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Small Entrepreneurs Have Global Impact: If you are Don Miguel, of Fincas Familia Castro, a small family coffee plantation and roasters, in San Pedro de Poàs, about an hour north of San José, the [...]

Self-Aware Startup Teams: The creation and development of a winning team depends on the founder’s leadership. The Johari Window is a marvelous tool to help founders to develop greater [...]

Mind Mapping: A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, [...]

Make Meaning Grid: “The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning,” says Guy Kawasaki (in The Art of the Start). It could be to right a wrong, or save a life. Equally [...]

Customer Profiling: How do you work out who your customers are? Are the important defining characteristics geography, lifestyle, demographics–or what? Take the time to answer your own questions. [...]

Conscious Competence Matrix: It is really interesting—and useful—to think about competence. Founders of new ventures do well to think about themselves in terms of competence, in order to be clear [...]

Brainstorming: Brainstorming originated in the world of advertising in the 1940s. Brainstorming is a creativity tool that is very effective when an individual or team is ‘stuck’. [...]

Affinity Diagram: Messy thinking? Scrappy data? Can’t see the wood for the trees? Oh, yes, that’s me. But, there’s help. It has a big name, but is a deceptively simple process. [...]