Today is this years ‘Blog Action Day ‘09: Climate Change’. The more ’seasoned’ followers of mine will know that I participate on my blog every year, this year being no exception.
What is an exception this year is the fact that climate change does concern us all, and it is fair to say our planet is in deep trouble. To get a sense of how deep in trouble we all are you only have to read some of the other very good posts written world-wide on this day about climate change.
Let me put a little business spin on all of this and like most people I have far more questions than answers. When will we understand that all natural resources are the property of all of us:

• when the sea or a river is polluted by a ‘business’, does this really increase our GDP?
• when we allow senseless de-forestation, does this really increase our GDP?
• how many of us get ill or even die every year because of environmental pollution?
• why is our world-population still growing, when we are too many humans already?
• why are we still using carbon fuel when we have technologies that could make a difference?

Some may say all of the possible solutions are not economical, question is, what will the final cost will be if we do not solve these issues? I am sure that the bill will not only be presented in monetary terms but in unprecedented loss of human & animal life. Bio diversity is not something ‘nice’ to have, it is essential for human life, think about the problems with our insects and especially bees?

I’m sure there are many more relevant questions to be asked, please leave them as a comment to this or any other post written about climate change.

Read more @ Blog Action Day ‘09 – Climate Change.

As you will know I usually join in on each years blog action day. Using the web 2.0 technology I’m involved in with WinWeb, is a very eco-friendly way to run a small business or home office.

So when this years Blog Action Day was announced to be about climate change I signed up without delay again. On October 15th I will post an article about climate change on my blog, along with thousands of other bloggers around the world.

Why don’t you join us @ BlogActionDay.org

Given the state of our economy world-wide, I hope that politicians and governments alike have learned their lessons. If nothing else they should have learned that the ‘Big Firm Capitalism’ has got us into big trouble. We are spending billions to bail these guys out, with money, tax money paid by ordinary people and micro- and sme-businesses.

At the same time these ‘ordinary’ people and small business suffer, as banks and other big business are lining their (pockets-) balance-sheets for the benefit of their shareholders with public money. The reduction in interest rates, was but a red herring, since it has not reached the people it should have reached and never will. The oil price fell below $60 a barrel, that is down from over $140, a reduction of over 55% and the pump prizes have fallen by how much ? 10 to 15%, it is a distasteful, to say the least.

The only way forward to create secure jobs, make local communities viable again, help with our carbon emission targets and most of all create a stable economy, not based on excesses and creed, is to support the creation of small business and foster entrepreneurial thinking even in people or students who will never start a business of their own.

One of the lessons we all learn in business school is, that it is better to have many small customers than a few big customers, it makes for less volatility in the business when one or two customers leave or do not pay. Maybe government economists needs to learn this lesson too.

On the positive side there are signs that government is trying to get better at helping small business, with initiatives that are intended to help, but don’t always hit the mark, because they just don’t understand what micro and small business is and which problems small business face.

It is difficult to do that if you have an army of people who help you to run your office everyday, send, type your letters and parcels and get things done. In other words a luxury small and micro business don’t have. Add to that red-tape, funding problems at the best of times, stigma if a business fails and many more and you can see why we have a long way to go.

One thing is for sure, only the entrepreneurs will get us out of this mess, so let’s help them for once and applaud their efforts. –ST.

I had an interesting conversation about my view that management control over employees is a myth. I have believed for some time now that an office is often a total waste of money and completely unnecessary. Most of the time I’m told it’s OK when you work by yourself, but not if you have employees, as they need to be supervised and somehow “controlled”.

I have now been working for almost ten years from home, and most of my staff works from home too. Apart from being an eco-friendly way to work, it saves people time and frustration to travel in and around London to come to an office, where we all sit in cubicles or offices. In the days of broadband internet, Skype and OnlineOffice, there is no need for an office, even to have meetings.

Offices, like cars are are often nothing else but status symbols – what other reason can there be for a small business to have an office? If that is true then how is the office helping with your business, it’s a big expense. Seriously, if you do not have clients coming thru your office doors several times every day, why have the office. Even if you have, do really all your people need to be in the office every day? I guess not!

We are in an economic downturn, what is more important – your ego or your business – ask yourself that every time you walk into your office. I’m sure there a good reasons for some micro businesses to have offices, even so I currently can’t think of any, but I’m convinced in most cases a healthy bootstrapping and outsourcing mentality would be more beneficial for your business.

Unless the first business goal is to feed your egomania, you need to have a good hard look at your cost structure to survive in these times. — ST.

Just got this question, I know there are others questions I have not yet answered, and I have already written my “The Week Ender” post for the week, what the hell, but I’m in the mood to have a go at “The System” again. I think I’ve mentioned before that blogging is therapy for me, and I’m sure some of you might even think I should be in therapy, so there you are.

I’m going to expand this question “slightly” into – I hope Walsh does not mind:

What are some of the social, political and economic issues small business face?

I should remind you that when I talk about small business, I mean 1 to 5 people businesses, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professionals, contractors, freelancers, self-employed, sole-traders and virtual assistants.

Social issues are clearly centered around the work-place, work life and private life. To many work is the central activity in their lives and the stresses and pressures of todays workplace are enormous, overtime, project pressure, sales targets, travel to and from the place of work, to name but a few. This all causes tension in a partnership, family and leads often to a dysfunctional family/private life. For example, we need dating agencies and web-sites to find partners, because we are too busy to find a partner in what used to be a “normal way”, and in this sense we have to be thankful for the service dating agencies and web-sites provide. These issues are prevalent in the group of small business owners too.

Striking the right work/life balance has become a personal choice item, with the advent of home businesses. Businesses run by entrepreneurs, often unhappy with the traditional choices in the work place, who have decided to set their their own work/life balance and run a business, not to grow and dominate the world, but to earn an often higher than average income, while retaining a certain amount of freedom and flexibility in their private lives. Parenting people often see a home business, as a way to have a family and stay active in their chosen field of work.

The growth in these kinds of businesses is explosive, while our society is technologically perfectly capable of sustaining this trend, our social work infrastructure in many cases is not.

This brings us to the political issues these micro and small businesses face. The fact that our society is wholly unprepared for this revolution in the work place and small business environment, has to do with the fact, that governments often receive no advice from actual participants in this new home based micro business economy. Current advisors are from big business, with virtually no experience or knowledge about micro business issues.

Of late universities and other institutions have started to produce a vast amount of valuable data, about micro businesses, which is often meaningless to the political elite in the western world. It is, in my opinion, wrong to expect our politicians to guide us into this new area of explosive micro business growth. Experience tells us that any decisions made will be often too late or even counter productive, market forces are much faster and more targeted to help these growing sectors develop.

In my discussions with politicians, civil servants and often big business, the term “Small Business Infrastructure” is rarely understood. The best we can hope for is the insight that less red-tape is going to help, for some politicians this is a frightening thought.

Economically, I feel we are at the beginning of a truly “golden age” of entrepreneurship. Our technical infrastructure, the internet, powerful micro-computer systems and mobile technology have helped to transform our way of doing business. The last piece in the puzzle was the advent of the software as a service industry, which took longer to develop than I had foreseen. With an almost transparent internet and IT infrastructure, the focus is getting back to the business objectives, even in very small businesses. If this is extended by a “Small Business Infrastructure“, which includes 24/7 technical and customer support, additional service offerings like bookkeeping, telephone answering, and similar services, the survival rate of small business startups, vastly improves.

If small business owners use outsourcing and bootstrapping techniques as a matter of cause, the fixed cost (over-head) structure in each of these micro businesses can lead to super efficient and hyper valuable home or micro businesses. I believe you can start a business with $20/£10 a month and grow your business, risk free (without loans) on the side, while still in employment, until the turnover is big enough to justify quitting ones day job.

You may feel about a business on the side as you will, the fact remains this is going on as we speak, trends we see in the online usage patterns of our OnlineOffice, certainly support this theory.

At the same time business failure is far less an issue, as the risk associated with these ventures is very small, with the right mental attitude of the entrepreneur towards failure, the learning effect of a failure can be enormous. Especially in Europe the old-fashined anti-risk strategies only serve to leave us further behind the other global economies in terms of technological leadership. The U.S. is testament to what an economy with a “normal prospective on business failure” can do.

Emerging economies like China, India and some others are learning from the U.S. and will outstrip our economies within the next decades, unless our politicians, will finally stop putting barriers up for micro businesses.

Last and by no means least, the positive ecological impact of a largely home based economy can not be underestimated. Endless hours of travel to and from the work place, meetings, office heating, and so on could be a thing of the past. Rural economies will be revitalized, multi-generation household will no longer be a thing of the past, this all will have a tremendous positive impact on our social infrastructure, child-care, crime and drug abuse, to name but a few.

While I have often quoted this in the past “it is not the answers that are the problem, knowing the question is”, I’m often left feeling with politicians it is both, not only do they not know the question, they don’t know the answers either. While I accept it is easy for me to sit here and say this, it does not alter the fact that it is only too often true.

It is almost the weekend now, and I’m off to see 10cc, or what is left of them. ST.

How often do we sit in front of our TVs or computers and see people in need, or the environment in trouble, and many more distressing things. Every-time, I wish I could change it all, the truth is I can’t – but we all can help.

The type of help I’m referring to here will not make the headlines, will not get you noticed by everybody, but it will help. I’m talking about pro-bono work, or sponsoring an organisation with a service or product you offer. I believe it can be better resources or money spend, than doing google ads, it is a good bootstrapping technique – and a win-win situation for you and the sponsored organisation.

For example, the College StartUp blog has an article today about “5 ways to get “paid” for pro bono work“, they talk about the marketing benefits you may gain by doing good. Every small business or start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professional, contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants has something to give, which could make a difference.

You may not be able to change the world, but if we all did our bit, we could make a hell of a difference. ST.

As you may remember I was part of the Blog Action Day for our Environment and I keep on finding great little posts about eco-friendly issues relating to small business, including home business – my personal favorite.

Tony Clark writes a blog about working from home from his home-nest called “Success from the Nest” and has tips how to save energy in your home based business:

“As a home-base entrepreneur, you have the unique opportunity to have a small impact on the environment, all while having a big impact on the world.

Just another good reason to give it a go…”

I think he is right, and remember all the green/eco-friendly benefits of working online for the environment and also for yourself. ST.

On October 15th I posted three posts for Blog Action Day For Our Environment and I was in very good company, the statistics are impressive:

• 20,603 blogs participated
• 23,327 posts where published
• 14,631,038 RSS readers alone

The reach of the postings is likely a multiple of the 14 Million readers via RSS, since most will have been read on the blog sites. My contributions for that day where:

• Blog Action Day For Our Environment: WinWeb Pledge
• The World Without US
• Slow Progress With Eco-Friendliness in Our Daily Lives

Next year there will be another Blog Action Day, so why not get involved? ST.

As my last article on Global Warming today, due to my commitment to the Blog Action Day For Our Environment, I would like to write about a couple of personal experiences that make you wonder what some people, companies and paper pushers think.

First up, John Lewis our local department store. My wife went to buy some new shoes, found a nice pair (You didn’t expect me to say anything else now, did you?), but did not want to take the shoe-box. The sales assistant lady argued with her about not taking the box, so my wife said she would not take the shoes, if she had to take the box.

At that point the sales assistant realised, that my wife was serious and she may lose the sale, so she wrote on the till-receipt, that my wife could not bring the shoes back – which is her statuary right as a consumer – because she had refused to take the box.

Packaging is a major contributor to our environmental problem, consumers get penalized for not wanting packaging. We need a serious change in attitude and the way we package our goods.

North Herts District Council, has their “own way” of dealing with packaging, they just won’t pick it up anymore. We have just been told with two weeks notice that they will only collect our normal waste once every two weeks. So rather than working at the source of the problem, they just penalize the consumers.

Apart from creating some serious public health risks they have completely abdicated their responsibility towards the public, by introducing these measures without proper information and in my mind consultation. This type of policy has created a “fly-tipping” nightmare in our neighborhood, and it is getting worse by the week.

If we do not stop, just going for the “weakest link” in this chain, the consumer, we will further delay coming to sensible solutions for our environmental problem For the time being that seems to be the current way forward, for this government without own vision and the local councils. ST.

I would like to recommend a book to you on this Blog Action Day For Our Environment. The book:

The World Without Us written by Alan Weisman (ISBN 978-1-905264-03-2).

It is not immediately obvious that this book is about our climate, it offers a fascinating glimpse of what would happen to the earth if humans vanished today, forever. Most importantly, would our planet ever fully recover? Bill McKibben, author of the End of Nature called it:

“… This is one of the grandest thought experiments of our time, …..”

He is right, I understand now that to really heal the wounds, we as humans have inflicted on this planet, we must cut our world population in half. This is a stark reality to open your eyes to, but it is a also the only way. We have the choice to do it ourselves or have our plant do it for us, in a very unpleasant way.

We can reduce our impact immediately, and we can heal our planet in the next 100 year. ST.