Morning Briefings

Scary Halloween for retailers: Operators of local outlets are spooked by a drop in sales this season; theft has been more prevalent this year.

– Lou Ponsi
Orange County Register

Now is a great time to start a company. Why? Because great people are available to join you, VCs are loaded with cash, and office space is available cheap. Everything is cheap and readily available in a recession. Expectations are lower during bad times so it is a good time to be in development mode, building a product, getting an audience, and starting a tiny revenue stream. Customers are willing to try new things to save money in bad times. If you can save them money, they are happy to deal with a startup. Go for it!

– Don Dodge
The Next Big Thing

Never ask anyone to do something that you wouldn’t do: This goes for customers (’fill out these twenty-five fields of personal information to get an account’) to employees (’fly coach to Mumbai, meet all day the day you arrive, and fly back that night.’)

– Guy Kawasaki
Five most important lessons I’ve learned as an entrepreneur

Fear can be the single biggest obstacle a person faces when trying to accomplish a goal. Unfortunately, it seems that modern society has developed into a fear-worshipping machine. Fear, more than any other emotion, is what drives people to do what they do. And most of that fear is irrational.

– Levi Brackman and Sam Jaffe
Jewish Wisdom for Business Success

Memo to law enforcement investigators tracking down who broke into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account: Gabriel Ramuglia might be a good place to start. ‘Usually, this sort of thing would be hard to track down because it’s Yahoo email,’ said the 25-year-old operator of Ctunnel.com, the browsing proxy service used by the group that hacked into the vice presidential candidate’s personal email account. ‘Since they were dumb enough to post a full screenshot that showed most of the URL, I should be able to find that in my log.’

– Dan Goodin
Not Quite Anonymous, The Register

Try stuff. Luck is a big part of many successes, so (a) don’t get too bummed out when you see a bozo succeed; and (b) luck favors the people who try stuff, not simply think and analyze. As the Chinese say, ‘One must wait for a long time before a Peking duck flies into your mouth.’

– Guy Kawasaki
Five most important lessons I’ve learned as an entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs sacrifice homes to save business: Study of 2.7 million small U.S. businesses showed the most severely delinquent business owners continued to pay their company’s bills even as they skipped mortgage payments.

– Jan Norman
Jan Norman on Small Business blog

Business is a race to see who can be the first to bring a product to the customer, and inventions and ideas are often born simultaneously around the world by any number of unrelated individuals.

– Yvon Chouinard
Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

Make a little progress every day: I used to believe in the big-bang theory of marketing–a fantastic launch that created such inertia that you flew to ‘infinity and beyond.’ Now my theory is you make a little progress every day–whether that’s making your product slightly better, increasing your skill in one small way, or closing one more customer.

– Guy Kawasaki
Five most important lessons I’ve learned as an entrepreneur

Cash is what keeps the doors open and pays the bills. As my mother used to say, ‘Sales fixes everything.’

– Guy Kawasaki
Five most important lessons I’ve learned as an entrepreneur

What does the world want? Build a company that answers this question in all its shades of meaning, and you’ve unlocked the most intricate riddle of marketing, of business, and arguably of human culture itself.

– John Battelle
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

See-saw power: We’ve already written about the use of playground equipment as a means of pumping fresh water for African villages, and now a British student at Coventry University has come up with a way to use see-saws to generate power.

– As reported on
Guy Kawasaki’s blog