The Key To Family Business Success
ISSN 15465640

Understanding Family Business brings you articles and tips from Family Business Experts who understand family values and business systems.

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Understanding Family Business

Spring has arrived here in the northern hemisphere. It's a time of change, of re-awakening.

Family businesses, of course, face change year-round. Even if they aren't changing, their environment is. So, Family Business Innovation is a relevant theme, and a new section on our web site.

Family eBusiness looks at the Search It! tool - a convenient and powerful [and fr*ee!] tool that should be on every desktop - always open and ready to go to work helping you to search the Internet.

"Family Business Innovation" was the subject of an interview with our Don Schwerzler by Karen Klein, a columnist for Business Week.

Balancing tradition and innovation can be a real challenge for family businesses. But it is a crucial component of the growth and profitability strategy for the family business.

Business Week released the interview in a Pod cast and if you are interested in listening to this provacative and insightful interview, click here.

Family Business Innovation
A new section on our web site

Don Schwerzler, Founder of the Family Business Institute and a pioneer in the field of family business dynamics tells this story about innovation. "For years, the mantra for many family businesses was simple: “If it ain’t broke, don't fix it.” Schwerzler continues, “The first time I heard someone challenge that philosophy was the then Chairman of Coca-Cola, Roberto Goizueta. Twenty-five years ago Goizueta opined that his core business philosophy was “If it ain’t broke, break it!” Schwerzler concluded, “That should be the mantra for family business innovation – “if it ain’t broke, break it”!

Read the rest of this interesting story here. You'll learn how to start an innovation program and 10 mind sets that have to change.

Our family business innovation workshops are facilitated by Dr. Kevin Fleming. Dr. Fleming earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. Dr Fleming's clinical practice, for the past ten years, has been devoted to refining the neuroscience of leadership and behavior change in the workplace. Utilizing REALignment principles of human nature and working with the ways of the brain, he is in the practice of moving individuals and organizations away from rote behavior toward areas of creativity and shared accomplishment.

Reminders...

Our Family Business Blog [Blog is short for "web log"] mini-journal will keep you updated about site changes and other family business matters. Check it out regularly on the site from the NavBar button. Better still, subscribe to the blog using the RSS feed information on any of our pages, such as

Understanding Family Business.

And remember to Take our fr*ee assessment on the 29 Leadership Practices...

Family eBusiness

e business marketing strategy

In the past 5 issues of UFB, we've shown you some of the individual tools that are useful - and free - to help with your marketing strategy. But we've saved the best one to the last! This one should be on the desktop of every person who is online - from student to seasoned executive. SiteSell.com has culled the Net for the best, most useful searches available. The goal was not to provide an exhaustive list.

They've organized approximately 100 specific searches (Search Types) into 20 ecommerce-oriented Search Categories. Each category offers a specific menu of Search Types. The search results deliver brief tutorials about how to get the most out of each Search Type (except for certain "straight searches").

The result? Search It! is the only ecommerce-related search tool that you (and your friends and colleagues -- please pay this favor forward by telling them about Search It!) will ever need. Keep it open in the upper corner of your monitor, for 24 x 7 access... instant info-mining of the Web, at your fingertips.

If you are a 5 Pillar Affiliate or an SBI! owner and have an idea for a new and useful search to add to Search It!, please let us know about it in the Site Build It! forums.

If you are not an affiliate or owner...

5 Pillar Program information -- click here.

Site Build It! information -- click here.

Search It! is powerful, yet so easy to use. You literally have the best marketing/ebusiness, search/research tool at your fingertips.

Click-click-click.

They've made it that easy.

Just follow the 3 STEPS (occasionally a fourth, if a search requires it)...

STEP 1 Select a Search Category.

STEP 2 Select a Search Type.
(Click on the Click for information text link for more information about the Search Type you selected in STEP 2, and what to enter in STEP 3.)

STEP 3 Enter a Search Term.

Then click the button...

Search It!

They send you to a short tutorial about that search type, and the exact search results you were expecting. Most importantly... you will know how to use this information for your business!

When you're finished examining results, close that window. And there is your faithful, little Search It! window, waiting to do it over again.

Bottom Line?

Keep that powerful little Search It! window open and at your fingertips. You will be amazed at how much more you get out of the Net, and into your business.

This is one of those indispensable tools that make you wonder...

"How Did I Ever Get By Without This?"

No more stumbling around the Web in a search fog. Welcome to the world of power-surfing. Whenever you need to search, just...

Search It!

Comments, requested topics, blog messages...!