Weekly Links

Scot McKnight writes about homeschooling with, get this, a Germany and Memphis connection

Making lemonade out of lemons - found out about this movie on Seth Godin's blog. The idea is that sometimes the best entrepreneurial moments come out of times of crisis

Starting a Church Without Losing Your Soul - by Ed Stetzer

Audio & Video from the Acts 29 Church Planting Bootcamp in Raleigh

Ten Reasons why Churches Stall - Tim Chester

10 Tips for Missional Communities

The Laws of Pareto & Parkinson

Here's part 2 of my review on Tim Ferriss' The 4-Hour Workweek.  Pareto's Law, named for an economist named Vilfredo Pareto and often referred to as the "80/20" Principle, states that 80% of the wealth is possessed by 20% of the population.  You've also no doubt heard this principle when dealing with volunteers (it's used in the church world quite often).  Here we say that 80% of the work is performed by 20% of the volunteers.  

Ferriss applies this principle to our outputs and inputs.  In other words, he says that 80% of our results (outputs) come from 20% of our effort and time (inputs).  If this is the case, then we need to figure out how to not only guard that 20%, but to purge as much of the wasted time so that we can do more that truly produces results, as well as do more of the things that bring joy and fulfillment to our lives.  This speaks into the myth that business = productivity. 

 

The second law he mentions is Parkinson's Law.  This law speaks to the need to shorten deadlines so that focus and quality are the result.  If you have two days to finish a project because you are going on vacation, you finish the project in two days, even when the project normally takes a week to accomplish.  If we have 8 hours to fill, we will fill it, but it doesn't guarantee that we will accomplish anything.  He refers to this as the "9-5 Illusion."    

In bringing these two laws together, Ferriss states:

If you haven't identified the mission-critical tasks and set aggressive start and end times for their completion, the unimportant becomes the important. Even if you know what's critical, without deadlines that create focus, the minor tasks forced upon you (or invented, in the case of the entrepreneur) will swell to consume time until another bit of minutiae jumps in to replace it, leaving you at the end of the day with nothing accomplished.

The 4-Hour Workweek

This weekend I started reading The 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss.  I remember looking at this book when I came out, but was decided not to pick it up after reading some negative reviews on Amazon.  However, a few weeks ago I read a great review of it, and decided to check it out at the library.  I'm glad I did.  Though I can understand where the negative reviews come from, it has already been extremely helpful to me.  Over the next few weeks I'm going to try to make some small changes in the way I work that I believe will make big differences.

Here are a few thoughts from the first few chapters that have been meaningful to me:

He shares in the Introduction how he hates being asked the "cocktail" questions, "So, what do you do?"  He says that it "reflects an epidemic I was long part of:  job descriptions as self-descriptions (6)."  He goes on to say, "How can I possibly explain that what I do with my time and what I do for money are compltely different things?"  As I said in a previous post, I've just started a real estate investing business, and although I really like this work, it's not what defines me.  And even though I am doing this so that it will allow me to do the work that God has called me to (pastoring a church), that's not entirely what defines me either.

Doing less meaningful work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness.  This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.  Few people choose to (or are able to) measure the results of their actions and thus measure their contribution in time.  More time equals more self-worth and more reinforcement from those above and around them (32-33).

Boy, do I struggle with this!  I think it has something to do with the fact that most of my work life has been entrepreneurial in nature, and most of it has been without punching a clock. Though this is great for me, it's often been difficult to know when I've done enough.  There are two reasons for this:  (1) I love my work, and (2) the work is never complete.  I despise laziness, so I work hard.  However, is my work always productive?  That's the big question.  

In chapter 5 he talks about the difference between being effective and being efficient.  He states, "Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals.  Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible.  Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe" (67).  He goes on to give the example of the person who checks email 30 times per day.  I have a habit of keeping Outlook open, and, if I receive an email, I often "tackle" it immediately.  So my first plan of action is to open up Outlook and respond to email only five times per day during this week.  He recommends doing this only twice a day.  I'll hopefully get there, but we've got to start with baby steps!  I'm also thinking the same way with tasks such as paying bills.  

Ferriss next gives two truisms that I felt were worth giving thought to:

1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
   
2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

I'll try to write more tomorrow on Pareto's Law and Parkinson's Law. 

Prison Entrepreneurship Program in Fast Company

Rising Star: Prison Entrepreneurship Program

From: FastCompany.com By: Fast Company staff

Catherine F. Rohr, CEO
Houston, Texas
pep.org

A large percentage of inmates come to prison as seasoned entrepreneurs, having run highly successful enterprises such as drug rings and gangs. What if these influential leaders were provided with the training and resources to establish and run legitimate companies?

The Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP) links executives and inmates through entrepreneurial passion, education and mentoring. The program engages the nation's top business and academic talent to constructively redirect inmates' energies by equipping them with values-based entrepreneurial training--enabling them to productively re-enter society.

In three years since inception, PEP has dramatically reduced return-to-prison rates: its graduates' return-to-prison rates are 3.7%, compared to the national average of more than 50%. The program has a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 150%, and has assisted 40 participants in starting their businesses. PEP has recruited 800+ senior level executives and venture capital/private equity professionals who serve as inmates' mentors and business plan judges. Additionally, the program has established affiliations with 12 top-tier MBA programs, including Harvard and Stanford, whose 400+ students serve as weekly advisors for the inmates' business plans. The program's innovative work has won several awards, and has received coverage on NBC Nightly News and in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur Magazine.

PEP's five-year vision includes:

• Growing its budget from $2MM to $15MM
• Graduating 1,000 inmates per year
• Assisting 500 graduates in launching successful businesses
• xpanding staff from 17 to 125 employees

PEP is hiring successful, motivated entrepreneurial-types. Ready to jump ship? Email: recruiting@pep.org

Guy Kawasaki's New Web Startup

I've been a big fan of Guy Kawasaki ever since I heard him speak at a nonprofit boot camp hosted by Craigslist a couple of years ago in San Francisco. I just read this interview with him in Entrepreneur magazine. It's about a new website he's just created called Truemors, short for "true rumors." It's a social media site, but it's also a business startup, and the purpose of the interview is to show that it doesn't take big bucks to start something successful. As someone trying to get two new organizations off the ground (without much money), I found this very helpful.


Here are a few excerpts...

Truemors is a functioning illustration of what it takes to launch a web startup these days. It didn't involve gobs of VC funding or years of development and testing. It may or may not turn into a big moneymaking enterprise, but entrepreneurs can learn a lot from Kawasaki's experience with getting Truemors off the ground and onto the internet. The startup guru took a few moments away from his new venture to answer our questions.

How did you fund Truemores?
So far, it's only cost about $12,000, so it was personally [funded]. Whenever I need more capital, I make another speech--a fraction of a speech, actually. This beats sucking up to VCs, and I'm a VC.

Lots of people said they could do Truemors for less money by shaving off domain registration costs here, legal costs there, etc. Yes, people could do almost everything that I did for less, saving a few thousand dollars. But the point wasn't to go from $12,000 [in startup costs] to $7,000. It was going from $1 million to $12,000.

You spent no money on marketing. Is this approach something the average internet startup entrepreneur could get away with?
No, but it's certainly not the case that you have to have millions of dollars to market something on the internet. You'd get that impression from most pitches to VCs. I was fortunate and did it for close to nothing, so anyone should be able to do it for $50,000 to $100,000.

What advice would you share with other entrepreneurs about this startup experience?
The most important lessons are: Do things quick, dirty and fast; don't wait for the perfect time/market/product; ignore the naysayers--odds are they are right, but you'll never know unless you try; and keep things cheap so you can make a lot of mistakes.

What does the fact that you were able to create a web startup so quickly and inexpensively tell us about the state of web entrepreneurship in general?
Now more than ever, people should give it a shot to create the next Google, You-Tube, Facebook, eBay, whatever. You can get things done so much cheaper, faster and better because of tools like MySQL and WordPress as well as the willingness of the crowds. There are many tech businesses that take millions to start, but there are many that can be done on credit cards. I hope I've proven that.