Short, provocative,

word-crafted questions

with double meanings

that make you smile

 are what sell best! BUT

they’re not waiting

to jump out

of your closet!

At the risk of looking like one of those idiotic email FWDs written by “anonymous,” here are some inspiring examples of great double-entendre marketing theme line questions. . .

• GETTING ENOUGH? (Delaware Sleep Disorder Centers)

• GOT MILK? (Who doesn’t remember the white moustaches?) 

• WHERE’S THE BEEF? (Years later, we still laugh at that one!) 

• ARE YOU BREATHING? (Stress management exercise for businesspeople and healthcare professionals)

• CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? (Verizon has us still saying this with every static crackle)

• IS IT IN YOU? (Yup, Gatorade) 

• MOUSE GOT YOUR WRIST? (Safe-Zone Stop-wrist-pain brace for computer operators)

Add your own favorites: ____________________________________

Yes, fun stuff, and hopefully inspiring. That’s the good news. The bad news is that these short sweet nothings, these provocative, punchy few words of flair do not fall from the sky.

Neither do they get dreamed up by in-house staff people who write coherent emails, business reports and plans, even news releases, church bulletins, or local fundraising flyers (or well-intentioned poetry-writing relatives with Fine Arts degrees who want to save you money).

Great headlines that slam out great short questions are the product of many years of studying and understanding consumer psychology, consumer behavior, emotional buying triggers, and professional advertising and marketing writing. That kind of expertise costs money.

It’s your call! Not every business owner or entrepreneur wants to sell products or services by identifying them and/or the brand name with a custom-created household expression. But if you do, you can’t cut corners. Top-notch sales messages sell. The exceptional ones can literally bury the competition.

Each of the examples cited above took at least a month (and probably longer) of intensive focus and concentration.

Contrary to auto dealership mentality, words that sell are not seat-of-the-pants, knee-jerk, last-minute compositions. Even with a professional marketing writer, substantial time is required to experience a process of what I call “total immersion.”

A record-sales campaign I once produced for Great Western Wine and Champagne came only after a three-month process of picking grapes, working in the winery, giving tourists tours, cleaning the vats (a time-limit situation to avoid passing out from the fumes!), and learning about processing equipment and the aging process..

I met with the glass bottle manufacturers, the cork people, the wire and foil wrapper makers, the label makers, the glue makers; I worked on the loading dock, in the front office, and out in the field with the sales reps; learning the history of wine and how the master winemakers grafted vines together to create varietals.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you she or he can write you sales-winning words without becoming thoroughly engaged with every level of your business. It doesn’t happen, even for a 2, 3, 4, or 5-word theme question or 7-word branding line.

Award-winning author/journalist Malcolm Gladwell is the epitome of this thinking. To write about John Kennedy, Jr’s piloting death plunge into the ocean at Nantucket, he hired a pilot to fly him to the same spot and dive. When you’re seeking big-time copy, find someone with big-time experience who’s willing and anxious to dive!

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“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

As a writer, designer, teacher, 

artist, architect, landscaper,

jewelry-maker, stylist or stage

performer, if you’re not

risking . . . you’re not

being honest!

With special thanks to author Mary DeMuth for the three great words: “Risk being unliked” which were featured in her article, “A Smart Approach to MEMOIR” in the June 2011 issue of The WRITER.

Those of us who create for a living, who own, operate, or manage creative businesses understand immediately what the “Risk being unliked” message is all about. And does it apply to professional selling too? Absolutely.

Whether we create with computers or paint brushes; with crafts supplies, hair, or music; with classrooms or pen and paper, or with the ways we communicate our sales messages, we must –as Ms. DeMuth so aptly puts it– “Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer,” she says, “you have a moral obligation to do this.”

I propose that truth-telling applies to all businesses, even the least creative.

When your focus, your branding, your website, your messages, your employees, and most importantly YOU are all about telling the truth as you understand it, you are setting yourself up to cultivate strengthened long-term high-trust relationships. Those who unlike you for it are not those you want to deal with anyway.

Honesty is (still) the best policy!

I’m not suggesting any limitations here. What’s the best way to express this idea to people who earn their keep with their creative talents? Could there be any greater and more meaningful statement than the following six words from Shakespeare?:

To thine own self be true.

When you believe heart and soul that the line, the dimension, the color, the musical note, the arrangement, the word choice, the emphasis is what your gut, your intuitive experience, says it needs to be, go with it and don’t waste time worrying about winning a popularity contest. People will judge your authenticity, not your masks or apologies.

For ALL business pursuits, not fibbing to or misleading customers, employees, associates, partners, referrers, investors, professional advisors,  lenders, and the various communities you serve is just one chapter of your build-a-better-business book. Leadership transparency is another. Honoring commitments is yet a third. 

Delivering exactly what you say you’re going to deliver –and more– exactly when you say you’re going to deliver it is the standard by which others will continuously measure your business performance.

There’s risk involved in all of this, but as with the mark of true entrepreneurship, the risk is always a reasonable one. We’re not talking about harnessing creative spirit here. In fact, if anything, the suggestion is to set it free, and to recognize that the results produced by an honest free spirit outperform those born of smoke and mirrors.

Don’t throw the tending to details, business conduct, and tight-fisted money management out with the baby’s bathwater simply for the sake of being more expressive in the products, services, and ideas you create. But do stop cowering away from being straight-ahead with your work and with all those you come into contact with every day.

Your behavior is of course your choice. Where do you think your reputation comes from?                                            

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

Does your website sweep people

into boredom? Does it wallow in

self-aggrandizement?

Does it need a lobotomy?

I run across them every day. So do you — websites that put people to sleep faster than a week of watching C-Span (Okay, the Weather Channel maybe, for those who live inside “The Capitol Loop.”)

I get the feeling that the reasoning for these Hollywood-style overkill sick website productions –from some of the culprits who pay for them and probably close to all of those who produce them (because they get paid more)– goes something like this:

“Hey, it’s free advertising; we should take full advantage by putting in a tab for each of our 26 different color and style shirt buttons (or accounting services, or surgical procedures, or pizza toppings, or . . .)

“And then, when visitors click on any of those tabs, they’ll be delivered to a complete showroom smorgasbord of 472 applications for each of our 26 buttom colors and styles (or accounting services, or surgical procedures, or pizza toppings, or . . .)

“And then, we’ll give ’em our 183-page limited guarantee and return policy (or insurance reimbursement) requirements –in really small type of course, and in a rolling scroll window that’s just an inch high so it doesn’t take too much space and so it will give an instant ulcer to anyone looking to return to earlier verbiage that they may have passed over too quickly.

“And then, we’ll throw in 47 testimonial pages — mostly from cousins and neighbors, but who cares? We should have a few pages on why we’re “green” and some more on our “sustainability” efforts with recyclable buttons. Let’s put in maps and stuff in case anyone wants to find us, and how about a dozen pages on the history of our company since 1762? We could throw in a blog and a weekly puzzle to . . .”

It may be time to take

your reality temperature.

Websites have become burdensome. Many have lost touch with the very markets they seek to impress and influence. Others simply seem to reflect an inability to focus. No one accountant or surgeon or pizza parlor can be all things to all people. So back off. Rethink your message.

What is the one single main product or service message you want your target customers/clients/patients to see and hear? Can you spare visitors the company history that no doubt has great importance to your great great great grandfather’s uncle’s sister’s brother who founded the company. With apologies for abruptness: Nobody cares.

When a business or professional practice has a website that overwhelms, it actually UN-sells people. Visitors typically shake their heads and delete. They don’t want to know that the site sponsor can do everything under the sun. They want to know they’ve found a resource that specializes in what they need.

So, what’s the trick to be able to do that? My advice? Hire a professional writer. Forget about “SEO Experts” who will talk the dollars right out of your wallet, and the web designers who will represent your venture the way they think will win them an award, and don’t burden your staff with it. Get great content written. The rest is easy.

Like a resume, your website just needs to get prospective customers, clients and patients to your door on on your phone or in your in box. Fewer than 5% of all websites actually make significant sales.

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

Are you a nice guy?

If you are so savagely money-hungry that you’ve stopped functioning like a human, you may indeed finish first financially . . . but you’ll be wasting away your life in the process. People will split into two camps: those with value to offer who cross the street to avoid you, and those who leach onto you, hopeful of getting their hands in your pockets.

“Happiness,” we’re told,

“runs in a circular motion” and 

“life is just a little boat upon the sea”

(With thanks to ’60s songster Donovan).

Well, acquiring and stashing cash may well be what fuels your fire and keeps you running, but little boats upon the sea capsize quickly if they’re anchored off shore in the middle of a storm, economic or otherwise — especially if you’re sitting below deck rolling your dimes and nickles. (And without a snorkel?) Glub, glub!

“Yeah,” you say, “well that sounds good, but reality is my family’s gotta eat and I have a mortgage and car and stuff to pay for, and if I don’t focus on making money, my business goes down the tubes, then what?”

Someone told me today that she quit smoking “cold turkey” after years of convincing herself “it would be too hard to quit. I finally realized,” she said, “that it would be a lot harder to die of cancer.” You don’t need to be addicted to your business just because you fear bankruptcy. A bankrupt body and a bankrupt family are far worse consequences.

No, I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but–as both an ex-smoker and ex-money-chaser–I can only say that I am happier, healthier, and wiser now than I have been since college athlete days (a  l-o-n-g  time). Money struggles are much easier to contend with when you can make the decision to downsize your lifestyle.

That action alone, in fact, enables some fantastically rewarding experiences that would otherwise never have come by fighting to stay living a plastic existence at the top of the financial ladder.

“Like what?” you might ask. “What benefits can there possibly be from giving up a big-bucks high life?”

Start with drastically increased odds for:

• A much-enhanced family life

• More friends and more meaningful friendships

• Increased numbers and types of opportunities to grow as a person,

• Support systems to be physically and emotionally healthier

• Increased awarenesses that facilitate being able to help others along the way

These are just a few of the hidden benefits. There comes a point where each of us must draw lines in the sand for our SELVES, and decide which roads to take. When that time comes –or when you decide to make it happen– choose your self and your loved ones first.

Money can put you there if you’re here,

but it can’t buy a new you or a new them.

You are undoubtedly a nicer person than you probably give yourself credit for. Don’t be afraid of letting the nice you rise to the surface more. And –since life isn’t football or boxing or war– don’t think for one minute that nice guys finish anywhere except first.

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 931.854.0474

 “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

 Reported today on satellite radio news . . .

Nearly 20% of all U.S. income

now comes from the

government!

Why bother working

anymore?

WITH GRATEFUL (Cough! Cough!) APPRECIATION FOR GROWING THIS PREDICAMENT INTO A FULL-BLOWN SMALL BUSINESS QUAGMIRE . . .

• THANKS TO: Our never-ending bad economy that we’ve been hearing for two-and-a-half years has repeatedly “turned the corner” and is “getting better” (uh, do politicians ever fill their gas tanks, notice foreclosures, or artificially-inflated unemployment rates?)

• THANKS TO: The complete absence of decisive leadership in the White House (which serves among many other things, to facilitate the evaporation of America’s world leadership posture and respect, and actually set us on a track of anxious retreat in the eyes of emerging nations). 

• THANKS TO: Mr. Obama’s incessant efforts to create boundless dependency on government incompetence (dramatically marked by government’s ever-present lack of business sense, business experience, businesslike conduct, and entrepreneurial spirit . . . the same entrepreneurial spirit that made America great to start with!).

• THANKS TO: The reckless government spending sprees that embrace idealistic socialist agendas at the expense of citizens losing their jobs, their homes, and their dignity (and front and center is the utter insanity that’s responsible for continuing efforts to ram a cataclysmic-ally extravagant and dibilitatingly expensive healthcare plan down the already constricted throats of small business).

Now you perhaps know more than you want to know, but –ah– what’s behind this leading of lambs to slaughter?

Could it possibly be that we have a government intent on gaining voter control by making all citizens and businesses beholden and grateful for the survivalist handouts that ooze out of wasted government programs?

And how do we initiate a great escape? How do we ever return to the solidity of national purpose and world respect and the high human standards this nation has been built on?

The answer, my friends, is NOT “blowin’ in the wind.”

The answer is NOT in redistributing the wealth, nor in providing safe haven to all illegal immigrants, nor taxing small businesses –literally– to death.

The answer is in taking action now. The answer is in standing tall for your small business enterprise and ambitions. The answer is in voicing your objections to increased and increasing government control and over-regulation. The answer is in doing the very best you can possibly do every day to strengthen and anchor your business interests.

The answer is to fight corruption and politics

with integrity and heart,

The answer is to light your own fire and keep it burning in the minds of all those who support you and the work you do — your employees, customers, suppliers, advisors, investors, and the geographical communities where your business lives.

The answer lies within the purpose of your business soul.

Take your opportunities and run with them.  

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

 “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

ALL THERE IS

FOR CERTAIN

. . . IS YOU!

Becoming an entrepreneur is not like becoming a corporate guy or (thank heaven) a politician. In Entrepreneurville, there are no rules about how to think, or operate, or create, or market, or finance.

All there is for certain is you!  

Why is that different from corporate life? You may have your own team, but you’re not part of somebody else’s.

All there is for certain is you!

And surely you haven’t the time or inclination to indulge in the under-pinning of all corporate existence: analysis paralysis. By the time your corporate counterpart initiates some market study, you could introduce your product, service or idea, take it back, adjust it, re-introduce it and be making money!

What makes entrepreneurship different from politics? For openers, winning popularity contests seldom has any value. And, for closers, truly successful entrepreneurs only win by exercising consistent integrity. In between the openers and closers is a vast wasteland of propaganda, distortions and outright lies embedded in every election.

It’s making your ideas work that counts. It’s finding ways –channels, roads, avenues, strategies– to get from where your ideas are now, to where you want them to be.

Sometimes that “finding” process needs the help of others. But if you’re an entrepreneur with great ideas and no ability to engage and manage others to provide the help you need, you’re not likely to ever get where you want to be.

The number one reason for new business failure is “poor management.”

So start at the beginning. Realize that having great ideas, and being driven with burning desire to achieve results with them is paramount. But knowing how to manage things, people, systems, and operations to get your ideas on the launchpad is an equally critical challenge.

Spare yourself false starts.

When you jump the gun, rush to judgment, make assumptions, take shortcuts –even though these steps might be well within your comfort zone because you’re an action-oriented kind of person– you are setting yourself up to take huge (and probably expensive) unreasonable risks.

True entrepreneurs take only reasonable risks! 

It is the utmost and arguably most important of all reasonable risks for an entrepreneur to take: to expend the time and energy to gobble up every available shred of information about how to communicate clearly with and motivate others . . . how to be a leader and exercise productive leadership that’s followed eagerly.

Of course there are many behavioral and personality traits associated with entrepreneurial instincts, and those are not to be underestimated for the values they bring to the table, but genuinely successful entrepreneurs are historically those who cut out and apply big chunks of management expertise and leadership know-how.

If this subject matter gives you queasy feelings, or you start to hear your knees knocking when someone suggests that a management psychology or professional growth and development or therapeutic group experience might serve your entrepreneurial pursuits big time, take that road less traveled. It pays the biggest dividends.

All there is for certain, you know? 

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 931.854.0474

 “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

Is your business on thin ice, 

racing around in circles,

bashing competitors in the

teeth, and getting nowhere?

If your answer to the headline question above is “YES,” then it’s probably time to pack up your puck and hang up your skates, or look for a different sport for your business.

The problem is not how you got where you are, nor is it –at this point– knowing where you’re going. Like extracting an accident victim from under a car or caved-in roof, concern one needs to be: How to get yourself out.

Entrepreneurs often dig themselves into holes (especially financial ones) while they have their heads down and are charging forward trying to make their ideas work.

The tendency is to grasp desperately at the first straws offered by the first investor who comes along and seems willing to plunk down enough rolls of quarters to post bail and get the new business venture out of the penalty box. Oh, sorry, back to hockey. (I never did like fighting with sticks, and on skates no less.)

The point is that jumping at an expression of interest from a venture capitalist, who may want to own 51-75% of your business is never a good idea . . . unless you’re a serial entrepreneur and looking to get in, make a quick killing, and then get out. And even then, it may not be a wise move. S~L~O~W yourself down. This is marriage.  

Venture capital (VC) deals are particularly risky if you know down deep that the business is teetering (no, not Twitter Tweeting) on the brink of bankruptcy (which is not always evident on the surface . . . and which many entrepreneurs refuse to accept or think about even when it’s staring them in the face!). 

First off, most VC professionals don’t make a practice of investing in incipient bankruptcies, so –even though our unprofessional federal government has proven that it thinks nothing of throwing good tax-dollars after bad business operations– a floundering business startup is not likely to see any real bailout options come along.

Unless money comes from an “Angel Investor.”

An Angel Investor might be Uncle Louie or Auntie Oprah or some recently re-acquainted long-lost college or Army buddy, or a wealthy next door neighbor who’s been watching the business take over the garage and who figures he can always foreclose on your property if a loan isn’t paid, and become a serious land-owner.

Before a struggling venture surfaces long enough to search for financial relief of any kind, it makes the most sense to look first INSIDE to see if overhead and/or operations can be trimmed or scaled back first without sacrificing the essence of the business’s product or service offerings. Note the word “essence.” (“Quality” and “Value” are variables.)

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

 “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

If what’s inside

isn’t shining outside…

your business is in trouble.

You’ve known this since you were a kid and first became interested in business. Your lemonade and comic book stands sold more when you gave that missing tooth smile. Well, you might still be missing a tooth or two, but hopefully you haven’t allowed yourself (chosen) to get lazy about wrapping your bright light around your venture.

I’m not going to lecture you about taking stock and personal inventory and making the most of your charm and all that other stuff that I’ve already printed here at one time or another. You can find it with a couple of the links here and in the search window. I AM going to tell you that there’s no room in entrepreneurship for (choosing) laziness.

If you’re not feeling charged up every day when you jump out of bed, something is not right. 

Have you lost touch with your mission?

With reality?

With those who support you?

With why pursuit of your idea must outweigh your pursuit of money?

Have you become (chosen to be) sidetracked with issues that pull you away from the burning desire you once had to make your ideas work? A family situation? Health problem? Staffing upsets? Investor edginess? Sales failings? Equipment not performing? Well, hey, you got trouble, right here in River City.

Now you can see why “poor management” is the number one reason for business failure? Why, sure: management of personal life, management of employees, management of financial support, management of marketing, management of operations. Trouble is only YOU can fix the ways you deal with any of these issues. And that takes focused energy.

You can never start a fire with a magnifying glass as long as you keep moving the magnifying glass.

Neither is it likely you’ll start a fire by keeping the magnifying glass fixed on a huge fresh-cut tree trunk. Your grip and wrist will give up first. Keep your focus steady. Keep it on paper or kindling and gradually build your fire by adding more and bigger pieces of wood or coal, a little at a time. Keep your energy channeled. Use patience.

Entrepreneurship –contrary to popular belief– is not about leaping wildly from one fire to another. If you could ask Ford and Gates and Oprah and Edison and Jobs and Carnegie, you’d be reminded that they each succeeded by: 1)staying focused, 2) by taking one step at a time, and 3) by believing in themselves!

Can YOU do all three of these things consistently, tenaciously, without giving up on yourself?

If you can–and here’s the simplicity of it all– you will succeed. Period. If you cannot (or are not willing to choose to), don’t whine and cry. There’s plenty of good space for you in government work, and with corporations, where loyalty and CYA behaviors are rewarded over innovation and taking action. Weird, isn’t it?

It’s weird considering America runs (with apologies to Dunkin’ Donuts) on Entrepreneurship, and we have a White House that doesn’t get it. Ah, but less than 19 months left to change “the change.” As for changing what you’re dealing with right now, choose forward motion, then take a step. Now. You can, you know.

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STRATEGY/ CONTENT/ CONNECTION

Higher impact. Lower costs.

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Entrepreneurship & Expansion Coaching    931.854.0474

Go for your goals, thanks for your visit, God Bless You!

OPEN  MINDS  OPEN  DOORS

Make Today A Great Day For Someone!

Not “Wealth” — It’s 

OPPORTUNITY that needs

to be redistributed!

It seems most everyone in the business world agrees that Mr. Obama needs to take an economy lesson from the world’s leading retailer.

Wal-Mart today announced it will be cutting consumer costs across the boards to increase revenues and stimulate some genuine deficit relief. 

Congratulations again, Wal-Mart. It’s no wonder you’re on top. You think and act like a business even when many in government would wish for you to roll over and give up.

Oh, but Mr. Obama, why would you who has dragged America feet first into a socialistic state, and almost necessarily into a companion state of incipient bankruptcy along the way, have any regard for a business solution?

After all, you’ve been doing everything humanly possible to make small business enterprises  (America’s ONLY hope for REAL job creation and economic turnaround) go away.

That is correct, isn’t it? (In fact, if you could just once admit this truth, we could move things forward quicker and much more productively — just get the politics out of it!) 

You offer nice sound bites and token funding through do-nothing federal agencies that duplicate efforts for extra (tax-dollar) pay! — just get the politics out of it!   

Nonetheless, Wal-Mart has got it right. Mr. Obama continues to get it wrong.

We have a man whom many believe falsified his way into the White House (If he didn’t, why has he spent a reported $2 million to cover up his true birth information? Regardless of what’s true, does that make any sense?).

It’s simply further proof of the pudding that questions of propriety have been back-seated to those of political pursuit at all costs. And in the process, business thinking has been relegated to “the kid’s table.”

But that’s what happens when ignorance runs incompetence. 

We have in Mr. Obama, a man who hasn’t a single clue about how business works, and who –adding fuel to the fire– appears utterly incapable of even understanding the need for having a business sense of urgency.

For the sake of all businesspeople everywhere in the U.S. and on the rest of the planet, and for all Americans, let us hope we have learned enough about talking the talk (instead of walking it) that we exercise some damage control and nip his political pursuits in the bud.

The notion that redistributing the wealth is a worthy goal is a mark of total naivety. Redistributing opportunities to those who create the wealth of our nation is where the federal government focus needs to be.

Only by supporting America’s small business growth can America support itself because coming from a position of strength is the only meaningful way to be able to afford to help others to grow.

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 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

If you don’t know how to 

apply what you know,

you know nothing!

I saw some guest blog post somewhere today that made me laugh out loud because it naively proclaims that “expertise trumps experience” and then proceeds to flex 20-something-years-old muscle with empty rants and raves about Internet skills, from blogging to SEO and beyond.

Not being one to let sleeping dogs lie, I submit the following for your consideration:

• Younger generations have quite literally constellations worth of knowledge to offer to any given situation.

• They are born of Google and Microsoft and American Idol and Harry Potter. They are filled with energy drinks that make a cup of coffee seem like Darvon.

• We rickity old antique types watch high performance skateboarders, or teenage text message thumbs at work in astonishment — young people ooze skills that older people could never even have dreamed of possessing.

• And I do once remember hearing, at age 32, that I was “older than dirt” from a 21-year-old who was quite serious at the time. 

Yet something tugs at my sleeve. Is it per chance that discarded old notion of respect for experience?

Perhaps the tugging is because experience is almost necessarily a product of quiet reflection while “expertise” practically requires a shout from the rooftops to get the attention of others. 

Maybe I live in fantasyland, but it seems to me that –other than some phenom celebrity types: Justin and Hanna? Or the dudes who invented Twitter and Facebook– there’s really no one on that horizon of greatness that once ushered in Bill Gates and Steven Jobs.

Ah, but then this isn’t about comparing generations.

It’s about the fact that expertise means absolutely nothing if you don’t have the experience base to know how to use it productively.

No need to look much beyond the world of professional sports for a few hundred perfect examples.

The Internet? Well, aside from Al Gore’s claims to have once invented it, I believe that the “expertise” involved is in fact not with any single age or experience group, and research –even that which is distorted by Internet industry research leaders– is aptly underpinned with total age diversity in the expertise of blogging to SEO and beyond.

Ah, but then this isn’t about the Internet either, really. It’s all about the fact that regardless of all the wonderful online skills in one’s possession, not having a way to get paid for exercising them –because of lack of experience– also means absolutely nothing.

And there’s no need to look much beyond the artificial unemployment figures being cast about by self-serving politicians, who trickle on down from the White House, to clearly see a few million examples.

_____________________

THE BOTTOM LINE:

Expertise (whatever that means, and from whatever sources declare themselves to possess it) is simply a specialized knowledge base of how things happen or function.

Experience is knowing how to put that knowledge base to work to get results.

It’s pretty silly to be trying to make a case for one at the expense of the other. 

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 302.933.0116      Hal@BusinessWorks.US

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Make today a GREAT day for someone!