Rich Mintz  

I saw an interesting tactic this week that the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston uses to help educate beneficiaries and the community about the programs they underwrite, which I wrote about here on the BSD Blog.

Beginning Thursday and through the weekend, I’ll be at the Americans for the Arts Half-Century Summit in Baltimore. More about my plans here on the Blue State Digital Blog. If you’re coming, drop me a line — I’d love to meet some real-life people there from among those of you I know only on the Internet.

Robert Reich (via Max Chafkin on the Inc. blog, via Greg Palmer) pours cold water on the conventional wisdom about entrepreneurism — namely, that recessions have their silver lining, in that they give incipient entrepreneurs a kick in the pants to go out and do that thing they’ve always wanted to do.

Obviously there are those who’d rather be doing something other than working for themselves, either because it doesn’t suit them temperamentally or because they crave more stability. But the conventional wisdom conforms with common sense.

There are thousands of small business owners in America, probably tens of thousands, whose entrepreneurial spirit was activated by adverse economic circumstance and who are out there right now making lemons out of lemonade. (I’ve been there myself. I didn’t make a fortune, but boy, did I get business experience that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.) And there are tens or hundreds of thousands of employed people in this country who are happily working at companies that were founded, or found their professional niche, or grew and flourished during and even as a result of economic downturn. I’d have to count myself as one of them: there’s no business more countercyclical than the business of helping nonprofit organizations fundraise more effectively in a downturn, which is one of the businesses my employer is in and one of the things I do for a living.

Based on my experience dealing with nonprofits (especially cultural nonprofits) over the past two years, I want to acknowledge the positive impact of financial strain on small organizations, specifically the way it enforces strict prioritization. If there isn’t enough money to waste on fruitless initiatives and vanity projects, two things you end up having less of are fruitless initiatives and vanity projects, and that is in its way a good thing.

This is also the appropriate time to plug Rework, the new business book by the people behind the 37signals family of Web applications and the “Signal vs. Noise” blog.

I read Rework today on the subway (yes, it’s that kind of read, more a collection of business vignettes than a book) and I think it’s worthwhile reading for anyone who’s thinking about starting something but afraid to jump in and do it, or who’s having trouble staying focused while developing a project, or who’s fighting off interference by friends or investors or colleagues obsessed with the wrong things. The gospel of these people is “simplify, simplify” — aspire to do less but know exactly what it is and do it well, be honest about who you are and what you stand for, break dizzying challenges into bite-size chunks, move the ball forward a little bit every day. One of the ideas I took away was the idea that an institutional culture isn’t something you create, it evolves out of consistent practice, which I think is true but which I’ve never heard stated quite that simply. I’ll post some more gems when I think of them — but in the meantime, buy or borrow a copy; it amounts to a crash course in institutional common sense that applies to any organization of any size, especially small ones that can’t afford to waste time or attention.