He’ll be remembered as a visionary and he certainly was that, though I’ll remember him more for being an “actionary”. He showed this drive to action in so many ways in his life. When he officially dropped out of college, he stayed around campus as a “drop in”, going to classes that interested him for another 18 months. Steve said of this time, “much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.”

In his business life, Steve got things to market, did it often and did it extraordinarily well. His legendary achievements at Apple and Pixar can lead people to think that Steve Jobs was a natural and his results inevitable, but none of it was clear to him looking forward. Reflecting on this, Steve said, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

If you’ve never seen his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, it’s 15 minutes well spent.

You can read the full text of his speech on Stanford’s website

Reflecting on his 2004 experience with pancreatic cancer, Steve had his own twist on the role of death in our lives: “Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

Steve Jobs reveled in his curiosity and intuition, but these were not things he indulged in merely for his amusement or to escape. Rather, they fueled his exploration and action. He forged a bond between ideas and action. I am grateful for his example and this is why I will remember him as an “actionary”.

RIP Steve…

When drive a car in traffic, we’re constantly predicting what other drivers, pedestrians, and so on will do. Same thing when we walk through a crowd on a sidewalk or at a mall. We’re guessing, and we do it really well.

So it’s not a big surprise to find that we make educated guesses about business situations too. We have to. There are so many things to do each day and many of them are small, with few consequences, and easily fixed if we get them wrong.

Here’s the big difference: when we guess about how to market our products and services, we do so with much less information and experience than we have in walking through a crowd. Navigating our way through a crowd, all of our senses get a constant, real-time flow of information that let’s us adjust our path instantly in response to subtly changing conditions. We’re so good at it, we can do it on autopilot. Business is never that way.

So how do we tackle this problem? Experience and expertise are useful, but they can be a double-edged sword. Sometimes, experts are too confident, which can lead to catastrophic mistakes. Testing in different areas has shown this time and again.

So what approach works in dealing with this?

There are many situations in business and in life where we simply cannot do a meaningful test before making a decision. So we do our best: we use our experience, we get advice from people we trust, we consult the others involved. We decide. Chance then does its part and we hope the result is successful. And we hope that if it’s not, that the result is no worse than a “learning experience”.

Given how much there is that we cannot test, why would anyone pass up the opportunity to test when they could? Especially if it is fast and inexpensive…

There are excellent planning tools available and they can be a big help when organizing a complex project. No matter what, whether a plan is simple or elaborate, big or small, the real test of a plan comes when you act on it.

Online tools make it possible to test business ideas online and to give you better information, faster and for less cost than offline tests can. That turns into a serious competitive advantage for anyone who understands this and does it. While others are left behind and wonder why…

A small investment in testing market traction for new product and service ideas can save many thousands of dollars in wasted effort on “misses”.

Better yet, refining products and services through testing can draw in more clients faster and accelerate revenue and profit growth.

The 80/20 rule tells us that 20% of our efforts produce 80% of our profits. Knowing – not guessing – what that 20% is makes a big difference and testing is the key to that.

To guess is human. Everybody does it, all the time. So wouldn’t you prefer to have an advantage over the herd? Wouldn’t you prefer to test and refine?

And that worked pretty well. No doubt it also worked because few business people actually wrote their own letters. The whole process took time, and then you had to review and sign what you wrote. And, whoever typed it for you had the chance to sidle over and mutter something such as, “um… about this part…”

There were filters and barriers and it took time. None of that is true today. So it’s no surprise that most people who write advice about email etiquette have “don’t send in anger” high on their list. It’s all to easy to see red when an email arrives and find yourself firing a salvo back before you’ve really had a chance to think.

And even under ‘normal’ circumstances, watch your tone. Seriously. None of the cues you see and hear talking in person, or just hear in a phone call, are there when writing email. But here’s the trap: they’re all there in your head. You have a clear sense of what you mean and what you intend. If you listen for it, you can practically ‘hear’ your own tone as you write. And the person receiving it will hear their own tone as they read it.

It’s one of the perplexing things about email. Think about it a moment; haven’t you had a “why don’t they get it” reaction to someone who ‘misread’ an email you sent? And haven’t you had a “that’s not what they wrote” reaction to a situation where someone feels you didn’t get the point of an email they sent you?

So watch out for any “just a joke” comments you’re thinking of sending someone in an email. Even well-intentioned, light-hearted efforts at ‘little’ jokes can so easily come back to haunt you.

That doesn’t mean you have to be dull… just leave some room for the person receiving the email to take your words a different way. And it’s much better to be funny about something than someone.

And speaking of funny, here are three tips on how not to be a laughingstock when using email:

• WRITING EMAIL ENTIRELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS = shouting
• Use the spellchecker. Every time.
• Email is a postcard, not a letter. Do not expect email – especially your company email – to be private.

And finally, one more time, remember: If emotions are hot, send it NOT.

What will you do with this platform you’ve built? And why did you build it in the first place?

If you expect your website to help your business, you will need to have useful, interesting or entertaining content on your site. And to keep visitors coming back, you will need to add new content regularly. So, how do you do that?

With any luck – or better yet, with some sound advice and good planning – your site was built on a user-friendly and flexible Content Management System, such as WordPress. Having an easy way to add content day-to-day is vital. Without it, your site will probably go stale after your ‘new website honeymoon’ time is over.

Adding new articles, pictures or videos regularly is the key to benefiting from all the hard work and investment you put into your website. Whether you do it yourself, or you have staff or an outside contractor do it, there are obvious benefits to making it easy to add new content. For one, you’ll be more likely to ‘Just Do It’ when inspiration hits. For another, it means you don’t need to restrict adding content to only ‘the web guys’.

To give people an idea of what it takes to use WordPress, our experience is that anyone who can use Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer can easily learn to use WordPress.

A great website blends an attractive, usable design, with solid, flexible back end software and a regular stream of fresh, useful content. In our experience, using WordPress is one of the best ways to make sure your content management is made easy.

You have a business to run, with a long list of things you really need to do. The last thing you want is to add technical hassles such as maintaining your email service to that list, right?

Here’s the first problem: it makes you look like an amateur. Maybe your customers and friends won’t tell you, but it does.

And here’s the much bigger problem: at any time, you can lose this email address without warning. The company that controls that email address can take it away from you, or they can go bankrupt. It can happen any number of ways and if it does, there is nothing you can do about it.

If your business is like most businesses, email has become your most-used and most important way of communicating. If so, you need control of your email service, just as you do for anything else vital to your business. This requires having a domain name, so that your email address will be something like you@yourcompany.com

Do you have a website? Was it registered with your company name? Then you already have a domain, which is the key thing you need to control your own email.

If instead, your website is on a free hosting service and not on your own domain, your business has an additional problem. The good news is both of these problems – email and website – are quite easy to solve. For the sake of your business and your brand, you need to be sure you control both of these key pieces of your online identity.

There are plenty of ways to get help with this. If you’d like a few tips on your options , feel free to get in touch.