Photo from Shane Morris Photography (Flickr)

Last Friday’s Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report was brutal: a scant 18,000 jobs were created in June. Many look to big business for answers — especially those corporate leaders who joined President Obama earlier this year for his job summit.

Unfortunately, they are looking the wrong people.

According to the WSJ, Big Business slashed 2.9M domestic jobs in the 2000s while creating 2.4M overseas. In fact, all of the net job growth in the last 35 years did not come from Big Business. Those jobs came from entrepreneurs.

This later claim came from a great article from Henry Nothhaft: “What if they Listened to Entrepreneurs?” He makes a compelling call for politicians to start listening to entrepreneurs on job creation, and not captains of big business.

Nothhaft has serious street cred. As a serial entrepreneur, he created 6,000 jobs and return $8B back to investors over his 35-year career. He last founded Danger, the creator of the T-Mobile Sidekick which was later acquired by Microsoft for $500M.

Plainly put, Nothhaft is rightly irked at the Fortune 500′s whitewashing in Washington DC on job creation:

So what can government actually do to spur job growth? Nothhaft first points to the underfunded US Patent Office:

But he holds his greatest criticism on the US’ shrinking manufacturing base. Citing the lack of funding support from both VCs and the US government, Nothhaft zeros in on the critical link between manufacturing and R&D:

His arguments are some of the most compelling for states and DC to start paying attention to entrepreneurs. Consider this article required reading for politicians and their economic development staff, and forward it accordingly.

Photo from Unhindered by Talent

The most valuable lessons in my professional life have often been delivered by assholes. One of the toughest was given to me in the summer of 1991 about my copywriting.

I was interning at the Detroit office of the Carlson Marketing Group, the loyalty marketing behemoth. I just finished drafting direct mail copy for Chrysler dealer incentive trip to Hong Kong, and was quite proud of my 20-year-old self. That was until I was called into the office of Haul Quarier, one of their account executives.

Haul was one of those agency types nearly the end of his second wind of his career in automotive marketing: angry and old with a false sense of entitlement. Haul was a classic asshole.

“Curt, your writing is clever, but complete shit,” he said bluntly. “Do you know why?”

I sat there for a moment, stunned, and meekly replied: “Bad grammar?”

“Really?” He snorted, called in one of the copywriters and spent the next 10 minutes reading all of my copy to both of us. “You should write for Conde Nast, not us, Curt,” said the copywriter with laugh and left me sinking deeper into my chair.

“Wow, you’re still not seeing it,” Haul blurted with a laugh. “You’re not writing to the Ambercrombie & Kent jet setters. You’re writing to Chrysler dealers. Quit being clever. Rewrite this with a dipshit dealer from Des Moines in mind, and give me the new drafts first thing tomorrow.”

So I spent the night channeling the persona of that dipshit dealer Mortie. I wrote why he should want to hit his service shop goals so that he could take his wife, Margie, to Hong Kong on Chrysler’s dime. And most importantly, I saw his painful point.

I put the new copy of Haul’s desk the next morning, but I should have left a thank you note as well. That past-his-prime account executive gave me two great lessons:

1. Always write to your audience. Your content must engage them instead of showing off your writing acumen. Your prospect cares about their interests only, not how great your company/product/mad writing skills might be.
2. The best advice is often best deliver bluntly and by assholes. A little pain and embarrassment are often required to shock us out of our internalized comas.

While I never will like Haul Quarrier, I’m eternally grateful to him every time I’ve seen others make this major mistake in their writing, and I still pull no punches when tough lesson have to be shared.

So take a moment today to review what you’ve written this week from the perspective our your readers. What have you seen?

MinneBar is one my favorite annual events. it’s evolved into the largest barcamp event in the US, and this year more than a thousand people a spent a beautiful Saturday indoors at the Best Buy campus.

It’s un-conference format always provides thought-provoking sessions on a wide range of topics from development to marketing to even personal rapid transit this year. Unlike many conferences, this one is pretty lean on bullshit and the attendees are largely developers.

Here’s the raw footage from my session: Five Marketing Points to Tackle Before You Start Coding.

Unfortunately, we did not pass around the microphone so the audience’s questions weren’t captured. The slides from this session can be snagged here.

Huge thanks to Ben Edwards, Luke Francl and Adrienne Pierce for another great event!

Roughly 100 from the business community turned out for the ‘tech transfer’ event arranged by MOJO Minnesota last Wednesday at the University of Minnesota. The panel discussion featured representatives from the U of M OTC / Venture Center, clean tech, the medical device industry, Mayo Clinic and one lone SaaS entrepreneur.

Despite the hype, it was a relatively mundane ‘few to many’ conversation focused on the basics of tech transfer, albeit with a little personality sprinkled on top. The UMN moves too slow; there’s a greater supply of intellectual property than entrepreneurs capable of commercializing it; especially galling was the notion that, that when IP gets commercialized, it heads to the Bay Area or Boston — pulling jobs and tax revenues away from the home that birthed it. All are valid and correctable complaints that we’ve heard before.

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Over the years, I’ve meet too many entrepreneurs who spent unnecessary cash on crappy company and product names. They hired ‘branding gurus’ who didn’t understand their target market, the tech industry, your company vibe — or worse, they really didn’t care.

There’s no excuse for a half-ass brand, no reason to settle for something that doesn’t excite you and your customers. Let me be clear: brands matter, even in the B2B tech world. With all of the noise that distracts your prospects, you need a strong brand that cuts through it all while aptly capturing your essence.

And yes, this is something you should do yourself, for few others know your products and prospects better than you. In other words, bootstrap your brand before you pay money to someone else.

A few weeks ago, an Israeli entrepreneur asked for my help dreaming up a product name. Knowing his nonexistent budget, I gave him the following 5-step, quick-n-dirty branding process:

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