Iarfhlaith Kelly – Code agus Craic

Today we’re launching a totally new business concept called The Board. It’s aimed exclusively at business owners to help them grow their business, solve issues, and fulfil their potential as entrepreneurs.

We’ve been quietly trialling The Board for the past 18 months, tweaking it’s format, figuring out what works and getting feedback from a selection of trial members. Now though, we’re ready to launch it as a fully blown business and can start accepting applications for membership.

We have secured funds from a number of private investors and are excited to be hosting our first official board meeting tonight in Dublin.

What is The Board?

The Board is a support group for your business, provided in the form of structured monthly board meetings. Each meeting is chaired by a trained facilitator who’s role is to ensure that the agenda is adhered to and that everyone gets to an even share of the allocated time.

Board members are made up of other business owners in non-competing businesses, often in very complimentary sectors.

Throughout the trials, we’ve found that typical areas of discussion include:

• improving cashflow;
• growing sales;
• seeking advice in gaining grant aid;
• staff issues;
• etc.

What Next?

I’ll write up a whole lot more about this over the coming weeks as further announcements happen, but for now, if this looks like something you’d be interested in then head over to http://theboard.ie and signup for an info pack.

Comments welcome.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about emotional responses, and especially about their role in marketing.

When I look at the very best brands in the world, I see they all generate very strong emotions from both their followers and their detractors. Regardless of whether it’s love, hate, passion, lust, desire, or disappointment, they all generate them in spades.

These emotions are essential to creating communities around the products, companies and brands that we are each trying to create and promote. And we should encourage these communities whether they’re positive or negative.

Someone once told me that the opposite to love isn’t hate, it’s apathy. If we hate something it means we still care. Whereas with apathy, we’re not interested one way or the other and have no desire to join a community or get involved.

We should be trying to avoid this. As crazy as it sounds, we’re much better off having people who passionately hate what we create then having people who couldn’t care either way, or worse still, haven’t even heard of it yet.

So with that in mind, the next time you’re trying to think of an idea, a good approach might be to think about something that would really piss people off. Because chances are if someone hates it, someone else is going to love it.

When was the last time you had an original thought? Something 100% your own idea. Think about that for a second before you answer.

I bet it’s harder then you expected (it was for me). Chances are, most of the opinions you formed and the recent decisions you made were heavily influenced by media, friends, family, preconceptions, and past experiences.

Sometimes it’s hard to form your own opinion. With the constant barrage of news, blog posts, tweets, ads, TV, radio, billboards, and sponsors it’s no wonder your own ideas on what’s good and bad, right and wrong all get completely squashed. Our point of view is programmed into us.  We’re influenced on conscious and sub-conscious levels. It’s inescapable.

But, if we can find a way to push past the subliminal messaging and ignore the biased reviews of the media (as hard as it is), we give ourselves a great power, and an opportunity to think clearly.

This year I’m going to make a large effort to form my own opinions. It’s not going to be easy, but I’m sure I’ll be happier for it.

If everyone made more of an effort to form their own opinion instead of following along with popular belief then I’ve no doubt we’d all be a lot better off.

Ever watched The Truman Show? The 1998 movie with Jim Carrey as a man who discovers his entire life is a reality TV show. I watched it again recently and it struck a deep chord with me. Partially because for a movie made over 12 years ago (before Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or even Google was storing tons of our information) it highlighted the issue of privacy, albeit in an entertaining way. But mostly it resonated with me because like Truman, without ever questioning it, we have accepted the world into which we have been presented.

The movie begins by showing how Truman Burbank became the first human baby to be legally adopted by a television network. And the network producers decide to run a reality TV show where Truman lives out his entire life in a mockup town constructed under a massive artificial dome in the Hollywood hills.

Everyone except him is an actor, everything around him is fake, and his entire world has been constructed by Christof, the omnipotent creator of the show.

For 30 years Truman lives out his daily life of routine without ever questioning his surroundings or the rules of his own world. He doesn’t push boundaries, challenge himself or others, and makes no attempt to break out of the mould into which he has found himself. Does this sound familiar to you?

Relating this back to our own lives I can’t help but feel that the same attitudes exist all around us, especially in our professional lives. For the most part, we believe what we see and we take it as gospel. We don’t question the state of the art, we don’t challenge it, extend it, or try very hard to disprove it. We simply accept it as fact.

This is a dangerous reality. How can we ever hope to do great things if we settle with for our present state of life?

For Truman, he starts to question his reality when an outsider named Sylvia, infiltrates the show and raises doubt in his mind about the circumstances of his life. From thereon in Truman begins to notice things. He begins to see behavour in people that doesn’t make sense, he begins to recognise patterns that don’t seem normal (even though he doesn’t know what normal is), he starts to question his surroundings and begins to push the boundaries created for him by Christof.

It’s this new heightened awareness that brings Truman to realise that his entire world is a lie and leads to his eventual escape from the artificial dome.

But without that element of doubt given to him by Sylvia, Truman may have spent the rest of his entire life trapped in a world where nothing is as it seems. For myself and for everyone reading this I think we should all try to be a little more like Truman, challenging our surroundings and questioning everything, because when we do that we can do truly remarkable things.