I’ve been asked a lot lately about business schools and entrepreneurship, which is why I did this post, last Friday, about one thing wrong in that area; and then this one yesterday, on whether business schools can teach entrepreneurship. That’s become a very interesting discussion. I expect to post on it again, if only just to summarize some of those comments.

So, in the meantime, looking at Twitter and comment reactions to yesterday’s post, I sat down today and thought about what you can learn about entrepreneurship in a classroom, that will help you be a successful entrepreneur. Not that you can’t also learn all of this from books, websites, mentors, and advisors too; but learning it in class might be more efficient.

1. Cash flow

Cash flow is critical but not intuitive. Cash isn’t profits. That ebb and flow of cash related to accounts receivable and inventory management, collection days and payment days. This one by itself justifies studying entrepreneurship. Studying this in the classroom is way better than learning it the hard way. One cash flow disaster (running out of money) in business can cost you more than two years in business school. Easily.

2. Business planning

Yes, I really like business planning. I’ve liked it since I was first exposed to it in the middle 1970s. Don’t get bogged down in the formal academic full business plan, necessarily; but business planning is a great way to see a whole business, from strategic focus to objectives to specific milestones, tasks, responsibilities, management, sales, marketing, and finance. And it’s a great tool for teaching.

3. General business fundamentals

Never underestimate the fundamentals of strategy, marketing, data gathering, finance, and analytical thinking. There’s a lot to be said for learning how to translate concepts to numbers and back to concepts. Not to mention vocabulary, and analytical frameworks, and methodologies for isolating problems and layout out solutions. Disciplines and methodologies are good to know. And hey, buzzwords don’t hurt.

4. Communication skills

Writing — clear, simple communication, in practical English sentences — is so important. It is so often underestimated. And presentation skills, focusing on what’s most important and communicating that to others. My experience is that good business schools teach that.

5. Skepticism

A good education can teach you what not to believe, and why not. Enthusiasm is great, and you hear so much about passion and persistence and all, but not without a basis for reviewing what makes sense and what doesn’t.

The question continues: study entrepreneurship, or just jump in? Does a degree help? Can anybody teach entrepreneurship in the classroom? Can anybody learn it?

You may have seen this post here from last week, about one problem with entrepreneurship education. That post was enhanced by John Wren’s comment there:

I haven’t seen any research that shows a connection between being a successful entrepreneur and having studied entrepreneurship, have you?

Interesting emphasis on research there. Can anything be true or false without research? Does a tree fall in the forest if there’s no rigorous research that says so? It would be hard to research this right, because entrepreneurship is a relatively new idea in university business schools. The idea has exploded in the last 10-20 years, but a lot of the all-stars didn’t really have a choice. That makes meaningful research less likely.

Research or not, education is good when it works; when it fits with life. Short cuts are good too. Knowledge is good. Wasting time is bad. All of that can be school.

Education in trade or business related subjects is about making things better, faster, and easier. If you can learn in a day in class what would take you a roller-coaster ride through the hard knocks, is that better? If Bill Gates did Microsoft without studying entrepreneurship, does that mean you don’t want to?

Things change. Shakespeare didn’t have a PhD in Literature. So how did he learn Shakespeare?

I think the value of studying entrepreneurship depends a lot on the specific case. Not that these are the only cases, or polar opposites, but:

• Start with the basic truth of studying what interests you. Don’t study business to get ahead in business; study business because you’re interested. Don’t study literature to get ahead, or science or math, either.
• If life gives you a valid choice, general education is better than business education. I’m really glad I studied Literature first, then Journalism, then business. I’m glad my children majored in education, history, psychology, and political science instead of business. First learn to think, analyze, read, and write, and you can learn business later. Not everybody gets that choice. Not everybody wants it. But if you can, that’s good.
• Entrepreneurship is the best of business. You have to get your head around the whole business, not some functional part. Studying entrepreneurship is the best way to study business.
• It’s not for nothing that I’ve spend a long time focused mainly on business planning. That’s also about getting around the whole business, not just parts. Strategy, operations, marketing, finance, they all come together in startups and small business. Which we call entrepreneurship.
• When it works out right for you it can be a big advantage, you’re already in school, and you’re interested in the subject, it’s a natural part of that time of life that people dedicate to learning, it can be a huge advantage. I did business school exactly at a career inflection point, jumping from business journalism to business, and it worked really well for me. Entrepreneurship would have been even better, but that wasn’t an option. Today, for you, it is.

Ultimately, there’s no formula here that works. You have to decide for yourself. I’m really glad for my two years in business school, even if they weren’t teaching entrepreneurship. That doesn’t mean I recommend it for everybody.

We all forget too easily: the best startup funding is sales. Sure, angel investment, friends and family, SBA loans, all of those options are necessary for most startups. But sales is better.

If you can, find the early customers. Give them a deal, make them important, work with them to optimize their needs; but make a sale.

Even if you need to go out and find investment — and I speak now as an actual angel investor — there’s almost nothing as convincing as actual sales. People are spending money. It makes a new business proposal far more credible.

True, not all businesses can do that. But a lot of them can. And, as we write about business plans and seeking investment and all, we forget the real sweet spot: finance growth by making the sales.

I’m not saying this is the only problem. And, by the way, I’m in favor of entrepreneurship education, when it’s done well. I think it helps … but that’s another post.

It’s a simple story. It’s a real problem with business education concerning entrepreneurship in top institutions. It happens way too often. Not that it’s the only problem with entrepreneurship education, but it’s harder to spot.

Take an imaginary person named Leslie who’s interested in entrepreneurship and wants to study it and then teach it, as a career. Here’s what happens.

First, she enrolls in a good graduate school intending to get a doctorate degree. In business grad schools, the MBAs study for two years to get jobs in business, not to teach business. Yet it takes a doctorate to teach business in a good school, as a career. Yes, there are exceptions to that rule, but Leslie is focused and motivated so she wants the best path to the best career opportunities, which means she needs the PhD degree. That’s a matter of academic records, standardized testing, essays, and recommendations, pretty much the same process people go through to get into college or university.

As she gets used to her studies and the general path to doctorate and teaching career she discovers, within the first year or so, that the academic study of business divides itself into standard groups; marketing, finance, operations, and so on, that don’t really include entrepreneurship (yet). And those functional divisions have generated a small set of academic journals, fewer than the fingers on one hand in most cases, that control her future. And the system of rewards and such within the small world of doctors of business is shockingly (to Leslie) well defined. Here is what she finds out:

1. She can’t get the doctorate without a thesis.
2. She’s not going to get into the upper echelon she wants for her career unless her thesis is published by one of those academic journals.
3. And those journals focus on the standard specialties: marketing, finance, operations, etc. Not entrepreneurship.

Result: if she’s ambitious, Leslie drops the focus on entrepreneurship and moves over to finance or marketing or something else that’s more established within the academic hierarchies. And you, dear reader, can go from there to the other logical conclusions.

Think about the impact on education in entrepreneurship at the big business schools. Maybe it’s a good thing because it means more real-world entrepreneurs teaching, even if they’re normally adjunct instructors instead of professors. And maybe it’s not so good because it relegates entrepreneurship and the study of entrepreneurship to a lower rung on the career ladder. I don’t know.

If you’re out there in academia, reading this, and I’ve got it wrong, please tell me. I’ve had a chance to watch how this works. I haven’t been down this path myself, but I’ve been an adjunct instructor for a few years, teaching one class per year at the University of Oregon.

(photo credit: lynnlin/Shutterstock (modified by me))

It’s not that surprising, really; and we’ve seen it before with Facebook. When Twitter released a new feature, and it’s users didn’t like it, they had to change it back.

The Wired Magazine online story is Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter. I found it interesting reading.

For the same kind of thing in Facebook, here’s a link to a Google search for “Facebook user revolt.”

The user revolt is a high-class problem. It’s the trappings of success. It means 1) you have users; 2) they care about what you’re doing with the site they use; and 3) there’s a forum or medium they can use to make their opinions known.

This is a great sign of real success. It’s a problem only if nobody listens.

(Photo credit: Flickr cc, by Daliborlev)

I’ve complained before, on this blog, about some common misspellings that get to me like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Yesterday Megan tipped me off to 11 Gorgeously Ironic Misspellings In Protest Signs on 11Points.com, by Sam Greenspan. Misspelling is bad, yes, but it’s got to be worse, or at the very least more ironic, when people butcher the language while complaining about language.  The post includes pictures showing the following exact quotes taken from protest signs defending the English language:

• Get a brain, morans
• Respect Are Country, Speak English
• This is America and our only lanaguage is English

You tell me: is that a great argument for basic spelling? It reminds me of Harvard math professor Tom Lehrer’s song Be Prepared, that included the following line:

Be prepared to hold your liquor pretty well
Don’t write naughty words on walls that you can’t spell

Useful sentiment. And, along the same lines, if you’re going to brandish your politics for all to see, in your yard … well, do you think this illustration is purposeful parody?

Finally, back to the xenophobic politics of the English-only crowd, just one last picture:

The photos shown here are just two of the 11 on the original post. Definitely worth a look: 11 Gorgeously Ironic Misspellings In Protest Signs on 11Points.com.

(Photo credit: both of those photos are taken directly from the post on 11Points.com, 11 Gorgeously Ironic Misspellings In Protest Signs)

Ugh, baby boomers, retirement, selling the business … ouch. Strikes me like “lions, tigers, and bears,” in the Wizard of Oz. Scary.

I’m 61. It was my choice to change my job more than two years ago, so that now instead of managing my company with 45 employees I’m writing, speaking, blogging, and teaching. And I thank God that I had that choice. The company’s better off with a new management team, and I’m better off with a new job. But I worry about the rest of us. Retirement scares the hell out of me.

One of my closest friends retired two years ago. Now he’s bored out of his mind, looking for things to do, and not happy about it.

I’ve seen some successful retirements: it seems to work when they jump from one thing to another, something they like, something they’ve always wanted to do. Golf and fishing, or the equivalent, are rarely enough.

One variable that I’m sure matters is liking what you do. As my good friend now retired used to talk about it with relish, just 3-4 years ago, it always sounded great to him, but horrible to me. And, no surprise, he was tired of his work, but had nowhere else obvious to go. I was getting tired of the managing, but I did have somewhere I wanted, badly to go: the writing, speaking, etc. I still love the company I started, just not the day-to-day management of it. I liken my new job here to the concept of a safe harbor. It’s different, it’s easily separable from what I did for years, but it’s still the same company, same industry. And it also keeps me away from meddling with the new management, which (I’m pretty sure) is a relief to them.

Apparently I’m not the only one. I just read Steve King’s Greying of the Workforce post on Small Business Labs. Lots of grey-haired folks are staying on longer. And that’s because they want to, not because they have to.

And then there’s this, which turned up last week in Why Retirement is Bad For You, on Forbes.com

Studies show that men who retired from corporate jobs, donned their gold watches and lazed about at a resort lived measurably shorter lives than those who sought productive work (e.g., volunteering for organizations like SCORE, the Service Corps of Retired Executives). In fact, plenty of retirees who traded productive work for sunshine and early-bird dinners dropped dead surprisingly soon after making the transition.

That seems like a variation on the same theme. Those older people in the work force are probably way better off for it, at least if they figure out how to be in jobs they like. Maybe that’s the best answer to an aging population?

It’s one of those days. Maybe you have technical problems, or a project that isn’t going well, you couldn’t sleep last night, you’ve run into a writer’s block or thinker’s block or city block. Maybe you just lost a client. Or learned about a powerful new competitor. Or maybe it’s simply just a bad day. It happens.

These are things that help break up a bad day.

1. Clean up the clutter.

Put on some music you like. Throw things out. Find the desk space down at the bottom of all the papers, books, cables, envelopes, and so on. You’ll be amazed at how much better you’ll feel in just a few minutes.

Second prize: clean out your digital clutter. Start with email. Sort into categories (folders or tags) for things you should keep, and archive. Empty the inbox.

Grand prize: take an hour or two. Do both.

2. Do one of those nagging-annoying tasks you’ve been avoiding.

Your business life is full of small annoying tasks you put off. Most of us rationalize that we have other more important, or more urgent, things to do, and we let this go. It’s that list you promised, the research you wanted to do, maybe it’s a call or a letter or email task you’ve been avoiding. Get this one done and you’ll feel better about everything else.

3. Exercise. Take a walk. Or a run.

Break out of your routine. Exercise is funny because of what John Jantsch, the marketing guru, called the math of exercise: the time you take gives you more time later. Particularly when you’re in that droopy slump time. Break it up, get out, come back to it later, fresh.

4. Do something Creative. Draw something. Write a haiku. Or a blog post.

What I mean is do something creative. Seriously, a haiku is a great mood changer: just three lines. Try this search for haiku on Twitter, and you’ll see. And if that’s too much, do whatever you do when you want to break the mood. Or, how about this: write an email to somebody you care about, not about business, just catching up with things.

5. Indulge somebody else.

My point 4 above reminded me: if the first thought is to go get yourself a chocolate and a hug somewhere, indulge yourself. But this is even better: indulge somebody else. Don’t get yourself a candy and a hug, give both to somebody else. Or call your mother or your sister or your spouse. Buy a kid you know a book you think they’d like.

There’s research I saw in the New York Times that shows spending money on somebody else is more likely to buy happiness than spending it on yourself. Here’s a quote:

“These experimental results,” the researchers conclude, “provide direct support for our causal argument that spending money on others promotes happiness more than spending money on oneself.”

So, seriously, have a good day.

(Note: I posted this on Huffington Post yesterday. I’m reposting here because this is my main blog.)

Today’s a good day to post on my angel investment experience, because this afternoon I’ll be speaking to a group on this subject in Corvallis, Oregon. What I want to do is just describe how it went for me, one set of eyes, one viewpoint, without making any generalizations about the rest of the world of angel investing.

Last February I joined Willamette Angel Conference (WAC), an angel investment group in the southern Willamette Valley, including Eugene and Corvallis. Here’s what happened. 

• It started for me with the discovery, in early February, that the buy-in price was $5,000 plus $250 in fees. I always thought of angel investment as a matter of putting $50K or $100K or more into a startup. But I could manage $5K.
• The group entity was an LLC of which every member had shares depending on how many $5K shares he or she signed up for.
• I had to certify that I’m an “accredited” investor. Nobody audited my books or anything, but I did have to sign a paper guaranteeing that I met the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) guidelines. Details of that here. The point is that this is a very risky investment, and you have to be able to just plain lose that money.
• I got access to Angelsoft.net for the WAC group. There were 43 potential investments submitted to the group by late March.
• We – about 25 members, each of whom had at least one $5K share in the group — met in the evening every Monday in April. In our first meeting we narrowed the 43 plans to 13 (we had aimed for 15, but there was a natural break at 13). In the next two meetings, we studied the 13 remaining plans. We listened to pitch presentations by the entrepreneurs, and asked questions. We divided into smaller teams to visit their offices, if possible, and talk to them. In the last April meeting, we chose five finalists, and divided into groups, again, to look at them in more detail.
• In a last evening meeting in early May, we shared additional information on the five finalist companies.
• At an all-day event in middle May, we heard presentations again along with an audience of several hundred people, and voted a winner.
• My wife an I now have a small equity share in CenterSpace Software, of Corvallis, the winner we (the investor group) chose.

From my point of view, as someone who’s raised VC money for my own company and been on the board of a company that raised VC money and went public quickly, has taught entrepreneurship and consulted to VCs, and has mentored a lot of startups, and judged business plan competitions, it was an extremely satisfying role reversal to sit on the investor side of the table. I enjoyed the meetings thoroughly. I read the business plans, paid attention to the pitch presentations, asked questions, and enjoyed meeting and working with the other investors. This was all good.

I liked this experience so much that this autumn I agreed to be investor chair for next year’s version.

If this sounds interesting to you, look for local angel investment groups in your area. Ask your Chamber of Commerce. Browse the Web. Go look at Angelsoft.net.

(Photo credits: Willamette Angel Conference)

You could call this post the taxonomy of trolls. I thought there were fairy-tale creatures, ugly and mean, living under a bridge, interfering with innocent travelers. It turns out, though, they’re real. Just like in the three billy goats gruff fairy tale, they are hiding along the way, jumping out to cause trouble.

I like puns and I like the potential double meaning with trolls. First there’s the beast or character of the troll, like in the fairy tale. And then there’s the verb, trolling, which I think of from 50 years ago when my granddad took me fishing. We’d put the baited hook into the water and move the boat slowly, trolling for fish.

I’ve happened upon several kinds of trolls in business. Maybe you’ll recognize some of these. Better yet, maybe you can avoid them on your travels.

1. Patent trolls. They buy up rights to otherwise useless or abandoned patents and hoard them until they can spring them on unsuspecting businesses. The mere threat of legal action is worth lots of money these days. Do you think it’s coincidence that the vast majority of patent troll lawsuits are filed in a single county in Texas? I don’t. I think that county has developed a symbiotic relationship with patent trolls. Encourage the trolls, get the revenue. The problem is that technology overwhelmed the government so much that the patent system couldn’t keep up with it. A lot of bad patents were issued. They become opportunities to quasi-extort money from innocent companies. These are double trolls: troll creatures (noun) who troll (verb) for opportunities.
2. Idea trolls. Seth Godin posted Trolls last week, referring to people who “gain perverse pleasure in relentlessly tearing you and your ideas down.” It made me feel better to see that even he – because I so admire his work — gets attacked by trolls. He said:
   

   1. trolls will always be trolling
   2. critics rarely create
   3. they live in a tiny echo chamber, ignored by everyone except the trolled and the other trolls
   4. professionals (that’s you) get paid to ignore them. It’s part of your job.

3. Politics-as-business trolls. I don’t mind political opinions, particularly not in blogs, but I do get annoyed by people whose approach is as a small business expert who has dipped their business expert brand into political mudslinging. The right-wingers who object to everything the government does as bad for small business, or the left-wingers who applaud everything the government does as good for small business. I hate the way they hide their politics in business terms.
4. Social media trolls. Talk about explosive growth—how about the growth in social media trolls. These two are trolls as creatures, but they’re also trolling around, looking for opportunities. Like the people who use Twitter or Facebook as media for selling things to people they don’t know, who haven’t asked; now that we’ve interacted in Twitter, will you tell your company to buy my product? Not to mention the annoying recent development of people selling things by tweeting with my Twitter name “@timberry” with a Web address to go to. I hate to think what some unsuspecting person gets if they go to that link. And it’s not like they’ve interrupted my account or done it as me; they just put my name in the sentence. Bummer.
5. Trade-show trolls. This is another double-troll situation because these trolls troll the trade shows catching the poor people behind the tables, staffing the booths, making them exposed and unable-to-escape victims of unwanted sales pitches. And the double-troll-trouble gets doubled again –- maybe that’s cubed – because the companies who pay for exhibition space become victims of trolls who didn’t pay for space but troll for sales victims anyhow. My particular favorite (not!) are the ones who want to sell competing goods or services.

(Photo credit: by John Bauer, via Wikipedia)