Each year Americans spend a LOT on Christmas. OK, the number is hard to pin down but if you’re generous with taking into account the whole ball of wax, from money spent on Secret Santa stuff, to the Politically Correct Happy Holidays banners that go up everywhere, from staff parties to Christmas getaways to points south and sunny – the number is really REALLY Big.

Like … $450 Billion Dollars.

To put a little perspective on this. Several non-aligned research and aid organizations remind us that the leading cause of death, worldwide, every year, is the lack of water. People can’t get it. OR, when they get it, it’s not potable. Best estimates of a massive global effort to eliminate this shortage of water would could in the neighborhood of $10Billion.

$450Billion.  $10Billion.

You’ve possibly heard of The Advent Conspiracy. These are sane people with a modest request: that we remind ourselves this is a time of year where we can be so, so much more than consumers. A time of year we can find time to slow down a bit, a very small bit, to spend time with loved ones. A time of year when we can forgo one or two presents. A time of year when we can make a difference.

An old friend, a professor at Harvard (a woman as unlikely as anyone you’ll ever meet sending links about searching for meaning) sent me this link.

Take the time, please, to look at it. http://9mp.com/OOEbl

years and years ago, when blogging was ‘edge-y’,  I wrote this in one of my blogs.  A friend’s reminder of the smell of chestnuts roasting outdoors made me look around for this.   Merry Christmas to all …

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Roasted chestnuts were one of the culinary wedge-issues in my childhood.

And once a year I try to find a kind of epicurean accommodation.

In food, as in so many things, my parents were from different worlds. My father was raised in an ethnic New York neighborhood that would someday lead to stories about my grandmother teaching her seven children which streets were safe and which where places where no-matter-what-you-see-you-never-tell-anyone. It was a world of sweatshops and growing Communist sympathies. A world of daily market shopping with net bags and noisy, argumentative banter taking place across expanses of decidedly un-Heart-Healthy food.

My mother was raised in what nowadays we’d call Appalachian Ohio, one of eight children of a modestly successful Gentleman Farmer. Hers was a more boundaried world, sounding at times like a cross between Lake Wobegan and Walton’s Mountain. I remember her stories about Pinkie, the family pet lamb, eating the grapevine clinging to lattice outside their summer kitchen, stories about the short-legged Shetland pony — Trixie — who always tried to be as fast a runner as her mother. Mealtimes at the farm were as full of genteel manners as they were of Scots-Irish comfort food.

These were two people, it should come as no surprise, with very different ideas of good food.

It was the 1950’s — food selection and preparation were my mother’s dominion. Now and then, though, it seems my father yearned for something from his childhood. Somehow, he’d routinely manage to find a local farm stand or delicatessen on his way home and surprise my family with something totally unexpected: Basketsful of out-of-the-ordinary fresh and dried fruit, smoked oysters, dry-cured fish, and an un-ending range of vegetables packed in oil or aspic, with spices and herbs that had never been part of *our* kitchen.

Tolerant as she was, my mother could never hide her dislike for the smell of roasting chestnuts. And as my mother’s son, I somehow inherited the idea that the sweet, musky smell of chestnuts baking in the oven was something that should occur in the homes of other people. People we’d not have to visit too often.

A generation later I began to suspect that some of my father’s food tastes had merit. One by one, I’d end up trying some of the treats he’d brought into our world of shepherd’s pie, pot roasts and garden salads. And far more often than not, I’d have to admit I’d missed something by being reluctant to try those foods.

Five years ago I began a new family tradition —  the Annual Chestnut Road Test. Each January, around New Year’s, I lay in a supply of fresh chestnuts. The shells are dutifully scored with a penknife, and are placed into a hot oven for varying times. Results so far have been uneven.

While I can’t honestly say I *like* the flavor of these roasted nuts, the truth is, I’ve gotten to the point where I find the smell charmingly evocative of cozy afternoons in my parents’ New England house.

So, on this late Sunday night (just after midnight) two days before Christmas and more than a week ’til New Year’s Day, I’m sitting in the kitchen looking at a bag of chestnuts. *This years* Road Test batch.

Who knows, maybe this’ll be the year that I actually enjoy them.

Well, maybe conventional wisdom isn’t the best way to think about this decision. The current (Dec) BusinessWeek publication has just launched its first annual “most intriguing 25 new businesses created in the last year” list.

The list is displayed alphabetically, so you’ll have to do a big of homework to come up with your own persona ranking of these efforts, but the point is this: great companies have often started in tough times.

Things have been tough, and they remain difficult, but there are some glimmers of hope Out There.

This year – 2009 – witnessed 24,500 startups financed by angel investors. Down a whole bunch from a few years earlier, BUT, up 6% from 2008.

Better still, according to estimates from the Center for Venture Research, this coming year should see over 50,000 startups funded by angels.

SO… we can hunker down til people in the streets are singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” or we can do what entrepreneurs do best – take calculated risks.

http://bluekey.9mp.com/miRCf

There’s no secret that I’m a fan of the idea that ‘virtual worlds’ have a serious place in business. ‘problem is, most pushback against these immersive computing environments is that they’re too weird, too difficult to learn, too much overhead, too.. too.. too…

Maybe that’s about to change. Take a look at a product – still in Beta – that really seems to be an ‘inworld experience’ meant for real business people.

Earlier this morning, President Obama outlined a series of steps that would help companies make the decision that it’s time to bring more employees on board. The process, even if it works according to economists plans, will take a long time. Meanwhile, not only do small businesses hold back (correctly so) on hiring people, but they also suffer from an economy where the combination of widespread unemployment and the fear so many of us have about the security of jobs.

Without jobs, people don’t spend. Without spending, businesses don’t hire. Without hiring, people remain unemployed.

Yes, huge bailouts to the financial system probably helped this country avoid a catastrophic depression. And yes, in time, free-er money will find its ways to small businesses as capital for growth. In the meantime, remind a small art frame shop owner who saw his revenue decline 20% last year, and anticipates another 20% this year – *remind* them that patience pays off.  Better still, remind an unemployed husband and wife balancing the decision whether to keep paying a mortgage or buy health insurance that patience is a virtue.

Plan B is the direct intervention of government to create jobs. Direct intervention.  Almost every city in this country has parks, or government buildings, or bridges, built by WPA employees in the Great Depression. The Civilian Conservation Corps employed my own father in rural Ohio 80 years ago. (just to counter the argument that ‘make work’ jobs create so many layabouts who grow used to government handouts: this same man went on to be a decorated bomber pilot in WWII and from then, used GI loans to become a physician and later, a psychatrist)

A few days back, Paul Krugman wrote a piece for the NYTimes about this politically impossible option.

I include his short column in it’s entirety.

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A question I’m occasionally asked at public events is, why aren’t we creating jobs with a WPA-type program? It’s a very good question.

As it is, job-creation efforts are generally indirect. Tax cuts and transfers in the hope that people will spend them; aid to state governments in the hope of averting layoffs. Even infrastructure spending is routed through private contractors.

You can make a pretty good case that just employing a lot of people directly would be a lot more cost-effective; the WPA and CCC cost surprisingly little given the number of people put to work. Think of it as the stimulus equivalent of getting the middlemen out of the student loan program.

So why aren’t we doing this? Politics, of course: government is the problem, not the solution, even when it is, you know, the solution, and cheaper than running things through the private sector.

Still, it might be worth discussing whether we shouldn’t try to include an, um, public option in stimulus, too.

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Sitting around the conference table just now with the principle of BlueKey – Julie Gordon White – we started talking about venues for meetings.

Before you find the back arrow on your browser, terrified by the idea of something deadly boring … here’re some of the thoughts we kicked around

Business lunches are challenging. People are at work, they have things on their desks – and on their minds – ‘n’ number of people are trying to get their attention by voice and texting and Blackberries are buzzing everywhere. In between trying to eat, there’s the nagging worry of ‘how long is this going to take?’

Meals at *either* end of the work day seem to be better.

-Breakfasts are inexpensive and the menu choices simple. While the whole load of workaday problems are waiting on peoples’ desks, they’re not yet engaged with them.

-Good things to say about dinner as well. People may be tired from the daily grind but they’re usually more receptive to more casual exchanges. (hint: avoid friday dinners – it’s too much like “thank GOD that week is over, oh… yoohoo… another double malt whisky over here fellah! “)  A friend of mine works at a nationally famous foundation and she claims that her monthly “dinner salons” have been the key to a LOT of great organizational planning. The short of it: she hires a caterer for simple snack food – and puts out the word “remember, this thursday is Cheryl’s dinner salon – come, eat, have a glass of wine, and schmooze with people in the Foundation you probably should know but have never had the chance!”  No presentations, no PowerPoint!”

(hmm… let me find out more about how she markets these evenings)

The POINT? It’s as old as civilization – breaking bread and talking over food and drink is something that reminds us that business is first and foremost, a matter of people interacting. Getting down to ‘bid’ness’ will happen, but having a ‘measure of the person’ your making deals with is invaluable. Sadly, it’s also something we often rush by…

In a twitter ‘tweet’ I just posted:  keitai-shosetsu – ‘thumb novels- fiction series in phone-sceen bits, 50% of Japanese top-10 fiction bestsellers originate on cellphones.

So you ask, “How in God’s name is this relevant to anything about my business?”

There’re arguments floating around that as we read more things like quick blog entries, bullet-pointed summaries, and (obviously) tiny twitter tweets, we become less comfortable wading through long(ish) texts. SO how do you, as a business owner, get longer messages across to your customers?  While there are lots of possibilities, here’s something you can consider.

Just as Charles Dickens’ wrote novels intended to be serialized in penny newspapers, so too are an increasing number of Japanese authors writing stories that are capable of being broken into small bits. In this case, however, the bits are displayed on mobile phone screens. Stories written for, truly, the Small small screen are typically less than 500 words – and even this short amount of text is broken into 6 or 7 chunks. When you finish one, you send a text message to a text address that sends you the *next* chapter.

Two things are important here. The first is that authors get their stories out to a potentially huge marketplace easily. The second is that  because of the nature of the medium, readers have the ability to send comments to a central site — and so the stories become interactive.

So – maybe there’s a clever way to wrap up your information in short, punchy, narrative spurts. Tell people they can get you stories at such-and-such a text address. And the novelty can drive the audience.

Background on this new form of story-telling:

http://bluekey.9mp.com/L1DfJ

It’s a quirky term – crowdsourcing – but it gets the message across. More bookishly, it’s called User Created Content. And how it can work for your small business is probably still an unknown issue.

BUT – here’s a local example. There’s a local Chinese restaurant that is trying, so, so very hard, to be *more* than a place you double park in front of on the way home to get some Lo Mein and Pot Stickers. Business was slow at the tiny restaurant and the owners wondered how to make themselves unique.

So, one day, in the window, in great big print, was the sign “We’re asking YOU to come up with combination plates – YOU will design the next menu!” For a place with little business, there were hundreds of responses – some by email, some by hand  written notes. Samples were put in the window and another notice went up “TIME TO VOTE FOR OUR NEW MENU!”

Now, to be fair, I haven’t seen the new menu and I’m inherently skeptical that it will be a *radical* change from the menu of yore – BUT – the point is, the restaurant owners did something so incredibly obvious – they asked their customers what they wanted. AND, they made an ‘event’ out of that question (unlike, say, corporate suggestion boxes in lunchrooms). The owners COULD have taken long looks at their menu, or driven around to other neighborhood Chinese take-out places and made notes, and they could have done the process by themselves. The ‘tried and true’ approach.  But they didn’t. They trusted the collective opinion of the people who were customers. They ‘outsourced’ the work to ‘the crowd.’

Hence, ‘crowd sourcing’

Just for fun, here’s another example of crowdsourcing at work. A couple of authors have been experimenting with planting a ’seed’ of an idea for a short story – as a Twitter ‘tweek’ (so, there’s the 140 character maximum) and asking people to write and complete the story. The article about two of these experiments is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/23/authors-experiment-twitterfiction

AND, the bit-by-bit crowdsourced story, here:    http://bluekey.9mp.com/N2tqX

Quite possibly fueled by The Great Recession, or possibly the inevitability of a generation long known for doing things differently, there’s a new entrepreneurial boom on the way — but it’s not what you think.

The stereotype is the college drop-out who goes on to form wee companies like, say, Dell or Microsoft. The reality is that over the last 10 years, the majority of startups are being done by the Baby Boom generation.  (generously defined as people born in the 10 or 15 years post WWII   1945-60)

Entrepreneur, the new mid life crisis – is a Newsweek  article from Emily Schmitt. http://bluekey.9mp.com/rRAEL

OK Boomers, get out there and help fuel that recovery!

Here at BlueKey Business Brokerage Mergers & Acquisitions help you find creative ways to market the company you’re selling.

Don’t make *my* word for it, check out this avatar’s little spiel:

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/5581