Too much text is the kiss of death for a presentation. Never put the whole text of your presentation into the slides and then read them aloud. Since the audience cannot read and listen at the same time, they will tune you out.

If You Want People to Listen to Your Presentation, Don’t Cram Your Slides with Text

A slide is best used to reinforce a single key idea or emotion. A strong graphic with one or two words is often enough. It is the presenter’s job to convey the details and hold it all together with a compelling story.
– From The Startup Daily

When consumers have trouble differentiating between products, they will fall back on shortcuts to help them make their decisions.

Quality Conscious Consumers Will Often Choose The More Expensive Product Automatically

If understanding the difference between your product and the competition’s requires more time or effort than customers are willing to invest, they will base their decision on the simplest measure that aligns with their priorities: “expensive=good.”

Consumers focused on quality will remember the rule of “you get what you pay for”, even when price is the only evidence that the quality is higher.

– From The Startup Daily

This is not a tactic of denial or avoidance, but a way to gain new perspective. Your biggest challenge is probably quite different from what you think it is.
The Obstacle that You Perceive as Being Your Biggest Problem May Actually be Blinding You to the Real Problem

Like the layers of an onion, you must peel back the top layer to expose the next.

Start with your biggest problem and ask yourself “why is this a problem?” When you find the answer, ask “why is that a problem?” Keep asking and you will find the real heart of the problem, usually in just a few layers.
– From The Startup Daily

When you are presenting your ideas to investors, don’t try to impress them with your understanding of industry jargon. Keep it simple.

Explain Your Ideas in Terms that Even Your Mom Would Understand

In fact, this is good advice for presenting ideas to customers, employees, and just about anyone else. If your mom wouldn’t understand it, simplify the idea until she would.
– From The Startup Daily

Even in failure there is success. No matter how big a problem, if you look closely you are bound to find some small pockets that have arrived at a solution.

Search for the Anomalies that have Already Found Solutions

Identify these positive deviants and focus on replicating and scaling up their behaviors.

Most of the world’s most difficult problems have already been solved, the solutions are just not where everyone else is looking.
– From The Startup Daily

No matter how hard you try to satisfy your customers, unexpected problems will cause some experiences to be less than perfect. You can safeguard against many problems by building goodwill.

Surprise Your Customers by Delivering More than You Promised

When you provide something of value that they didn’t expect, customers will like you more, and they will be more forgiving of mistakes.
– From The Startup Daily

Big improvements are often the result of incremental changes in behavior. Yet most reward systems are only setup to recognize the end results.

When you reward results without taking into account the behaviors that led to the results, you may be rewarding behaviors that are ultimately harmful. You may be inadvertently encouraging people to increase output by sacrificing quality, or to take short-term gains at the cost of long-term losses.

Reward Behaviors, Not Just Results

By rewarding the behaviors you want to encourage, your initiatives won’t be derailed by those who would game the reward system and damage the overall strategy.
– From The Startup Daily

For the boss, no little thing goes unnoticed. You may be distracted and therefore you don’t notice when you fail to acknowledge an employee you just passed in the hallway, but that employee has certainly noticed.

Employees Read into Every Interaction with the Boss as Reflection of their Own Performance

People are always looking for additional feedback about how well they are doing their job, and how they compare with others. As the boss, you must remember that people are watching and interpreting your behavior.
– From The Startup Daily

Choosing a name is often one of the first decisions a company makes, and it has far-reaching consequences. The wrong name can limit your growth, and the right name can accelerate it.

The Type of Name You Choose Determines how to Best Market Your Product

A technical name may appeal to early adopters, but a technically named product will have trouble crossing over into mainstream markets. The PocketLink was wisely given the friendlier and more accessible borrowed name BlackBerry before going to market.

Borrowed names—existing words used in a new context—come preloaded with connotations and emotions, giving people a hint at the product’s characteristics and making the name easier to spread. These are often a good choice for a focused product.

Synthetic or “made-up” names are empty vessels that can be filled with anything and are infinitely expandable. However they are often cold and sterile, and will need a large advertising effort to educate consumers about their meaning.
– From The Startup Daily

Of course, we all remember where we were on that fateful day, even where we were at the very moment evil struck.

We were preparing for a networking get-together at a furniture store in Tempe AZ under the auspices of the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce. Upon reaching the site barely a couple of hours after those planes flew into the World Trade Center and forever onto the pages of infamy, I encountered a group of people who were in shock . . . as was I.

As we exchanged our hollow greetings and nervous glances, there nonetheless was a certain positive resolve that settled over the room. After all, we were American business people doing what American entrepreneurs do best: promote business. Though it was not stated in so many words, no terrorist cabal was going to keep us from our task of communing with our business friends as we stepped over the threshold of promising opportunities.

Surely we may only have only been going through the motions, but isn’t that the point? There WERE motions, as opposed to the opposite, which is the paralysis – physical and emotional – that the terrorists had wished upon us. Here we were, business people doing “our thing” amidst an economy and within a system of free enterprise that even today is a model for all to emulate.

Now, 10 years later, we find ourselves in a confusing environment of another type; one having nothing to do with that dark day in our past. Though the current conundrum is one clearly of our system’s own making, surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, so eventually will the best traditions and bountiful gifts of capitalism. And these wonders will once again be borne upon the backs of individual small business owners whom neither aero bombs nor the greedy denizens of Wall Street can permanently bend.

While remembering that awful day with the solemnity it deserves, let us be no less inclined to anticipate with optimism the dawning of a new decade of opportunity. It will be powered, not by government, but, rather, the honest sweat, innovative thinking and resolute dignity of American business people doing their thing.