Is it wise to use your business to hurt people?

You’d probably agree with me that it’s certainly not wise to hurt your customers or potential customers. That seems pretty clear, doesn’t it?

But what about the people you work with or who work for you? Is it okay – is it appropriate – to hurt, abuse or cause your staff, peers or partners to suffer simply because they work with you?

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If you’re paying attention to the media you know that we’re are headlong into some hard economic times. Banks are failing, investment firms are in financial trouble and the housing markets across the nation are suffering.

Things are so bad here in Michigan, the state with the worst economy in the nation, that General Motors is talking about buying Chrysler – the Big Three become the Big Two.

So are these such terrible time economically? For some, yes. For others, and I’m not talking about the extremely wealthy, no. But that’s not how it’s being talked about. If you just pay attention to all the Henny Pennys writing for newspapers, magazine and the web and listen to their banter on TV and radio, our economic sky is falling.

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Most of us at SOBCon08 are bloggers, right? So you had to know that we blogged the event. Now I say we collectively as I was too busy jotting notes to live blog and too engrossed in conversation to blog at the event.

So what about the evenings…well, if I was getting to bed before 2am, perhaps. But I wasn’t.

Yet plenty of people either wrote reports from SOBCon08 or were live blogging as it happened. We even had a Twitter feed going at one point. The conversation behind the event didn’t stop – even during it.

So if you missed something or lost your notes at least you can find what you need from the vast resources below.

And if you couldn’t make it to SOBCon08 this year, you’ll find a great list of content that was written during the event. Having gone through all of these posts, photos and videos, there’s enough content here to make it feel like you were there – just without the smiles, hugs and handshakes.

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SOBCon08 – Biz School for Bloggers… A report, part 1

Liz and Terry sure nailed it this year. Not only in concept but in execution. Their goal – create an event where business owners and bloggers come together to learn from each other – both about social media and about running a business. In my opinion, much needed and only scraping the surface of what’s needed around social media. The weekend was great…here’s my experience.

The flight to Chicago on Friday was quick and uneventful. We landed just before a storm rolled in that delayed a number of SOBCon-ers, including Chris Cree and Gorgeous (his name for his wife). I jump on the orange line out of Midway which deposits me, 40 minutes later, a block and a half from my hotel – in a downpour. Cab it or walk…I chose to walk. And when I stepped into Hotel 71 I was drenched.

I get to my room, dry off, unpack and out comes the laptop. I was thinking of a short nap before the afternoon’s festivities, but turns out Chris Garrett was looking for a lunch date. Sonia Simone and I join Chris for a stroll down Michigan Ave, a nice chat and a great lunch lunch at Carmine’s. Thank God the weather cleared up.

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I have a friend who’s been self-employed in one way or another for more than ten years. She’s brilliant, caring and a really good communicator. Anyone who works with her immediately sees her huge range of gifts.

But this friend of mine – whose name I’m not going to mention – hasn’t made much of her business. Well, I should say businesses.

You see over the past twelve years or so she’s had, maybe, eight businesses. All have focused on providing some array of services based on her varied background. Each one has taken a somewhat unique approach to helping people overcome various problems in their lives. And each one could have probably been quite successful.

But here she sits, more than a decade later, struggling to make ends meat. She keeps wondering how she’s not successful when she has all these great ideas of how to help people and make money doing it. Yet she never sticks long enough in one business concept to see it become successful for her.

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If you’re an educator, coach, consultant or advisor you usually want one main thing for your clients – that they use your advice.

That only makes sense, right? They’re paying you fees, sometimes large fees, to help them either change something or accomplish something that they just can’t manage on their own. It doesn’t matter whether you’re hired to give advice, as a consultant might do, or be more hands-on in helping with change as a coach might – the desired outcome is still the same.

This sometimes leads to pressure to help our clients get results. A little pressure on the client to change is good. After all, change is seldom easy and often requires a little push to get started (okay, and sometimes a big push).

Yet any good coach or consultant knows that we have to manage our clients and how they progress with a bit of skill. Sometimes we can put it all out there and people get it. Other times we have to pull back a bit and offer change in small steps. So we give each client what they can handle in the way they can implement it best. As I’ve seen it, this is the art to being an effective coach or consultant – and even to being an effective teacher, parent, spouse, or friend really.

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