“The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovery, but a process of creation. You are not discovering yourself, but creating yourself anew. Seek, therefore not to find out who you are, seek to determine who you want to be.” ~ Conversations With God
Absolutely! I believe we create our own futures and I live the belief that one of the best ways to determine who we want to be is by focusing on our talents, interests and passion. At the same time though I cherish the fact that life is a process of discovery, discovering truths and purpose, talents and passion, discovering the joy of other people.
Augmented Reality
Over the last couple of weeks I have begun work on a project involving the deployment of an Augmented Reality showcase of Dunedin’s heritage, arts and culture. Our project is inspired by immersive heritage experiences like Museum of London | Street Museum with so much potential for the platform we propose, I feel amazingly blessed to have discovered collaborators to help create and share this vision for our City.
In order to create my own future, I’ve committed to this project the most valuable resources I own, my talent and time, passion and energy. I wholeheartedly believe that this project will serve our City for years to come, providing not only a fun and engaging, compelling and immersive user experience but also establishing an open access platform that many members of our community can contribute to and potentially monetise.
Collaboration & Gratitude
I am inspired and encouraged by the range of support I have discovered in bringing together this collaborative. I see this project as a catalyst for on-going and future collaboration, spanning many of Dunedin’s most talented and creative industry sectors.
Most importantly, Thanks to my Great Omnipotent Deity for blessing me with talented people to work with. Thanks & massive respect to my talented collaborators Stu FlemingTim CalderPierre-Emmanuel de La Bussière and community support from:-
Port Otago’s application to dredge the harbor, expand the existing port, and dump 7.2 million cubic meters of spoil six kilometers off Tairoa Head was notified to the public last Friday.
Take part in a community action project that will have real impact on the future of Dunedin City.
Apply your legal skills to an environmental conservation project and discover first hand how the public submission process works.
We encourage all people concerned or opposed to the proposed Port Otago dredging to enter a submission to the Otago Regional Council by Friday 5pm August 2010.
“Chose a job you love, and you will never have to Work a day in your life.” Confucius
Ancient wisdom. As true today as it was when Confucius – China’s most famous teacher, philosopher, and political theorist 551-479 BC – wrote it some 2500 years ago.
Here at Worknow we believe you can find a job you love by connecting with work opportunities that match your talents, skills and interests, passion, values and experience.
It’s taken four times longer than first thought and although still under testing and development we now have [ pause for drum roll & trumpeting fanfare to sound in my head ] Version 1.0! of our website live! Basically, this means a couple of new but important features & changes.
New Types of Talent Profiles
People can now register a talent profile as one of different types of entities:-
Individuals: Can post requests and offer services on all work
Business: Can post requests and offer services on all work
Community Group : Can post requests but can not offer services
Charity Organisation: Can post requests but can not offer services
With only a single field now for keywords we hope this change will help people focus keywords around the talents, skills and values relevant to the dream job they want to work toward.
We will work on improving profiles, without adding complexity, in the next round of development.
New Volunteer Marketplace
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Anyone can now request volunteer help.We are working to populate the marketplace with volunteer work opportunities. Please if you know of anyone that needs volunteer help tell them that they can list with us at $0. If you are interested in volunteering or finding volunteers please include “volunteer” in your keywords, for now.
New Workspace Workflow
We’ve implemented a new work flow to make it more clear – for each party to a trade – where progress stands. We’ve integrated a flow chart to highlight which stage the trade is at and applied colour indicators:
Green represents work requiring your attention
Blue suggests it is pending attention from the other party
Dark Grey finished / closed.
A summary of your activity – Number of Trades; Number of Invites: Work Requiring your Attention vs Pending – is visible at all times in the top right corner of the web page : We hope this makes it just all the more easier to respond to work invites, requests and keep everything progressing
Changes to Time Trade
We removed the time offers section because it doubled up on the information required on people’s talent profiles. Basically all your skills and talents, strengths and passion, values, interests and experience need to be listed as keywords on your talent profile because
the keywords on your profile are how we can match you to work opportunities and the “job you love”.
Previous Development Changes
Invite to Trade: Matching talent & work opportunities: Now each time you post a request Worknow can suggest people for you to invite to view your trade by matching keywords on your post with the keywords listed within their talent profile.
Invite to Trade: You can also invite people you know to view your trade by creating a simple email invite. We’d like to invite you today to start trading & earn time credits simply by signing in and responding to our request for people to help test the trade functionality
Group Marketplace: We’ve established Groups functionality to enable existing communities to self organise and build community specific marketplaces. At this stage groups are created on request by providing a group name and contact email to renee@worknow.co.nz
Trade Status: We’re testing a new format for the Workspace to make it easier to understand trade status and actions pending on open trades. And we’ve updated the my posts page to provide a little more detail on the trades you have posted.
Worknow Start Up Tips & Tools
This is a copy of the email sent to member following the recent development update. I use and would highly recommend Mailchimp At start up stage Mailchimp provides all the email capabilities and performance measures you’ll need free of change when you have < 500 subscribers and send < 3000 emails. Brilliant!
Our Southern Maori Business Network gathered last week for the annual Hui.
Four generations of people, Maori and non Maori, representing businesses from concept and start up to long established success stories, in fields as diverse as recycled glass art, spot factoring and farming to native perfume, tourism and accounting.
It was a great success and although all good things must come to an end I returned to Dunedin inspired by the talents, intelligence and collaborative strength of those that attended the Hui.
I am encouraged by the vision of our people, our capacity for sharing and the enduring nature of Maori community. There were many highlights: great company, beautiful surrounds, delicious food, ongoing opportunities to learn and share and connect with people…
I’d like to Thank
Karen, Viv and Trish for making this happen. Awesome work ladies
The crews from the University of Otago Te Taituara Maori Commerce Students Association and Wakatipu High for your participation
Ta Tipene O’Regan for challenging us to work for the collective good and find new ways to envision and create our future
Llyod McGinty, for insight into the future of our green economy and the simple tips (from an energy consultant) like join powershop
Phil Broughton, for making accounting “sexy” his words but we believe him and the students were swayed in favour due to his engaging styles and real life application of knowledge
David Kennedy, for being funny while also making the important distinction that business can create logos and positioning statements but that brand is how our other people perceive our business
Richard Kerr Bell, for highlight the importance of values such as communication and trust in business
Robbie Paul, for evidence that our education system can innovate with today’s skills based learning, training and qualifications providing people with improved pathways to work
Don Rhodes, for challenging the forms of organisation that I believe in and helping me to practice the skills of listening and remaining open minded
Supporting People in Business
I’m am forever thankful to have discovered KUMA at a time in my work life where I was being misled as to the importance of values.
I will never forget the manager that advised that sticking to personal values (honesty & personal integrity) could create barriers to getting work done.
I have never before been so disheartened and am thankful to have moved well beyond that place with a slew of lessons about “what NOT to do”. If it had not been for the wonderful support I received from KUMA – the Southern Maori Business Network I might not have stayed in Dunedin long enough to discover all the other great people and communities that I now know are here.
I’d like to especially thank Phil Broughton and Suzanne Spencer for your support and encouragement and for giving me the opportunity to be a part of this great network. It is an immense privilege to be a member of this board of trustees.
At that very first board meeting I discovered a true sense of caring and community (whanau) from a team of people proactively working to help others which confirmed that I could aspire to be in business to help people rather than on the basis of “what’s in it for us”. KUMA empowered me to believe in my values, aspirations and my motives and continues to help me be my most authentic self.
I found Sir Ken Robinson’s Ted talk immensely inspiring and encouraging but it leads me to wonder why did it take me so long (15yrs) to choose my passion and talent over my need for achievement?
…we make very poor use of our talents…I meet all kinds of people who don’t think they are really good at anything…who don’t enjoy what they do they, they simply go through their lives getting on with it, they get no great pleasure from what they do, they endure it rather than enjoy it… but I also meet people who LOVE what they do…it isn’t what they do, it is who they are…their most authentic self… Sir Ken Robinson”
My talents and aspirations didn’t align because I was self centered and vain. Now, I was blessed to be raised in a family that nurtured my talents, surrounded by people that assured me that I could do anything I wanted. The education system, with which I am now thoroughly disenchanted was – up until I was about 15 years old – an environment in which I thrived upon learning and the ongoing recognition of academic, sporting and cultural achievement.
Yet for a long time now I have not lived up to the potential, that others saw in me. Despite the fact that I studied, worked and strived to become a better person, I was so self centered and focused on my own goals and achievements that I could not see opportunities to do what I most aspired to – help people and effect change – passing me by.
Over the last year, working as an aspiring social entrepreneur, I’ve recognised that I had things round the wrong way. Even as lately as January 2009, I thought that if I could make myself “a better person” then I could help others. Yet it now seems so apparent that only by helping others first will I ever be the person I aspire to.
The How: Helping Others Employ Their Talents
Using social networking to create a community in which people can feel OK about promoting and sharing their talents
“…natural talents: human resources are like natural resources, they are often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface you have to create the circumstances where they show themselves…” Sir Ken Robinson
This is not going to be an easy cause to gather people to and therein lies the challenge: to effect the national mind set.
We kiwi’s are not known for our self promotion, why would we when tall poppy syndrome is so alive and well in this country, ready to cut back down to size those that are too confident, too successful or aspire to lofty goals. One way I have found to overcome this barrier of talking about talents and strengths is simply to ask:
what are your interests?
what do you like to do?
what are you passionate about?
what interests would you want to share with other people?
By creating a talent profile and sharing you passion, talents, interests and values with the world we can match you with opportunities to LOVE what you.
When we plan it is inevitable that we make some assumptions.
As we put our plans in motion however, we have talked to people, tested our service and developed means to continually question our assumptions
In doing so we recently discovered we were off target so we changed our plans. We haven’t changed our destination but we have re-prioritized development within the scope of our long term vision and purpose.
And then this evening via twitter I come across an article Venture Capital 101 for For-Profit Social Entrepreneurs. We are bootstrapping this journey but I aspire to implement new financial and business models for social enterprise so I was compelled to read further and view the presentation below.
Although most of the Venture Capital talk does not apply to us, I discovered two slides #10 #11 that allay some concerns because although I intuitively trust that our decision is on track, it is a little at odds with recent sage advice concerning the importance of executing on plans.
The “execution paradox”
#10 Start ups need to be adaptable: Changing directions used to be a near-death experience for startups. Now, it’s common fare.
“The pivot – what do successful startups have in common? Pivot is the ability to change directions quickly. The difference between a successful and an unsuccessful start-up is the number of pivots a start-up makes before it dies.” [Eric Ries]
“[...] some things that startups that aren’t run well do: You don’t change direction fast enough. Every startup should be looking at its direction every month or so.” [Robert Scoble]
“In the average Y Combinator startup, I’d guess 70% of the idea is new at the end of the first three months.” [Paul Graham]
The “execution paradox”
Those startups who are adapting and changing like they should, are not “executing” against their prescribed milestones. Consequently, they will get eaten up by VC with all the “downside investing”.
Those startups who are not adapting and changing like they should, are apparently “executing”. In a high R-o-C environment, these are statistically likely to be failing.
Agility needs to be an intrinsic part of VC/startups. Was: “execute, execute, execute”. Now: “pivot, pivot, pivot”.
I am increasingly embarrassed by the amount of time I spend on Facebook. Granted, social media marketing is a component of what I do and Facebook is an effective, targeted marketing communications tool but personally, it was so ‘07. I’m over it. Anyways, tonight I went to edit, or refine my personal Facebook profile for a couple reasons:-
Targeted advertising harassment. I am sick of seeing ads for meet singles into [insert one of my interests here] Today it was “meet singles into equine” Equine!? Because I love horses I should be interested in singles into EQUINE? [insert swearing here telling facebook were to go]
I cringe at the thought of Facebook morphing into some kind of social search engine spewing out information based on what people “like” vs. fact (which is still what I use search engines for).
Only to happily find that Facebook has just made it easy for me to dump a whole lot of personal information due to the new…
A Richer Profile
Your Profile is now organised into categories and will link directly to Official and Community Pages about your interests. Now you can express yourself more fully on your Profile and your friends can learn more about you by simply clicking on your interests. To help you link to actual Pages, we’ve matched info you’ve entered on your Profile to Pages about those topics.
Well gee thanks Facebook, look at the lovely categories you created. Clever but not clever enough to mitigate my lack of punctuation. Trying way to hard because “funny Happy Gilmore” is not a movie and “Robert De Niro Edward Norton” are two of my favourite actors .
I’m completely cynical about your reasons for attempting to categorise this information. Piss off! I don’t believe it’s so I can express myself more fully and my friends can learn more about me. Blatantly, it’s so you can manipulate my information easier and sell it of to marketing people, like me…
So I un-tick the “Select all” box voila! easy out and this is where it got interesting. I would have been quite happy to have this information remain formatted just as it always was but instead I saw a message warning me that sections on my profile will be empty
Awesome! I’d like to see you serve me stupid ads about Equine Singles now. Your loss facebook, not mine. Ahahaha!
Except of course it is not that easy. Facebook ignored the fact that I unselected all of the pages, by default including a raft of new pages and to remove them I had to
I am a member of an incredible web start up community called the Distiller: A collaborative support network of young and aspiring entrepreneurs creating an environment wherein we support and encourage each other, offer feedback and share the highs and lows of the new venture journey, together.
Throughout the year we hold 12 week “Sprints” as a primary means of sharing with and supporting one another. Each sprint is made up of six fortnightly “therapy sessions” : a forum to discuss the stepping stones towards our end goal.
Basically it’s about answering the question: where do you want to get to over the next 12 weeks? and then breaking this goal down into smaller action orientated tasks.
It is a practice in planning, intended to instill a sense of urgency and keep us focused on putting our plans into action. It is a great model and planning is an excellent disciple but a plan is only ever as good as it’s execution which of course comes back down to having the right people, as I discussed in lessons from an Angel
Failure to execute was seen as the number one reason that companies fail and for this reason – People – the management team is the number one factor influencing the angel’s investment decision.
Back in February our Worknow mission gained added momentum by the addition of another talented programmer, Sam.
“…Yeah it is an Inuk name. Samson Ootoowak: it is pronounced Oo-too-vuck…”
Sam, you’re brilliant we wouldn’t be here without you, you rock! Here’s what new this April…
Invite to Trade: Matching talent & work opportunities
Now each time you post a request Worknow can suggest people for you to invite to view your trade by matching keywords on your post with the keywords listed within their talent profile. You can also invite people you know to view your trade by creating a simple email invite.
Simplified Talented Profiles
People mentioned that the talent profile was a mission so on the basis of quality vs. quantity, we simplified. With only a single field now for keywords we hope the change helps people focus profile keywords around the work opportunities they want to be matched to.
Organising trades
We’ve established Groups functionality to enable existing communities to self organise and build community specific marketplaces. At this stage groups are created on request by providing a group name and contact email to renee@worknow.co.nz
We’re testing a new format for the Workspace to make it easier to define the status and actions pending on open trades. And we’ve updated the My posts page to provide a little more detail on the trades you have posted.
Work Opportunities
There’s bound to be some bugs and areas we can improve so we’d be really interested in peoples feedback but more than anything we’d love to see people building keyword rich talent profiles and posting requests so that we can match people with work opportunities
I aspire to one day be in the position of Mr Bill Payne – being able to invest time and money in talented, entrepreneurial teams – but I’ve got a long way to go and in the meantime I will glean as much learning and insight as I can from the experts in order to execute the plans we have for Worknow.
Mr Payne’s insights into the world of new venture financing are summarized in the presentation he offered The Capital Food Chain but in addition to taking notes it is necessary to reflect upon the knowledge imparted. Therefore, the following are some of the key points I took from Mr Bill Payne’s talk, which I feel are important to the new venture journey.
People: the management team is the number ONE factor influencing the angel’s investment decision.
People make or break a company. We were advised the primary difference between company’s that succeed vs. those new ventures that fail is simply the people and their ability to execute on plans.
“Better to invest in and A team with a C idea than a B team with an A idea”
Failure to execute was seen as the number one reason that companies fail and for this reason – People – the management team is the number one factor influencing the angel’s investment decision.
Important characteristics of the entrepreneurial individual / teams
Integrity
Industry Experience
Experience working together
Willingness to “let go” of control in the best interests of the company
Passion
Commitment
On the Investment process
If you don’t need money then don’t waste your time seeking investment. Bootstrap as far as you can. You’re better investing time executing on your plans than pursuing investors. That said…
Absolutely the best way to connect new venture teams with potential investors is to network. Talking to and learning from people is key to finding the best investors
Even before you need investment seek to learn from those with the knowledge, experience and connections to help, mentor and advise. Join entrepreneurial communities or clubs. Attend events, seminars and lectures.
Look for “smart money”: Experienced people offering both time and cash.
Be prepared to pitch your idea with the view to attracting interest
Mr Payne advised that there are four key communication tools that those seeking investment will require:-
1. Elevator Pitch [60 seconds]
2. Executive Summary [2 - 4 Pages]
3. Presentation [10 slides / 20 minutes / 30 font size]
4. Business Plan [Due Diligence]
People often make the mistake of focusing too much on the product or service offering. They key is to ensure each form of communication provides a balance between product or service offering / opportunity / differentiation.
Five Mistakes to Avoid
For more information including the five biggest mistakes to avoid when seeking investment check out the full presentation The Capital Food Chain
Worknow & The Distiller
We hope that the tools we provide may help connect talented entrepreneurs with those seeking to invest in New Zealand’s next generation of start up teams. Thanks again Otago University, this time the Masters of Entrepreneurship – for inviting The Distiller Crew to attend.
