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Kell on Earth Teaches About Small Business Failure

Startup Sunday

There are plenty of blogs and articles written about startup success and making your first million. Harder to find: advice on overcoming a small business failure.

That's one reason I've become hooked on Kell on Earth, a new Bravo reality television show about Kelly Cutrone, the founder and owner of People's Revolution, a public relations firm for the fashion industry, and a single mom of a 7-year old daughter. Kell on Earth displays the good, bad and ugly of running your own small business. But often it's the ugly that fills the screen: demanding clients, overwrought employees, trouble getting paid and the inevitable small business failure.

In a recent episode, Kelly Cutrone and her team knock themselves out to produce a fashion show on a tight budget, but the client ends up disappointed and decides to fire People's Revolution. It just so happened that the week this episode aired, I was struggling with my first big setback in my own business. It was so cathartic to watch Kelly take the phone call in which she was fired, visibly swallow her disappointment, and move on to the next task at hand. Sure, it took me about 10 days to digest my own sense of failure and upset emotions, but hopefully the next setback will go down easier, until I can turn on a dime when things don't go my way.

Because inevitably, you'll experience a small business failure. Maybe you lose a big customer you were counting on. Or a vital employee decides to leave your company. We've all seen how the economic cycle can wreak havoc with the best-laid business plan.

A Mother's Pro-Choice Mantra

Sharing Saturday   

I am 47 years old and quite wise in the ways of preventing pregnancy. However, if by some crazy chance I were to get pregnant at this late stage of life, I know what I would need to do.  I am not about to move back into the baby business with my youngest of three teetering on the brink of independence.  I am done, absolutely and positively done with having babies.  My energies must go to raising my three children and to pursuing the many pursuits I have in mind for the second half of my life.

There is no question in my mind that I would end the pregnancy. It would be the best choice for me, and the best choice for my family. And thankfully, living in a large metropolitan area and at a time when abortion is still safe and legal, I know that I would be able to address the issue quickly, if need be.

So I was feeling quite prickly a few weeks ago as I watched the trial of Scott Roeder, the man who murdered Dr. George Tiller, the brave and remarkable Kansas doctor who performed abortions when most other doctors had stopped.  I also was following the Focus on the Family anti-choice ad that ran during the Super Bowl.  And my blood pressure has been rising.

Olympic Dreams, Perfectionism, and Parenting

Family Friday

Future Olympic gold medalist!  Few parental fantasies of children's future glory carry quite as much emotional weight.  Now that we parents have aged past such athletic endeavors ourselves, it's natural for the current Olympic fever to infect even the most level-headed parent.  As Petula Dvorak of the Washington Post noted, nothing drums up tears among us moms and dads more than the cheering parents in the stands waving their signs. 

I may represent the minority here, but I frequently cringe while watching the Olympics, especially with my kids.  And it's not the events, athletes, or cheering parents that bother me – it's the snide, often catty commentary, combined with an unhealthy dose of schadenfreude.  

Here you have some of the world's most amazing athletes performing almost unbelievable feats, yet the commentating focuses on tiny, nearly invisible errors.

"That did it – he lost the gold right there!"

"Oh no!  That triple toe loop became a double!  She just didn't bring it tonight, did she!" 

"I'm not sure what those costumes add, besides looking ridiculous."

"Oopsy-daisy!  Wow, what a catastrophe!"

"Look at the angle of that ankle there – he is out of the running for the gold now, and he'll be lucky to even make the top twelve."

"How devastating – to have trained for all those years, only to turn in a performance like that!"
and the worst interview question of all:

Who Knows Where You Are When? Locational Data and Privacy

Image by Sir Mervs via Flickr

Technology Thursday

The issue of locational privacy has been percolating in technology policy and civil liberties circle for quite some time. But with fast-growing mobile application platforms, it seems to be reaching some sort of saturation point. From a technical standpoint, for your mobile phone to work, it has to know where it is in the world. And most people carry their mobile phones with them, so any application that knows where your phone is knows where you are.

Newsweek recently ran a story about the FBI using cell phone location data to track people without a warrant. It's pretty disturbing.

This capability to trace ever more precise cell-phone locations has been spurred by a Federal Communications Commission rule designed to help police and other emergency officers during 911 calls. But the FBI and other law-enforcement outfits have been obtaining more and more records of cell-phone locations—without notifying the targets or getting judicial warrants establishing "probable cause," according to law-enforcement officials, court records, and telecommunication executives.

[...] A potentially more sinister request came from some Michigan cops who, purportedly concerned about a possible "riot," pressed another telecom for information on all the cell phones that were congregating in an area where a labor-union protest was expected. "We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of abuse on this," says Gidari.

[...] That was precisely what Smith and his fellow magistrates were worried about when they started refusing requests for cell-phone tracking data. (Smith balked only at requests for real-time information, while other magistrates have also objected to requests for historical data on cell-phone locations.) The grounds for such requests, says Smith, were often flimsy [...]

More innocuously, some companies, like Four Square, are making a game out of location data.

Happy Tenth (Work) Anniversary to Me!

Work Wednesday

As the mounds of snow finally start to melt, I'm turning away from the snow-centric themes of my past few posts. (See here and here.) But before I leave winter in the blogosphere, I'll leave you with one last (I hope) snow image. And that's this: My anniversary slipped by at the beginning of the month buried in the Blizzard of 2010. 

Not my wedding anniversary. (That,I don't let my husband forget!) My work anniversary. The tenth. 1-0.

It wasn't intentional. The snow was falling, my office was closed, and the kids were clamoring for another round of Candyland. On the actual day, and for many days after that, "work" was more about shoveling than meetings. (Of course, there was the Blackberry, the phone, etc.)

So, it wasn't until last week that I realized that the ten year date had come and gone.Ten years. Longer than anything else I've done in my life. (Except go to school.) I hadn't marked it or celebrated in any way. And more importantly, I hadn't freaked or started figuring out an exit plan.