I just posted some thoughts on how the design is the solution over at Online Biz Outfitters.

I firmly believe this and tied it to what I have called the 10 Immutable Design Principles.

These are design principles everyone should keep in mind whenever they do any kind of design work.

I blended some thoughts from different sources because I felt that in all cases, the original focus was too narrow and left out something crucial.

We’ll see how this stands the test of time and subsequent ruminations.

Here’s a quote from the opening stanzas.Follow the link to get the rest of the story.

Every online business has a purpose; every web site has a purpose. The online business is essentially the web site and everything around it.

This means that your web site is the solution; the solution to how you the owner operator want to do business and to how you provide value to your customers.

But how did you get there? You started with nothing and evolved.

The evolution may or may not have followed a really firm plan or path, but you got there.

Along the way you made decisions: decisions about how things should look and feel, for instance

via The Design is the Solution – Online Biz Outfitters.

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I posted a thought piece at Online Biz Outfitters yesterday. It was a story I came across many years ago in a delightful little book by Eugene Herrigel called “Zen and the Art of Archery.”

I was very active in archery at the time and shot pretty much every day. When I’m interested in something I typicaly read everything I can get my hands on that seems relevant and helpful. Which is how I found Herrigel’s little gem.

Even if you’re not into archery, the story has general relevance. I think of it as The Parable of the Empty Cup. Here’s the introduction. As per usual, follow the link to get the rest of the story. 

Everybody struggles to get things done fast enough and well enough. Well, let’s share a powerful productivity trick: empty your cup. Of all the things we can do, correcting our thinking is perhaps the most important.

This is why we want to share with you a great (and true) story that stops pretty much everyone in their tracks and make them think.

It is both inspirational and motivating besides being quite funny. But rather than us being mysterious, move on and read it for yourself.

via Powerful Productivity Trick: Empty Your Cup – Online Biz Outfitters.

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I have been remiss in keeping up with my blogging and tweeting of late.

The reason is an exciting personal project that has been simmering on the back burner for quite some time.

I have called it Online Biz Outfitters at onlinebizoutfitters.com

I have been operating web sites since 1999 and while not as expert as some, I have learned quite a lot about what it takes to get a site up and running, maintaining it and creating content.

Over the years I started and abandoned several blogs, but my latest venture here at Preben Ormen’s Blog finally found some legs of its own.

Early Aspirations

At the beginning my aspirations for my blog were quite lofty, but it became clear that doing too many things at once becomes confusing to readers.

I have had the opportunity to meet or learn from some very talented and experienced people in the online marketing world and I felt it was time to start putting some of this back out there.

Despite a wealth of information about how to successfully set up a web site to attract readers and customers, it can be a bumpy ride to learn even the basics even for the best of us.

The Internet is vast and diverse and that is the problem. Just sorting through all of this takes time.

The Opportunity

It occurred to me that there is an opportunity here to offer a long awaited service to simply and clearly describe some leading practices that work and a set of products, tools and services to build with.

As with anything else, there are more options than we can make use of. But we don’t need them all; we just need those that work reliably together for us.

And that is the rub: so much of this is software based and software has glitches. A perfect program or plugin may have all you want; except it collides with something else you can’t live without. If you have been reading this blog for awhile, you will have seen my own account of some very painful recoveries from colliding plugins. The worst was when I lost all category links for over 300 posts. Ai, that hurt.

Who is Online Biz Outfitters For?

Online Biz Outfitters is aimed at people who:

• are entrepreneurs, small and medium sized business owners or professionals, who
• want to build, grow and prosper with their online business, who
• want change now because things are not working the way they should

Online Biz Outfitters was started to address a very specific need for online business builders and marketers:

• The lack of a clearly described solution for getting an online business up and running from scratch to making money and then growing it to where you would prosper as a successful owner of your own online biz.

Our aim is to provide guidance for every step of the way for a solution built up from components that will work together.

In short, we do the research so you don’t have to. Then we share, so you learn faster. This way you can get your online biz up and running faster than working on your own. In essence, it is  just like what you would expect to get from a traditional guide and outfitter for  fishing, hunting or back country horseback riding. They got the basics figured out so you can enjoy the trip you came for.

We call this the Online Biz System and base it on what we call “plug-and-earn.”

You get it: Making money online shouldn’t be hard.

A Point of View

The site will have a point of view, so in that sense it is not unbiased. It is officially biased towards those things that we know work together because we use them ourselves. And that’s the crux: I will share our own experience.

The focus is on three key areas:

• Web Hosting (the right host makes a big difference – we have opinions)
• Web Design (the right design makes a difference – we have opinions)
• Marketing Tools (the right marketing tools and the knowledge to use them effectively makes a difference – we have opinions)

Where We are Now

I am building a team behind this site; a team of select contributors who are experts in their field who want to share.

The site has just launched in the sense that I opened it for spidering and indexing. Currently, the content is light, but will change daily.

It’s of course a truism that things always take longer than expected, especially anything to do with information technology; so also with Online Biz Outfitters. I have been racing to get this up to the point where I can start concentrating on content and less on design and functionality. There is still some work to do there, but the foundation is in place.

You see, I am going on a long vacation out of the country shortly and wanted to have nothing major outstanding so I could see what it would be like to support this from a remote location. Where we’re going  should fit that bill nicely as it is a poor country (but interesting) and not just around the corner, that’s for sure.

So I hope you will take a minute to check it out and follow along as the site grows. It will be especially interesting to see what it takes to support this from abroad.

Many online businesses are run by owner operators who are totally reliant on their own time to get results. Taking time off can be scary, so here’s a real live experiment coming up.

Should be interesting.

If you enjoyed this content and want more like it ... go here: Preben Ormen's Blog - Leadership - Management - Projects - Productivity

I was skimming some information about EPM or Enterprise Performance Management for a client presentation when I came across a statement (no source attribution) about how 80% of all executives still get their information from Excel. This brought the association that Oh My God, it’s still stuck in the system after all these years.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of that statement, but it feels right. We talk about living in the information age, but we are still relying on remarkably simple tools. And it’s not so strange, really-

Most corporations have monolithic information systems to store all their transactions and information. Almost none of these systems were ever created to be fully inter-operative with other systems. Despite all the sales hoopla about easy reporting and access to integrated information and so on, getting anything out of these systems is typically so hard it defies belief.

I’ve been around these puppies for 40 years and I would say it is only marginally easier to extract information for reporting purposes today compared to, say the ‘70’s.

I understand full well why we use Excel so much, but the costs are high; much higher than we want to admit. All the Big 4 accounting firms have done research on spreadsheet models because so much of their audit work relies on information from spreadsheet. So if you are signing off on the financial statements of a corporation where most of the information comes from spreadsheets you want to know that the spreadsheets are reliable.

In fact, and as a rule, they are not. And the bigger the spreadsheets, the bigger the problem. It is notoriously difficult to validate the accuracy and completeness of spreadsheet calculations. Spreadsheet software was not built to some unified design, they evolved.

Added to this is the fact that most users are not programmers and have little or no formal training in the art and practice of software development or creation of computer models.

The net result is what we see in practice today. Simple little spreadsheets are all over the place and represent as many versions of the truth as there are users.

In certain pockets, like accounting and finance, spreadsheets have taken on the proportions of minor religions complete with macro gurus and high priests of budgeting and planning.

Some of the spreadsheet models I have seen over the years are mind boggling in their complexity. Most of them can only be maintained by one person and in one case this was a consultant who now had a steady, predictable 3 month project every year at budget time. Nice work if yo can get it, I suppose.

Budgeting and planning is a good example of complicated models, because this is fairly difficult to model because the model itself changes continuously as the organization grows and contracts and reorganizes small or large parts to fit the market, the product mix or the latest panic in the executive suite.

And to be fair, some of the so-called robust tools are bears to implement and maintain. And that is just building the data model and populating with data. Getting reports out is just as hard as from the underlying ERP system itself. The data just moved to another place.

As much as managers and executives say they love reporting dashboards, few are willing to pay price to have these things built and then maintaining them.

Wa are stuck in an information technological quagmire of extraordinary proportions. I don’t see a smooth way out with the current, mainstream tools. This makes it difficult for the vendors, too, because without customers they cannot justify investing in new development.

Perhaps, we just have to wait it out till a new generation gets their hands on purse strings and gas pedals. I doubt that the young folks entering the work force will be as patient as we have been. I suspect that they will have a greater appetite for building information integration and reporting solutions that actually does what information technology has been promising all along: get us the timely and reliable information we need to make better decisions.

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But first some background. We have a new camera and there’s a lot to learn. These units can do so much now that it is almost a super human effort to figure out how to actually use all the functions.

We’re going on vacation to Nicaragua shortly and bought this new camera for the occasion. I’m wondering if it will take more than one vacation to master this unit. The good thing is that we are motivated to slog through it.

As an aside, I have to ay that the image quality is astounding when shot in 18 megapixels. The resolution allows such closeups in post production that it essentially gives you an extra lens for free.

Once again, the technology is capable of more than the operator can make it do.

Back to the title association. We abolished slavery in most parts of the world quite some time ago, but isn’t it curious to see how some terminology lingers on in isolated contexts?

The camera connection is the use of the term “slave” to describe a connection between a remote unit and some other function on the camera, in this case the flash.

My ditzy association was that multiple slave units in multiple groups sounds like a description of matrix management, and quite a good, succinct one at that.

Now, consider the ridiculous thought experiment where you are a farm consultant 2-3-400 years ago trying to build some business with a new management fad. How would it go over, do you think, if you could travel back and suggest matrix slave management?

Probably not so good as this was a time when management problems on the estates running slaves was a binary problem: Shall we whip them or not?

Then I had the sad realization that this binary approach to management is not so different from what we see in many organizations today. Like it or not.

We don’t physically whip anyone anymore, of course, but we are heavy users of equivalents. Fear and retribution is still a major management tool. We reward or punish. Binary response, no? After all these years, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Can’t we do better? Faster?

If you enjoyed this content and want more like it ... go here: Preben Ormen's Blog - Leadership - Management - Projects - Productivity