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A new survey shows that small business owners are curtailing hiring and spending in anticipation of the new rules.

Even after months of aggressive outreach, a new survey shows just how far the Obama administration has to go to convince small business owners that the health care law will benefit them.

A new Gallup survey found that about half of small business owners still believe that Affordable Care Act will be "bad for business." Some are holding off on hiring or scaling back workers' hours in anticipation.

The survey of 600 owners of small businesses with revenues of $20 million or less, revealed that only nine percent of them believe that the legislation will be good for their business. Just five percent of respondents expect health care costs to decrease as a result of the law's implentation. Many of the law's requirements go into effect in 2014.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, almost half, at 48 percent, believe that ACA will be bad for their business and the majority, at 55 percent, expect their businesses' health care costs to increase. At the same time, 52 percent said they believe that the law will actually reduce the quality of health care.

According to Gallup, "this overall impression of the ACA is consistent with owners' tendency to be more Republican than Democratic, higher income, more against big government, more conservative, and less optimistic than Americans overall."

Four in 10 survey respondents said they've already curtailed hiring or spending. While a quarter of small business owners contemplate dropping health insurance coverage for their employees, about one in five have cut jobs or workers' hours.

President Obama has repeatedly come out swinging and did so again after the survey was released, accusing his political adversaries of mounting a misinformation campaign to sway public opinion.

It's a battle he's been fighting for several years, amid the complexity of the law and the uncertainty swirling around it. The White House has previously attempted to shape the public's perception of ACA and commissioned a report by the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) on how small businesses suffer economically under the current health care system versus the ACA legislation. Specifically, the administration attempted to dispel the perception that the legislation would increase coverage prices and gain support of small businesses by drawing their attention to the small business health care tax credit included in the legislation and demonstrating how different types of Main Street businesses would benefit.

Crowdfunding critics take note: A recent study by Wharton professor Ethan Mollick proves that crowdfunders are better than you might think at finding quality entrepreneurs--and even seem to act with less bias than venture capitalists.

The typical crowdfunding-project backer is more sophisticated than you might think.

In a recent study, Wharton professor Ethan Mollick analyzed 2,101 Kickstarter projects--all of which were based in the United States, were seeking more than $5,000 in funding, and fell within particular start-up verticals including hardware, software, video games, and product design. He had a simple question: Compared to a skilled venture capitalist, how good is the crowd at assessing the quality of entrepreneurs?

There's been plenty of research about how venture capitalists seek out investments; but in this study, Mollick's goal was to understand how and why typical backers make their decisions--and determine whether those decisions were in line with how a VC might make a decision. The results were surprising--and encouraging for proponents of crowdfunding.

"Although the amateurs and the experts differ in many key ways, they are ultimately assessing whether early stage entrepreneurial ventures have the ability to succeed at their goals by looking for signals of quality," writes Mollick. The findings suggest "that the signals of quality that are used by VCs to assess the viability of new ventures are also used by crowdfunders."

Obviously, venture capital and crowdfunding have completely different models for raising capital. First, there are relatively few VC firms, compared to millions of potential crowdfunders. Second, VCs are in the middle of start-up networks, while the average crowdfunder might live 1,000 miles from the nearest start-up. And third, the most obvious difference (at least for now) is that VCs get equity--the typical crowdfunder does not. But Mollick's study is an important advance in the study of crowdfunding, because it lends credibility to the argument that crowdfunding has the potential to find--and fund--the next generation of high-growth start-ups.

In the study, Mollick lays out his fives hypoethesis that show that crowdfunded-backed and venture-backed start-ups are actually not all that different. They are:

Hypothesis 1: Entrepreneurs who demonstrate a history of successful projects are more likely to be crowdfunded.

Verdict: True.

Looking at the backgrounds of crowdfunding-project creators, Mollick found that "explicit past evidence of success is predictive of successful funding...I examined whether projects that listed relevant past projects or employers by name are more likely to be selected than those that don't clearly indicate a relevant background."

Hypothesis 2: Entrepreneurs who demonstrate third-party endorsements are more likely to be crowdfunded.

Verdict: True.

"Endorsements were explicit hyperlinks or quotes from outside organizations or new media providing support or legitimacy to projects," Mollick writes. "Most commonly, this was a quote from a journalist or prominent blog...outside endorsements significantly increase the chance of selection in crowdfunding."

Hypothesis 3: Entrepreneurs who demonstrate preparedness are more likely to be crowdfunded.

Verdict: Sort of.

To examine this hypothesis, Mollick looked at two measures: whether or not there was a prototype listed, and whether there was a video that existed. While having a prototype and video helped entrepreneurs raised funds, it was tough to prove causality: "A key question about these findings is whether signals are important given other potential sources of information on entrepreneurs, such as social networks," Mollick writes.

Hypothesis 4: Selected projects are less geographically concentrated in crowdfunding than in venture capital.

Verdict: True.

VC-funded typically happens in start-up clusers--the average distance between a start-up and its venture backer, for instance, is 70 miles. One of the benefits of crowdfunding is that it's potentially immune to the "cluster" effect. Mollick writes that "crowdfunding does seem less concentrated than VC funding, though the difference is not great in magnitude."

Hypothesis 5: Gender is less predictive of selection in crowdfunding than in venture capital.

Verdict: True.

One of the key insights of Mollick's study is this: The number of successfully-funded Kickstarter projects founded by women was fifteen times higher than among those backed by VCs tracked by VentureSource. "Further," Mollick writes, "gender was not predictive of selection under any specification...These findings offer strong support for [Hypothesis 5], that crowdfunding has less gender bias than VC selection."

A strong culture isn't something you wish into place, or even will into place. It's something you build. Here's how.

“We train for war and fight to win.” -- Navy SEAL Creed

I’ve never met a business owner who didn’t say he or she wanted to create a winning company culture. But I’ve met plenty whose actions exhibited something different.

That's because building a winning culture isn't easy.

The most focused, most well-defined winning culture I’ve seen is the Navy SEALS culture, and at our company we try hard every day to replicate that personality. This is how we go about building a winning culture.

Define values and ingrain them in everything you do. Instilling company core values takes communication and repetition. It also takes action and leading by example. The values and guiding principles of any company should be so important that without them the organization would fail. To create and build a winning team, you need to clearly define the values, partner with team members and clients that share the same values, and live them every day. Also, set values-based performance measurement systems and reward success publicly. Always reference values when doing so.

Team members, not employees. Navy SEALs refer to the community as “The Teams.” We refer to ourselves as “Team-guys.” That is how team-oriented the culture is. At IMI, we never refer to team members as employees. In a winning culture, everyone shares a common goal and understands how their role affects mission success. All team members are aligned, engaged, and focused on achieving goals rather than performing activities.

Create an environment of trust. Many organizations believe internal trust is nice to have but not a key factor for bottom line profitability. That simply isn’t true. Trust directly affects speed and cost. When trust diminishes, speed goes down and costs go up. These economic factors are usually disguised as other things, but when there isn’t trust between team members, or between the company and its customers, it is impossible to achieve real success. The myths are that trust is built solely on integrity, that you either have it or you don’t, that if lost it can’t be restored, and that it can’t be taught. The realities are that trust is a function of both character and competency, it can be both created and destroyed, it can be restored (in most cases), and be taught and developed into a measurable strategic advantage.

Set the right goals and constantly raise the bar. You can’t win without setting goals and defining the path to success. It is critical to set both attainable goals and lofty, seemingly unattainable goals in order to drive a business forward. While celebrating the small wins is important and keeps people engaged, we don’t want to get too hung up on the little achievements. If this is done too frequently, we start to master mediocrity and spend less time on working towards the tougher goals. We need to get out of our comfort zones and push our organizations hard. The more we do this, the larger that comfort zone becomes and goals that used to seem far reaching will then be just another simple win.

Focus on results and build accountability. A winning culture is not just about setting the right goals and pushing hard toward milestones. It is about measuring performance, learning from mistakes, and holding every stakeholder accountable. Accountability can come in many forms, but in a truly winning culture that has the right people doing the right things, people hold themselves accountable. There is no better system for accountability than that.

The iPhone 5 is hardly the only game in town. Here are several business-oriented handsets that meet even the most demanding entrepreneur's needs.

The iPhone 5 is hardly the only game in town. Here are several business-oriented models that will meet even the most demanding executive's needs. Prices for these phones vary by contract and wireless carrier.--John Brandon

As you might expect, the Z10 is the hands-down winner when it comes to typing. The software keyboard is incredibly accurate and the keys are spaced just right. For business users, the Z10 brings peace of mind. BlackBerry Balance automatically secures your email so you can't copy from a work account to personal. And, company apps are protected and managed by your IT folks. Swiping works quite well: You can flick left and right to see open apps. The Hub provides quick access to incoming text messages. And, the phone is slim and business-black. The device uses a 1.5GHz processor, has 16GB of internal storage, and lasts 10 hours on a charge.

Don't count the Windows Phone 8 out quite yet. This speedy model, which runs on a 1.5GHz processor with 16GB of storage, might fit into a Microsoft-centric office better than an iPhone or Android model. For starters, you benefit from easier integration with Microsoft Office 2013 to save documents to the cloud and open them on the phone. Like the BlackBerry Z10, IT folks can wipe the phone of data and manage apps. The big win for larger companies: The 8X works out-of-the-box with SharePoint and can even auto-discover your existing server, which many companies use for collaboration.

There's some serious hype surrounding this successor to the Galaxy SIII, and for good reason. This Android model offers nifty consumer-oriented tricks like using both cameras (front and rear) at the same time and a sensor that can read gestures. But it's also outfitted with high-end business features. For starters, the KNOX service keeps business and personal apps split between two distinct views. You can also encrypt the phone to protect files. And here's a unique feature: One version of the S4 will have an octa-core (eight) processor running at 1.6GHz for blazing speed.

Two HTC phones, both for business? Sure. The HTC 8X has Microsoft apps for easy integration. But the HTC One is a worthy Android model. For starters, it is an exceptional phone that's sleek, well-made, and super-crisp. The 1.7GHz processor is speedy enough to keep pace with just about any Android business app. The camera uses a new technology to produce sharp images that you can even edit right on the phone. Read more: Go Rugged: 4 Tough Tablets

A conversation with Thomas Davenport, author of Judgment Calls: 12 Stories of Big Decisions and the Teams that Got Them Right.

We think of judgment as something exercised by individuals. But organizations can learn to exercise judgment collectively, argues Thomas Davenport, co-author (with Brook Manville) of Judgment Calls: 12 Stories of Big Decisions and the Teams that Got Them Right. Inc. editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan talked with Davenport, a professor of management at Babson College, about why companies that build processes and cultures around good judgment more consistently make the right moves.

Aren’t great analytics or leaders with great guts sufficient to make great decisions?
Numbers are certainly a good guide to decision-making. But a lot of companies don’t have enough data, and it can be time-consuming to gather and analyze. That’s a problem when you need to make a decision quickly. If your company is making a decision it has never made before, which tends to happen with the really big, swing decisions, you may not have any data at all. As for guts, I’m not sure there’s any such thing as a consistently great gut, even among the most successful leaders.

How do you move from individual judgment to organizational judgment?
Look at the different classes of decisions your company makes. Tactical ones like what do we charge? or how much inventory do we keep around? And strategic ones like will we acquire this company? or how will we choose the next CEO? Think about how often you make this kind of decision and how much is worth investing in it. Then consider what tools and resources you need and set up a decision-making process for each. Data is generally easier to get for tactical decisions. The executive team may need to function very differently on strategic questions.

What questions do you ask as you create these processes?
Did we examine all alternatives? Did we converge too quickly on a single alternative? Did we involve multiple people? Did we involve the right people at the right levels with the right expertise? Did we use data and was it the right data? Also, ask yourself how often you’ve made that decision before. If you’ve done so repeatedly you may already be very good at it.

What does a culture of organizational judgment look like?
It’s a culture of modesty and self-examination. It’s a culture where people admit errors and become students of those errors. It’s a culture that is deliberative--that doesn’t fly off the handle but also isn’t paralyzed by excessive analysis. It’s a culture that figures out how long it has to make a key decision and then makes it in that time period--neither too fast nor too slow. It’s a culture that uses data when there is data available. And it’s a culture that values the intelligence and experience of its people. That’s one reason Google has succeeded and why it uses wisdom-of-the-crowd approaches so much. They realize, we hired some incredibly smart people here. We should ask them every once in a while what their bet is on a particular topic.

You mentioned admitting errors. So it’s not enough to be comfortable with failure. You also have to publicize those failures?
Publicize failures that you clearly learned from. If you make a bad decision in corporate life, it can quite easily disappear without a trace. But look what happens in health care. More and more, we see organizations that made an error and learned from it get sued less for malpractice. Health care in this country is screwed up in many respects. But if you kill somebody at least there’s likely to be a meeting about it.

Most problems aren't solved by silver bullets, brilliant strategy, or high technology. They're solved by simple common sense.

Every homeowner has nagging problems to deal with. Leaks, critters, weeds, pool algae--it's a long, long list. The bigger the home, the more property you own, the more stuff you've got, the more problems you've got to deal with.

I've lived on a relatively large property for a long, long time. Every year, it's the same old problems. And the more years pass, the more I understand that most problems aren't solved by silver bullets, brilliant strategy, high technology, or even brute force. Usually, it just takes a little finesse, a little craftiness, a little common sense. That and a lot of patience and persistence.

Take gophers for example. They're a huge problem around here, in the mountains surrounding Silicon Valley. I've tried pretty much every silver bullet solution and they all came up short. The only thing that works is learning to think like a gopher, finding their tunnels, and setting really low-tech traps in their holes--the kinds of traps that have existed for decades. And you've got to stick with it. That means setting those traps every week during the season, year in, year out.

The funny thing is, the working world is pretty much the same. Whether you manage a business, an organization, or your own career, you can spend all your time searching for quick fixes and miracle solutions. But at the end of the day, most problems aren't that different from the gophers. You're better off just doing what works.

So, why don't people do that? Why don't they just do what works? Because that requires a little thought and getting your hands dirty. And it's usually pretty boring and repetitive. Like annual planning, budgeting, calling on customers, keeping your marketing fresh, using simple metrics to determine what works and what doesn't, that sort of thing.

None of that's fun. In fact, it's all a royal pain in the butt. But it works. It's always worked. And it still works.

Sure, it's a lot more fun to just get on your computer and search for new stuff. It's a lot easier to just plunk down a credit card, make a purchase, and hope it works. It's certainly a lot more instantly gratifying to try something new and different or even to read something that's supposed to inspire you or help you to be more productive.

It's easy to be fooled into feeling good about clicking on a link or a button.

But you know what? Just like managing this property for the past 20 years, I ran businesses, organizations, and my own career for a long, long time. Now I advise others. And one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty is this: When it comes to managing a business or making it in this world, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

So quit wasting all your time searching for quick fixes, silver bullets, and cool new things to try and buy. Just do what works. Maybe use a little finesse, a little craftiness, a little common sense. And be patient and persistent about it.

And you know what? You'll be more successful and you'll have a lot more time to have fun than you ever imagined. No kidding.

Leading has its challenges, but when your followers are powerful leaders you need to step up your game. Here are six helpful tips.

As a boss or team leader, you have to lead people every day. It makes life easier when you have established authority and your followers are generally compliant. But someday you may find yourself leading powerful leaders, perhaps for a board meeting, a nonprofit, or even a high-level management team. These focused and dynamic people create completely different challenges for a facilitator.

This was my exact challenge this week in London. I was honored to moderate a panel for the G8 Young Summit (G8YS) and was quickly recruited to help facilitate 35 young leaders to create an important, detailed communiqué for the heads of state from G8 countries, all in 24 hours. These young leaders, from more than 14 countries, many of whom had never before met, were described at the event by keynote Matthew Bishop of the Economist as the people who will control the world in 2030. They are all strong-willed, successful, passionate entrepreneurs with healthy egos, varied points of view, and independent agendas.

I am happy to say that after an intense and spirited discussion we achieved our goal, but only because of agile facilitation practices, some of which I knew well and some of which I had to improvise along the way.

1. Prepare

If you are blessed with advance time, give attendees plenty of information to ready them for the discussion. Use subject matter experts to help frame the conversation in writing, preferably days in advance. Send the attendees a bulleted e-mail with key points and objectives so you don't waste valuable meeting time while preparing them for discussion.

2. Manage Expectations

Make sure your attendees are absolutely clear and aligned on both the objectives and the deliverables. Strong leaders will likely have varied views of the level of depth and detail required in a solution or document. Your job is to make sure you are all working toward the same goal. You also have to make sure the deliverables can be completed within the available timeframe or you will take the blame. Take a little extra time initially to determine a clear and appropriate scope. Then constantly remind everyone in case they stray to their own standards.

3. Keep Everyone Equal

In a free discussion, some people will dominate and others will hang back, letting others talk. Your job is to bring everyone's ideas to the forefront so all can be heard. When soliciting input, start by having everyone take a few minutes to jot down specific ideas on paper. Give them tight structure, such as asking for only two or three responses. If there is time, each person can read his or her notes. Or if consensus is close, simply vote with hands and ask if anything was missed. Don't be afraid to cut someone off if they are hogging the conversation. They might think you are a little rude and bossy, but the other people at the session will appreciate you keeping time and input in balance.

4. Maintain Clear Priorities

Passionate people will follow their passion especially when it's coming out of their mouth. Strong advocates can derail a discussion by constantly dragging it back to their own agendas. Your job is to keep the focus on the objectives and deliverables. Write down the discussion focus at the top of the whiteboard so you can simply point to it when correcting a digression. Guide the group toward expansive thinking early and then tighten the boundaries to refine and get to consensus. You have to own the conversation or your leaders will push you aside and take it their own direction.

5. Step Out of Situational Conflict

It's not your job to make people play nice. Spirited debate and healthy conflict can add to the depth of the result. When flare-ups happen, let them go, at least for a bit. Otherwise your participants will feel stifled or unresolved. Let them express enough to verify they have been heard without overusing the time required to complete your task. Of course, recognize that strong advocates may never feel fully heard if the group agrees to go a different way. In this case, make sure that you acknowledge the issue and focus the advocate on the need to meet objectives and deliverables within time constraints.

6. Be Firm but Gracious

When facilitating leaders you have to show strength and self-confidence. You may or may not have time to build trust, but you still have a job to do and you are accountable for completing the task. Many in the group may feel they could do better and they indeed may be right, but this is your session and you must take absolute ownership even if it means politely rejecting the people you admire and respect. As long as you keep a sense of humor and advocate for the priority, most leaders will respect your approach within the context of a difficult challenge. Make sure at the end you acknowledge the participation and patience of each member of your group. Show appreciation and grace; voice your pride in the successful accomplishment of the team deliverables.

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Building a business takes a village. But how can a growing business afford it?

Entrepreneurs are highly motivated, risk-taking individuals. Despite their risk profile, they aren't necessarily risk-seeking individuals. Many "solopreneurs" yearn to build a team around them and share the risk as well as the upside benefits of building a company.

We recently heard from Cecilia Wong, the CEO of Cecilia Wong Skincare in New York. She asked us three questions:

1. I'm a solopreneur and would like to start building a team. Where do I start? Should I hire a sales assistant or a marketing assistant or both?

2. I sell my products through several avenues: my website, Amazon and at the salon. I'm trying to find ways to increase more sales online--any tips to attract more traffic or different ways to increase sales?

3. What are some no-cost marketing ideas I can implement besides social media?

At the heart of these questions, it seems that Wong is struggling with how to build a team and infrastructure around her. Growth businesses can't be built solely by an individual; they require a team of people and partners with complementary skill sets. Building a business takes a village.

In Wong's case, she is trying to build an internal team to boost her marketing and sales efforts. She needs a distribution network to put her products in front of more customers and she needs to promote her product to attract potential customers .

Finding an individual with all of these capabilities would be rare and possibly expensive. The right person is not only "smarter" than Wong in terms of sales and marketing prowess, but also must be seeking an entrepreneurial environment. The perfect individual might also be willing to take some equity in lieu of salary.

In terms of distribution and marketing partners, Wong should look to find companies that can work with her in building the business. This might mean investing alongside her in the upfront costs and reaping some of the benefits as the company grows. She may be able to find a young, entrepreneurial PR expert looking to build a track record of his or her own and is willing to partner with Wong at a reduced rate, or on a success basis.

As a solopreneur who aims to build a growing business, the best thing Wong can do is find the right partners and team members. This takes a lot of digging, and the ability to give up some of the future upside of the business. But finding the right partner can reap rewards for years to come.

How are you finding success in building an entrepreneurial team? Send us your thoughts and questions to karlandbill@avondalestrategicpartners.com.

No one says you have to help out a fledgling fellow entrepreneur once you've found success. But there are some pretty compelling reasons to do so.

One of the enduring mysteries of human nature is why a very successful business person would give away his time to help an up-and-comer. After all, given the mentor’s success, he easily could charge the protégé $500 an hour for the valuable advice and contacts that he has pulled together during his career.

And yet mentoring is a widely accepted practice. To figure out why, I spoke with Mike Bergelson, CEO of Everwise, a service that connects mentors and protégées. It’s a mentoring company that benefits from being near a key mentor. Bergelson--who started Audium, a software company in New York City that Cisco acquired in 2006--ended up moving to California as a Cisco executive.

He left Cisco and pulled together the team from the software start-up to work on business ideas. But Everwise did not gel until 2012 when Bergelson discussed these ideas with Maynard Webb, his mentor, whose Webb Investment Network (WIN) offers “young entrepreneurs seed capital, mentorship, and on-demand access to experts.”

Thanks to his conversations with Webb, Bergelson decided to focus solely on mentoring. As he explained, “Maynard asked questions that made me realize that I had a passion for creating a way for corporate protégés to find mentors and that addressing that need could be a big opportunity.”

Bergelson knew first-hand how commonly big companies miss the opportunity to match protégés with mentors. That’s because when he was working for one of those big companies, he was given the name of his mentor. That person never responded to Bergelson’s email suggesting a meeting. A few weeks later, the mentor had quit and the company never gave Bergelson another.

Still, Bergelson believes mentoring is a great way for big companies like his former employer to develop talent. A study by a former Sun Microsystems executive found that employees who received mentoring were five times more likely to be promoted. And a study of successful people like Warren Buffett found that the second most important reason they believe they’ve been successful is great mentors (Buffett’s was Benjamin Graham).

Everwise has developed an algorithm that has contributed to a “96 percent match satisfaction rate.” Assuming that’s true, Bergelson should be an authority on why people agree to serve as mentors. Here are his four top reasons.

1. Give Back

Successful people I have interviewed often say that they were helped early in their career by someone who had achieved greatness. Now they believe that they should “pay it forward.”

But why do they feel that way? Some feel that they are repaying a debt to future generations; others believe that if their advice helps a younger person, it will make a little piece of them immortal; still others see mentoring as going back in a time machine and giving a younger version of themselves the advice that they wish they had received.

This last reason highlights the importance of matching the right mentor and protégé. After all, if a mentor finds a young person with similar life experiences--such as emigrating from Chile or competing in triathlons--it will strengthen the feeling of giving back to a younger version of herself.

2. Learn From Process

Many mentors claim that they learn by teaching. This observation brings to mind the Seinfeld episode about mentoring. In case you missed it, George Costanza needs to learn about risk management so he asks his protégé to record herself reading the book to him. (Naturally, Costanza took the idea of learning from mentoring and turning it on its head.)

Bergelson said that many mentors learn through the process of teaching others and they find that mentoring makes them better leaders. He said that 94 percent of mentors agree to repeat their experience because they “take away a lot from the process.”

3. Meet New People

Mentors also like the idea of meeting new people whom they can add to their “I knew when” list. After all, who doesn’t like the idea of bragging to associates that they knew [currently famous person X] before they became successful?

For mentors with this motive, there is also a potential financial benefit. The protégé might offer the mentor an opportunity to invest in an early-stage venture. And if that happens, the mentor may not only get bragging rights but a big slug of cash when he sells stock in the now successful venture.

4. Get Exposed to New Ideas

Protégés also expose mentors to new ideas. For example, the protégé might discuss how her company is using a new approach to innovation, pricing, or customer service. Mentors may be able to apply some of these best practices to their own activities.

People are willing to mentor for free because they already have--in the context of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs--met their physiological and safety needs and now seek esteem and self-actualization. Mentoring is a way to get there.

Beyond the lessons learned, you'll establish a culture that emboldens your employees to take risks.

Remember that old Teddy Roosevelt quote--the slightly sexist one you had to write an essay about in high school? It goes something like this:

"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming . . . and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

In short, it's better to dare to fail, than it is to fail to dare. Few would disagree. But when it comes to incorporating such derring-do into your company's culture, you'll probably need to do more than write a few presidential bons mots on a whiteboard.

Engineers Without Borders Canada, a nonprofit that specializes in international development, has gone farther--much farther--than inspirational quotes. For the past five years, it has published a "failure report" alongside its regular annual report. "I only let the best failures into the report," Ashley Good (@admitfailure), the report's editor, tells the New York Times.

On Management Innovation eXchange's M-Prize website, Good explains how the report has helped to instill more risk-taking in her organization's culture. The 2010 failure report, for example, features a story by an employee named Owen Scott about his efforts to improve the water-infrastructure monitoring system in Malawi.

Scott describes one of his failures as "prioritizing tangible activities as outcomes." He explains, "Success is hard to find sometimes in development work and can have a serious effect on how we think about it. For me, success quickly became about having the district staff collect data--it was tangible, concrete, and simple. Success wasn't about the district office valuing the program or about behavior change. This all but guaranteed that my own priorities and the actual priorities of the district would eventually become misaligned."

As you can see, much of what a nonprofit like EWB can learn from its failures is transferable to the business world. Beyond that, Scott shared his failure with the organization in an extremely public manner. That's a habit any culture should aspire to encourage.

And it's cultures like this that abet recruiting. Good writes: "Michael Kennedy, who was hired last year to join EWB's Water and Sanitation team in Malawi, told me, 'The failure report is the reason I am in Malawi right now. Having had no previous experience with EWB, the report's existence indicated to me that the organization was reflective and dynamic. It gave me the impression that if I had issue with an approach we were taking I would have opportunity to voice my concern and be heard--which has been the case.'"

In addition, EWB has acted on the events documented in its failure reports. In 2010, an employee named Eli Angen wrote about an outreach initiative called Bring EWB to Work. The idea was simple: The nonprofit would mobilize its volunteer engineers to make presentations about EWB in their workplaces. "A major goal was to deliver 200 presentations nationally through this mobilization strategy," Angen reveals. Yet only 51 presentations were delivered (25 percent of the target).

Why did the initiative fall short? Angen gives three reasons:

1. Timing. "July was a poor time for workplace engagement given vacation schedules."

2. No regional representative. "This limited our follow-up and personal touch required for engagement."

3. No follow-up. "Seventy-five presentations committed were never delivered. We were not diligent in ensuring follow-through."

When the time came for EWB's next national outreach, the nonprofit acted on these lessons. Guided by Angen's experience, the organization took workplace schedules into consideration. In addition, it identified regional representatives who could take the lead on follow-up actions. The campaign, according to Good, reached 85 percent of all the first-year engineering students it targeted.

EWB's 2010 Failure Report

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It's not just cocktails and hookups. No other television show portrays life in a start-up the way Mad Men does.

If you're watching with the eyes of an entrepreneur, the true star of Mad Men isn't really Don Draper, Joan Holloway, or Peggy Olson. It's not even the 1960s. The true star of Mad Men is the advertising firm itself.

Entrepreneurship is a roller coaster, and it's hard to think of a television show that has dramatized that better than Mad Men. Over the course of six seasons, viewers have watched the firm's partners battle for business, come to blows, grow big, get acquired, fall apart, relaunch as a start-up, lose key clients, gain even better clients--and most recently, merge with a rival.

Your business life may not come with quite as many cocktails, or quite as much sex. But when it comes to what it takes to build a business and keep it humming, the show has demonstrated some key lessons of entrepreneurship.

1. It's not who you know. It's who you get to know.

So, you've filled out your LinkedIn profile completely and you go to industry meetings with a stack of business cards? That's nice.

Don first got hired at the agency after meeting Roger, engineering a daytime bender, and then showing up the next day to convince Roger he'd offered Don a job but had been too drunk to remember doing it. That's some aggressive networking.

More recently, Sterling used a fling with an airline stewardess (that's what they were called then), who tipped him off on midwestern executives flying to New York to interview advertising agencies. He hops on airplane trips to meet and befriend them--all in the name of drumming up business.

That kind of networking is probably the second-most important impact on the fictional agency's success. Its account executives are willing to do almost anything to meet decision-makers, develop rapport, and keep them happy.

2. Customers don't know what they want until you show them.

If networking was the second-most important lesson, this is the most important.

Whatever you call the firm (its post-merger name hasn't been revealed as of this writing), much of its success in early seasons was due to creative director Draper's ability to see beyond what clients and customers said they wanted, and understand instead what they truly needed.

In a famous episode from Season 1, he saw that the cool thing about the then-brand-new slide projector wasn't its technology, but the fact that customers longed to connect with their pasts. (The scene where he pitches the client is worth watching.)

That kind of empathy requires truly understanding the client--maybe even better than the client understands him or herself.

3. Perception often trumps reality.

Don's stock in trade is deception--in his messy personal life, for sure (he's not only a hounddog; he's literally living another man's life), but also in business. He and many of the other characters spend much of their time trying to shape reality into what they wish it really were.

When the firm was struggling a couple of seasons ago, and Roger accidentally invited their biggest client to the office Christmas party, they cranked up the tempo "from convalescent home to Roman orgy" to make it seem as if they were doing very well. Advertising itself is largely about perception. To take a recent example, there's the Fleischmann's commercial that Don and his new creative partner, Ted Chaough, came up with: a farmer's wife forgoing the fresh butter from their dairy cows and spreading margarine on her breakfast (as if that would ever happen).

I think this brings up a very fine point: So much of entrepreneurship is about salesmanship, and so much of salesmanship is about managing perception. The difference between fiction and life, I suppose, is that in real life if you squander your credibility, it's much harder to regain.

4. Details matter, but vision matters a little more.

One of the big plot lines for the remainder of the series (the show ends next year) is likely to be about complications from the merger with a competing firm.

Fast growth through acquisition is what you might call a "good problem," but it's clear already that the details are going to drive the drama. From fitting everyone into the physical space, to growing and shrinking staff, to figuring out how the big personalities involved will get along, Mad Men looks as if it will face many of the same management and administrative challenges that any growing business faces in real life.

As that unfolds, it might be easy to forget that driving that kind of major plot development--either on a TV show or in real life--often requires bold vision.

Two episodes ago, sitting in a hotel bar the night before pitching Chevy, Don and his rival Ted decided on-the-spot to merge their firms. They stayed up all night, according to the story, won the carmaker's business--and left it to others to clean up the mess and wrap a pretty administrative bow on it.

5. Drink to excess and cheat on your spouse.

Okay, I'm kidding about this one. But if there's one thing the show's characters seem to do besides run an ad agency, it's drink a ton of alcohol and sleep around. These aren't exactly keys to success, and I'm not advocating them. But they do make for good television.

Some entrepreneurs need to overhaul their lifestyle, but everyone can benefit from small tweaks to their routine.

When we posted a new trick for shoehorning healthy habits into your schedule, LinkedIn lit up with several comments from business owners going to heroic lengths to stay fit.

Scheduling your life to accommodate good health can be a challenge for many. But why does it have to be difficult?

Trevor Gibbs, a former engineer turned health blogger, says it doesn't. Simple but effective interventions are often overlooked, especially by those who feel a need for bigger change. People can "build the movement habits first, and look for opportunities to move, stretch, and be mobile," he says. From there, he offers some useful tips to get started:

• Park at least five minutes away from the office so you'll walk more
• Use the stairs instead of elevators
• Set up a standing workstation

"Oh please," you might be thinking, "these small things might be decent first steps, but they're hardly going to make a dent in my health." But Gibbs isn't the only person saying little changes can have big impacts. The iDoneThis blog recently offered more examples from some big names in business.

Ryan Hoover, a grown-up who knows he should take his vitamins but somehow always forgets, is one of them. "I made a small change," he explains in a post. "I took the jar out of the cupboard and placed it on the countertop. Since then, I haven’t missed a day of taking my vitamins."

Again: Tiny change, big impact.

Hoover notes how other entrepreneurs are taking small steps toward big change:

• Buffer’s Leo Widrich sets gym clothes on top of his alarm clock so he's forced to move around.
• Google increases employees' water consumption by rearranging the fridge--Googlers go for the visible water that's within arm's reach.
• Simplicity author Leo Babauta says flossing-challenged people should only do one tooth per night.

These small behavior tweaks won't disprove the fact that many of us are in need of a major lifestyle change. But the key point still stands: Don't overlook simple but effective changes because you're searching for a silver bullet.

What small change can you make today?

Oreck used to be one of the biggest names in the vacuum cleaner business. Ten years after he sold his company, David Oreck reflects on what happened.

The Oreck vacuum is familiar to generations of consumers who remember television commercials and QVC spots featuring company founder David Oreck touting the quality, value, and light weight. Now, a decade after Oreck, then an 80-year-old entrepreneur, and his family sold the business to a private equity company, Oreck the company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

"We sold a company that was doing extremely well: profitable, growing, debt-free," Oreck says. Now 90 years old, he has looked back on decades of experience in business and written a book called From Dust to Diamonds, in which he discusses what made his business a long-term hit and what fundamentals entrepreneurs today should hone.

Oreck thinks he knows what went wrong with the company he founded since the sale: Management strayed from important business principles.

Keep Control of Distribution

One problem was an over-reliance on third-party retailers. "If you don't control your distribution, you'll be controlled by your distribution," Oreck says. Back in the day, the company had about 600 franchised stores.

"At Oreck, we built a good product," he says. "We built it to last. We had a 21-year warranty. Our people would keep it going. If service was required, it was done immediately and if it couldn't be done immediately, we gave them a loaner."

However, third-party retailers like big-box stores cannot provide that level of attention and service. "I submit that value is essential," Oreck says. "You don't get that as a rule from the big-box guy."

Not that big retailers are unimportant. "[They have] a role to play and certainly an important one," he says. Being able to display merchandise and explain the relative values and benefits is critical to many purchase decisions. Unfortunately, many consumers will use the retailer as a showroom and then go online to purchase for a lower price, which hurts the future of the retailers, as well as the businesses that depend on them.

Know Your Target Customer

Oreck's two big selling points were its light weight and a reputation for being dependable, built by selling the units to hotels for commercial cleaning. The vacuums were not cheap.

Oreck says that the successful target market was middle-aged women. The light weight made the vacuums easier to handle, and middle-aged people were often better able to afford the price tag.

"By definition your customer is someone who could buy today, not a year from today," he says. "A year from today you could be broke." However, the new owners of the company began to target a younger demographic, moving away from the natural customer base.

Market Smart

Marketing should go with knowing your customer as a glove fits on a hand. "With advertising costs today, you can't afford to advertise to everyone," Oreck says. "Many manufacturers don't really know who their customer is. That's essential. A productive ad costs no more than an unproductive ad."

Oreck says that he was willing to continue being the spokesman for the company, much as Dave Thomas was the face of Wendy's after he stepped down from daily management. But "someone convinced the company they didn't want to have some old fart tell them to buy their vacuum cleaner," Oreck says, "so they had some eye candy gal push the vacuum cleaner."

Put Money in the Business

The final straw was a classic private equity approach to making money: Buy a business, rack up the debt and pull cash out, and then drive down costs to service the debt. "It weakens the company and I think it threatens the jobs of those who invested heavily of their own time," Oreck says. It may not be illegal, but as far as I'm concerned, it's immoral."

Although David Oreck has no financial interest in the company, some members of his family are exploring a repurchase of the company when it exits bankruptcy. Presumably to use his father's principles to reestablish the business.

What you gain when you stop taking everything so seriously and giggle a bit.

I live across the street from a kindergarten. Kindergarten, where I live in Switzerland, is two years and begins at four. They have their own building and most of the children walk by themselves to school. Except, they don't walk. They run.

As adults, we run, too. When we're very late, or when we're in exercise clothes, trying to get in shape or just get into our jeans. But, these children are not late. They aren't trying to lose weight. They are just running, from their houses to the school. And they laugh while they are doing it.

They run in clumps of threes and fours. Sometimes they hold hands. Sometimes they don't. They all stop at the curbs and look carefully, right and then left, as their parents and the safety officer, who came to their kindergarten, explained to them. And once they are assured of the safety of the situation, they take off, running, until they arrive at the kindergarten gate.

We're adults. We're way too busy and serious and important to gleefully scamper down the street, on our way to whatever task it is that we have to do. Most of us tend to drive whenever it's possible.

Now, I'm not advising you to start running down the road, flailing your arms and giggling madly, because there is something to be said for showing a little restraint and maturity. Clients aren't generally thrilled when your team of four walks into the meeting all holding hands and giggling. But, there's something I want to point out here:

Not one of those children is going to kindergarten of their own free will and choice.

Not one. Even their parents didn't have full authority to make that decision. School is mandatory from age four. (Homeschooling is legal here, but it's a complex process to be approved for it.) They don't even get to decide if they want to go in on a particular day. If mom and dad say, "Today's a school day!" then, by golly, it's a school day.

Yet, they still run, gleefully. And it's not because it's a perfectly cheerful place to be. There are squabbles. Skinned knees. Rules about what they can have in their snack. (Healthy snacks only!) And occasionally, one of their classmates may slap, punch, kick or bite them.

But, when they are on their way to school, they don't focus on the unpleasant parts. They may be holding hands with someone who hit them the day before. They may have a slightly mushy apple as their snack.

Do we do that? Or do we focus on the negative? When we get up in the morning, do we focus on the cool things we get to do today? Or do we grumble the whole way about the person at the office who is a jerk? When we had a squabble with a coworker or direct report or boss they day before, do we still look forward to seeing that person? (We shouldn't, however, attempt to hold that person's hand, as sexual harassment laws apply, and that's pretty creepy.)

My challenge for myself and for you for this week, is to try to be a bit more like a kindergartener. I'm going to look for the positive. Rapidly forgive those who are rude, thoughtless or just plain clueless. I know I have lots of hard things to accomplish this week, but that's not going to stop me from trying to giggle my way through it. (If not out loud, at least an internal giggle.)

I think my life will be better. Who is willing to join me?

It's not enough to delegate work. If you can't bring yourself to delegate responsibility, everything will get clogged up.

Hierarchy constipates the economy.

I’ve been reading a lot recently about decision-making, including Chip and Dan Heath’s Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work and Tom Davenport and Brook Manville’s Judgment Calls: Twelve Stories of Big Decisions and the Teams That Got Them Right. (Both excellent, by the way.) These and similar books discuss how to make better decisions. They talk less about the imperative to get decisions made by getting them the hell off your desk.

Every leader recognizes the importance of delegation. But you cannot delegate work without delegating responsibility--and the defining mechanism of responsibility is the decision. Failure to (I can’t believe I’m going to use this word, but here goes) empower people to say yes or no not only slows work to a crawl in your organization, but also potentially affects the performance and even the reputations of individuals at every organization with which you do business.

If every decision lands on your desk, then your company is like a city with one street, one traffic light, and no byways or exits. Slowly, as your time permits, a car or two passes through. But most of them just sit there, idling in frustration, their emissions (which are bad feelings in this metaphor, from which I am getting impressive mileage) poisoning the air.

It's bad enough that your subordinate can’t act until you give him an answer. But consider the people who can’t act until they receive an answer from your subordinate. And the other people farther down the line who can’t act until they receive an answer from those people who are waiting to hear from your subordinate.

Let’s say your company is weighing whether to move into a new office or expand in your current building. The general manager has been trying to pin you down on this for six months. Every week he receives several calls or emails from your building’s facilities director and a real estate agent whom the GM consulted about alternative spaces. The facilities director, meanwhile, is getting calls from her regular contractor, who will need to knock down some walls and perform other construction work if you decide to stick where you are. The contractor wants to keep the facilities director happy--she’s a great customer--so he’s been putting off other customers until she commits to a schedule. Further down the chain of inaction, employees handling building projects for those put-off customers can produce no firm answers about the contractor’s availability for their own finger-drumming bosses. Meanwhile, the real estate agent wonders whether she should keep looking for new sites or she’s just wasting her time. The GM can’t give her any guidance (we need more conference rooms or a bigger parking lot) because you haven’t given him feedback on the spaces you’ve had time to inspect.

I could extend this string of dependencies out further, in a kind of there-was-an-old-lady-who-swallowed-a-fly progression. The problem isn’t just that--as my husband says when I stand in front of a cashier trying to dredge exact change out of my purse--the wheels of commerce have ground to a halt. It’s also that bad feelings are created at every level. Every time a new message comes in--“Can we schedule this?” “Is it going to happen?” “What are the next steps?”--the person applied to must respond, in essence, “I don’t know. I am powerless. I cannot make that decision. I cannot even get my boss to make that decision. I know I am making your life harder. I cannot help it. Sorry, sorry, sorry.” And that humiliating response travels down the line.

At some point, the people with no answers begin to feel harassed or beaten down by the people who need answers, and they stop responding altogether. Bridges burn. Reputations are tarnished.

How to avoid all this? Carve out a few categories of decisions you want to be consulted about and delegate--without threat of second-guessing--the rest. The matters on which you require input should not be the kind that power day-to-day operations. Remember that behind every employee tapping her toes outside your door, there may be two or three or four toe-tappers waiting. Their ability to get things done, to maintain reputations as people who get things done, and in some cases to earn a living, depend on you.

Don't think it's possible because you're already working in overdrive? Here's a new way to look at your to-do list.

In the spirit of the topic, let's get right to it:

1. Eliminate one ego commitment.

We all do things that have more to do with ego than results.

Maybe you serve on a committee because you like how it looks on your CV. Maybe you teach at a local college because you like the words "adjunct professor."

Or maybe, like me, you write a weekly column for your local newspaper mostly because you like when people recognize you at the grocery store.

The things you do mostly for ego are mostly a waste of time. Think about something you do mainly because it makes you look important, smart, or cool. If it provides no other "value," drop it. I'm dropping my weekly newspaper column.

Anything you do that serves the greater glory of you is a waste of time; besides, the best glory is reflected, not projected.

2. Create a happy shelf.

I have a shelf full of old Photoshop books. Haven't opened them in years, so I replaced them with family photos.

Makes me happy. When I'm happy, I do better work. You will too.

3. Stop looking for that extra 10 percent.

I'm somewhat competitive. When I start to do something, within a short period of time I start wanting to do it better than other people.

Okay, I'm overly competitive.

Take cycling. I'm faster, fitter, etc. than the average person. But compared to the fast guys, I'm nothing. They can drop me within a few miles. Drives me crazy. Makes me ride more and train more and spend tons of hours on a bike--and for what? So I can hang with them for a couple more miles? So my time up a certain mountain is only 30 percent slower than theirs instead of 40 percent?

The kind of improvement has no real importance. Sure, I may get in better shape, but at that point the improvement to my overall health is incremental at best. And in the meantime I spend hours on cycling that I could spend on working towards more important goals.

Or I could just spend more time with my family, the most important goal of all.

So this year I'll stay in good shape but I won't worry about working to keep up with the fast guys: One, I never will, and two--it really doesn't matter if I do.

Think about something you already do well but are trying hard to do even better. Then weigh the input with the outcome.

Sometimes "good" truly is good enough, especially if that 10 percent gain is hugely disproportionate to the pain required to reach it.

4. Craft your "just say no" elevator speech.

Entrepreneurs work hard on their elevator speech. They revise, they hone, and they rehearse because their elevator speech is important.

It's also important to know, with grace and tact, how to say no.

Most of us default to "yes" because we don't want to seem rude or unfriendly or unhelpful. Unfortunately, that also means we default to taking on more than we want or can handle.

Maybe your response will be as simple as what I plan to use, "I'm sorry, but I just don't have time."

Whatever yours is, rehearse so it comes naturally. That way you won't say yes simply because you think you should; you'll say yes because you think it's right for you.

5. Eliminate one "fun" commitment.

I used to play fantasy baseball and football. Now I just play fantasy Premier League soccer. When I think about it, I have no idea why.

I could rationalize that it creates a nice break in the week. I could rationalize it's like a "mental health" activity that lets me step aside from the stress and strain of business life. I could, but that's not true.

I just do it because I've always done it, and once I start every year I don't want to quit because, um, I'm not a quitter. (I know that sounds stupid, but I'm willing to bet you do at least one thing for the same reasons.)

Look at the things you do because you've always done them and decide if it's time to stop.

Here's an easy test: If you wouldn't do something while you were on vacation, there's no good reason to do it when you're not.

6. Set limits.

Deadlines and time frames establish parameters, but typically not in a good way. We instinctively adjust our effort so our activities take whatever time we let them take.

Tasks should only take as long as they need to take--or as long as you decide they should take.

Try this: Decide you'll only spend 10 minutes a day on social media. Just 10.

The first day you'll get frustrated because you won't get everything done you "need" to get done. The second day you'll instinctively skip a few feeds because they're not as important. The third day you'll re-prioritize and maybe use a tool like HootSuite to get better organized.

By the fifth day you'll realize 10 minutes is plenty of time to do what you need to do; all that other time you used to spend was just fluff.

Pick a task, set a time limit, and stick to that time limit. Necessity, even artificial necessity, is the mother of creativity. I promise you'll figure out how to make it work.

7. Rework your nighttime routine.

Every day the first thing you do is the most important thing you will do: It sets the tone for the rest of the day.

Prepare for it the night before. Make a list. Make a few notes. Review information. Prime yourself to hit the ground at an all-out sprint the next day; a body in super-fast motion tends to stay in super-fast motion.

8. Rework your morning routine.

Then make sure you can get to that task as smoothly as possible. Pretend you're an Olympic sprinter and your morning routine is like the warm-up for a race. Don't dawdle, don't ease your way into your morning, and don't make sure you get some "me" time (hey, sleep time is me time). Get up, get cleaned up, get fueled up--and start rolling.

My elapsed time from bed to desk is about 15 minutes, so there's not much I can improve there. So I'm going to take a different approach. I normally check email first thing; now I'll get at least one important thing done.

Sprinters don't do cool-down laps before they race. Neither should we.

9. Rework one repetitive task.

Think of a task you do on a regular basis.

Now deconstruct it. Make it faster. Or improve the quality. Pick something you do that has become automatic and actively work to make it better.

Even if you only save five minutes, that's five minutes every time.

10. Eat one meal differently.

Eating can take up a lot of time, especially if you eat out. Deciding where to eat, what to eat, driving and ordering and waiting and lingering... ugh.

Pick one meal to eat efficiently. Turn 30 to 60 minutes of dead time into 10 minutes of refueling and recharging. Bring something healthy you can eat at your desk, like tuna and a salad or fruit. Or eat a meal replacement bar.

Use that meal to fuel up in a healthy way. Then move instantly on to doing something productive.

You'll feel better. And you'll get more done.

11. Outsource one task.

I was raised to think that any job I could do myself was a job I should do myself.

Starting next week the kid down the street will cut my grass. He can use the money. I can use the time.

12. Fix that one thing you often screw up.

I'm terrible about putting meetings and phone calls on my calendar. I figure I'll get to it later and then I never do. I spend way too much time, often in a panic, trying to figure out when and where and who...

All that time is wasted time. My commitment: I will immediately enter every appointment into my calendar the moment I make it--regardless of what else I might be doing.

You probably have at least one thing you tend to mess up. My wife often misplaces her car keys, and when she does she (and I) spend too much (because any is too much) time looking for them.

Maybe you don't file stuff properly. Maybe you put off dealing with certain emails and then forget them. Maybe you regularly find you're unprepared for a call or meeting.

Whatever your "thing" is, fix it. You'll save time and aggravation.

13. Rework your commute.

According to the Census Bureau the average commute is 25 minutes. (Here's a cool map showing average the commute times across the U.S.) That's almost an hour a day you're probably wasting.

Make it productive instead. Review your to-do list and think of the best way to knock off those tasks. Listen to a podcast or audiobook. Make a couple of calls--not ones requiring focus or important decisions, but ones to check in, review progress, network, etc.

Shoot, learn a language. Studies show speaking at least two languages may slow the onset of dementia and Alzheimer's in an aging brain. (Reason enough, eh?)

Don't let your commute be dead time. Get things done you won't have to do later; if nothing else you'll get to do something you actually enjoy during the time you free up.

14. Pick one task during which you won't multi-task.

Plenty of research says multi-tasking doesn't work. Some research says multi-tasking actually makes you stupid.

Maybe you agree. Maybe you don't. Either way, I feel sure there is at least one thing you do that is so important you should never allow a distraction or a loss of focus.

Choose an important task and when you perform it turn everything else off. Focus solely on that task.

See if you do it better.

I bet you will--and I bet you'll extend the practice to other tasks.

Here's how OUYA co-founder and CEO Julie Uhrman and four other female entrepreneurs are revolutionizing gaming.

Last week, OUYA game console CEO Julie Uhrman closed a whopping $15 million in funding, in a round led by Kleiner Perkins. The funding was a sign of a dramatic shift underway as women start to revolutionize games. "There are more [games] that appeal to women, and therefore it makes sense that there are more female developers making [them]," says Christopher Swain, an entrepreneur and member of the University of Southern California's gaming faculty. Here are the five most visionary women in gaming.

In Russia, gamers know Chumenchenko by name. She says her Game Insight Internernational owns 10 percent of the Russian mobile gaming market, and the company, which reported $50 million in revenue in 2011, added a San Francisco bureau last year. Her biggest game to date? Paradise Island, which puts you in control of your own Caribbean island resort, and was at one point making $1 million per month on Android phones, according to BusyBizBee.

Santiago's Flower and flOw video games were commercial and critical successes that turned traditional gaming on its head. "They created this user experience that was about things other than competition," says Swain, the USC professor. Santiago sets herself apart with games that allow a player to control the wind or an aquatic microorganism. Flower also ranked in Sony's top 10 Playstation games for two years in a row, while the PS3 follow-up Journey swept several video game awards last year, plus a Grammy nomination for Best Original Soundtrack.

In April 2008, Abbas teamed up with Ziad Feghali and Karim Abi Saleh to found Wixel, one of Lebanon's first gaming companies. Their latest game endeavor, Survival Race: Life or Power Plants, available for iOS and Android, centers on a post-global warming Middle East with two unlikely Arab heroes: Salem, the young Saudi wheelie stunt champion and Abu Ahmad, a middle-aged botanist. "Two unlikely heroes from the Arab region determined to save the world from this catastrophe is a feature that you rarely see in the entertainment industry in general," Abbas said.

Uhrman's OUYA, which just closed a $15 million round in funding after raising a cool $8.6 million on Kickstarter last summer, is probably the most anticipated video game console to hit the market in years. You'll soon be able to pick up the Android and open source console in Amazon, Best Buy, Gamestop, and Target--and Uhrman hopes to produce a new version of the $99 product every year. "Our plan is to have a yearly refresh of Ouya where we leverage the best-performing chips and take advantage of falling component prices to create the best experience we can at the $99 price point," she recently said in an interview with The Verge.

As founder of Perfect Plum, a start-up that builds and designs "personal pleasure" software for women, Kelley conceived the much-publicized iPhone app OhMiBod Remote. As co-founder of the Kokoromi experimental game collective, she curates the annual Gamma social gaming event, to showcase the best and brightest indie games, like Paper Moon. "I really feel that games can be considered one of the most important and profound forms of culture in the 21st century," said Kelley during a TEDx Vienna talk in February.

Before making the decision to downsize, you need to evaluate your sales efforts. Your real problem might just be a lackluster sales strategy.

Do you ever look around your office and ask yourself, "What are all of these people doing?" You look at your sales and revenues and they are flat or below projections. Your payroll, however, is still disproportionately robust. You start to wonder...Do we really need all of these people?

Before you grab a pencil and start plotting how to "right-size" your business, ask yourself a few questions first:

1) How does seasonality and business cycle affect your staff needs?

2) What does the backlog show the demand to be in the near future?

3) What does the pipeline show for the possible demand in the near future?

One of my great mentors once said, "All business problems are really sales problems." An overstatement perhaps, but it is still something worth considering. Once you have looked at the fluctuations in your staffing demands based upon the questions above, you need to focus on ramping up your sales efforts.

Let me start with a confession--I have made almost all of the staffing mistakes you can make, some of them more than once. I have held onto staff when I should have trimmed. I have trimmed when I should have kept. It took me a while, but eventually I learned the lesson to hire slow and part ways fast when it is clear the relationship isn't a good fit. Assuming you have done the same, that means you have a really strong staff who are underused. This is not a management problem, a scheduling problem, or a lack of commitment. It is a sales problem.

What to do:

Examine what's on the horizon of your sales pipeline--What can be done with your larger clients to accelerate the purchase cycle and implementation? Often you have more influence than you think. By working from the more-distant horizons back to the current moment, you can find opportunities for acceleration.

Analyze current customers and your account penetration--I am often surprised by the complacency of sales people with their existing accounts. Their fear of losing what they have causes them to not aggressively pursue growth and expansion in an account. This might come from a bad experience in the past. It also comes from a misunderstanding as to who actually owns the account. The sales rep does not own the account, your company does. This means you need to declare the strategy and ensure its execution.

Take control of the sales calendar--In our work with clients, I will do a calendar-mapping activity with the sales and business development teams. Each person maps out the next 90 days on a big flip chart to indicate where they are going and with whom they are meeting. We then ask them to value the weeks in revenue growth or new client acquisition, week by week. No value is given to account maintenance, nor is any taken away- it's just not counted. The outcome is surprising. It often shows how little effort is being spent on growing revenue. Using this information to reset the expectations and time investment of your team is a great motivator for bigger numbers faster.

Drive the account meetings yourself--During sales down cycles, you need to be driving the account reviews of your company's top customers yourself. It's not magic that accounts grow when you are in attendance. It's a projectable outcome. So why did you stop going?

You have solved many of your people problems in building a good team. Now go solve your sales problem. You may not be overstaffed overall, just undersold.

There's only one way anyone gets motivated. And it's not a big speech to rally the troops.

I recently sent around a rather direct memo to a number of our marketing folks, suggesting that (a) being better prepared for certain meetings was a really good idea; and (b) that one great way to be better prepared was to make sure that they had seen and reviewed the videos and other materials that were going to be discussed in upcoming meetings beforehand - especially those sent around by me.

Not only would this improve their participation and the value of their contributions, but it would also prevent them from wasting the time of everyone else by insisting that we watch the videos again before getting started.

To me, it seemed to be a fairly basic, straightforward and obvious request. Apparently, for at least some people, I wasn’t being sensitive enough to how awfully busy they are and how hard it is for them to keep up with things. I guess that expecting people to do their jobs and telling them when you don’t think they have has fallen out of fashion and is bad for morale.

The whole episode got me thinking about motivation and incentives, and how too often, we’ve got it backwards. Way too many folks think that motivation is something that we do to other people. That it’s the boss’s job to be the team cheerleader and keep the troops pumped up. That motivation is an external process and a management tool that has to be religiously applied to keep the wheels from falling off.

Wrong. Real motivation comes entirely from within. People who pump themselves up stay pumped and succeed because passion and commitment and a true appreciation of why you’re doing something--and how it ultimately benefits you--don’t wear off. These things aren’t slogans, incentives or stupid party tricks that you read in some book.

There’s no way to excite or motivate or inspire people that’s not grounded in their own perceived self-interest. That’s the way it should be. No one’s really against anyone else in business - they’re just mainly interested in themselves and looking out for Number One.

So if you want to effectively influence others, the process is simple: You’ve got to talk about what they want (their future) and you’ve got to show them how to get it (the path). Then get out of their way and let nature take its course. If they’re engaged and excited about their prospects, their projects and their futures, they will create far more compelling and comprehensive justifications for working their butts off than you ever could. Each of them knows exactly what’s important to them. You’d have to be a mind reader to even try to guess.

Instead of thinking about motivation as something you do to your team, think about what you can do for them. How can you remove obstacles, add resources, clarify directions and goals, or reduce friction so that they can see clearly what’s ahead of them, how to get there, and what’s in it for them? The smart ones will be highly and authentically motivated all by themselves. The others will soon be working somewhere else.

The truth about sales compensation, customer complaints, and other sales basics

When you run a company--especially a start-up--it can be a 24-hour job. But no matter how busy you are, there's one crucial part of your operation you should never ignore: sales. Not every entrepreneur instinctively understands this part of the business, but if you keep these four things in mind as you lead, you’ll have happier, more productive sales reps and plenty of loyal customers.

1. A good sales team can be as important as a good product.
We’ve all heard it: “Create a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” But often it does take effort to demonstrate how great your mousetrap is to potential customers. Even the best products have to be sold, and that’s where your sales team comes in. Astute leaders recognize the value of their sales teams, and they ensure that their teams are made up of top performers.

2. Sales reps should be paid well--maybe even more than you.
Many people ask me what they should pay their sales reps. The answer is simple: What’s a sale worth to you? Professional, well-trained, and skillful salespeople help ensure consistent revenue growth. And for many companies, sales reps are the primary contact between the company and customer. They are responsible for the customer’s primary impression of the company. You definitely don’t want a group of cut-rate employees handling this pivotal part of your business.
In nearly every high-performance, publicly traded company I’ve worked with, the top salespeople’s income routinely rivaled or exceeded that of the CEO. So don't be resentful or envious if your top salespeople earn more than you do. Instead, recognize the immense benefit they bring to your organization.

3. Yes, the customer is always right.
Some entrepreneurs still debate whether or not this maxim is true. But the customer is the ultimate judge of a business and votes with his or her pocketbook. Business owners who stay close to their customers and pay attention to what they have to say will far outperform those who don’t.

4. Customer complaints can be a blessing.
No one likes handling a disgruntled customer, but a complaint can actually be a good thing, because it means that the customer wants to continue doing business with you. And, if you manage the complaint in a timely and efficient manner, 95% of complainers will continue doing business with you. That’s what put Nordstrom on the map. The company gave an unconditional guarantee that if a customer was unhappy with a purchase for any reason, Nordstrom would provide a replacement or a refund--without any red tape--100% of the time. Like Nordstrom, you can turn complainers into loyal customers.