How to Head Off Small Business Fear in This Economy
Lifehack’s Susan Baroncini-Moe gives some suggestions on how you can avoid mistakes and cut the right costs, emphasizing that the current economic conditions are temporary. “This is a scary time. Everyone you know knows at least one person who has gotten downsized and new jobs are scarce. People are scared to start businesses and they’re scared to invest in their existing businesses right now. Part of it is that in an economy like this, mistakes are even more costly than before. And part of it is that people are just plain scared to lose anything right now. What you need to know is that the surest way to lose and make mistakes now is to NOT invest in your business. The only way to win right now is to face your fear and keep moving forward in the right way.”

The Internet economy: How it will drive recovery
In his blog, futurist Jim Carroll talks about key trends in various sectors that will aid in recovery. “The ramp-up in healthcare spending that will occur as boomers age will be staggering, and this will perversely drive job growth at the same time it strains the budget. In the US, healthcare spending could equal 60% of gross domestic product in some states within 10 years. Such stark realities are driving furious rates of business model, technological, structural and other innovations in healthcare, much of which will involve sophisticated Internet technologies. For years, I’ve been talking about the potential for bio-connectivity devices: smart home-based medical monitoring technologies doctors can use, via the Internet, to monitor noncritical-care patients. Such innovations will drive a variety of growth-oriented markets.”

Innovation Is Quickly Replacing Manufacturing As The Engine Of Our Economy
Idris Mootee discusses the virtues of innovation and its importance in getting through these tough times. “Executives understand that innovation is necessary in order to stay ahead or just to survive, yet only a handful have the conviction, discipline and energy to act on that understanding. Very few have the will to change and even fewer led their organizations through disruptive change and discontinuities. Over decades, business schools have developed a language for talking about business, from marketing to finance. We hear this corporate jargon all the time in the boardroom and see it in annual reports and press releases. It helps us to understand and communicate. But because we don’t have a language or framework for innovation, the word was used loosely and even improperly, confusing many people. Innovation needs processes, languages and visual metaphor.”

Study: Online Retailers Plan to Focus on Search, Email Marketing & Social Media During Recession
On ReadWriteWeb, Frederic Lardinois features a survey on how businesses are maneuvering to stay afloat. “While the U.S. economy is still puttering through a recession, a new marketing study from the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org and Forrester Research found that at least some online retailers have been able to take greater marketshare in the last few months. About 46% of the 117 retailers polled in this study also said that they had no plans to scale back their original budgets for 2009, though 54% of all respondents expect their overall growth to slow during the next 12 months. Over the last few months, shoppers have become increasingly price-sensitive, and this has clearly helped some online retailers to outperform their brick-and-mortar competitors.”

Do You Really Know Where You Make Your Money?
In his column Upstarts and Titans, Anthony Tjan shares a conversation with former Thomson Corporation CEO Dick Harrington where they talk about the need for small businesses to understand their product line profitability. “TT: But isn’t that because product line profitability is hellish to measure? Do you really need to measure every SKU’s revenue and profit and work through allocating fixed costs? DH: Not quite; you can categorize products. And if you’re small, you can estimate and be approximately correct. For example, if one product is consuming all your customer support resources, you want to account for it. But for small changes in floor space usage, for example, you probably don’t need to factor that in. Being approximately correct is good enough; you don’t need to have perfect information to make the right decision.”

How to Talk to Your Employees about the Recession
In Leadership at Work, John Baldoni looks at ways to approach the topic of hard times in your office environment. “There have been long-running public service campaigns discussing ways to talk to your children about drugs, sex or even money. I suggest a new public service campaign to find ways to speak to your employees about the recession. Whether we have hit bottom now, or will not do so till next year, it is clear that the recession is provoking new thinking about how organizations function and so it falls to managers to talk to their employees candidly and honestly about what to expect now and in the short term.”

How Customers Can Lead Us Out of the Crisis
Conversation Starter’s Steven Spear notes that people’s behavior today is far different from what it was during the good times, hence the impetus to understand them anew and adapt to their needs. “In a world turned economically upside down, there is a hitch. Deciding something implies having effective understanding (mental model) of how the world works and having enough data to get the right answer. But how things work is not understood today. How actions lead to outcomes is now unclear. New models have to be discovered to understand what to do.”

Ballmer Talks at Stanford, Says Now is the Time for Entrepreneurs
Lidija Davis of ReadWriteWeb features the fiery Microsoft CEO and his tips for entrepreneurs, including a video of his lecture. “Now is the time for people who care, who want to invent, who have skills in specific scientific and information technology areas, to get out there and add to the productivity of the economy,” Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft said during the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture at Stanford University last week. “The question is,” he continued, “will you have the passion and the tenacity and the interest to really start something that’s important?”