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Copyright issues have been at the center of many discussions at my volunteering placement at Hold the Future. This is the center for disabled young people in Hanoi, Vietnam. The center offers both vocational training and handicraft production.

At this present time the center makes handicrafts on orders placed mostly by one big client. This means that almost all products are copyrighted to this client. Hold the Future has few original designed goods.

Besides this, by virtue of the fact that the center works with disabled youth, it also means that there is no excess money available to set up a design studio. The basic economics are quite easy. How do you pay a living wage to someone who can only make two items a day whereas an abled person would produce fifty?

This means that workers are subsidised. So how do you afford a research & development department?

But besides the serious question of how one can afford to pay for new designs one needs to add the following. What happens if great designs are made, at a serious cost to the center, and they are ripped off within minutes of getting onto the shelves.

There is no doubt that this is a major issue, especially in Asia where anything and everything is copied. In most cases it’s a matter of necessity. But still, new designs especially ones that may be considered successful in terms of sales, will be copied.

How do you avoid that? Many ideas have been voiced by staff of the center and much time spent discussing this issue. From aspects of what to do with the website to how to design a brochure without giving away ideas are discussed at length.

There is no solution. New designs are impossible to hide away. After all we need sales of products and not designs hidden away in safes.

So it was with particular interest that I watched this excellent video of a TED talk that discussed exactly this problem. The speaker’s solution? Forget about copyright. Just continue to design and innovate. Create a ’signature’ collection that is more difficult to copy and make an individual statement that distinguishes you from competitors and copiers.

That certainly sounds a more realistic approach than trying to hide great designs but still somehow sell handicraft products.

Just reading about the Eurozone bail out of Greece that’s happening now. And a particularly bad move by German Chancellor Merkel is showing up some dire consequences. Wait and see just didn’t work here.

Greece was in trouble. It’s Eurozone partners huddled around for weeks. During this time the money that Greece could borrow to help itself out of the hole it had dug for itself got more and more expensive. It’s logical. The more you appear to be about to default the higher the cost of borrowing to stop you from defaulting.

Add to that the rating agencies putting their effort in to destabilise the situation more by downgrading the country and you have an increased momentum in the dive because this triggers further rises in the market interest rates. Great article here about this.

This results in a further financial deterioration. And it starts to effect the private banking sector. If a government’s solvency is in doubt, so is the solvency of it’s banks. After all their liabilities are guaranteed by the central bank.

The worst part about this entire disaster for Greece and the Eurozone has been the fact that politicians were running the show. Merkel has been worried about elections. So she drags her feet and plays the hard nosed politician.

She might have gotten a few brownie points amongst her voters but she surely made the cost of the bailout of Greece a much larger problem. What was originally mooted to be an amount of €40bn has within the last few weeks grown to a probable €140bn.

But this isn’t all of the damage. The fall-out in terms of other members of the Eurozone could end up being a speculative €1000bn if the weaker partners start experiencing similar problems. Portugal, Spain and Ireland could add to the problem. And Italy is not exactly a shining beacon either.

What lessons can the small business manager learn from this disaster. One might be inclined to say none at all. But you would be wrong.

If you have a problem coming towards you then don’t ignore it. Tackle it straight away. A solid business principle is that a problem addressed straight away will take less effort to fix. And the fall out is not as extensive.

This applies to everything. Whether you are needing short term financial assistance, or have to withdraw a product because it is defective it all requires quick action.

Maybe you need to fire staff because they are incompetent or even move into a totally different business because you aren’t making it happen.  Whatever the situation act now and don’t wait. It will surely be less trouble in the long run.

The first time I ‘met’ up with Tom Peters was during my MBA. His book that he co-authored with Waterman “In Search of Excellence” was a prescribed book. Even the remote spot of Westville in South Africa where my Graduate School of Business was situated had heard of him.

This was in the late 1980s. Thirty years ago.  As management and business strategy books went In Search of Excellence was pretty much way ahead of it’s time.

I still follow Tom Peters and still buy his books, RSS his blog, watch his videos on YouTube and follow him on Twitter. He’s 67 years old now and he’s as real and on the money now as he was then.

Some of his ideas haven’t changed because they are as valid now as they were thirty years ago. And of course there are many great new ones. Not only are his ideas as fresh, relevant and interesting as before but his delivery method has also kept up with the times.  Besides his books and lectures he’s a great supporter and user of social media.

There is such a dramatic difference in the way some people can keep up with change and embrace it and others who just don’t seem to be able to keep up. A podcast I was fortunate to find on the internet really showed up the consequence of not being able to change.

This podcast on NUMMI,  a motor vehicle manufacturing plant in the USA,  describes the story of the motor industry in the USA and in particular the demise of GM. It’s a classic example of what happens if  a company is unable to move with the times.  It’s a long one, but if you like business case studies this one is superb.

The story of GM is told using excellent journalism. There is also effective use of opinions and in-house knowledge provided by a string of people who contribute well to this podcast. It’s a tale about people, whether managers or workers, who over a lengthy period of time refused to change and adapt to new times even though they were offered many opportunities to do just that.

They were scared of losing power, status, money, jobs, special privileges and more. In the end they lost a lot more.

The final result is that GM had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings and Tom Peters is assured of a best seller again with his recent book The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue EXCELLENCE.

Change is difficult to deal with. In Vietnam I often hear  the saying that this or that idea that is put forward can’t be implemented because that’s not how things are done in Vietnam.

Can’t really blame them. If a world leader in motor vehicle manufacturing can’t cope with change, a new developing country such as Vietnam with a communist government may be excused for being cautious and reluctant to grab hold of change with both hands.

Whatever the situation or circumstances though, change is an important component in daily life whether private or business.  The people who cope with it the best find success in their endeavours.

Working as a volunteer has been quite illuminating to say the least. Besides learning how non-profits approach business, the other new field for me has been that of fundraising.

As part of my ‘education’ in the subject of fundraising I am subscribed to a fair number of blogs that share information and words of wisdom on this topic.  A recent article made me think about the difference between asking for help as opposed to asking to work with somebody.

The advice was that it would be better to request to work with a partner on a project rather than to go cap in hand and ask for help. This would change the dynamics of the relationship between donor and receiving organisation the article maintained.

Collaboration of course means that the donor organisation then has some say in how their money or expertise is used. Possibly non-profits are reluctant to allow this kind of ‘interference’. After all they know how things should be done. Or so they think.

It’s easy to take the money donated and spend it on whatever one thinks the highest priority might be. It’s a lot more difficult to take on a partner who wants to get involved in how those funds are spent or how the expertise is utilised.

Not only would one need to be more transparent in how the funds are used but one might also need to be open to new suggestions and advice on how to do things differently. This can be a very uncomfortable process to have to go through.

Before we all look down on non-profits as a breed on their own, let’s have a look at how often we do this in the real world of business. Do we employ staff to help us or to work with us.

How many of the team working in your office are perceived to be helpers? That is they are employed to do as they are told. Often this is where the receptionist, PA or manual labourer fits into the picture. These are the people for whom the fifty page procedure manual has been written.

Is it any different higher up the organisation? At what level does the business allow collaboration amongst all its staff?

It could be possible that the company where all participants are partners rather than helpers will do much better than those where the line is drawn between the ‘real staff’ and the helpers.  With other words management views it’s staff as partners resulting in a healthy business.

Many senior management people tend to only pay lip service to the statement that their staff are their most valuable asset. The organisation, whether for or non-profit, that partners with its staff will win whether that means a more profitable business or a more fun place for all participants to work at.

Working at my organisation, the one statement that I hear almost daily is, ‘this is not how it’s done in Vietnam’! How often do the folk in your company say ‘this is not how it’s done here’? It is a direct block to ensure no interference with the status quo and that no innovative thought is allowed.

Surely this situation would be improved if the distinction was clearly made between helper and partner. A helper bathes the baby, a partner helps with bringing up the baby. Big difference. Which one is of more benefit to the organisation? Surely that’s a no-brainer. But regrettably it’s not viewed quite so clearly by the for profit or non profit world.

On Friday I had a heated dispute with Microsoft Word. It almost won. Touch and go. What is the most irritating is its tendency to think it knows what I want to do next. Well I don’t want to do that next!

One remembers fondly back to the days of the first word processing software. The excitement when one could correct a word before printing it or even more wonder if it could be made bold or italic. Of course the typewriter was something else again, but those early word applications were a miracle.

What has happened in the meantime is that they have become so complex one needs to graduate from Microsoft college to cope. Whether MS Word or WordPerfect, never mind Excel or Apple’s Numbers and as for page lay-out apps they are far too complex to use effectively.

Oh for that lovely simple and straightforward original Adobe Pagemaker.

Having just had this minor irritating experience I was definitely in the mood to read an article by Clay Shirky in which he commented about complex business models and their demise. When things become so complex that they are totally unwieldy, then we tend to have a collapse.

In fact some societies have collapsed totally due to becoming far too complex. Maybe that is also why mergers and acquisitions generally don’t do too well. To run these large businesses just becomes too complex.

Such complexity means that the entity is unable or unwilling to move with the times, adapt to new societies, markets and more. Is this why the Christian church in Europe and England is almost confined to the history books? There are too many layers of people and traditions to allow these religious organisation to move with the times and adapt their doctrine to something that resonates with the modern people.

Let’s take this same principle of simplicity or complexity and check your business. How complex is your business? Do you have an order system that requires the sign off of five different departments. Or do you have a sales person who talks directly to your production department?

How easy is it for a client to speak to the decision maker? In the banking environment for instance it’s almost impossible to get to somebody who has any decision making power. That is if you are a small client. It changes of course proportionally to the wealth you have.

So how easy is it for big business to listen to clients or change their product range to serve new clients in new markets? Not that easy. And it means that big companies find themselves bankrupt in both ideas or money because they are unwieldy and complex. Take the motor industry as an example.

It’s also a reason why the internet grew at such a pace. There were a myriad tiny service providers who had a few hundred clients, looked after them well, knew them all personally and did things any old way as long as it worked.

Once the internet becomes controlled by umpteen laws and standards that need to be followed, the complexity will eventually destroy it. Just alone a law that makes internet service providers legally responsible for content their users upload will kill off the small service providers.

They just cannot afford the software and it’s constant updates required to control all content that flows through their servers mainly because the evil doers are so resourceful in keeping themselves ‘alive’ on the web.

Want to build a house in the developed world? You have to fight umpteen government and local departments before you are able to put one brick on the next.

See how quickly buildings go up in Vietnam. The work force sleeps on site. This means they work seven days a week. Morning to night. And sleep on wooden floors with a plastic sheet draped around the structure for some shelter from the weather. Health and safety regulations? Not that one can see. But at least the city is being rebuilt rapidly and people have work.

It would seem a good idea to keep ones business lean and mean. Definitely have less layers of command, as few rules and regulations you can get away with and a work force prepared to be innovative in its approach to clients, service and products. It will certainly keep the business alive longer than if you regulate it to death. And it’ll be a fun place to work at.

At the moment I am establishing teams to work on projects for the Centre I am currently working at. The Centre, Hold the Future, provides vocational training to young disabled people as well as an opportunity to earn a living making handicraft products.

There are a number of projects that are outside the normal scope of the Centre’s activities that we are currently focused on. They fall under fund raising and public relations efforts.

Amongst these are a new website and the design and manufacture of merchandising products to use for loyalty programmes and fundraising drives. Add to this articles, images and video to spread the message via a string of conventional media as well as the newer social media channels and one can immediately see that external help is going to be a must.

It seems the best way forward is to use teams to manage and drive each project along. Picking a team leader with energy and focus will be critical but the rest of the team members are important too.

A short video by Tom Peters has a great point to make regarding diversity and teams.  View it here, it’s imminently watchable. Tom Peters mentions a book on the topic and here are the details for that for those who might be interested in taking a closer look at the subject.

His main point regarding teams is that the more diverse the composition the more effective the team is. Avoid so-called subject matter experts or in-house narrow focused department members.

To build great teams one should embrace different cultures, educational levels, languages and gender for instance in order to optimise the dynamic power this diversity will generate. Makes sense to me.

PS

There will be more articles on my work at Hold the Future in Hanoi Vietnam on this blog. Subscribe to the feed or provide your email address to get articles emailed to you.  If you would like to get involved in the Centre’s work by giving some of your time please email me direct at anja at hqlondon dot net.

One of the things I noticed when I first moved to Vietnam was the abundance of TV sets.  Every home seems to have one and mostly it’s on all day. Even offices and work places tend to have the flickering screen supervising all life.

It was quite a surprise because I had been thinking in recent years that the days of the TV would be over and that the internet would take over the entertainment portfolio in our lives. It certainly had done that in my life.

An interesting article in Time as part of the 10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years series discusses the TV and its spread. The article points to the significant growth in the spread of television and the access people have to it in underdeveloped countries.

Far from showing a demise of the media it appears to be finding a veritable renaissance in the world. Citizens of Asian countries are grabbing this powerful communications tool with both hands.

One point the article was making was that TV would assist the spread of greater access to human rights by people previously disadvantages. In particular women would benefit from exposure to programmes showing women with greater rights in other parts of the world.

This exposure has already shown some results. It has been noted that women in rural areas in India for instance who have access to cable TV have become emboldened to become more independent by doing things such as going to the market on their own.

Does this have anything to do with marketing you might wonder.  Well the concept of the demise of TV does, the greater independence of women not so much for the point I’m trying to make! I just added that because it’s such good news…

The significance of it is that one can get entrenched in a point of view such as the demise of TV because one is focused on one tiny small market segment of the target audience.

Just because I and many computer geek friends use computers as the primary entertainment tool does not mean that the rest of the market or the rest of the world does as well.

When examining your market, or observing a new trend, keep your eye on your immediate market but do not ignore the bigger picture. You could find that you miss the point totally because your view is too narrow and limited by your immediate environment.

When checking your market it’s easy to think that you and your circle of acquaintances are the global market. It’s most probably not so!

Many years ago my father invested heavily in the South African stock exchange, the JSE. He realised early on that his small pension due to him at the end of his working days would not be sufficient for my parents to retire on.

He spent hours on reading up about companies, investment opportunities and different options and he worked mainly in the stock exchange and in bearer bonds. His investments were mostly focused on blue chip companies whose shares were offered on the JSE.

His principle way of investment was to find a share that was providing a good dividend return and possible growth. He would purchase a considerable number of shares and stay with the company for years.

I often used to discuss investments with my father while he was still alive and I kept an eye on the world’s money movements ever since. More recently I have started studying the markets more closely with a view to investing myself.

In particular the market movements from September 2008 to current standings have been entertaining to say the least.

What also helped with kindling a renewed interest is the fact that my daughter has decided to try her hand at forex trading. Discussing her trades with her has given me a small insight into how this market works.

And it’s all based on waves of trends. Sure there are some external influences such as earthquakes and unexpected icy winters or Greece knocking the Euro value that effect trades. But in general forex movements appear to run according to trackable patterns.

This weekend I had one of those aha moments. I watched a video (you might have to sign up to watch this) interview of a trader who has been in the business for 37 years. And the aha moment came when he said that volatility in the market was an opportunity.

Suddenly it was crystal clear how the stock markets could rally so strongly after the whole ‘recession’ drama of September 2008. For instance even though the recession can hardly be considered entirely beaten in the USA, UK and Germany the bourses in these countries are looking quite healthy.

As an equities trader you can bet on the shares going up or going down. So it doesn’t matter what the trend is as long as you can identify the trend you can make money.

With other words the principles of investment in stocks is no longer based on whether a company has a good track record, a competent CEO, good dividend pay-outs etc etc.  You have to track the Average Directional Index as per the trader interviewed on the video for instance rather than decide whether the stock is in an industry with growth potential.

What does that mean to the smaller investor who has been advised that he should place some of his retirement savings into stocks? It’s a big problem. Does he (or she) spend hours a day watching trends on his computer using dedicated software or does he go with a trader? Or maybe stocks is just not going to be the right option anymore.

Whatever the decision, one thing is for sure, investing in stocks is a whole different discipline to what it was during my father’s investment days in the 1960s to the 1980s. Anybody wanting to invest will need to be sure to understand the rules of this game.

Checking the briefing offered by trendwatching.com is often very interesting. This month’s trend briefing was in the form of videos that addressed a few interesting questions.

There were two that were particularly interesting. One was Car vs Phone. It surveyed a fair number of people from all walks of life and in different countries as to whether they would prefer a car or a mobile phone. Surprise? More people voted for the mobile phone.

What does this say for the motor industry? Maybe nothing at all. On the other hand, if you lived in a country where public transport is dirt cheap, totally accessible at all times and used by most citizens what then? Would you really want to bother with a car and the costs involved, never mind the danger of driving on roads with other mad people.

Is this what is killing the motor manufacturers during this current recession? It’s not really at all about consumer spending, it’s actually about life style changes. And if that is the case, then the motor industry is in a far worse state than one can imagine because then it’s the death knell isn’t it.

But the video that truly fascinated is called Who Cares. It’s not so much a revelation as the car vs phone one was to watch. It was more a confirmation of what one knows already. Public opinion on whether brands or the company that makes them care about their customers was quite strong and universal.

The overall consensus of all the people asked was that nobody cares. Companies only want you to buy. The bottom line and making sales is what it’s all about. All the time.  Nothing else matters. Certainly you as consumer do not matter to them. That was the opinion voiced by these consumers.

Nobody surveyed in the video could think of one company or brand that they felt represented a business that cared about it’s customer. Very sad.

But surely that’s a business opportunity isn’t it? If you truly care about your customers or potential customers then imagine how ahead of the pack you are. Unbeatable in fact.

An interesting statistic was mentioned in a post on Huffington. Unemployment for those making $150 000 a year was only 3% in the last quarter of 2009 whereas the percentage of unemployed was a staggering 31% for the bottom 10% of income (USA stats).

So much for an across the board unemployment rate. Put a figure to the percentage and the number of people involved is officially at 15 million but estimates make the figure closer to 26 million if one counts those who have given up looking for work.  A third of these are placed in the bottom percentile.

In other statistics offered in articles on the employment situation it is generally pointed out to the reader that the most affected group are the young people joining the work force. This ties in with the 31% in the bottom 10% of income.

Young people enter the workplace with no actual work skills. This is especially true for young University graduates. Historically many disciplines offered at academic institutions have been fairly divorced from the real life of the work environment. Classics, philosophy, ancient literature and many more fields do not provide graduates with employable skills.

True, University students will always learn how to conduct research, put together a logical dissertation on a point and hopefully do this using good language skills. But does one need to spend three to four years learning this with the resultant large student loan to have to pay off for the rest of ones life?

Regrettably, academia tends to sit huddled in its ivory towers not prepared to budge from its self-image of ‘pure knowledge’. Whatever that might mean. Perhaps what will help them budge might be the exodus of young people who will turn to other resources and institutions available to continue with their studies.

What is indisputable is the fact that young people will need to acquire different skills from those traditionally offered by present day colleges and universities. Some of these will be about how to start ones own business, invest for wealth, marketing and selling ones skills and many more that will enable young people to become entrepreneurs rather than working for a company.

Self-sufficiency will be the key for the following generations.  The key to the factory doors have been tossed in the garbage bin never to be found again.

Of course it also means a mind set change for parents.  As parent there is no longer the easy option. The concept of college and job for your children doesn’t cut it anymore. It just got a whole lot more complex.

Instead of constantly trying to get your child to conform you will need to encourage them to take risks. You will need to help them with thinking outside of the box, to plan for a future that is totally unpredictable.  No more life time jobs, no more single career lives. It’s all up in the air.

It’s a totally different scenario. We cannot approach this in the same way as our parents or grandparents did. New ideas and innovations will be king, not drone like ‘follow my leader’ behaviour.  Are we up to the task? We better be.