Welcome to the Carnival of Entrepreneurship!

Hello and welcome to this week's edition of the Carnival of Entrepreneurship. This carnival is a weekly roadshow featuring tips and inspiration for starting and running your own business. The format is such that the host -- myself in this case -- picks their favorite seven posts for the week. Thank you to all who submitted. There were many great ones. Lets get started. A post from David Maister starts us out this week. He presents The Power of Principles at David Maister's Passion, People and Principles. In this post, David talks about the "challenges facing businesses today and the principles that define successful business and managers." One of the key messages I passed on was that the elements of good management often sound like “moral” points – you “should” care about clients and customers and you “should” act as if you cared about whether your employees are engaged and enthused. In the past, I used to apologize for this and say “it’s not a moral point, it just works in business!” I think alot of what he is saying also plays a part in the culture of the company. It is also defined in the mission and values of the company. If you can latch on to that mission and those values, it should help create a successful environment. Our next post is from David Lorenzo. He presents The Eight-Step Process to Manage Your Emotions posted at The Career Intensity Blog. This post is all about the balance a business leader needs to have between emotions and intellect. The most sound strategic thinkers make decisions based upon a harmonious blend of emotional and intellectual drives. Their passions incite them to act, and their minds guide them in navigating and making solid choices. Neither force overwhelms the other. They exist in peaceful synergy. As the business leader goes through the day to day -- ups, downs, good times and bad ones -- it is important to keep a balanced head on his/her shoulders. The business is counting on them to make the right decision and not let emotion take the upper hand. It is also important for the leader to believe in the decision that is being made. So maybe this is a emotionally calculated and balanced decision maker? It is also important for this leader to use his/her team while making these decisions. Pawel at Software Project Management presents How to Make Decision with a Team. Despite the last word belongs to the leader, the team should feel they’re important. They should feel their opinions matter. They should feel the leader wants to listen to them. To be honest, more important is what they feel, not what’s the truth. Even if the leader doesn’t really listen to the team he should try to create impression that he does. That’s better than nothing. I can again tie these all back to setting up your company culture. Employees will respond better if they feel they are actually needed. In a small business, this is important as they reflect your brand image and the over all success of your venture. So far I have focused on leadership in small business but what about the innovation of the product or service? David Daniels presents Innovation Brain Freeze posted at Business & Technology Reinvention. You have your team in place and the leaders trained and ready to lead but how much can your team handle? So here is the most scuccessful company in the world, a multi-billion dollar enterprise saying they have 70 things that tally $7 Billion. Can it be done? I tend to agree with Ballmer that Microsoft can because of their vast resource pool. But what do you do if you're a smaller business without the funding to do whatever you want from an R&D perspective? How many innovation areas should you set for your organization before it gets "brain freeze"? I'm a believer in doing 4 things incredibly well vs. spreading myself thin over 15 things that end up being done poorly. So one answer is to get more done with less. But that's too simple an answer. Make sure that your team can handle the load and that you are producing the best products/services that you can. David goes into a list that can act as a guideline of sorts to make sure that you are not going after to much of the apple. If you are going to dive into entrepreneurship and owning your own business you have to remember that it is hard to jump in part of the way. It is going to change your life. Emmanuel Oluwatosin presents Emmanuel Oluwatosin: Inspiring Excellence, Realising Ambitions » Entrepreneurship is Not for the Faint of Heart… It is a Vocation & a Lifestyle posted at Emmanuel Oluwatosin: Inspiring Excellence, Realising Ambition. It’s a scary world out there and you are definitely going to take some hard knocks along the way. And the one you just survived is not going to be as difficult as the next. The good news is, when all has gone to the bottom of the barrel, there is only one direction to go and that’s up. Our business has found many of these "hard knocks" but that is part of what we get for signing up for this game. You kick back and learn from it. I like what this post has to say about getting with others in the same place and those that have gotten through it. Find a mentor and be willing to take the advice humbly and learn from it. Dr. Jeffrey Cornwal presents a guide for first time angel investing in our next post. In today's world of high growth venture investing, angels most often provide the seed or early stage money. Know the likelihood that the deal will need future rounds of financing, and if there is even a remote chance that it will, structure the deal in a way that will make in attractive to future investments by VCs. Some angels try to protect their investment from possible future dilution only to block any VC interest in providing needed Series A financing later. That can actually limit possible returns for the angel by limiting the upside potential of the deal. Angel investing seems to be a major source of funding these days for many start-ups so it is important for the entrepreneur to also know how this works as it will better their chances of gaining this type of capital and start-up money. For those of you that are first time visitors to this blog, A Thought Over Coffee, I write quite a bit about environmental issues. I love seeing businesses that are offering "green" services and practice "green" habits. This next post fits right in. Trent presents Plantronics Offers Green Headsets posted at Stock Market Beat. If oil rises to $100 (42 percent from current levels) and solar power costs are cut in half over the next five years (both of which seem to us to be within the range of reasonable expectations) the payback on solar power systems will be 7 years without subsidies. At least in places like Santa Cruz. And that kind of potential is what keeps venture capital dollars flowing. Although there are more than financial reasons for doing a project like this, it is great to see businesses that are giving back to the environment. We are entering an age were customers are becoming more environmentally friendly and -- in many areas -- appreciate a company that is doing what they can to help. This post also gives a nice list of interesting things about the alternative energy market and how businesses can jump on the chances to get involved. That will do it for this week's edition of the Carnival of Entrepreneurship. Thank you to everyone who submitted a post for this week. We had 15 submissions and they could have all been featured. Rules are rules, however. Please check out the past editions of this festival at it's home page over at About.com's Entrepreneur Guide. You can submit your posts for the next edition of the carnival here. Matt Inglot is slated to host the next carnival so stay tuned.. ..be bold Tagged: carnival of entrepreneurship, small business, entrepreneurship, start-up