals.

It happens all the time: you're trying to solve a tough problem and you get stuck. You rack your brain but the answer just won't come. Asking around doesn't help. Neither does the internet. Bummer.

We all know what that's like. It's damn frustrating. But when it happens to your career, it's far worse, especially if you're one of those people who expect a lot of themselves. I'm like that. I live to accomplish things and I always want to know I'm going somewhere. So when I get stuck, it really weighs on me.

Perhaps the biggest problem with getting stuck in your career is the time factor. It can go on for years. After you've exhausted every source of advice, you get that sinking feeling like you're just spinning your wheels and going nowhere fast. It can really get you down.

So quit wasting time searching for a magic solution to your problems and listen up. Here's a simple and foolproof process for getting your career unstuck.

Step 1. Ask yourself what you want to achieve next.

One of my favorite quotes is from baseball great Yogi Berra, who famously said, "If you don't know where you're going, you might not get there." Call it obvious and silly all you want, I've seen countless executives, entrepreneurs, and business leaders try to run companies without a clear goal in mind.

If you have trouble figuring out what you want out of the next stage in your career, then at least come up with a list of possibilities and start eliminating them one by one until you've narrowed it down to a short list. Then try to get really specific about what you want to achieve and eliminate what you know you don't want to do.

Why bother? Simple. There's a world of opportunity out there so you've got to rule out the vast majority of options so you know how to focus your efforts. Otherwise you'll be all over the map, you'll never find your way, and you sure as hell won't get anywhere.

Step 2: Figure out what's stopping you.

That's a big, hairy question so here are some straightforward ones to help you figure it out: Why won't your current situation get you to where you want to go? What skills, capabilities, or relationships are you missing? What are you doing wrong or what should you be doing differently? What will likely derail your plans?

In the business strategy world we call this a gap analysis. It's the same thing with individuals and their careers. This is where you get to take a long, hard look in the mirror. If you're not entirely honest with yourself about what's stopping you or will likely stop you from achieving your goals, you'll never get there.

Once you've figured that out, check to see if you set the bar too high or too low in the prior step. Are your goals at least achievable? Are your expectations within reason? Are you taking a risk that you're not financially prepared to handle? Don't get me wrong. It's good to take risks, but they have to be in line with your risk tolerance at this point in your life.

Don't be afraid to iterate between steps one and two until you're comfortable with your goals and what you need to do differently or gaps you need to fill to achieve them.

Step 3. Come up with an action plan and do it.

This is where people--even experienced executives--usually fall down. This isn't the easy part; every part of this process is hard. That's right, I said this would be simple; I never said it would be easy. After all, nothing worth achieving in life is ever easy.

What you want to do here is come up with a relatively detailed action plan including milestones you plan to achieve, when you'd like to achieve them by, and the next step you need to take in the process of achieving each one. Keep it on your computer or print it out and post it in your home office or wherever you're likely to see it every day.

Be disciplined about it. Have monthly meetings with yourself to review your status and update your "next steps." If the schedule has slipped, that's okay. You can modify it from time to time and reset the dates. Just be aware, if your schedule is constantly slipping, you may have bitten off more than you can chew. In that case, you may need to iterate once again.

Finally, some words of encouragement. These days, people are very good at wanting but they're not very good at sticking with it. They want things and they want them now. But here's the thing. Careers don't work that way. So, when you get itchy for good things to happen too soon, don't get discouraged and quit. Stick with it. That will set you apart. And that's why you'll succeed.

Users don't want to go through training, read a manual, or figure out your jargon. They want to get going.

I recently spent some time with the very talented and thoughtful team at Pathful. They are developing analytical tools to help non-technical website owners determine which parts of their sites are effective (driving engagement, conversion and ultimately sales) and which parts of the site either aren’t as successful or, worse, are actually damaging their business.

While everyone tells us that we need a website, regardless of the type of business we may be in, no one ever tells the site owner with any precision whether the website is working and whether it’s worth continued investment. If you call your website developer, provider, or host, and ask how your site is doing, at best you’ll get some up-time data and maybe some traffic information. But you won’t get anything that deals with the real metrics and ROI of the site.

One very appealing aspect of Pathful’s service is how highly automated the back-end processing and reporting systems are going to be. That lets Pathful offer some basic versions of their service at prices that should be reasonably affordable and appealing to early-stage businesses. Another promising aspect is how quick and easy they said it would be for a business to deploy their software and start getting feedback. A customer just has to “add a couple of lines of javascript” to his or her site and they would be ready to roll. Just like implementing some of Google’s basic tools.

And that’s where I started to get worried that the team at Pathful were about to become victims of their own narrow environment and technical expertise. Because when you’re sitting in a start-up incubator or a shared tech workspace killing it with your team, and you’re all surrounded by other smart, young techies who eat javascript for breakfast, it’s a lot like living in an echo chamber lined with mirrors.

Everyone hears what they need to hear, and it’s easy to have very little idea of how life actually works in the real world. That’s especially true if you’re selling to young and small businesses. Telling a small business owner that all he needs to do is to “add a little code” to his website is a lot like handing him a penknife and telling him that it’s cheaper and easier to just do his own root canal. And he doesn’t even need to make an appointment.

Campbell Macdonald, CEO of Pathful, says that he’s trying to make his company’s technology as easy to install and use as possible. “We have wrestled with this extensively,” he says. “In our experience, whoever takes care of the website wants to help get these tools installed because a successful website makes for a successful business. For business owners who choose to go DIY, we are providing single-click installs for common platforms such as Wordpress and Magento. It’s typically less than a minute to get installed.”

The other byproduct of this type of situation is the curse of creeping functionality. This can really hurt a start-up by encouraging product offerings that are too complex, over-engineered and technical for the larger market. This may be great for the earliest adopters, but it’s gonna freak out the crowd. Your product has to satisfy the immediate needs of prospective customers and users, not the egos or desires of the company’s managers and engineers.

Existing users are incrementalists. They are generally willing to try enhancements and updates as long as these are not disruptive of their ongoing activities. New prospects, on the other hand, are always looking for an easy on-ramp and a simple way to start. They don’t want to read a book, take a training course, or spend a week getting up to speed.

For the vast majority, too many bells and whistles are not attractive enticements or incentives. They’re perceived headaches and heartburn in the making. Prospects and new customers want solutions to serious, finite and obvious problems. They may not even know that they have some of these problems until they’re “sold” on a solution, but I can promise you that they want a solution in a box and not a set of D.I.Y. instructions.

For companies with the right staff and support, adding a powerful, effective and inexpensive tool, like the one Pathful is building, would be an easy and smart thing to do. I understand that not everything can be natural, easy, user-friendly and taste like chocolate. But for vast majority of potential users, it’s a waste of time and effort to identify the problem only to offer a solution a user can’t take advantage of or implement.
In this particular case, the problem is very clear: If the customer is incapable of adding a couple of lines of code to his website, you’ve got to figure out how to add it remotely (or through a channel partner like BrightTag). Once it’s there, everything else is easy. I’m thinking of something along the lines of a next-generation, no-brainer InstallShield kind of download that the customer emails to his or her website host.

You’ve got to solve the whole problem for the customer, from beginning to end. Once you figure out how to do that, you may discover that there’s a huge, readily scalable market sitting right in front of you. It’s not critical that your solution addresses all the issues and provides every form of report. That can all come later - but only if you can get a foot in the door and get started. This is really what disruptive innovation is all about: start small, listen aggressively, iterate, and then scale.

Once you can eliminate the major barrier to acceptance (in this case, the javascript addition to the website) and get yourself onboard, you’ll discover that the bar for substantial success is embarrassingly low. Good enough, in this case, can be more than good enough. The more hand-holding that you can do for these customers, the more appreciative and satisfied they will be.

With his Dorm Room Fund, the serial entrepreneur is putting more cash in the hands of college start-ups--and that's a good thing.

By his sophomore year of college, Josh Kopelman was a full-fledged entrepreneur. Not that his alma mater--the University of Pennsylvania--understood him.

"When I graduated they sent around this form," said the First Round Capital partner during his talk at the Venture Forward Conference in New York City Tuesday. "The only box I could check at the time was unemployed. There was no entrepreneur box."

Needless to say, times have changed and Kopelman is helping the next generation fulfill their start-up ambitions. His Dorm Room Fund, launched last September, helps students start companies. It started with $500,000 in Philadelphia, expanded to New York and San Francisco, and now has plans to open in Boston later this fall.

"While the cost to start a company has come way down, funding sources for these dorm room entrepreneurs haven't really changed," Kopelman said. "If you want to stay in school and start a company, the sources of capital have not changed from 25 years ago when I started my first company, even though the industry's completely changed."

Dorm Room Fund also lets college students find and vet would-be companies seeking funding. Taking advantage of these networks makes sense, he said: "Who knows the students on campus better than anyone? It's other students."

In fact, just two months after launching last year, students drummed up $20,000 for Firefly, a company started by University of Pennsylvania students, which creates screen sharing software, according to Mashable.

There are many types of small business opportunities available to ambitious buyers. Here's how to choose the business that is right for you.

There are tens of thousands of small businesses available in today's business-for-sale marketplace, representing dozens of industries and a multitude of market sectors. But not every type of small business is right for every buyer.

Before you start looking at possible businesses to buy, it's essential that you think through key personal and market factors. These are the key factors that should drive your selection process and define the types of businesses that you will evaluate.

Getting this right--i.e., finding the right business for you--will be a big determinant of your success as a new business owner. Getting this wrong can quickly turn your dream of owning your own business into a nightmare. As such, in addition to the thoughts below, it's also a good idea to talk with a qualified business broker whom you trust. They will help you answer the questions below and target your search in a way that maximizes your chances of finding a successful and personally rewarding entrepreneurial path.

Buying a business is a process. During the exploratory stage, much of your energy and attention will be focused on determining whether or not small business ownership is the right career path for you and your family (don't underestimate the importance of this very first step!). After you have made the decision to pursue business ownership, there are several other important factors to consider before you settle on an industry or market sector:

Since you will be investing a significant amount of time in your business, you should narrow your search to an industry that interests you and that is in sync with your desired lifestyle. If you're unsure about what type of business you want to invest in, talk with small business owners across multiple industries to gain additional insights.

It's not uncommon for start-up entrepreneurs to build a business around a personal hobby or passion. As a business buyer, you may not have that luxury, but the business you acquire must be situated in an industry that you can immerse yourself in for an extended time period and be content doing the type of work that is required of a business owner in that field. One of the key drivers of success is enjoying and being interested in what you do!

Passion alone won't guarantee your success as a small business owner--you need to be honest about your skills and experience. For example, if you have never worked in the food service industry before, it's unlikely that you will be a successful restaurant owner until you have accumulated experience in the field.

Although it's possible to succeed without previous experience, you should consider working as in your chosen industry before you plunge into an ownership position, even if it means working as an employee in someone else's business before you invest in your own operation.

You will also need to consider your capital position since some industries require higher levels of investment than others. For example, manufacturing operations usually require much more capital to acquire than small consulting firms or businesses with fewer assets.

It's critical to make sure you have enough available capital to seriously pursue an acquisition in your chosen industry. Although seller financing may be possible for a portion of the purchase price, a thorough evaluation of your current capital position can help narrow your search to the business opportunities that align with your financial means.

Market research, including an evaluation of short- and long-term industry forecasts, is essential in selecting potential business acquisitions. Are there opportunities for growth or is the industry in decline? It's important to identify an industry with the potential to increase the value of your investment.

Additionally, you will need to examine the market in your geographic area to determine whether it is already saturated or if there is room for you to compete and grow your company. Consult with a business broker for help in evaluating the condition of the regional marketplace as well as local trends that could impact your success.

Small business buyers often overlook the importance of their existing business networks in the search process. Whether you know it or not, your current business network is an asset that can be a valuable source of customers and strategic partnerships. Although it's not necessarily a deal-breaker, buying a business in an industry outside of your existing network will require you to build a new network from scratch, which could delay the achievement of key growth benchmarks.

Finding the right small business is challenging. But the rewards of owning a business can far outweigh the costs--especially if you let your personal interests and professional capabilities inform your search.

These five elements of big data analytics will help you make the smartest decisions for your business.

In today's hypercompetitive, real-time marketplace, where customers demand personalized solutions to their specific wants and needs, CMOs need a bird's-eye perspective to leverage their resources. And savvy leaders who know how to align departments and integrate consumer data can achieve operational efficiencies that lead to cohesive multi-platform messaging, meaningful customer engagement and greater profitability. But how can advocates of big data solutions earn the internal buy-in needed to streamline data collection and assessment and ensure that marketing communications are hitting the mark?

Here is a process, based on the free guide Be A Big Data Marketing Hero: An Enterprise Guide to Ruling Your Customer's World, for earning organizational buy-in on big data solutions.

No matter how well you may understand the rewards of integrated strategy, explaining it to others throughout an organization and convincing them to rethink department boundaries can seem impossible. So consider the enormous value of something as simple as a shared vocabulary. Establishing some common terms for describing the challenges and opportunities related to data-driven marketing throughout your organization can help break down resistance and ensure your team is speaking the same language.

Here's a great place to start; it's what the guide calls the high five of big data analytics. The first four elements--volume, velocity, variety and veracity--are the brainchildren of Doug Laney, vice president of research, analytics and information management at Gartner. The fifth element, value, is vital for ensuring that objective analysis applies to the real world of business.

In the digital, sharable and feedback-friendly marketplace, the amount of information about customers that's available to decision makers is mind-boggling. In 2011, for instance, 1.8 zettabytes of data was generated globally. "That's roughly the equivalent of every U.S. citizen tweeting three times per minute for 26,976 years," Bob Boehnlein, general manager for marketing operations at Teradata Applications, pointed out in a 2012 blog post. Filtering the vital insights from this massive collection requires a new way of approaching strategic business operations.

Remember when communicating by fax seemed really fast? Well, it's a real-time world now, and customers as well as business leaders have quickly come to expect immediate responses and transactions around the clock. Delivering on this expectation for high velocity is a matter of survival for many companies and departments.

Marketing leaders receive customer data from traditional channels such as sales reports and marketing research studies, as well as from smartphone geo-placement programs, web behavior models, Facebook updates, Twitter feeds, credit card transactions and many other sources. Data warehousing programs and cloud computing are helping some companies manage the high variety of digital information, but businesses across the board need to find a way to gather and interpret cross-functional customer insights.

Trusting the data on which you're basing decisions is a fundamental requirement in all walks of life. But when the stakes of making the wrong call affect thousands of jobs and possibly even the survival of a company, the accuracy and reliability of information that's guiding big decisions is paramount. When business leaders know where information is coming from, as well as how and why it's being collected, they may more readily embrace integrated big data analytics.

The amount and variety of even the most credible and timely customer data can be crippling if analysts aren't honing in on the most important metrics and information. Getting the information you need to reach the right people with the right message at the right time and place is the name of the game. So try not to get distracted by everything that glitters in this era of big data analytics. Fundamentally, the important thing--now as it was in the past--is to use what you know about your customers to build strong one-on-one relationships to increase your value to each other.

For more information on the basic terminology and benefits of big data analytics to improve internal integration, download the free guide Be A Big Data Marketing Hero: An Enterprise Guide to Ruling Your Customer's World. Encourage colleagues throughout your organization to get up to speed on the basics of big data analytics and explore ways to coordinate efforts to achieve efficiencies and greater profitability.

One lender uses sophisticated algorithms--and any online dirt it can find about your company--to determine credit risk.

The amount of stored digital information that companies, researchers, and others can mine is growing exponentially and is nearly impossible to fathom. In the book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Change How We Live, Work and Think authors Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier maintain that in 2013 the world's collection of data amounts to around 1,200 exabytes. "If it were placed on CD-ROMs and stacked up, they would stretch to the moon in five separate piles," say the authors. "The amount of stored information grows four times faster than the world economy, while the processing power of computers grows nine times faster."

What does this have to do with you and your company? A great deal if you want to get a loan.

The Big Data Back Story

Every digital act you make is stored--think Tweets or Facebook likes or what you buy on Amazon or what you search for on Google not to mention your online bank account, your credit card transactions, and even where you are based on your cellular transmissions. An interested entity with the resources to do so can create profiles that pretty accurately portray who you are as a person.

For small businesses it's the same thing. Your digital cash flow, whether or not you've had property foreclosed upon, what others are saying about your company online and more can be tracked, aggregated, and analyzed so that conclusions can be drawn.

Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier talk about how the ability to analyze billions of data points instantly has huge implications for society. There are cool things like Google's ability to show in real time where the flu is breaking out based on the terms people use when they search the Internet. But big data also ushers forth not-so-great implications, such as the fact that privacy is pretty much dead in the water.

Prediction is another side of big data, one that's either injurious or invaluable, depending on your perspective.

"[A]lgorithms will predict the likelihood that one will get a heart attack (and pay more for health insurance), default on a mortgage (and be denied a loan), or commit a crime (and perhaps get arrested in advance)," they write.

Getting a Small Business Loan

"Minority Report" and "Person of Interest" foreshadowings aside, one company says it's using big data to help small businesses.

If you own a restaurant, auto repair shop, nail salon, dentist office, or any kind of Main Street small business, borrowing money from a bank can be tough. After the recession many of them largely stopped issuing small business loans so if you need money to buy equipment or inventory it means either taking out a personal loan based on your FICO score or using a credit card.

There's another option, and one that's growing in popularity with both business owners who need a loan as well as big shot VCs who want in on the action.

New York-based start-up On Deck looks at a company's digital footprint--things like bank transactions, public records, and social data such as the kinds and frequency of reviews on sites such as Google Places, FourSquare, or Citysearch--to figure out how much risk is involved in issuing a loan.

According to On Deck CEO Noah Breslow, his 6-year-old company has delivered around $500 million in capital to thousands of Main Street businesses across hundreds of industry verticals.

"We've built a platform that aggregates all that data so in some cases we integrate with different providers of data and in other cases we go out and actually harvest that data itself from the Internet because it's publicly out there but you need to extract it, aggregate it, and get it into usable form," he says. "Then when a business owner applies, we collect as much data as possible on them from all these different sources and use that to make a very efficient lending decision usually within minutes after the customer applies."

Such efficiency is one thing that led Google Ventures to invest $17 million in On Deck last month along with PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel as well as previous investors including SAP Ventures, RRE Ventures, and others that altogether have thrown $93 million into the company.

According to Google Ventures General Partner Karim Faris, what On Deck is doing is quite different from how traditional banks underwrite loans.

"It's unique in both the data signals and data analyses that they take in and also really more mundane stuff like the process they use to underwrite loans," he says. "The ability to get it done within days versus weeks or months is actually no small feat and a significant benefit to the business. If you can get a loan within a few days versus months that could be the difference between life and death for a business plan."

But Does It Work?

The numbers say so: Breslow says On Deck has achieved 117 percent compound annual revenue growth since 2007, will double its employee head count to 300 by the end of year and is opening branch offices nationwide.

Breslow says On Deck's credit scoring algorithms are on their fourth generation. Part of the magic of its intellectual property involves how it is able to factor in the intricacies of individual verticals.

"We [are] underwriting 700 different industries that we have in our loan portfolio so we have to understand how a doctor is different than a restaurant and how that's different than a plumber or how that's different than a light manufacturer. They're all different kinds of businesses with different credit profiles, different cash flow, different margins," he says.

Breslow says On Deck loans are typically three to 18 months in length, require at least one year of business history, and are ideal for businesses that have a lot of small transactions. They're less than ideal for contractors or consultancies that don't get paid frequently or for tech start-ups or other companies that are focused on R&D.

Want more on this topic? Check out 4 Tips for Getting a Business Loan as well as Too Big to Ignore: The Data Revolution.

Most small business owners believe digital theft won't happen to them. They're wrong.

Could your company be putting customers and employees at risk of identity theft? Most small business owners would answer no. They'd be wrong. "In general, we see a sense of invincibility among small business owners," says Matt Cullina, CEO of Identity Theft 911, which provides identity theft prevention and recovery services. "They know data breaches are happening, but they don't think it's going to happen to them."

Of course, small business owners also face another challenge: With money tight, and simply keeping the doors open a top priority, many feel they can't afford to invest in data security even if they want to. That's a perfectly legitimate concern. But the good news is there are things small businesses can do to up their data security without much expense. Start with these four steps:

1. Don't store more personal data about employees or customers than you need.

Most companies view data as an asset, which it is. But it's also a liability, Cullina says. If your security is breached and an outsider gets access to your customers' or employees' data, every bit of personal information you have--names, addresses, birth dates, place of birth, and so on--makes it easier for a hacker to sneak into their online accounts.

"A lot of times we collect information just because we can," he says. "Don't take in sensitive data unless you absolutely need it to run the business. And have a destruction policy for when you don't need it anymore."

2. Train employees to treat personal data appropriately.

Though the risk of employees stealing or misusing data is something to watch for, the biggest cause of data breaches is simple error by people who meant no harm, Cullina says. "Simple training would have saved those companies a lot of embarrassment," he adds.

The idea is to teach employees to treat customer and employee personal information as a valuable asset and protect it in much the same way they might protect your company's bank account access or trade secrets. "Make your employees stewards of that information," Cullina advises.

3. Talk with vendors and contractors about how they protect your data.

"Any kind of support people--website designers, people who set up payment processing--all those connection points can create vulnerabilities," Cullina says. One small business he worked with suffered a devastating data breach in which all employee data was exposed, including Social Security numbers. When Identity Theft 911 staff analyzed the breach, they discovered that the company had outsourced its IT to a vendor who did not keep it secured by updating passwords and malware protection. Eventually, a hacker got inside the company's network.

"The IT provider said that they didn't know the small business wanted that updating service, which would have cost extra," Cullina says. You need to either let vendors know that you expect them to provide data security--or make sure to provide it yourself. If everyone thinks someone else is minding the store, bad things happen.

4. Consider using encryption.

"Most data breach laws and regulations include best practices for managing data," Cullina says. "The No. 1 item--other than having firewalls in place--is encrypting data any time it leaves your company." In fact, he says, if you suffer a data breach but the data is encrypted, you likely won't have to go through the legally required notification to customers. "It's a key get-out-of-jail-free card," he says.

Getting data encrypted may not be as hard as you think, he adds. In today's market, encryption vendors may be able to provide products that can simply be added to your email applications. "It's not as complicated or expensive as it used to be," he says.

We all need to reinvent ourselves regularly. Here's how I suggest new grads--or anyone--go about it.

On May 23, I had the honor of delivering the convocation keynote at my alma mater, San Jose State University, for the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications.

Unlike most graduation speeches, mine wasn’t esoteric or philosophical. I didn’t tell the graduating seniors to follow their dreams. Nope. I told them what they--and their tuition-paying parents--really wanted to hear: how to get a job. I shared practical job and career strategies I’ve seen work thousands of times. The full transcript, and a video, of the speech is here.

My tips aren’t just for college grads. We all need to regularly reinvent ourselves, no matter our industry or level of experience. Best of all, these tips come without a tuition fee.

1. Go out on a limb

In my college senior seminar class, we prepared for the real world by writing a cover letter and resume for a hypothetical job. I found a marketing coordinator position that requested three to five years’ experience, but I’d only done a single summer internship. I sent my cover letter and resume anyway. Surprise! The company hired me part-time while I was still a senior, and then full-time after graduation. For my fellow students, it was a 15-point assignment. For me, it was the beginning of a career in Silicon Valley.

The takeaway? Apply for everything. It costs nothing. Job descriptions are wish lists. And companies love people who are willing to put themselves out there.

As former President Jimmy Carter says: “Go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.”

2. Answer the frickin’ door!

Two years ago, I was asked to speak at a Student Leadership Conference, and made an offer to the audience. If a student would give me his or her name, email and major, I’d match him or her with a professional mentor from my personal network. For free.

One hundred students gave me their info. My team and I matched each student with professionals in similar career fields. We sent each student his or her mentor’s contact information and told them they were responsible for initiating contact.

Out of 100 students, how many do you think followed up with their mentors?

Zero.

Everyone wanted the golden ticket-;but nobody bothered to unwrap the Wonka bar. How many golden tickets do you think you’ll get in your lifetime? It doesn’t matter how busy you are. Or how intimidated you may feel. When opportunity knocks, answer the frickin’ door!

3. Make a sweet impression

My son, Adam, attends college in Los Angeles and wants to break into the entertainment industry-;along with everyone else in L.A.

In his freshman year, a Hollywood producer spoke to one of Adam’s classes. Afterward, Adam walked and chatted with her-;and learned they’d both worked at Baskin-Robbins and shared the same favorite ice cream flavor: peanut butter & chocolate.

The producer promised to connect Adam with a friend who owned a Hollywood talent agency for dancers and choreographers. He emailed to follow up and she kindly made the introduction. Adam got the unpaid internship at the dance agency. But that’s not the best part of the story.

After his first week at the internship, Adam bought a styrofoam ice chest, took a taxi to Baskin-Robbins, loaded the cooler with pints of peanut butter & chocolate ice cream, and delivered it to the producer’s office with a handwritten thank-you note. Total cost? About $50. Net value? Priceless.

Adam’s unpaid internship is now paid, and the agency sent him to work in their Broadway office in New York for the summer. Even though he’s just finished his junior year, they’ve already offered him a full-time talent agent job when he graduates.

People work with people they like, so pay attention and look for common threads with others. Then exceed expectations. That’s how you make a sweet impression-;to get that first job and excel throughout your career.

4. Work on your network

Your career depends less on what you know than on who you know. Don’t just connect with people you already know on social media. Reach out to people who know other people with opportunities. I’m getting resumes from friends of my kids, and I always take the time to reply. Buy a professional outfit and go to networking events where you can get face-to-face with professionals in your field. Then follow up.

If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, whip one up NOW because employers like me will creep there first, and go to Facebook second. Your LinkedIn profile is accessible to millions of potential employers, while your resume goes to one person at a time (if you’re lucky). And if you’re on Facebook, get rid of those pictures of you downing tequila shots. Don’t post anything you wouldn’t want a potential boss to see.

5. Sweat the small stuff

I still see public relations spelled with a heinous typo on resumes. Try the word “public” spelled without the “L.” Yup. Would you believe there are 49,805 professionals on LinkedIn who’ve listed a job title as “Principle” instead of the correct “Principal?” Try it! Spell-check isn’t going to save you from either of these gaffes.

To be taken seriously as an educated, reliable professional, read and reread everything. Get fanatical about accuracy and integrity in all that you write, shoot or post.

And it’s game over if you spell my name or company name incorrectly.

6. Be a tiny bit braver

The economic news is getting better. The housing market is rebounding. The stock market recently reached a new high, followed by the S&P 500. Companies are hiring again. But in any job market, competition will always be fierce. Employers will always be picky.

It’s okay to be scared. I’m still scared every day. Deep down, I’m still the insecure girl who never dreamed of being a convocation speaker, writer for a global publication, or president of my own company. But when I’m scared, I know I’m still learning. Still growing. Fear is a great motivator. It gives you direction and focus.

I’ve found my passion for connecting and empowering people in their work and life. I get to do it with people I love and laugh with, every single day. And I had to create that from nothing. There was no template. If I can do it, you can too.

Just be a tiny bit braver tomorrow than you are today. In work, and in life.

Of course you put your best foot forward when courting investment. But there are good reasons to be a bit more transparent, too.

I suppose it’s only natural for an entrepreneur to be a little nervous before meeting with a potential backer for his or her company. But the result of that nervousness, often, comes off as fairly unnatural.

Many times, when entrepreneurs begin meeting with investment partners, they feel inclined to display a certain bravado that they think conveys confidence -- confidence they don’t necessarily have. The hope, I suppose, is that doing so will maximize their valuations.

The reality, however, is that most VC firms are made up of former entrepreneurs who are empathetic to the development that first-time founders naturally go through as they build their companies. And, contrary to popular belief, we’re often open to, and excited about, helping advance that development.

That help often takes the form of operational value-add services aimed at helping a company build and execute certain initiatives more efficiently. These are often initiatives that are critical if a company wants to scale successfully. For the most part, such help is offered in the context of collaboration, not dictatorship.

Why Pre-Investment Transparency is Critical

Of course, forging a collaborative investor-investee relationship requires entrepreneurs willing to ask for help and investors willing to provide it.

Truthfully, no entrepreneur, nor the VCs who invest in them, knows everything. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to create a false image to the contrary when you’re courting investors, or to choose a hands-off VC just for the sake of avoiding an operational takeover.

Instead, I always advise entrepreneurs to simply be themselves during pre-investment meetings with potential VC partners. Reveal your strengths and weaknesses, and be very open about where you will -- and won’t -- need their help. That transparency is critical for several reasons:

• It will create an environment of trust and collaboration
• It allows your investors to focus their energy on the operational areas in which they can add the most value
• It forces everyone to put their cards on the table and opens critical lines of communication that will be necessary post-investment

Once an investment is made, a company and its VC become symbiotically connected, and both parties must be willing to work together to achieve a shared set of goals and aspirations.

In that way, partnering with a VC who’s capable of providing insight and expertise can be hugely valuable. The more your VC is aligned with your vision and engaged in executing initiatives that will help you achieve it, the better your chances are of deriving value when and how you need it.

Pre-investment transparency is also critical to weeding out investors that aren’t a cultural fit for your business. By engaging potential VCs in operational and value-add discussions, you can acquire a better understanding of how each investor thinks and how they might help.

How Much Help Do You Really Need?

The answer to that question depends on your company’s needs, skills gaps, and goals, and no one understands those things better than you.

That’s why it’s critical to proactively engage your VC as you run into issues. Even if your investor can’t help you, he or she will at least be aware of your problem and might be able to find the help you need externally. Revealing problems as they happen also keeps your VC in the loop and mitigates the painful experience of blindsiding your investors with months-old bad news.

It’s also perfectly acceptable to let VCs know when they are overstepping their bounds. Doing so establishes critical parameters, encourages VCs to re-focus or preserve their energy, and allows you to leverage your investor’s expertise only when it’s needed most.

A VC is Not Just a Rolodex

When entrepreneurs accept an investment from a VC, they very often do so hoping to tap into that investor’s network. What founders need to realize, however, is that the value of a Rolodex is short-lived, and it tends to be at its apex in the first year of an investment.

After that, the ripple effect begins to fade. And, if you chose a venture firm based solely on the breadth of its network -; failing to consider the additional value that investor could bring and its cultural alignment with your business -; you may regret ever signing your term sheet.

That’s especially going to be true if your VC begins to ignore you or starts to second-guess every decision you make.

A new study suggests that negative emotion may actually be a pretty good launching pad for creativity.

Creativity is mysterious and difficult. If you have tasks on your to-do list that require a creative spark, perhaps you’ve been putting them off, waiting to get in a mellow mood or for inspiration to strike.

But a new study suggests you may have been making a mistake waiting around for the right mindset to start your creative project. Bad moods can actually improve creativity, the series of studies by three European professors suggest, at least if the negative emotions come at the start of a work session.

The trio took two approaches to come to this conclusion. First, they asked around 100 creative professionals to keep diaries of their emotions and productivity. While happiness at the end of the day was linked with increased productivity (who wouldn’t be happy after getting a ton done?), being in a bad mood at the start of the day was associated with even higher productivity. Why might that be? The British Psychological Society’s Occupational Digest blog explains one possible explanation:

The narrow, alert focus on issues can be useful by focusing on things that are in need of a solution and spurring motivation to act on these; previous research does suggest that negative emotion can lead to more persistence in problem solving. Once this focus has been set, allowing the negative emotions to slide away and positive emotions to explore the possibility space is a good recipe for getting to innovative solutions.

Grumpiness, in other words, helps you focus on problems and get down to business, but as you dig deeper into a problem, hopefully, that negativity subsides, leaving the mind more free to roam. To test this model of emotions and creativity, the researchers asked another group of study participants to write about either a neutral or positive event in their lives before completing a brainstorming task.

"Those who were tasked with articulating an unpleasant instead of a neutral experience ultimately performed better the brainstorming task, producing more varied and unique ideas. This happened even though the negative state had no function in focusing their attention on anything related to the creative task, which suggests the better performance was due to entering a more suitable cognitive mode," reports BPS.

More research is needed, the authors note, to determine how negative and positive emotions affect creativity on different time scales (does it matter if you’re grumpy for five minutes or an hour?) but there is an immediate takeaway for entrepreneurs: forget waiting around for the perfect mood for innovation and try to use your less that cheerful moments as a springboard for getting started on creative projects. You may not only improve your mood, but also come up with better solutions for your business.

Do you need to be in a certain mood to be creative?

Bossholes drive away talented employees and cost your company money.

A bosshole is a combination of a boss and, well, an anal sphincter. Bossholes are workplace bullies who yell at the drop of a hat and generally make their employees feel tired, lousy, and unappreciated.

For entrepreneurs, the primary danger is that you might be a bosshole but not realize it, according to Robert Sutton, author of the bestsellers Good Boss, Bad Boss and The No A****** Rule.

Here are his suggestions to ensure your inner jerk isn't making you (and your team) less effective:

Bossholes cost companies revenue and profit--big time. "Bossholes drive away talented people and force otherwise useful folk to follow around after and clean up the emotional messes they leave," explains Sutton.

E-mail is what Sutton calls an "emotionally thin" media that tends to magnify negative emotions. In an e-mail, anything you write that's insensitive or seems angry is likely to deeply offend or wound. So think before you click the SEND button.

Assign your more reasonable employees to be "bosshole monitors." Link their performance evaluation to telling you when you've blown it. Or maybe offer to pay $20 to anyone who points out when you've been a jerk.

When you get angry or find yourself focusing too much on performance and too little on the human needs of your team, cultivate and practice emotional detachment from your own sense of frustration.

Even if you're maniacally-driven to succeed, you still need your sleep. "Sleep deprivation can turn even a great manager into a grumpy, intolerant jerk," says Sutton. It will also completely ruin your health.

Every IT manager knows that running a computer center constantly at 100 percent capacity eventually results in system failure. Why would you expect a human being to react any differently?

When you've chewed out employees or thrown a tantrum (both common bosshole behavior), publicly apologize and make it clear that you don't consider that behavior acceptable.

Google statistically measures whether its managers are acting like bossholes, according to Sutton. "When Google identifies bossholes, the company sends them for re-education, and if that doesn't work, they're fired," he explains.

If your customers treat your people like dirt, drop them as customers if possible. If there are bossholes in other groups in your firm, limit your team's exposure. Give some extra "combat pay" to employees who are forced to cope with bossholiness.

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What began as a social gathering for like-minded entrepreneurs and VCs has evolved into one of the Valley's most dynamic accelerators. Meet the man with the connections, Saeed Amidi.

When international entrepreneurs want a shot at Silicon Valley stardom, they call on Saeed Amidi.

The angel investor is the son of Amir Amidi, who owned the Medallion Rug Gallery where fellow VC Pejman Nozad famously built up his contacts. And his ties to the tech hub span 35 years. As co-founder of the investment firm Amidzad Investments, Amidi has the expertise and deep pockets to show for it.

Since 2006, Amidi's passion project has been Plug and Play, an international network that's accelerated 1,200 start-ups and collectively raised more than $1 billion in venture capital. Last year, the organization made 62 investments, while helping 150 start-ups from Silicon Valley and another 100 from abroad find resources and make connections.

Helping foreigners get their foot in the door is perhaps what Amidi, an Iranian exile, does best. During their time at Plug and Play, which Amidi describes as a sort of "start-up university," ambitious entepreneurs learn the ropes of launching a business from those who know it best: veteran VCs and serial entrepreneurs. The most promising start-ups get to pitch during Plug and Play's Expo Event, which wrapped up last weekend.

Plug and Play vies with the likes of Y Combinator and TechStars for talent, but it boasts a fair share of big names on its roster: Lending Club, which has funded $1.6 billion in consumer loans, and Zong, a mobile payment start-up founded by PayPal President David Marcus that sold to eBay for $240 million. What's more, Plug and Play has become synomous with "international talent," not a small feat in hyper-competitive tech land.

I spoke with Amidi by phone about what makes a great pitch, why he loves nurturing start-ups, and why the Silicon Valley bubble isn't going to burst in his lifetime.

How did Plug and Play get started?
We started by investing in companies that were leasing space from us, like PayPal and Andy Rubin's Danger. For 12 years, we used to invest for fun and then Plug and Play got started about seven years ago, in 2006.

Did you always have an international focus?
The main objective for me is finding a great investment. We found the companies that are in Palo Alto are already connected. They didn't need our help as much as the companies that may be just as good but are not in Silicon Valley. We love to participate in the seed round, but more importantly, we like to be part of their success. It increases the value of our investment.

What compels you to invest in a start-up?
It's the passion, the intelligence, and the team. If I like the team and feel they are brilliant and passionate, I don't even care about the idea. The second thing is what idea they are going after. Is it something that can scale? Something that is missing in the market? This is much easier to do with a serial entrepreneur, but a lot of the entrepreneurs we work with are first-timers, so you have to check out what they are focusing on. Can it be a big business?

We see what they have done in the last three, six, or twelve years. If they haven't put in a lot of sweat equity and don't have a product or prototype, we tell them to come back later when they do.

Tell me about the environment at Plug and Play.
We host 300 companies in one building. If a start-up is local, they stay with us for two years. If not, they stay for three months. They go through something called start-up university, where we show 20 case studies on average from 20 entrepreneurs who have gone on the same journey before. It's done professionally and casually. The entrepreneurs who stay three months meet about 20 other entrepreneurs who have raised money, exited, failed, and can explain why they've failed. Most of what they learn, they learn from other entrepreneurs.

Where do they stay if they're international?
We got a couple apartments years ago, but it was too much of a headache, so now I tell them, "You're the entrepreneur, figure it out. Rent a room from AirBnB or Craigslist."

What's your typical day like?
My goal every day is to meet with four startups and then I usually like to have a meeting with one or two investors. That translates to one investment a week. Each company we're looking at is in a different stage.

Why is Silicon Valley so valuable to entrepreneurs?
Some people were worried during the downturn that Silicon Valley might lose its charm, but I really think that if you want to be serious about being in movies, the best place to be is Hollywood, and I feel the same way about tech innovation start-ups. You have to be connected to Silicon Valley.

I have an accelerator in Valencia and another in Berlin, and you can build a great company just about anywhere. But I urge entrepreneurs to be connected to Silicon Valley, because I think the culture that is here, the investors that are here, as well as all of the success and failure stories that are here is like a crash course in entrepreneurship.

Is Silicon Valley on the verge of another bubble?
No, because I see a lot of companies with real business models. B2B is coming back really strong, and if you take most of the world's corporations like Walmart, its labs are here. Even Amazon has a big technical center here. Groupon has a very big office here in Palo Alto too. No matter what Silicon Valley becomes, the heart of innovation of the start-up world--at least in my lifetime--will be here.

Marissa Mayer is on the verge of completing 14 Yahoo acquisitions in just six months. Will she reinvent Yahoo?

With Marissa Mayer at the helm, Yahoo is on an acquisition tear.

One month after the company's $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, AllThingsD reported yesterday that Yahoo is in talks to purchase Xobni, an address book app, for $30 million to $40 million. And today, news surfaced that the company is also about to acquire Qwiki, a popular video sharing app, for close to $50 million. If the two deals go through, Yahoo will have publicly acquired 14 companies in 2013; by comparison, last year it bought only two companies, and, in 2011, three.

No Surprise, But What's the Strategy?

When Marissa Mayer took over as Yahoo's CEO in late 2012, one of her first stated missions was to sniff out potential acquisitions in order to turn Yahoo back into a growth company. And with $1.2 billion in cash on hand--even after the Tumblr acquisition--she has room for several more big purchases before 2014.

"We're looking for smaller-scale acquisitions that align well overall with our businesses," Mayer said on a shareholder conference call in October 2012. Ken Goldman, the company's CFO, chimed in saying, "Our primary objective as a new management team is to leverage our assets, competitive strengths, and available resources to transition this company from financial stability to a growth business."

What's puzzling to me, though, is the strategy behind these acquisitions on a whole.

In just six months, Mayer the 14 deals have been spread over a wide variety of areas. You have to wonder if Yahoo is just shooting from the hip at this point, hoping that at least one brings in new revenue. Even though Yahoo is beating Wall Street profit estimates, its core advertising business is suffering, and it's clear that Mayer is looking for some way to make money.

That said, two loose themes emerge from Mayer's deal-making moves, but I'm skeptical about both.

Building Out Mobile

Yahoo has an impressive 300 million mobile users, but that's about half Facebook's mobile user base. Mayer has been vocal about aggressively trying to capture a larger mobile audience. Last month, at the Wired Business Conference, Mayer said that the biggest goal right now is to have "Yahoo persistent on every smartphone, tablet, and PC for every Internet user."

Of the acquisitions Yahoo has made so far this year, several were focused on expanding mobile capabilities, including Summly, a news app; Loki Studios, a gaming start-up; aLike, a recommendation app; and Ghostbird software, a photo app.

Anecdotally, it seems Mayer is ready to attract the best mobile talent, too. Reports The Post:

"Employees chosen to work on the all-important mobile mission are given the coolest and latest laptops, the best, most recently redecorated offices and prompt access to Mayer's office, according to interviews with several Yahoo insiders."

But mobile expansion will be tough for Yahoo, even with a slew of upstarts and new thinkers in the space. Unlike its competitors like Facebook and Google, Yahoo never made the leap into hardware--which will make Mayer's hope to be on every device all the more difficult.

Making Yahoo More Social

Clearly Mayer's other big bet is to revitalize Yahoo by making it more social. Some were skeptical about Mayer's $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr--which only had about $13 million of revenue in 2012--but it's apparent Mayer sees the company as a vehicle to tap into one of the most active social platforms on the Web, along with a somewhat different advertising model.

As Adam Rifkin writes:

"In some ways, Tumblr is actually Facebook 2.0! As Facebook has become a real-life social network infested with parents, co-workers, ex-friends, and people you barely know, Tumblr has become the place where young people express themselves and their actual interests with their actual friends."

But Yahoo's foray into social will be fraught with challenges. Tumblr's core demographic is the 18-to-24-year-old bracket, a notoriously fickle cohort. Yahoo's other "social" purchases--like its January 2013 acquisition of Snip.it, which lets users collect articles--don't have much to do with Tumblr.

It's too early to see if Mayer's acquisition strategy will pay off, and Mayer knows it'll take time to see if the deals deliver material results to the core business. As she said on an April 2013 shareholder call:

"Overall, I have been very pleased with how well our talent acquisitions have integrated into the company. You'll see many of the contributions come to life in our product experiences over the next few months. So stay tuned."

The one thing your sales team needs to improve? Explaining, says Lee LeFever, founder of Common Craft. Here's how.

People rarely buy products they don't understand, so it's a salesman's job to explain them. But what if your explanation is so organic it's pointless?

Perhaps you suffer from the curse of knowledge--knowing so much you explain things in ways no one grasps.

Revisiting the basics of explaining can help, writes Lee LeFever, founder of Common Craft, in The Harvard Business Review. Here's an overview:

Focus on why.

Make sure your team knows exactly what your product or service does for customers. "By answering the "why" early on , you create a foundation for understanding on which to build more complex ideas," says LeFever.

Simple trumps clever.

"Fancy vocabulary and extensive background information might impress customers--but, more likely, will just confuse them," he says. Instead of trying to impress people with how smart you are, make them feel smart by building their knowledge.

Explain the forest, not just the trees.

Customers must understand why your product exists and how it can help them. Make sure they get the big picture before going into detail.

The antidote to confusion is less information.

It's tempting to bombard your customers with information, but that won't help someone who's confused. "Don't add detail; come back to one of two big ideas you know they'll understand" LeFever advises.

Tell a story.

"If you think stories are for campfires, not your state-of-the-art product, then you're forgetting that your audience is human," LeFever says. "Stories provide a way to see how a product works in the real world, with real people."

Don't be condescending.

"No one likes to be talked down to, and if you approach explanation with the wrong attitude, it can be destructive," LeFever explains. Assume your customers are as smart as you, just not as informed.

The NSA won't stop snooping on you, but you can throw them off your trail. Here are some tools to help you go private.

Revelations of NSA surveillance have shaken the nation, but while many of us would love nothing more than to toss our phones out the window and avoid well-trafficked search engines like Yahoo and Google altogether, the government seems intent snopping on Americans whether they like it or not.

Sometimes that's not a bad thing--but often it is. As privacy attorney Sarah Downey writes, one of three things can happen when your data falls into a corporation's lap: Your privacy may be breached like the customers of LivingSocial; the company might use it in a way that makes you uncomfortable and/or violates your privacy; or the government may use it, courtesy of the NSA and PRISM.

To help you sleep better at night, here's a roundup of tools that can help you go private.

TextSecure

TextSecure is an open source app that encrypts text so that no one can read it. Just keep in mind both the sender and respondent must use it in order for it to work. Also, while the content will be secure, your messages' destination will not. As a bonus, the app can encrypt old messages.

RedPhone

Designed by the makers of TextSecure, WhisperSystems, RedPhone features end-to-end encryption for calls, meaning no one can decipher your chat from beginning to end. RedPhone also forgoes assigning private numbers, so you can stick with the one you know and love. Calls can be placed via Wi-Fi or your mobile data plan.

Onion Browser

Using Tor, a free software and open network that blocks out surveillance, Onion encrypts web traffic, so no one can pinpoint your IP address. The browser also hides what platform you're on, be it tablet, cell phone, or desktop.

Orbot

Another Tor app, Orbot encrypts traffic by bouncing signals, much like a sped-up game of Pong. Created by The Guardian Project, Orbot proxies traffic so what you're clicking stays under wraps.

Miscellaneous

SilentCircle

SilentCircle keeps companies from accessing unencrypted calls, messages, and emails. Though it's open-source, its code is audited to prevent back doors or loopholes. You can use it on Android or iOS platforms.

Seecrypt

This South African start-up will protect your calls and SMS messages on Android or iOS. Users are assigned a private number to allow for end-to-end encryption.

Wickr

Similar to Snapchat, this one-year-old app offers "military-grade encryption" of texts, pictures, and audio messages using a key that's unknown to the company. Wickr promises not to collect personal information, call logs, or location data. Its messages also self-destruct.

Browsing

DuckDuckGo

Unlike Google, DuckDuckGo doesn't store IP addresses. The partially open-source search engine is now available on several desktop and mobile platforms, including iOS.

Tor

Ever watch a CSI episode and hear the tech guy exclaim that the suspect's signal is moving? That movement is Tor. The network bounces traffic across computers so sites can't determine their origin.

Onion Pi

For those not on Tor, there's Onion Pi. Combining Raspberry Pi's microcomputer, USB Wi-Fi adapter, and an ethernet Cable, Onion Pi creates a small, potable private access point that directs traffic through Tor's larger network.

Instant Messenger

OTR

Like many others on this list, OTR offers end-to-end encryption. Since it's an extension to regular networks, users will need to download supporting software such as Adium for iOS and Pidgin for Windows.

Cryptocat

This open-source software will keep the conversation top secret.

Cloudfogger

This open-source app encrypts files before they go to the Cloud and is available on Android and iOS.

InTheClear

When all else fails, download InTheClear, a suite of applications that wipes data clean with just one swipe.

Facebook is just one Internet giant that has released its NSA stats to reassure users. Here's a round-up of the others, and their numbers.

Consumers haven't been able to look at Silicon Valley the same way ever since news broke of a long-running government program called PRISM. Of course, the nine Internet companies implicated in the leak aren't the only ones handing over customer data. Apparently thousands of companies do this, writes Inc. reporter Eric Markowitz.

However as news continues trickling out, Internet giants feel pressed to step forward and disclose the total number of legal orders they received for user data, including ones from the National Security Agency and from state, local, and federal police performing criminal investigations.

Here's what they've told us so far:

Yahoo

Yahoo is the latest company to disclose the number of government requests for data it has received over the past 18 months, reports TechCrunch. In a statement signed by CEO Marissa Mayer, the company said it received between 12,000 and 13,000 requests between December 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013.

“We’ve worked hard over the years to earn our users’ trust and we fight hard to preserve it,” Mayer and general counsel Ron Bell said. "Like all companies, Yahoo! cannot lawfully break out FISA request numbers at this time because those numbers are classified; however, we strongly urge the federal government to reconsider its stance on this issue."

Apple

Apple recently spoke up about PRISM, per its Commitment to Customer Privacy:

"From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters. The most common form of request comes from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide."

The company also made it clear it wasn't mining data for fun:

"Apple has always placed a priority on protecting our customers’ personal data, and we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place. There are certain categories of information which we do not provide to law enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it."

Microsoft

Microsoft came forward Friday after receiving the go-ahead from the government. According to John Frank, vice president and deputy general counsel, the search company received between 6,000 and 7,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 accounts in the last half of 2012. In a blog post, he writes:

"We appreciate the effort by U.S. government today to allow us to report more information. We understand they have to weigh carefully the impacts on national security of allowing more disclosures. With more time, we hope they will take further steps. Transparency alone may not be enough to restore public confidence, but it’s a great place to start."

Google

In a statement provided to CNET, Google said it wants to be even more transparent. As it is, Google releases statistics about government surveillance in its transparency report, including information on NSA letters sent by the FBI.

Last Wednesday, Google revealed it uses secure FTP servers and in-person delivery when complying with NSA requests. Over the course of 2012, the search giant received between zero and 999 National Security Letters--foreign intelligence-related requests from the FBI involving U.S. citizens separate from its investigations into criminal, civil, or administrative matters.

On June 11, Google wrote to the Department of Justice and the FBI asking for details on national security requests and their scope.

"When required to comply with these requests, we deliver that information to the U.S. government-- generally through secure FTP transfers and in person," spokesperson Chris Gaither told USA Today. "The U.S. government does not have the ability to pull that data directly from our servers or network."

Facebook

Facebook also announced on Friday it had been given permission to disclose its number of data requests. Facebook received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests pertaining to 18,000 and 19,000 accounts.

“The government will only authorize us to communicate about these numbers in aggregate, and as a range,” Facebook said. “This is progress, but we’re continuing to push for even more transparency, so that our users around the world can understand how infrequently we are asked to provide user data on national security grounds.”

Twitter

Twitter was one of several companies approached by the NSA to participate in a "dropbox" system, whereby legally requested data could be copied from their own server to one owned by the NSA, The Guardian reports. However, the start-up flatly denied the request and has since joined the rally for support to publish more details about the number of U.S. law enforcement requests.

Alex Macgillivray, the company's chief lawyer, tweeted:

Completely agree with @Google, @SenJeffMerkley & others-;we'd like more NSL transparency and @Twitter supports efforts to make that happen

-; Alex Macgillivray (@amac) June 11, 2013

Jazz musicians are agile and dynamic. They are gracious--but not shy. Here's what you can take from the stage to the board room.

Some people would introduce me as a venture capitalist, since I run a venture firm in Detroit. Others might reference me as an entrepreneur, given that I've founded four technology companies. I guess these people wouldn't be wrong in their verbiage, but it's not an introduction I prefer.

Instead, I'd rather be deemed a jazz musician. After decades of training, countless hours of practice, and a whole host of gigs nationwide, jazz is my passion--and its something that has benefitted all other aspects of my life tremendously. While on the surface it would seem that jazz musicianship is the polar opposite of running a business, the two practices are linked in numerous ways.

Just as you'd learn a great deal from a trusted advisor, so too can non-traditional sources help you to expand your knowledge base. Jazz musicians are agile and dynamic, carrying their group's song and themes through the diversified landscape to the end. Quite frankly, I don't know anyone better to provide leadership advice than a professional jazz player for this very reason. Here are some powerful takeaways I've picked up along the way from incredible musician leaders--let these lessons shine at your business, and your cube will get a lot swankier.

1. Playing it safe gets you tossed off the stage. Some executives would say that in today's turbulent economy, takings risks isn't wise. If you don't take risks you'll never excel. Playing it safe all the time becomes the most dangerous move of all.

2. There are no do-overs in live performances. For every hour in a "performance" setting, you should spend five hours practicing. Athletes do this, musicians do this--muscle memory is no different in the board room, in front of a new client, or with your team. So why aren't you doing this?

3. Listening to those around you is three times more important than what you play yourself. If you're the one talking all the time, you're not learning anything. Listen, absorb what you hear, and use the information to make a conscious choice about whatever you're facing.

4. There's a time to stand out as a soloist and a time to support others and make them shine. You rocked a project--nicely done. Praise is well-deserved. However, as a leader, it's more likely the case that your team members rocked a project, together. Susie was on top of her game with the slide deck? Tell her--and tell the client. Johnny couldn't have articulated the challenge to the press any more astutely? Refer back to his commentary as a stellar example. When you can share the wealth, everyone wins.

5. Expect surprises and adversity, since jazz (and life) is about how you respond and adapt. If running a business was always smooth sailing, everyone would do it. That being said, the old adage explains that "a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor." Anticipate hurdles and maximize your team's effort to jump over them.

6. Know your audience. If you're playing for a group that's looking forward to something slow and calming and you get on stage and play a wild and crazy, upbeat riff, nobody will dig it--even if it's a well-crafted piece. Your customers are the same. If you're not working to provide them with something they want and need, you're doomed to fail.

7. It's always better leaving people wanting more, rather than less. Of course as you live and breathe your business, you have a visceral urge to share every piece of minutia with anyone who asks. Don't. Instead of pouring it all on at once, give people a teaser, so they crave the next bit you explain. In similar fashion, don't try and launch 15 products at once for a new line; start with one or two to get people begging for more.

8. The best leaders are those that make others sound good. Big band leaders bring out the best in their troupes--during a sax solo, his job is to make sure the drum line supports the sax player with a quality backdrop to make the riff shine especially bright. Are you putting these pieces together on your team? Where could someone excel that they're being held back? Shatter those boundaries and encourage creativity to soar.

9. Pattern recognition is easier than raw genius. If you drive the same way to work every day for a year, you're bound to learn about--and avoid--the pothole on Main Street that you pass each time. Jazz is no different; if you've played combinations countless times, it becomes second nature to pair new things together based on previous patterns. So too in business, seasoned executives and professionals have seen so many types of people, deals, projects, and processes, so it becomes much easier for them to avoid these proverbial potholes, rather than having to start from scratch every time.

10. Shy musicians are starving artists. If you're playing a gig, you get paid when there's butts in seats, so you can't be shy in telling people about the upcoming show. Why haven't you been this bold in your new product launch? Are your employees evangelical about your company's culture? Are your vendors singing your praises?

11. Keeping it new and fresh is mandatory. Jazz has its roots in real-time, collaborative innovation, just like the act of starting and growing companies. If you're not actively seeking new challenges and ways to expand your horizons, you are automatically falling behind.

Legendary jazz pianist Dave Brubeck put it best, and his words resonate not only on stage for musicians but also in life for business leaders. As he so eloquently described it, "There's a way of playing safe, there's a way of using tricks and there's the way I like to play, which is dangerously, where you're going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven't created before."

Start-up VCs get all of the attention, but Fortune 500 companies might make better investors for your start-up.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson is not a fan of corporate capital; he said as much during one of Pandodaily's fireside chats in New York last week.

Wilson was served a rebuttal on Tuesday, however, at Bloomberg's Next Big Thing Summit in Half Moon Bay, California. Panelists from four corporate investment firms sat down with Bloomberg reporter Douglas MacMillan to set the record straight. Corporate capital provides a few things traditional VCs can't offer, they said.

Here are their five reasons to consider--or reconsider--a corporate investor.

They're already stakeholders.

Corporate investors have a built-in motive for supporting innovation within their sector: It strengthens their own business ecosystem, according to Citi Ventures CIO Deborah Hopkins. This may seem contradictory to the notion of free market competition, but Hopkins explains that industry innovation actually helps existing companies more than it hurts them.

The payment processor Square, for example, could be deemed "disruptive to our own business" says Hopkins--yet Citi has invested heavily in the start-up. Why?

"We're not focused as much on financial return as on strategic return," Hopkins says. "What we get back [from Square] is first-class learning from an exciting entrepreneur."

They have awesome resources.

According to Hopkins, corporations have one major asset that traditional VCs lack: a customer base.

"That's the golden ticket," she says. "Unlike a VC, we can help [start-ups] scale."

An existing network of customers can provide young companies with the low-risk setting they need to test and develop a winning product, says Comcast Ventures managing director Michael Yang--which is good for both the parent investor and start-up. According to Yang, corporate investors see start-up partners as an opportunity to innovate (read: make riskier decisions) while offering those start-ups the benefit of a safety net for product development.

They have friends on both sides of the table.

Corporate VCs are well connected; they rub elbows with both traditional VCs and other key players in their sector. So, they can connect you with their customers or colleagues, and additional funding, according to SanDisk Chief Strategy Officer Sumit Sadana.

In addition to making the most of their corporate network, says Sadana, SanDisk tries to keep its portfolio companies' best interests at heart. "We could do a right of first refusal," he says, "But we try not to do that. We bring them to customers that we have good and deep relationships with."

"We don't believe in pushing exclusivity at all," echoes Hopkins. "We see it as counter to being the champion of these companies. [Instead] we built partnerships with other VCs who bring us companies... because of our way of working alongside them."

They're not focused on your IPO.

"For a VC, going public is the end. For corporate [investors], it is a means to an end," says Heidi Mason, a managing partner of the Bell Mason Group. She adds that the "end goal" of most Bell Mason investments is a portfolio company's growth.

"We have an opportunity to break the [traditional investment] cycle... and completely accelerate the impact [we] have in an emerging ecosystem," she says.

Superman as an entrepreneur? Not exactly, but you just may walk away from "Man of Steel" with inspiration for your business.

Over the weekend my wife and I and a friend saw Man of Steel--the latest reboot of the Superman franchise. Note: Spoilers below! If you haven't seen the movie yet, you might want to stop reading. But then again, it's Superman. You probably know the story already.

Afterward, as we left the theater, my mind wandered to what the movie had to say about entrepreneurship. (It's a sickness. I can't stop thinking like this. Maybe you can relate.) Nobody actually starts a business in Man of Steel, but the movie is as much about leadership, integrity, and gathering teams to achieve a worthy goal as it is about action and explosions. In other words, it has a lot to do with the best principles of entrepreneurship. Here are my top takeaways:

1. Familiarity (Sometimes) Rules

Almost everyone who goes to see Man of Steel knows pretty much what's going to happen. No joke, my three-year-old nephew told me the entire Superman origin story a few weeks ago, complete with references to "Kwypton" and "Superman's daddy, Kal-El." (I think he's a bit confused. Jor-El is Kal-El's father, and it's Kal-El who later becomes Superman. But still, not bad for a three-year-old.)

Despite that familiarity, Man of Steel pulled in $128 million in the U.S. last weekend. Not bad for a cartoon character who made his debut in 1938. Lesson: It can sometimes be better to put a new twist on an old idea, rather than make up something new out of whole cloth.

2. If Trust Doesn't Quite Trump Everything, It Comes Close

Kal-El (aka Clark Kent--interestingly the film manages never to refer to him as "Superman") starts out angst-ridden, unsure of where he's from. Just as he figures it out, his Kryptonian father's nemesis, General Zod, shows up. Zod demands that Kal-El surrender in exchange for Zod sparing the Earth--and Kal-El almost gives in.

What stops him? It's all about trust. First, he realizes that Zod isn't trustworthy. Then, the fact that Kal-El was willing to sacrifice himself for Earth helps the humans learn to trust him. (As Kal-El reminds a still-skeptical general at the end of the film, he grew up in Kansas!) The more loyalty he shows to humans, the more they slowly develop trust in him, in return.

3. It's Not What You Say; It's What People Hear

You know the giant "S" on Superman's chest? It's not really an "S." Instead, as explained at least twice in Man of Steel, it's a Kryptonian symbol meaning, "hope." That's nice. But on Earth, as Lois Lane reminds Kal-El, an "S" is an "S" is an "S." 'Nuff said.

4. Focus, Focus, Focus

Kal-El has super-hearing and super-vision--and man-oh-man, is he ever distracted as a result. As a kid, this nearly pushes him near the edge. It's only after his mother teaches him to focus on one sound or sight at a time that he can retain sanity and function. When Zod and the other criminal-refugees from Krypton reach Earth, they have the same problem, except that nobody has ever taught them to focus their senses. Result? They're overwhelmed with sights and sounds, and unable (temporarily) to function.

Sound familiar? Distraction is driving us all crazy and it can be killer in business. Learning to focus is key. (As I wrote this column, this realization almost made me close a few of the dozen tabs I had open on my browser, shut off my phone, and maybe even turn down the sound on the Boston Bruins Stanley Cup Finals game I was watching. Almost.)

5. Make the Customer Comfortable

At one point, Kal-El surrenders to a group of humans despite knowing that they plan to turn him over to Zod. When Lois Lane subsequently expresses surprise that he allowed the humans to handcuff him, Kal-El tells her it's because it was important that they feel safe around him. (Even though Superman needs handcuffs like a fish needs a bicycle.)

Sometimes people (read: customers) insist on things that don't cost you much, but make them feel more comfortable. If you want them to deal with you (or try your product), go along with the gag.

6. Negotiating is a Super Skill

There's a lot of action in Man of Steel, but at the same time there's a heck of a lot of negotiating. Jor-El tries to negotiate with the leaders of Krypton before their planet explodes. General Zod tries to negotiate with Jor-El, and then eons later, he tries to negotiate with Kal-El. Kal-El tries to negotiate with Zod, and then the U.S.-led military. Eventually, he and Lois Lane negotiate an interstellar love connection.

What does it all reinforce? Well, without getting too deep, each time negotiations fail and the scene turns to action, it follows a character who has been pushed all the way to the brink. Nobody ever mentions the phrase, but Man of Steel is filled with some tough negotiators who have clearly identified their best alternatives to a negotiated agreement.

7. You Can Easily Hide Forever, Just By Wearing Glasses

This one's tongue-in-cheek of course. Most renditions of the Superman story suggest that Kal-El can blend in with humans simply by donning Elvis Costello specs--and maybe stammering a bit around Lois Lane. Man of Steel takes this idea to extremes. It's kind of cute to see a Superman movie subscribe so blatantly to the "ugly-pretty-girl theory" of Hollywood flicks.

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The seasoned VC says Silicon Valley will remain a tech hub for years, but Silicon Alley, with its focus on content, is paving the way for exciting changes.

What's in a name? A lot, according to Mark Suster, founder and CEO of Build Online and an investor with the Los Angeles-based GRP partners.

That's why his firm is changing its name.

"I think it's a bit rich that we go around to entrepreneurs and say markets are being disrupted, you need to change," he said during the Venture Forward Conference in New York on Tuesday.

The new moniker, which he wouldn't disclose at the conference but plans to unveil next week, will be the first such change for GRP in 17 years. It's meant to reflect GRP's renewed focus on transparency and investment in infrastructure--two things entrpreneurs say they want.

The idea came after polling a group of entrepreneurs, who also said they look for operational experience, industry insight, marketing help, and people who can bring capital to the table from their VC firm. Since all those encompass what GRP does, "We felt we needed a name that would represent all those things," he said.

When asked how hard it's been to do business "so far south of Silicon Valley," Suster acknowledged the challenge, but pointed to markets outside of the tech hub.

"Silicon Valley will always produce the biggest hits; it will always be the tech ecosystem for the foreseeable future," he said. "But there are market conditions that make it easier and better to build outside Silicon Valley."

Focusing on software-based start-ups has proven this: Many things which revolve around the Internet--content, commerce, and communication--aren't dominated by the Valley, he found.

"Commerce is something great trading cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles have always done well," Suster said. In terms of content, "New York has a significant advantage there." And communication has strongholds in Washington, D.C., Kansas City, and "of course, New York. That's why we've seen companies standing out more."

Businesses in all kinds of industries are going mobile and bringing their goods directly to customers.

Mobile may be the new thing for businesses, but there's an old way to put a twist on the concept. Pack your business onto a truck. Although food trucks now have a reality show, forgoing a permanent home for a business and taking it onto the road isn't a new concept. But it might be one your company should explore.

Food trucks in their original incarnation--commissary trucks that brought coffee and bad food to locations like construction sites--have been around for many decades. So have trucks to replace automobile glass or wash and detail vehicles as well as vans that bring mechanics tools out to auto repair shops. In a way, plumbers and carpenters have done the same thing, bringing equipment and supplies to the customer's location.

But the concept of putting a business on a truck is beginning to expand. Over the last three or four years, fashion trucks have become... fashionable. The people behind The Fashion Mobile of Minnesota used to own a store but found that buying a used truck off Craigslist cost about the same as one month of rent.

There are trucks for all kinds of businesses: hard-to-find shoe brands, a record shop, kitchen and home goods, and vintage clothing. The Original Mobile Barbershop Co. is not the only one with chairs on wheels. Heck, there's even a site where people buy and sell used pet grooming vans.

The principles are sound. You bring a business out to the customers and provide convenience. At the same time, you intercept people outside of their normal shopping routine and get more attention. Overhead is much lower, though you do have to work through the logistics of permitting and legal parking to do business on the road and avoid tickets.

So what are some other businesses that you could do out of a truck, or with a vehicle as a supplement, going to the customer? Here are some ideas:

• photography studio
• nail or hair care
• massage or physical therapy
• business consulting
• CPA/accountant
• financial services advisor
• tailor
• wedding planning

You could bring samples and services to a B2B client and ship afterwards. Insurance firm? Send the truck out to an office building where you've already made arrangements and workers can consult. Combine a truck with an existing business and the ability to schedule appointments and look at product on a website and the possibilities grow. Is it time that your business hit the road?

Great research doesn't always lead to great medicine -- and sometimes forming a company can actually get in the way.

Say you’re a healthcare entrepreneur. And say you meet a brilliant immunologist at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference, and she has very exciting data demonstrating full tumor regression in a genetically engineered mouse model of human breast cancer. It’s clear that she has discovered a critical step in cancer development that could be a great new drug target.

Time to license the intellectual property, right? Get this scientist onto the board of your new start-up, then turn her research into a treatment and, of course, profits.

Actually, that’s probably not such a great idea.

Here’s why it’s not the right time to pull the trigger - and why it may never be:

1. Most early science will not lead to drug candidates that pass feasibility and toxicology requirements to qualify for human trials. Human biology is complicated, and no one can predict what will or won’t work.

2. Once you raise money and recruit co-founders, you’re in the business of convincing them that you will be successful. No matter what. In so doing, you incentivize scientists to design experiments that will support your business plan. This corrupts the conduct of the most important testing and encourages your scientists to generate ‘good enough’ data - good enough to keep the funding rolling in.

3. Capital that could be going directly into research will instead be spent on the all-too-familiar costs of doing business: salaries, attorneys, accountants, boards of directors, etc.

4. As all these parties become more invested in the success of certain experiments and approaches, the less willing they become to admit it when things-;even small things--inevitably go wrong. Dismantling a team and a company is difficult, and it isn’t any fun.

5. Even the best outcome - generation of a compound that achieves Investigational New Drug status- carries a burdensome economic sidecar. To generate attractive returns for your earliest-stage investors, you have to begin recuperating not only your company’s scientific investment, but also the general and administrative costs, which have probably eaten up one-third to one-half of the total capital invested. And the road to a marketable drug has just begun.

6. In the pursuit of ‘good enough,’ it’s likely that your team has passed over other approaches that may have led to better drugs. Now that capital is gone.

Can you tell that I’ve seen this movie a few times? Here’s when you might consider investing:

1. When the science has become a platform--a fundamental new approach to generating many new drugs. Now you’re jumping into something that’s more akin to an engineering start-up.

2. When a bonafide drug molecule (better, several) has been advanced to the human trials stage. This is still a high-risk investment, but at this point your ultimate buyers - the pharmaceutical companies - will be lining up to partner with venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to co-invest. That greatly raises your chances of profitable success.

In medicine, forming a new company around early science can easily produce a misalignment of incentives and waste precious capital. Early-stage biomedical assets should be managed and tested as a portfolio of ideas with no bets or promises placed on any single one. This will allow the unbiased pursuit of the projects that survive rigorous vetting and testing, all the way through to drug molecules that are ready to be used in the treatment of actual disease.

Nobel-prizewinning physicist Richard Feynman was an eccentric within the scientific community. But he sure got a lot done.

In the book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, relates a story about an ant he found near his bathtub.

Instead of squishing the bug, Feynman put some sugar out for his visitor and used a colored pencil to track the ant’s march back to its nest. When another ant emerged to collect more sugar, Feynman tracked its movements as well. Feynman soon discovered that the ants used each other’s trails to find the pile of sugar he’d left out. He also learned that the ants continually improved the route from the sugar to the nest over time.

Tracking ants all day with colored pencils doesn’t exactly seem like a productive exercise. But for Feynman, that was never a consideration. He let his curiosity guide him. He was always ready to tackle questions that interested him with focus and care.

For Feynman, productivity was less about work and more about exploring problems that intrigued him.

Leaders, entrepreneurs, and anyone who strives to do more can learn from Feynman’s unique way of working.

1. Don’t worry about what others are thinking

Feynman was an eccentric within the scientific community. He frequented strip clubs, drank heavily for a spell, and taught himself to paint. He never let the judgment of others get under his skin or unnerve him. He was content to follow his own course and do as he pleased.

He wrote, “You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.”

By adopting this attitude you free yourself from paralyzing second guesses, doubts, and uncertainty. Work in your own way and don’t let other people’s criticisms delay you.

2. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do

Feynman did his best work when his curiosity, interest, and wonder were piqued.

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it!” Feynman advised. “Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.”

If you do what you want to do, everything else will fall into place. If you undertake tasks you want to do first, your enjoyment will increase your productivity and enhance your focus.

3. Stop trying to be a know-it-all

Feynman accepted that he didn’t know everything and that most of the world was one big mystery. He didn’t bother trying to solve the mystery of the universe or being the smartest person. In fact, he liked not knowing things. Ignorance, and not having all the evidence, made him excited.

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong,” Feynman said during an interview. He once commented in a lecture, “We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.”

Embrace your ignorance and let it propel you to new, interesting discoveries. Try to prove yourself wrong and don’t be afraid to fail.

4. Get off the computer

Feynman was able to follow ants around with colored pencils, learn samba in Brazil, and discover how to crack a safe because he enjoyed learning things that interested him. However, he avoided computers because they were distractions that dulled his ability to investigate the world.

“There is a computer disease,” Feynman tells us. “Anybody who works with computers knows about [it]. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!”

Obviously, computers are crucial to today’s world of work. However, it’s advisable to free yourself from them whenever possible. They can distract and limit your productivity and perhaps your creativity.

5. Have a sense of humor and talk honestly

Feynman was never one to dress up his sentences with fancy words and complex phrases. He tried to explain things clearly and with a touch of humor.

He lived by a simple rule: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” The phrase speaks to Feynman’s enduring modesty and acceptance that he was no better than anyone else. His most urgent goal was to learn about the world and as such he did it with astonishing precision and productivity.

Don’t pretend to be better than others and don’t fool yourself into thinking you have all the answers. Like Feynman, be humble and talk directly and honesty.

I just dumped (and donated) 300 books. But the rest you'll have to pry from my cold, dead fingers.

Two weeks ago, I dumped more than 300 business books.

“Dumped” sounds harsh. The purge wasn’t as bloody as all that. Many were unbound galleys stamped with dire warnings not to quote, reproduce, or distribute. I’m very cautious about such matters (in accordance with the FBI’s no-exhibition rule I never watch DVDs with anyone beyond my immediate family). So I dutifully stuffed the galleys into 30-gallon garbage bags and left them for the trash guy.

The hardcovers I deposited in a book-donation bin outside the local high school. Books on startups I set aside for the prison library where I volunteer. The inmates are always talking about businesses they plan to launch when they get out--a motorcycle detailing shop, a tattoo parlor, one of those mondo vending machines stocked with pet supplies. They can’t use the Internet, and the few entrepreneurship books available to them are out of date. So I know those volumes will get a lot of use.

My own library began accumulating when I started reviewing new business titles for Inc. Before that I owned a couple of shelves’ worth: the canon, if you will. I had Porter on strategy; Bennis on leadership; Schein on culture; Senge on continuous learning; Kotter on change; Christensen on innovation; Drucker on everything. Entrepreneurship has produced a canon of its own, including Amar Bhide’s The Origin and Evolution of New Business; Jack Stack’s The Great Game of Business; and my colleague Bo Burlingham’s Small Giants. Also The Peter Principle, The Art of Demotivation (by Despair.com founder Dr. E.L. Kersten), and, of course, the seminal work of Scott Adams.

Over five years, that collection had swelled 30-fold. Publishers cast virtually all their bread upon the waters, so I receive as many as four or five titles a week. A handful I write about. A few find a place in my home office. The rest migrate down to IKEA bookshelves in the basement. Recently, my near-and-dears decided to clear out that basement to free it up for teen parties. (Apparently teenagers lose all zest for life when forced to congregate on the same floor as adults.) I was assigned the task of culling my business-book hoard by two-thirds or more.

I expected the process would prove agonizing. Which of the four books on managing millennials should I consider the managing-millennials Bible? How many Seth Godin titles do I need to represent his oeuvre? I knew I should probably hang on to one brain-science book. But the amygdala so rarely comes up in conversation.

In the end it wasn’t so hard. Whole categories I instantly deemed expendable. Out went the parables. Out went the leadership lessons from sports and military figures. Out went the creativity books full of line drawings and white space. Out went the books laying out an author’s trademarked “system” for generating ideas or managing teams. Out went the technology books published more than a year ago. Out went the books that didn’t mention by name any actual businesses, or that merely name-checked usual suspects like Apple, IKEA, and Nordstrom’s.

My daughter suggested dumping the myriad books with alliteration in their titles. That turned out to be a surprisingly effective sorting principle.

What made the cut? Here are just a few of the titles I retained without a second thought:

The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. HBS professor Theresa Amibile explains that employees are happiest and most productive in environments where they can make unimpeded progress on their work every day.

Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us. Sociologist Duncan Watts argues that decisions and predictions often go awry because we think we understand more about the world than we actually do.

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. Business author Daniel Pink takes the first really fresh look at sales in ages. Everybody sells, he explains, and getting people to buy requires softer skills than we were taught.

Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best… and Learn from the Worst. Stanford professor Bob Sutton’s worthy successor to The No Asshole Rule. If only Sutton was director of human resources for the whole world.

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Entrepreneur Eric Ries articulates what many of his peers have long instinctively known and launches a movement in the process.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Business reporter Charles Duhigg explicates a seemingly mundane but potent motivator. Useful for marketers, bosses, product developers, and anyone with an unused gym membership.

The Laws of Subtraction: Six Rules for Winning in the Age of Excess Everything. Innovation advisor Matthew E. May became a student of minimalism during his years at Toyota in Japan. Less is more.

Islands of Profit in a Sea of Red Ink: Why 40 Percent of Your Business Is Unprofitable and How to Fix It. MIT lecturer Jonathan Byrnes directs his waste-seeking spotlight into every nook and cranny of a business. This book is spinach: not a delicious read but very good for you.

The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation. The Tuck School’s Ron Adner reminds us that innovations--no matter how brilliant--require upstream execution from suppliers and downstream cooperation from distributors to succeed.

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works. Once and future P&G chief A.G. Lafley and the Rotman School’s Roger L. Martin show leaders how to make the right choices and urge them to ask this excellent question: “What would have to be true for this strategy to succeed?”

Those are just a few of the 200-or-so titles that survived the shakeout. Clearly I failed to reach the two-thirds benchmark. But I’ve promised my family that as I add new volumes to the shelves I will get rid of old ones. That means every surviving book should be glancing over its shoulder. Yeah, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, I’m looking at you.

If you want all your employees to have the same experience at your company, don't forget about this crucial relationship.

As the founder and CEO of BerylHealth, I built a company from three employees to almost 400, and scaled a unique corporate culture along the way.

But earlier this year Stericycle, a public company, acquired BerylHealth and I was named Stericycle's chief culture officer. Now I have a much different challenge. Stericycle has 13,000 employees in 13 countries, a great financial track record, and strong customer satisfaction. But its executives have determined its future success is contingent on a renewed focus on employees.

Gauging Company Culture Today

One of my first steps is to "baseline" where Stericycle's culture stands at this point. To do this, I recently conducted the first employee satisfaction survey the company had conducted in four years.

As I reviewed the survey results and read thousands of open-ended comments, a couple of things hit me. First, Stericycle has a lot to be proud of. Its employees are loyal and hard-working, and committed to the company's success. Second, the problems and issues Stericycle employees raise are much the same as what I've always heard from the Beryl team. Whether you have a company of 13 people or 13,000, employees want what I'd call the basics.

Here's what they've said so far:

• Give me the tools and resources to do my job.
• Make sure I understand the company's vision so that I am here for a purpose bigger than my job.
• Show me that I am valued for the work that I do.
• Give me opportunities to grow.

Where a Culture Problem May Lie

As I read the survey responses, I also noticed a great range in their tenor, from those who were highly satisfied to those who were very unhappy. That told me that the culture problem for Stericycle isn't knowing what to do, but instead knowing how to do it consistently. To me, that says that a breakdown is occurring with how middle managers and supervisors are tasked with and execute on management's vision.

What's the lesson for you? As your company grows, realize that even if you do a great job of setting the vision and communicating it from the top, a different obstacle awaits when it comes down to the most important relationship in your business: the one between an employee and his or her direct supervisor.

This vicious curse can take you down if you let it. Here's how to beat it.

Anyone who has started and ran a business knows the entrepreneur's curse.

The frustrating dichotomy between never having enough spare time outside the business and the frightening reality when you do.

When I started Wild Creations a number of years ago, I lived the curse firsthand. As someone who had just come from the corporate world and was a master at leveraging vacation days with three-day weekends and long holidays, the entrepreneurial transition was challenging. I had lofty aspirations of "being my own boss" and having more freedom and independence.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Like any new business, it consumed every minute of spare time and every ounce of energy I had. When I actually took a few hours off, for example on a weekend to indulge in a simple college football game, the enthusiasm and pleasure of doing so were always dampened by the heavy guilt I felt for not working at the business. If we were slow enough to take time off, should I not be focused on trying to get more business?

It was a vicious cycle.

After a while, however, I learned to effectively deal with the "curse" and in fact became quite adept at avoiding it altogether. Here are a few tips on how other entrepreneurs can do the same:

Many entrepreneurs, by nature, are soloist. While completely understandable, I personally find it to be less optimal. I was fortunate to find a trustworthy partner and co-founder at Wild Creations. We had met and worked together on a USAID project overseas and discovered that we shared similar entrepreneurial aspirations. It took a number of months to establish the rapport and the trust we needed, but the patience paid off. When one of us needed time off, we could always feel confident knowing that the business was in capable hands.

If you cannot find a good partner or opt to go at business yourself, make sure to find better employees. And by "better" I mean better than you. Let's face it, the most capable and trusted person you are going to find to run your business is you, so do not compromise on selecting employees that you will trust to do it for you.

For many entrepreneurs (present company included), giving up control of any aspect of the business is difficult. I often compare my business to my children. As nice as it might be, turning over the responsibility to watch and protect them is not easy. It is important to understand, however, that you cannot do or control everything. Indeed, there are individuals much better qualified for particular tasks. Understand your strengths and the priorities of the business and trust the rest to your team.

Like any parent, you will always worry about the business, regardless of the team you have in place. For me, I find it useful to have a "happy place" where I can go and tune out the business and outside noise. The time allows me to recalibrate, mentally, so I make certain I am focused on what is important. Whether it is a beach, a reading bench, a set of headphones, or a state of Zen, find your place and be willing to allow yourself the indulgence of "letting go," even if for a short time.

It may be a cliché, but it is spot on. Most entrepreneurs choose to start businesses to pursue a personal passion or interest but quickly get lost in the rigor, stress and anxiety of running the business. When you start to get frustrated, remember why you started your business and reclaim the enthusiasm you had before. Working tens of hours in the business then feel a little less like a chore.

The entrepreneurs curse is, for the most part, mental. It requires the ability to turn the business "on" and "off" at a moment's notice, which is completely achievable but takes practice ... lots of practice. In the end, you may not find more spare time to enjoy, but you will most certainly learn to enjoy the spare time you have.

As for me, I finally learned to enjoy my ASU Sun Devil football games ... outside the office!

Have any other tips for beating the entrepreneur's curse? Please share them below!

This simple approach to market research reveals what customers really want when they buy your product. (Hint: It's not the product.)

Guerrilla customer research is easy. To prove it, we just need 4.5 minutes of your time.

That's how long it takes to watch Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen--the guy who coined the term "disruptive innovation"--explain one such technique in a video on the Forum for Growth & Innovation's website.

Christensen (@claychristensen) describes how his team learned why a fast food chain's customers were buying so many milkshakes for breakfast. News flash: It wasn't because they wanted milkshakes.

That's interesting, but it's not the point. The point is how Christensen's team unearthed what motivated this seemingly odd behavior. The method was cheap, simple, and highly replicable. So replicable, we're outlining it in three steps.

1. Before you interview, observe. Christensen's team spent a long day taking notes on milkshake buyers. "It turned out that nearly half of the milkshakes were sold before 8 o'clock in the morning," Christensen says. "The people who bought them were always alone, it was the only thing they bought, and they all got in the car and drove off with it."

2. Ask the big-picture question. The next day, they asked customers "What job are you hiring the milkshake to do?" The answer: The customers "had a long and boring drive to work, and they just needed something to do." They didn't want a milkshake, per se, but something easier to consume than a greasy doughnut or a dry bagel.

3. Conduct research face-to-face. "What job are you hiring the milkshake to do?" is a deceptively complex question. If you ask it in person, you can explain what you mean by "job," ask follow-ups, and drill down. Posed via e-mail, the question might yield a useless answer. Asked in person, it revealed something surprising about commuters' preferences.

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Good or great is acceptable for some, but consistently striving for awesome with this formula will prevent you from regretting your business or your life.

Thanks to Kanye West, the word awesome has been overused of late. Some even claim awesome fatigue. Why do things have to be awesome? Isn't good good enough? What about great--isn't that good enough? Not in today's business environment. With all the noise and distraction even great can fall short. It's not that people and companies intentionally force mediocrity our way. In fact, it's their lack of intention that usually results in mediocrity. But given a choice, I strongly believe most people would choose awesome.

Three key characteristics define an awesome experience:

Awesome experiences are always positive. Awesome by definition means inspired by that which is grand or sublime. Creating a positive experience will assure that your audience consistently wishes to relive it.

What is the point of doing something if nobody cares? Meaning comes from context and impact, and lends itself to sharing and discussion. If no one is talking about it, it wasn't awesome.

Reflect on the business or life experiences you remember. They likely resulted in a surprising epiphany you couldn't wait to share. You must find a way to connect with a compelling message that sticks in the brain.

Awesome experiences can be created anytime, anyplace, so why isn't the world overflowing with them? Primarily because creating them requires forethought, creativity, planning and execution. It takes time, skill and an understanding of how to turn a mediocre or "just OK" experience into one that is meaningful and memorable for everyone. Whether you are trying to step up your marketing, make an impression on someone or just create an awesome experience for yourself, this formula will help make it happen.