I recently wrote a post entitled Smugness Equals Entrepreneurial Opportunity that suggested that a business that acts smugly or arrogantly should be sending a welcome message to entrepreneurs to steal their customers from them.

If you manage a new or growing venture, chances are that you spend a lot of your time in meetings. Among others, meetings are critical to strategize new opportunities, assess different ways to accomplish tasks, set and update goals, and to ensure that all team members are aligned.

However, since ventures must focus the majority of their time and efforts on executing opportunities, there is a significant risk for them to spend too much time in meetings strategizing. This article provides some tips to keep meetings effective.

Several years ago I attended a lecture given by a former Procter & Gamble executive. In his speech, he mentioned that a significant portion of households pre-wash dishes before putting them in the dishwashers. (I just found a 2002 Arthur D. Little, Inc. report that said that 15% of households pre-wash their dishes.) The executive smugly commented about how this was great for P&G -- they made money both from the sale of dishwasher detergent and dishwashing soap.

My son wanted to stay home from school the other day. He wasn't really sick; just wanted to stay home.

I asked him what he was going to do if he stayed home. The list went on and on -- watch this DVD, watch this show on Tivo, play this video game, etc.

I recently reviewed the book "PRIMAL BRANDING: Create Zealots for Your Brand, Your Company, and Your Future" by Patrick Hanlon and wanted to share my thoughts on it with you.

It's truly awesome. Here's the scoop. Hanlon worked in advertising for many years for Fortune 500 clients. A few years ago, he asked himself the question: What is it that gets consumers to bond with brands like Google, Apple, Mini Cooper, Coke, Disney, Starbucks and Nike and not others?

There’s an old saying in marketing, “Sell the Sizzle, Not the Steak.” What
this means is that marketers need to promote the benefits of a product or
service and not the features. For instance, people buy a drill to make a hole
or they buy a light bulb to provide light.

When selling these products, it is often better to promote how easily the
product provides the benefits rather than offer a comprehensive list of the
product’s features (which many consumers may not even understand).

Market research is critical to entrepreneurial success. It is absolutely crucial to understand customer needs in order to successfully launch a new product. Likewise, market research must be conducted on the industry, competitors, etc., in order to flourish.

However, formal market research studies are not always critical. Rather, by asking people who can offer good estimates of customer wants and needs, ventures can answer many questions more quickly and inexpensively.

Consider the following queries and suggestions:

Query: What types of toys will sell well this holiday season?

A question that is often asked by entrepreneurs and emerging businesses is how much equity to give key employees and new hires.

While there is no correct answer to this question, there are guidelines and key criteria to consider. The key criteria are 1) other compensation and 2) the risk profile of the venture.

Other Compensation: Equity compensation is one component of an employee's total compensation. Other components include base salary, bonuses, benefits, etc. For each position and geographic market there are standard compensation rates.

Advertisers often say that people need seven or eight exposures to a new product in order to really take notice. This is approximately the number of times I heard about Second Life before I decided to give it a try.

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world built and owned by its residents. Second Life launched to the public in 2003, and has grown dramatically since then. Currently, the site has nearly 1.7 million members/inhabitants worldwide.

Great article in the Washington Post today by Shankar Vedantam entitled "The Pain is Never as Bad as We Fear." Basic premise is that studies have shown that human beings greatly over-estimate the pain they think they will feel regarding a prospective future loss. For example, when it comes to money, people are much more able to emotionally "connect" with the pain of a hypothetical loss of a sum of money than they are to to connect with the pleasure/joy associated with a hypothetical gain.