The core concept is “threshold resistance,” which essentially is the philosophy of finding and eliminating anything that is preventing your customers from crossing your threshold and doing business with you.

His business was retail, but I see all kinds of applicability to online marketing and lead generation. I also spotted lots of valuable advice for sales people and understanding their mission in lowering that resistance.

Who are you thanking today?

My short list:

• God
• Family
• Team
• Customers

All have made my life better, each and every year.

An old mentor used to say, “You have to take the roast out of the oven.”

The “threshold resistance” to building (or at least proofing) a new business is nearly zero dollars. The challenge is getting smart people working closer together.

I think the opportunity is great than ever. It seems so many digital refugees and nomads have been created as a result of the recent/current recession–the ecosystem is fertile.

What do you think? Could a little corner of your office be a tech incubator?

I don’t because that would only make me dumb.

I most admire his simplicity. His writing style, his projects, and his thoughts are always a quest for simple clarity and elegance. I frequently point our engineers to his blog posts for guidance.

Favorite Winer ideas: Outliners, Rebooting the News, Editorial tools, Future-safe archives, 2, 3.

Jason Fried (37signals.com/svn)-Jason has always been a virtual mentor to me. His company is a super successful Micro-ISV.

I admire his demonstration of scale using the magic of keeping it simple. I guess I like simple, huh? I also like the fact that he writes all his own Web copy.

Favorite Fried ideas: UI design and feature minimalism

Matt Mullenweg (Ma.tt)-How could you not pay attention to Matt? His platform and software jujitsu literally seems to power the Internet.

Favorite Mullenweg ideas: Community building, How he works/managing a virtual company

Chris Brogan (ChrisBrogan.com)-Chris is another one that I tune into daily. There are lots of things to like about Chris, but mostly he is just a genuine, nice guy (I have met him in person a couple of times).

I most admire Chris’ way of asking questions and generating open thinking. His power as a community leader is impressive. This is what draws me to read him for inspiration. I often get more value from the discussion he generates than his own daily post(s).

Favorite Brogan ideas: Trust Agents, Fish Where the Fish Are, Giving Ideas Handles (I am specifically working on getting better at this)

Joel Spolsky (JoelOnSoftware.com)-Joel is someone I first plugged into via his book (Joel on Software), not his blog. Although, his blog preceded the book by about four years. I subscribed to his software management philosophy long before I bought his software, Fogbugz.

We have used it at Kaleidico from day one.

Favorite Spolsky ideas: How to write specs, Paper prototyping, UI Designing, 2

Interestingly enough there are no sales gurus here. Why? Simple, few sales gurus are as successful as these guys. Sales is only one facet of a much larger business success strategy.

The point is when you are looking for business ideas and inspiration look for examples, not advice. Each of these people have common trend to their core philosophies–an intense focused on people (users).

Who inspires you? Who do you follow daily?

I’m really tired of line graphs, pie charts, and other analytical eye candy. I can’t do anything with the questions they present. It is always impossible to drill into the data that creates these confusing images.

I have been analyzing complex data for years. I have have crunched data to understand everything from signals intelligence to sales performance. Ironically, the most useful methodology always boils down to three distinct concepts that work beautifully together.

1. Lists-Discrete elements neatly listed. These could be URLs, Twitter users, contacts, songs, keywords, or any of an infinite number of data items. By breaking data into its discrete element we can see patterns and trends more easily. Simple, easy to scan and sort, lists become  agile frameworks to manipulate and analyze.

2. Counts-Frequency, scale, reputation are all potential revelations from the simplicity of counting occurrences. Counts make it easy to reveal what is most relevant in data sets. What’s more counts create relevant lists of associated elements.

3. Nodes-Where is the data coming from, going to, or inter-related? This is a powerful way to gauge the quality and accuracy of information. There is a tendency for associates to exchange data and that exchange tends to be consistent. Therefore, following nodes and relationships can help you locate the right data.

These three data structures give you all the elements quickly and powerfully analyze very large data sets. Next time you are building an analytics dashboard start here and don’t necessarily go beyond.

Everything else is pretty, but probably far less useful and ultimately frustrating.

(Hat tip to Dave Winer. Most of this revelation came from 40-Twits.)

Flat Rock, Michigan is a great little community of around 10,000 people. When I was recruited up from Ohio to serve on the Quicken Loans Leadership Team I had many options of where to live. We visited communities from Birmingham, to Ypsilanti, to Monroe, and of course the more obvious options close to work–Livonia and Novi. All of those cities were very nice and I am sure we would have been happy living in any of them, but when we visited Flat Rock it had a remarkable charm that we immediately fell in love with.

You see the people who have lived in Flat Rock much longer than I have created a remarkable community. The folks are friendly and they care about their city. They are hard working and have strong family values. The City is active–there is always something going on; a baseball game, a soccer match, a football game, a parade, or a picnic. We have great walking/biking paths, beautiful parks, scenic waterfronts, and state-of-the-art community center. These are the outward things that drew us to Flat Rock.

However, as our kids started school we discovered even more hidden treasures–the teachers, the schools, the parents, and most importantly the children.

Unfortunately, the economy is going to make maintaining the quality of our community and education system challenging. This is what made me proud when several people from the community of Flat Rock asked me to run for the School Board.

I wait to represent these great people during these challenging times. And I know we will continue to improve on the strong foundation those before me have created.

If you want to read more visit the Flat Rock School Board website or the Bill Rice for School Board Facebook Fan Page. Feel free to join!

The common thread to these warnings: the danger of a single company being the sole provider of Web plumbing, infrastructure, or coral reefs.

Twitter and URL shortening services have been the most recent warnings and both have show their frailty in the last couple of weeks. Naturally this is triggering a rethinking of how this plumbing is provided, maintained, and serviced in the Web ecosystem: Anil Dash’s Pushbutton Web, Google’s PubSubHubBub, RSSCloud.

The even more interesting trend is that it is bringing people back to their blogs–little corners of the Web they own. Maybe in all the fever of compressed attention spans we had forgotten that humans still need/want context. This is Om’s point that struck me–maybe we just misapplied many of these services function:

Late last year, following the Bombay terrorist attacks, I wrote about Twitter’s growing influence as a source of breaking news and how, in order to make sense of it all, we need more context. The best place to provide that context is now in blogs. To be sure, most people view Twitter as a microblogging service, but I’ve always seen it as micromessaging service — and the more I used it, the more I realized what a disjointed conversation it can produce.

It will be interesting as we sort it out. After all we always do. Dave Winer is leading the charge to have that sorting take place on our blogs, with #blogpostfriday.

This is an interesting article from Mary Jaksch, of Write to Done, on the benefits of collaboration over the more traditional author paradigm–copyrighting.

Exploring ides like co-creation, open-source, and the new rage in writing–uncopyrighting.

I am not sure I am totally convinced. Although, I do think that writing copyright on your works provides little protection in a digital world anyway. Point being, it might be simply a smarter marketing strategy to free your works.

What do you think?

The most important part of that preparation for me (especially since we are headed for the beach) is the reading list.

Here is a peek at mine:

• Democracy in America, by Alexis De Tocqueville
• Letter to the New President: Commonsense Lessons for Our Next Leader, by U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd
• Aquinas on Nature and Grace, edited by A.M. Fairweather
• The Arrogance of Power, by Senator J. William Fulbright
• A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law, by Justice Antonin Scalia

What have you read this summer? What is on your reading list?

I love great recommendations–leave a comment with your great finds.

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