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Since we are talking about sustainability here is one more video about rooftop gardening from Obsessed:

http://obsessedtv.com/

The Bloomington Normal area has many sustainability efforts underway in the community. The Town of Normal leads the way with LEED oriented ordinances for commercial buildings, a community sustainability plan in the works, and employee green team, and the recent purchase of a home adjacent to a park and it’s transformation into sustainable model for home building. The building our offices (Bank of Illinois Building above) are in was built under LEED guidelines.

Recently on their trip to Washington, D.C. the One Voice delegation met and brainstormed some ideas on sustainability under the context of economic development. What type of companies can we grow or attract to the area based on the many assets we have are some of the questions we will continue to ask ourselves as we move forward. The Sustainability task force has been created to form our strategy.

What are other communities doing? San Fransisco is moving forward with a residential loan program.

Here is a blog on The Green Workplace that is interesting and worth a read.

Here are some other blogs that address sustainability and cities from a variety of political perspectives:

World Changing: http://www.worldchanging.com/
Project for Public Spaces : http://www.pps.org/

We are near the end of March Madness. Our hometown Illinois State University team had a terrific year, but didn’t quite make it to the big tournament. The ISU women are in the final four of the NIT, so we are hoping for their success.

So in honor of the sport that captures the attention of so many, I feature a talk by Coach John Wooden. Known for coaching UCLA in the seventies to some fantastic, dynastic years, he is also revered for his wisdom and knowledge. I love listening to him, as he reels off poetry and quotes, that would take me years to memorize. I always admire that in a person. Here is my TED video of the week:

Can you believe he his 99 years old? I admire him more than ever.

Here is a cool new website for those who have nothing to do on the weekend: Obsessed. While I had never heard of Samantha Ettus, she has apparently done well. I like the idea of web television. Check her out:

By the way, John McEnroe has (had) a TV show? Is it still on?

I am very proud of our community. We have a great group of leaders. If you are reading this from outside Bloomington Normal, Illinois, I am sorry. If you want to experience what I do every day, which is working with a group of people who know and understand how to work together for the common good, then you will have to move here.

Check out our website if you wan to see what our trip was about. Click on the 2009 video. Thanks to all the One Voice participants and everyone who was part of the trip.

Special thanks to Brad Barth at Trace Design Media for putting together the video (once again). Also, thanks to Beth Whisman from WJBC who came with us and reported our work. You can find her interviews on our website or at her page on the WJBC website.

Social Media marketing is a new phenomena for me. My daughter has been doing it for her store for quite some time and when she first told me what she was doing, frankly, I was skeptical. Now of course, I am a recent convert, having recently started working with Twitter, Facebook and this blog. I believe that younger generations, the people that will be our future are guiding our media consumption. I feel it is the way to go. In addition, the book I recently read, Grown up Digital, by Don Tapscott makes me think in different ways.

Another interesting piece I found (via a tweet, thanks @mashable) is the report “Social Media Marketing Industry Report” by Michael Stelzner. Give it a read, and listen.

Don’t forget the blog Mashable. They provide all types of information on people interested in learning more about Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites.

Are you using Social Networking Media for your business? Should you? Respond to me here.

Financing Small Businesses in Uncertain Times

It’s always a challenge for entrepreneurs and small business owners to find the funds they need to start and grow their firms, but it is even more challenging in the current economic and financial situation. The Economic Development Council of the Bloomington-Normal Area (EDC) is cosponsoring a seminar, along with the Illinois Small Business Development Center at Illinois State University and the McLean County Chamber of Commerce on how to finance your small or start up business. The seminar will be held from 6:30 to 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 7th at Illinois State University’s Alumni Center (1101 N. Main St, Normal), Room 118. There is no charge to attend this seminar, but space is limited so please register in advance by contacting Cathy at the EDC office at (309) 452-8437 or cathy@bnbiz.org

Free Seminar: Challenges of Starting and Operating a Home Based Business

There are some real advantages to starting and running a small business out of your home, but there also are some challenges. If you are not careful, you may compromise your chance to launch, sustain and grow your home based businesses. This seminar will focus on some of the most common mistakes made by home based business owners. The seminar, which is cosponsored by the Economic Development Council of the Bloomington-Normal Area (EDC) along with the Illinois Small Business Development Center at Illinois State University and the McLean County Chamber of Commerce, will be held from 8:00 to 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, April 8th at Illinois State University’s Alumni Center (1101 N. Main St, Normal), Room 117. There is no charge to attend, but space is limited so please register in advance with Cathy at the EDC office, (309) 452-8437 or cathy@bnbiz.org

I really enjoy the television show Mythbusters. I was very pleased to see Adam Savage one of the two main creative hosts on Mythbusters be highlighted in a TED talk. Savage is very entertaining on the show and seems like the more gregarious of the two primary hosts. He’s the kind of guy you would love as a next door neighbor. You could go over to his garage on the weekend and each time he would be building something or creating some new gadget. Better yet you could call him and he could probably fix anything you had that needed repairing. I bet he could connect my sound system to my TV which I still haven’t figured out since I moved my TV to the other side of the room.

Anyway, Savage is one the fastest talking people I’ve ever heard. He is also has an obsession. You’ll understand what I mean when you watch the video:

Don’t you wish that sometimes you could be obsessed about a project, object, or activity like Savage is? Are you obsessed?

The EDC staff and I were preparing for our March Board meeting. It’s a big deal, because we only have four a year. Therefore we have a very specific topic and we want to carefully craft our message. Our first topic of the the year will be, guess…the economy. Wow, I know the topic was hard to come up with, but truthfully most communities don’t know how to measure their local economy, how to report on it and what they are doing about it. Frankly our economy is doing well. At our meeting we will be presenting what the EDC is doing to deal with the recession.

But what about you? What are individual business people doing to weather the storm or develop strategies to come out of the recession? Michael Snyder is principal of The MEK Group, a marketing and business development consulting firm writes in the latest issue of MidwestBusinesss.com that a recession offer an opportunity for companies to reposition themselves and implement longer term strategies.

What are some of your long term strategies? What have you been doing to manage your business in this downturn?

While I was in Washington D.C. this past week, I missed a very important event in San Fransisco. The GTD Summit. For those who don’t know what GTD means, it is an acronym for “Getting Things Done” and is the title of a book by David Allen.

David Allen has turned into an organizational guru for millions of people around the world. I love his work, and enjoy hearing what he has to say about organizing. The summit was for all the GTD geeks in the world, and had I not been on DC pining for money from our congressional delegation, I would have been in San Fransisco with all the other organizational geeks hearing what our master had to say about “next steps”, “mind like water” and “weekly reviews”

Several months ago I wrote a review of his book for our website. You can read the review, but better yet pick up the book.

On the One Voice trip, the group was inspired to think about what we can do in the future to make the community more sustainable. Not only sustainable as a community but in the more common usage of the word today; more environmentally sound.

After a full day of Capitol Hill visits with our congressional delegation, a majority of the group got together to discuss the issue. In one hour we made great progress in defining our assets, and talking through some definition. Mind you this is a group of people, who are diverse in their outlook on the world. However the entire group sees the economic business case for sustainability. You’ll hear more as we go along, I promise.

To go along with the idea of sustainability Bill Gross,CEO of Idealab,a hyperactive, fast talking, but totally understandable inventor discusses solar energy. You don’t have to be a techno-geek to understand his talk. It describes some work he has done on putting together cheap solar energy by revisiting older ideas.

His idea for solar energy is so fantastic and it makes so much sense. It is one of those ideas that makes one wonder why haven’t we already made this type of technology available? It has to do with economic incentive, but that is another blog entry. Check out this weeks TED video:

What do you think? Give me some feedback.

Like many issues in our country, the subject of earmarks gets a lot of attention by the media. Some people like Senator McCain who has never requested an earmark makes sure that he highlights some of the “pork” as he refers to it each year. Politicians like to lambaste the idea, pundits love telling stories about what is being funded and what a waste these projects are. There have always been earmarks and I believe there always will be. After all, Congress is responsible for spending. Not only spending but directing spending, and earmarks are nothing but “congressionally directed spending”.

Having just completed our communities “One Voice” trip I am concerned about all this talk of earmarks and what a crime they are. Let’s examine the facts. First let me provide full disclosure and tell you that our trip to Washington D.C. is designed to support 3 to 6 projects that are requesting public funding (at least partially) or earmarks. All the projects we propose can stand the “light of day” are transparent and I would challenge ANYONE to tell me they are not good projects worthy of federal funding.

In fact we are so confident of our requests we list them on our website. Any one can read the list and understand the projects if someone takes the time to do so. Senator Durbin, Congresswomen Halvorson, and Congressman Johnson are all knowledgeable about the requests we have made, support the concept of earmarking and are willing to tell you that. But let’s really understand what an earmark is and is not.

An earmark is a request by a congressional member to “set aside” or provide specific funding for a project in the member’s state or district. It is funding that would likely be provided at some point, but instead of having a federal agency bureaucrat determine whether McLean County gets the money or not, a congressional member has made that choice and is requesting the dollars be devoted to a specific project. In addition, all earmarks are within the confines of the budget. Earmarks are not budget busters. They are not expenditures designed to be above and beyond the federal budget.

Of course there has been abuse of the process, and that is actually what most people are opposed to. There are projects that sound funny or seem wasteful, but I can guarantee you they make perfect sense if the person or organization requesting those dollars could sit down and explain it to you. The now infamous “bridge to nowhere” that people love to point to as the poster child for earmark abuse was actually a good project that someone misrepresented in a news story and was forever repeated like a bad rumor. The bridge was designed to provide a link to a town and their airport on the island across the bay. Currently the only way to get to the airport is by ferry, and this poses all types of problems for emergency vehicles, public safety and simple travel.

I hope President Obama looks at this whole issue clearly as he has reluctantly signed the fiscal year 2009 omnibus budget which has 9,000 earmarks listed. He has indicated that the issue of curbing earmarks will be on his mind in the next budget. Notice he didn’t say, do away with them.

I often tell people the reason we got to Washington D.C. each year and request our earmarks is because we have a constitutional right to do so. The first amendment to the constitution tells us among other things, that we have the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances“. Our grievance is that we in McLean County do not receive enough of our tax dollars coming back to our community. Remember we send the federal government a potful of dollars every year. It is our money, it’s our right to ask for it, it is the Congress right to direct spending section 8), and therefore we do it.

I’ve struggled with the idea that perhaps we shouldn’t be asking for earmarks because it doesn’t stand a moral test of some type. But I’ve reconciled that thinking buy remembering every year the Congress passes a budget, every year funding is provided to states and local government and other institutions for worthy projects and darned if we shouldn’t make a strong effort to be in the front of the line. To do anything less would be the ultimate show of a lack of leadership.

P. S. When we know what we have received in earmarks, I will post here.

There are many opportunities for Entrepreneurs (I will call them “E’s” from here on because I am tired of typing the full word) in a recession. Richard Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes magazine reminded us of the fact that many companies we know today and call successful were born out of the recession of the late 70s’ and early 80s’.

As an example, Southwest Airlines has survived practically every downturn, not only in the economy, but has stayed away from the economic roller-coaster rides legacy airlines like United, Delta, Northwest, US Air and others have had during the same time period. Apple is another highly successful company that came out of that era that is an admired company today. Undoubtedly some of these companies and others have had layoffs and slower growth and profits during this time, but they have managed to survive and thrive. Perhaps it is because of their E mentality and early struggles that caused these types of companies to never loose their “edge”.

The question to day is what can E’s do to help stimulate our economy? In my discussions with E’s and business owners in McLean County I find that many of them are “working within themselves” as Vickie Tilton said in our BNBIZ radio show (every Tuesday at noon on WJBC 1230 am) a couple weeks ago. She said that she does not pay attention to the news and works with her customers to make sure that they receive the best customer service and care she can possibly give them. In fact, she says this year her business is up. Vickie owns Fox ‘n Hounds, a Hair Salon and Spa in Bloomington and has been in business for over 20 years. In fact she is one of the few businesses of her type that offer her employees good benefits.

The stimulus plan has had very little to say about E’s directly. Although like all things having to do with our government, it is easy to pick holes at this huge program designed to to try to be all tings to all people.

There are issues the federal government and the state government could do to further enhance the ability of E’s to grow and gain access to capital, one of their greatest needs. Sramana Mitra, an E and consultant who has started several of her own companies thinks President Obama has not listened to the E and done enough to help them gain access to capital. She thinks that tax credits for angel investor and others who put money into angel funds and start-ups could be a good way to grow the economy and help early state E’s. In Arizona, the state gives a 20% tax credit for angel investors. Oklahoma and Indiana has similar programs.

Check out Mitra’s blog to hear what else she has to say about E’s their role in the economy and great ideas on how to generate strategic growth in your small company. She even has an idea for a bootstrapping business just about any unemployed (ok, not any, but many) person could start and make a good income.

In our society it is a practice to create heroes and villains. As soon as we recognize someone for their achievement, place them on the proverbial pedestal and award them medals and honors it seems as though we seek opportunity to tear them down. We all have people we admire. People who have done great things, or are the best in their field. How did they get to that point? What skills did they use to become so good? Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers (reviewed on our website) says greatness comes form 10,000 hours of practice, or the time of year one was born among other things. Many people admire our new President, Barack Obama for many of his skills, and there is no question people are seeking to tear him down.

There are many people in our world who are very smart, very good, excellent at what they do. Yet they are torn inside by their genius. Perhaps they don’t recognize their ability or knowledge, or perhaps their low self-esteem doesn’t allow them to appreciate their contribution. Society’s quest for building up then tearing down undoubtedly wreaks havoc on their emotional psyche. What is it about geniuses and other “great” people that causes them to suffer?

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the recent bestseller, Eat,Pray, Love has a thoughtful and beautiful presentation on TED that every one should listen to. It is a heartfelt discussion on the struggle of coping with genius and why creative people suffer to the point of suicide. Think about what we do to our creative artists and people in our world. Success is wonderful, but separating the “genius” of an individual to the muse of borrowed talent may be advantageous. It is about 20 minutes long but worth every minute. Check out my weekly TED video:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

There has been much talk about the “nationalization” of the banks that are in the brink of insolvency. Nouriel Roubini is one of the biggest advocates of this strategy. He believes that there must be a triage operation undertook that will sort out banks that are illiquid and under-capitalized but solvent from the mere insolvent. Then you shut the insolvent down, take them over, fix them, and then throw them back into the private sector. Often called the “doctor of doom”, Roubini believes governments across the globe need to do six things to fix the global economy along with the bank triage operation:

1.Central banks need to loosen monetary policy far more drastically, for example buying more types of securities.
2.Governments in Europe need to ramp up fiscal spending to boost demand.
3.Governments need to do what it takes, including full nationalization to clean up their banking systems or risk facing a lost decade
4.Collective inaction by banks will require government to force banks to re-lend.
5.Governments hit by property slumps should introduce across-the-board reduction in the principal value of mortgage debts to relieve pressure on insolvent households.
6.Major shareholders should sanction the doubling of the IMF’s capital base so it can extend effective assistance to emerging markets facing liquidity problems (Easter Europe).

A full copy of this interview can be found at Roubini’s RGE Monitor.
More commentary about how troubled assets plague the recovery effort of TARP was written by Alex Pollock a fellow at American Enterprise Institute. Pollock looks at history to solve our problems in his article called “Bank to the Future” Lucian Bebchuk, a professor of law, and economics at Harvard writes about jump-starting the market for troubled assets. He believes an effective plan for a public-private partnership to buy troubled assets can be designed that will protect taxpayers and have the characteristics of market competition. Both of these are very good articles and if you have time read them.

Finally is these are too heavy for you, go to the NPR show “This American Life” website and listen to last weeks show Bad Bank. It is a humorous and simple explanation of the banking crises. Ira Glass always is interesting and he has hit a homerun for those folks whose heads are spinning.

I am interested in knowing what YOU think. Post your thoughts here.