As
you probably know, my book on creating sustainable, responsible,
joyful, community-based businesses will be published in the Spring by
Chelsea Green. I need some assistance from readers to finalize a title
and subtitle, and to design the web tools that will accompany the book.
The original title for the book was Natural Enterprise. In discussions with another publisher and with my agent, the title morphed to Working Naturally: Discovering What You Were Meant to Do and How to Do It Responsibly, Sustainably, and Joyfully.
Chelsea Green has challenged me to revisit the original title (or something close: The Natural Entrepreneur) and to condense or change the subtitle to something shorter and punchier.
As the graphic above suggests, the book's purpose is:
- To
help you better understand and overcome the fears of entrepreneurship,
and assess whether you have it in you to be an entrepreneur -- i.e.
when you're dissatisfied with your current work (or lack of work), to
help you answer the question "now what do I do?"
- To help you
discover the 'sweet spot' where your Gifts (what you do uniquely well),
your Passions (what you love doing) and your Purpose (what is needed in
the market, that you care about) intersect i.e. what you were meant to do; and also who you were meant to work with
- To
explain to you what a Natural Enterprise is, and the important ways it
differs from most modern businesses, and why Natural Enterprises are
inherently more responsible, sustainable, improvisational,
collaborative, resilient, and joyful
- To teach you how to do exceptional market research, to find unmet needs that are in your 'sweet spot'
- To help you imagine ways to fill those needs, and then teach you the innovation process to bring your ideas to fruition
So what do you think -- do you prefer Natural Enterprise, Working Naturally, The Natural Entrepreneur,
or something else as the main title? And how would you shorten or
change the subtitle to capture the gist in fewer words than my sixteen?
The
three-part website accompanying my book will contain tools to help
people (a) find their 'sweet spot', and people to make a living
with, (b) share success stories and war stories of what has worked and
what hasn't, and (c) expose needs and ideas that might address them to 'the wisdom
of
crowds'.
The first of these tools, Finding Natural Partners,
would enable you to discover and share your 'sweet spot' with others --
you could identify the Gift(s) and Passion(s) you have that are 'on
Purpose'. You could search for other people who share your Purpose and
whose Gift(s) and Passion(s) complement your own -- potential Natural
Enterprise partners. You could discover what other people have
identified as their Purpose and (if it resonated with you) make it your
own. You could discover how Natural Partnerships had emerged in other
communities, and replicate them in your own community.
The tool for
doing this would have to be very simple, intuitive, and fun to use. Any
complexity would have to be 'buried under the hood'. It should also
enable both virtual conversations and face-to-face meetings. It has to
be more structured than a discussion forum but less structured than a
form-filling exercise. The process of discovering your 'sweet spot' is
iterative, so the process of using the tool has to be flexible and not
tedious. I'm not even sure it can be 'specified' -- it may have to
evolve. Peer production, anyone? Should I set up a very simple wiki or
some other tool to 'talk through' its design?
The second tool is
the Natural Enterprise Community, and while it sounds like a forum,
it's actually more of a storybook. I foresee it being a place where
people could tell their story, complete with moral ("remember to do
this" or "don't do that"), in the first person plural.
Because I have never discovered a Natural Enterprise that's a sole
proprietorship, I will seed this with some collective success stories
and some cautionary war stories about people who tried to do everything
themselves. I'd like to offer a story template, but not impose it on
anyone. Stories are valuable because they provide context through
detail and specifics (so-called 'best practices' and 'benchmarks'
usually oversimplify and sacrifice that essential context). We are all
natural storytellers, and I just want to create a place where people
can share their stories.
The third tool is the Natural
Collaboratory. This is an 'idea market' with a difference -- no money
changes hands. It's a place for people to float ideas, do some
secondary research, and get a 'crowd' of prospective customers and
coworkers to assess these ideas, and perhaps even serve as the
launching pad for Open Source, Peer Production or Open Space activities
to move these ideas forward.
I see this third tool as being more
structured. Each idea should be based on some real, primary research
that indicates there is an unmet need to be filled, and the need and
the research needs to be spelled out, as context for the idea (and to
avoid people just being lazy and posting their pet ideas without having
done the homework, and to shut up people who just 'black hat' ideas by
claiming there is no unmet need for them). But beyond that I can see
the idea development as very collaborative, very conversational, going
where it will, facilitated by some real-time Skype or other inexpensive
technology to allow more iteration and rapid idea development than
forums permit. This is not intended to be a vehicle for innovation --
in most cases I think innovation needs more resources and energy than
any online tool could manage. It is a vehicle for ideation -- for
thinking out loud about how identified needs might be solved,
imaginatively, without getting sidetracked by the details of
commercialization.
I am a little worried that people will be
afraid to float ideas in case someone else steals them. The book
explains that even great ideas are pre-commercial, and it is the
innovation process that separates great ideas from great products and
services. But some fear is inevitable. I am going to see whether we
might use some kind of preemptive 'idea registration' process to
preclude anyone taking a great idea and spending a fortune to patent
every imaginable application of it. Ideas should always be free, and
freely shared.
I'd welcome your thoughts on these tools. I don't
want anyone rushing ahead to prototype them, because they need to be
collectively imagined and talked through first. I doubt that anyone
will be able to make money developing them -- my hope is that they will
serve as 'working models' for other applications that need similar
enabling processes and infrastructure.
They might even be
among the first of a new generation of social networking tools that
have actually been designed to meet a specific business need, so that
unlike Web 1.0 and 2.0 tools they might actually achieve sustained
traction in the business community. It's worth a try.
So -- title, subtitle, tool evolution -- what do you think?
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7:42:12 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
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