eFranklin Circle M-F at noon Denver, Starts Monday, 7-6-2020

Join us for first eFranklin Circle Monday, to be on the show as a guest we promote on Facebook call me (303)861-1447

Starting a new career? A new project or campaign? Starting a new Business?

Join us here each Friday at noon Mountain Standard Time for the
Startup Show. Sponsored by the Small Business Chamber of Commerce, Inc.

IDEA Cafe Startup Workshops, other free groups to help you with the
practices of recovery, imagine, think, and learn; to start, grow, flourish.
More info at http://www.SmallBizChamber.org

Today! Live! Startup Show, noon MDT.

Startup Show, Here each Friday, noon MDT, anytime after that via recording. Thanks for watching! John Wren Sponsored by Small Business Chamber of Commerce, Inc. Life's short, start now! Also seen on YouTube Live Events and Google+ Hangouts On Air. Mark your calendar, watch each week!

On today's show: Forbes Magazine article headlined "Why is entrepreneurship dying." Also, new developments with our SBCC Startup Method and the four practices. Tweet any question you'd like to see addressed Tweet @IDEACafe now or anytime including during the show.

We are trying something new...

 Google ad for SBCC, as we start integrating into IDEA Cafe "new" Method for Spiritual Startup and Growth +AGDM+ . Spending $4 per day, $120 per month, but ad can change and we can stop early if it's just not working.

 What is your guess? Will this be a hit or a miss? (Hit is lots of new visitors to http://www.SmallBizChamber.org and then increased attendance at our free meetings and Startup Show.)  

Your feedback would be very much appreciated, either here as a comment or join us this afternoon (Fri, 12/11) for Denver IDEA Cafe or tomorrow at Socrates Cafe @ DU. More about meetings at http://Meetup.com/Small-Biz-Chamber or call me (303)861-1447

 Thanks! 

Live at 10 a.m. Mountain, The Startup Show

Each week at 10 a.m. Mountain time or here via recording later John Wren talks about startup, going in a new direction with your career, a project or campaign, or a new business. To be on the show call (303)861-1447, if you get the voice mail leave a complete, confidential message and John will get back with you ASAP.

Watch now! Starting? Pivoting? Want help?

John Wren's The Startup Show, sponsored by the Small Business Chamber of Commerce is on each Monday, 5 to 6 p.m. Mountain (7 to 8 p.m. Eastern, 4 to 5 p.m. Pacific)



 The Startup Show answers your questions about starting in a new direction with your work, your questions about starting a new career, a new project or campaign, or a new business.

Tweet your questions, right now if you want, and Tweet your answers, to Tweet #TheStartupShow A link to the show will be posted right here just before show time, or watch on Google+ Live Hangouts or YouTube Live Broadcasts. The link here converts to a link to a recording of the show just after the broadcast.

Tweet your answers? Yes. We intend to create a one-hour and beyond on air brainstorming frenzy, join us when we are one live, or join us laster. SHARE WITH YOUR FRIENDS WHO MIGHT LIKE TO JOIN US BECAUSE THEY ARE STARTING/ PIVOTING OR THEY HELP PEOPLE WHO ARE. THANKS!

Last communication about Small Business Chamber here. Maybe.

I just sent out this memo to our Small Business Chamber/ IDEA Cafe Startup Workshop Meetup.com members. In the future this type of communication about the Small Business Chamber of Commerce, Inc and  all our various activities will only be posted on http://www.SmallBizChamber.org and/or our Facebook Page http://Facebook.com/Small.Business.Chamber and/or our Google+ Page click here . (Unless you object and I suddenly realize this would be a mistake, If you see something wrong with this please let me know ASAP.)

If you didn't get the memo below directly from me via an email from Meetup.com and you'd like to next time, please become a (free) member and RSVP for an IDEA Cafe Startup Workshop or other event at at http://Meetup.com/Small-Biz-Chamber 

Questions or suggestions for me? Contact me at (303)861-1447 or John@JohnWren.com  Post comments here if you'd rather talk with all of us. Here's what I just sent out.

Friday, August 9, 2013

To:  Small Business Chamber IDEA Cafe Meetup Members
From:  John S Wren, founder & CEO, Small Business Chamber of Commerce Inc
Contact John at John@SmallBizChamber.org or (303)861-1447 To RSVP for an IDEA Cafe Startup Workshop or the new Go Group see http://Meetup.com/Small-Biz-Chamber

1.  Our weekly broadcast The Startup Show is looking for a few good guests to share their startup story. We'll be recruiting at our IDEA Cafe Startup Workshops, there is an online meeting each Tuesday afternoon. For more see The Startup Show Facebook Page http://Facebook.com/SmallBizStartup

2.  Free IDEA Cafe Startup Workshops are in Boulder this morning (thanks Toby and Steve) and in Denver, which I'll be leading myself today. I also lead an online IDEA Cafe each Tuesday afternoon. If you want to start a new IDEA Cafe Startup Workshop in cooperation with your local chamber or other group, I'll help you. Let me know if you are interested and I'll invite you to the next organizers meeting.

3.  New Go Groups are like Franklin Circles on steroids, they are for people who are serious about getting started. I personally interview those who participate, I'd love to talk with you about it. We've set a group up here on Meetup.com (it's at the bottom of the scheduled events, no date), we ask you to RSVP and to pay in advance, we only want people who are serious. Scholarships are available, and I'm looking for a couple of Go Group leaders. Call me with any questions. (303)861-1447, call me any time, I try to pick up the phone right away 9:30 to 11 Monday thru Friday and I'll be picking up tomorrow morning (Saturday, August 10.)

4.  I've made a media release about what we are doing that asks for help. I'll be posting it on www.JohnWren.com later today, that's where I'm asking people to go who would like to make an online contribution for a Go Group scholarship or who would like to help me get our various activities transformed into a real, functioning non-profit. Again, call me if you have any questions. (303)861-1447.

Thanks to Russell, John, Toby, Steve, Don, Bill and all the others who have been helping with this recently, and to all those who have helped over the past nearly 20 years to get us to this point, again Bill, last year Sharon, Richard, Ken, Paul, Fran, Marilyn, Karl, Eustace, Tom, earlier David, Bill, Doug, Barbara, Polly, Dennis, John, and all the rest.

Our mission is to strengthen the grassroots in business and politics by helping people get a good start with a new career, a new business or a pivot with a new project or campaign.

If we are successful at an IDEA Cafe Startup Workshop, those who are attending are too busy to come back the next week. But hopefully they will join one of the Go Groups we are forming and/or they will join or start a Franklin Circle. If this spreads as we expect it to over the next few months, we believe it will help bring about a dramatic drop in the unemployment rate.  Will you help us? Again?


No RSVP is required, but it saves you a seat until the start of the meeting, which is sometimes very helpful. To save a seat for one of today's IDEA Cafes, or for next Tuesday's online meeting (limited to 7 who want to have a seat at the online virtual roundtable, but unlimited for those who want to just watch) to to http://Meetup.com/Small-Biz-Chamber PLEASE SHARE THIS WITH ANY OF YOUR FRIENDS WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED, OK? AN EASY WAY IS TO JUST FORWARD THIS EMAIL ALONG WITH YOUR NOTE. SEND IT TO THOSE WHO MIGHT NEED HELP, AND TO THOSE WHO MIGHT BE WILLING TO HELP US, ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO MIGHT CONTRIBUTE TO THE SCHOLARSHIP FUND FOR THE GO GROUPS. THANKS!

Grief Will Become Joy

Grief Will Become Joy

So far in my life I have not had many occasions to be close to dying friends and their families, though that will surely increase through the coming years. Five years ago a friend was in her mid-thirties when lung cancer was detected late in pregnancy. She and her husband were valiant throughout, enduring with parents and siblings as they faced the disease, struggling to care for each other and for the baby. It was impossible during that time to believe that grief could become joy.

The short quote below is from an interesting article in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine about a yearlong couples-therapy group led by a Philadelphia psychologist named Judith Coché. Seems to me the benefits of the couples group are very similar to the benefits of participation in a Franklin Circle: accountability to the group, the benefiting from shared experience and observation of changes in behavior, and the isomorphism (see excellent definition below.) I wonder if Ben Franklin has influenced Coche’s work.

Professional-led groups for people with discrete emotional or physical conditions — Coché has run them for overweight adults and learning-disabled adolescents — have become ubiquitous in the last three decades. More recently, couples education, especially the premarital sort, has taken off inside and outside of religious groups, spurred in part by federal financing from the Bush administration. But the type of ongoing experiential group Coché runs, which is heavily dependent on mining the interactions among the members in the so-called here and now (“Sitting here for six hours you just know what it’s like to be married to him,” Coché muttered to me once, out of earshot of the offending spouse), aren’t terribly common.

When Coché lists the virtues of the group over other forms of therapy, she cites the “Greek chorus” effect, a term that captures how members begin to harass one another, if politely, about the habits corroding their marriages. “In a group, there’s an experience of being held accountable for one’s own behavior,” Coché told me, adding that it’s more powerful to be called out — or cared for — by a civilian than by a professional. “I’m a paid consultant. I’m a nonperson.” Other benefits she cites are the often-silent products of group dynamics. No matter how ultimately prosaic their woes, members are startled to see reflections of themselves in the other marriages — My God, I do that, too — and if one person musters the strength or resolve to make a change, somebody else may consciously or unconsciously follow. The principle of isomorphism also comes into play, she said, meaning that as people forge intimate connections within the group, the enriching encounter in that system may spread to the other system: the marriage.

Wikinomics explains how to prosper in a world where new communications technologies are democratizing the creation of value. http://wikinomics.com

Wikinomics--How Mass Collaboration Change Everything hit #10 on the business best-seller list last Sunday, so I finally picked it up. Wish I'd read it when I'd first noticed it last year! If Ben Franklin was alive today, he'd be a Wiki publisher!

I've kept this blog for years, am considering shifting my energy to a wiki or two. Blogging feels too much like just raising my window, leaning out, and shouting, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!"

Learning to Keep Learning
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New York Times 12/13/06
(This is why the IDEA Cafe http://ideacafe.meetup.com and Franklin Circles
www.JohnWren.com are important. John Wren)

I recently attended an Asia Society education seminar in Beijing, during which we heard Chinese educators talk about their “new national strategy.” It’s to make China an “innovation country” — with enough indigenous output to advance China “into the rank of innovation-oriented countries by 2020,” as Shang Yong, China’s vice minister of science and technology, put it.

I listened to this with mixed emotions. Part of me said: “Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice to have a government that was so focused on innovation — instead of one that is basically anti-science.” My other emotion was skepticism. Oh, you know the line: Great Britain dominated the 19th century, America dominated the 20th and now China is going to dominate the 21st. It’s game over.

Sorry, but I am not ready to cede the 21st century to China yet.

No question, China has been able to command an impressive effort to end illiteracy, greatly increasing its number of high school grads and new universities. But I still believe it is very hard to produce a culture of innovation in a country that censors Google — which for me is a proxy for curtailing people’s ability to imagine and try anything they want. You can command K-12 education. But you can’t command innovation. Rigor and competence, without freedom, will take China only so far. China will have to find a way to loosen up, without losing control, if it wants to be a truly innovative nation.

But while China can’t thrive without changing a lot more, neither can we. Ask yourself this: If the Iraq war had not dominated our politics, what would our last election have been about? It would have been about this question: Why should any employer anywhere in the world pay Americans to do highly skilled work — if other people, just as well educated, are available in less developed countries for half our wages?

If we can’t answer this question, in an age when more and more routine work can be digitized, automated or offshored, including white-collar work, “it is hard to see how, over time, we are going to be able to maintain our standard of living,” says Marc Tucker, who heads the National Center on Education and the Economy.

There is only one right answer to that question: In a globally integrated economy, our workers will get paid a premium only if they or their firms offer a uniquely innovative product or service, which demands a skilled and creative labor force to conceive, design, market and manufacture — and a labor force that is constantly able to keep learning. We can’t go on lagging other major economies in every math/science/reading test and every ranking of Internet penetration and think that we’re going to field a work force able to command premium wages. Freedom, without rigor and competence, will take us only so far.

Tomorrow, Mr. Tucker’s organization is coming out with a report titled “Tough Choices or Tough Times,” which proposes a radical overhaul of the U.S. education system, with one goal in mind: producing more workers — from the U.P.S. driver to the software engineer — who can think creatively.

“One thing we know about creativity is that it typically occurs when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework in one to think afresh about the other,” said Mr. Tucker. Thus, his report focuses on “how to make that kind of thinking integral to every level of education.”

That means, he adds, revamping an education system designed in the 1900s for people to do “routine work,” and refocusing it on producing people who can imagine things that have never been available before, who can create ingenious marketing and sales campaigns, write books, build furniture, make movies and design software “that will capture people’s imaginations and become indispensable for millions.”

That can’t be done without higher levels of reading, writing, speaking, math, science, literature and the arts. We have no choice, argues Mr. Tucker, because we have entered an era in which “comfort with ideas and abstractions is the passport to a good job, in which creativity and innovation are the key to the good life” and in which the constant ability to learn how to learn will be the only security you have.

Economics is not like war. It can be win-win. We, China, India and Europe can all flourish. But the ones who flourish most will be those who develop the best broad-based education system, to have the most people doing and designing the most things we can’t even imagine today. China still has to make some very big changes to get there — but so do we.