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Gguest blogger on www.capitalgainsmedia.com

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 17:19:00 GMT

I was recently invited to be a guest blogger on www.capitalgainsmedia.com. I was thrilled at the opportunity and enjoyed writing out some of my thoughts. The hardest part was trying to keep it under the word count requirements.

Here are the posts:

Post # 1: Which discusses the idea of “Change” and the pace of change in the world today: http://www.capitalgainsmedia.com/blogs/posts/bunmi20230.aspx

Post # 2: Which provides a critical analysis of how our region (Mid-Michigan/Greater Lansing) and our state (Michigan) has adapted or not, to change in recent years http://www.capitalgainsmedia.com/blogs/posts/bunmi10230.aspx

Post # 3: Discusses what Michigan needs to do, in order to be relevant in the future, and to revert the downward spiral being experienced today. http://www.capitalgainsmedia.com/blogs/posts/bunmi30230.aspx

Post # 4: Explores 'Collaboration' as a theme for embracing change and driving innovatoin. http://www.capitalgainsmedia.com/blogs/posts/bunmi40230.aspx

I welcome feedback!

Enjoy.

An email-to-blog service

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:07:00 GMT

This is a new service I'm using, it's called Posterous. www.posterous.com is a micro-blogging service based on ease-of-post. It allows you to send in various types of contents via email or text messaging. e.g. video, links, documents, etc. I will begin trying it for blogging these days.

I will attempt to link to every post on there from this blog.

Visit me today: http://bunmi.posterous.com

Being an Entrepreneur

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:01:00 GMT

Dan Sullivan (sp?) says it best in his book “How the best gets better”.

An Entrepreneur is someone who have made the following three decisions (paraphrased):

1. I will Rely only on my persoan abilities to drive my economic security

2. In my lifeteme, I will only expect opportunities when I deliver value to others

3. I have freed myself from a mind of dependence, and an entitlement attitude. The world owes me nothing, my future is carved by my actions

Meaning of "Entrepreneur"

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:57:00 GMT

From Guy kawasaki's book, he says it best: "the 'entrepreneur' is not a job title, its the state of mind of people who want to alter the future!

The experience of my life: Startupweekend

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:59:00 GMT

StartupWeekend is a 1-weekend event in a city, where about one hundred random software developers, marketers, web designers, financial folks, etc come together undre one roof to turn an idea into a business/product starting on a friday night, thru sunday night. It's a great experience! Especially for folks with the entrepreneur bug.

I had a uber-awesome experience at Startupweekend Ann Arbor about 1 month ago. You can read more about Ann Arbor Startupweekend here: http://annarbor.startupweekend.com/

I project-managed a team that built a company: TagRoad in 52 hours (or so)....and launched a product: Vagabandoo. Check out more

The team is still together doing work on the product.

I actually would love to attend more startupweekends in other cities.

The Raleigh StartupWeekend was actually covered by NBC....and Columbus StartupWeekend I read, was a lot of fun.

Really hot

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:24:00 GMT

I'm very hot on Enterprise Social Media these days. Companies such as: Neighborhood America and Ning thrill me.

I spoke briefly at a small meeting about how Starbucks is using Social Media: http://www.mystarbucks.com/

Artemis helped Biggby Coffee, a national coffee franchise create a community of loyal customers on the web, check it out here

We are proud of our work - our first social media project. With integration with flickr and twitter.

Artemis wins a very significant deal with the City of Aspen, Colorado

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:15:00 GMT

We are extremely happy that we just landed the City of Aspen, Colorado as a client. This is what we have been waiting for; for a long time!

We were featured in their local newspaper as well. The City of Aspen is one of the “go-to” places in the United States...actually, in the world. Many of the millionaires and billionaires in the US call Aspen home. It's also the dream destination of skiiers, snowboarders and nature lovers.

Bunmi featured in local paper...

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:11:00 GMT

I was recently featured in Lansing's Best, Brightest and Most Beautiful 2008 - I don't know about the “beautiful” part. Read more

Thanks to the folks at The New Citizen's Press.

Embracing change in the face of fast moving waves

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:05:00 GMT

The idea of “change” is nothing foreign to anyone

The idea of “change” is nothing foreign to anyone. In fact, it is one of the few inevitable realities in life. The human race and every other surviving organism have had to naturally evolve at the gene level, in order to not be extinct. Why is it then that we still resist change? Why is it that we sometimes get complacent with the status quo, instead of striving to do more, be more, find a better way? From the most fundamental perspective, the biggest challenge that we all face is realizing, accepting, and embracing the concept of change.

In order to survive, we must keep in sync with the pace of change required by the times that we live in. I propose that the critical battle that we all fight today –as individuals, organizations, companies, countries, etc. is adjusting our “clock” of change to sync with that of the times around us. People who can’t evolve as quickly as their ecosystem requires become extinct. Those who adapt can evolve and continually challenge the status quo to move from good to great.

Envision a sine wave, with a certain frequency, time and amplitude. There is what I will call the wave of “life” – unconsciously, we are all striving to make the oscillation of our wave be in sync with that of life. Most low-performing individuals or organizations have a wave pattern that is slow, sluggish or inconsistent with that of the life around them; they cannot keep up. Thus, they become irrelevant and forgotten. When it comes down to it, I believe that in striving for greatness, we are all simply trying to get our arms around the intense speed at which change is happening in this day and age. We are trying to evolve our personal and corporate strategies to change at a pace that is on par, or quicker than, the “wave of life” around us.

The rate at which knowledge and information become stale today is far quicker than it has ever been in the history of earth. The half-life of any piece of information these days is way too short, thus requiring that for survival and success, organizations and individuals must be open to change. Their strategies must also adapt, evolve and change at the pace determined by their marketplace, competitors, neighbors, environment, etc.

As a business leader who finds him/herself leading a business in the year 2008, imagine this - you think you are the first to market, and you have no competitors…tomorrow, you realize that there is a new company in Bangladesh that provides the same products you have, with better quality, and at a fraction of the cost. In order to survive the fast paced, knowledge driven, global reaching world today, first and foremost, you must embrace change within yourself and your organization so you can stay relevant. In fact, you must learn to thrive on change by refabricating the genetics of your organization, just like human genes go through gene adaptation in order to combat evolving diseases and environmental conditions.

Thriving on change is crucial - in the form of continuous improvement, relentless pursuit of a better way, and constantly challenging yesterday’s known facts. “Be open to change” is one of the famous mantras of management in the past decade, but being open to change is no longer good enough. This is not about accepting change, not about tolerating change, not about adapting to change – rather, it is living and loving change, and thriving on change at every possible opportunity. The most groundbreaking ideas, concepts, companies and organizations come out of abandoning conventional wisdom, and making fundamental changes in how things are done.

There have been several studies of what it takes to be successful as an individual and as a company in a global world. Most agree that the first step is realizing that the world is flat, or I guess it just got flatter. You are now competing with people not just within your local geographic boundaries, but with people all over the world – which is smaller now than it has ever been.

Secondly, in order to navigate and compete effectively in this small world, one must be disciplined. Jim Collins, in his book titled “Good to Great” said “All companies have a culture; some companies have discipline. But very few companies have a culture of discipline. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get a magical alchemy of great performance.”

Lastly, surrounding yourself with a team that understands and embraces this culture of change is critical. Individuals who understand what is going on beyond their immediate surroundings will help you see that wave of life, so that you can pace yourself accordingly. You must be around people who pay attention to the trends within their immediate environment, as well as on the other end of the world, like Bangalore or Dalian, China.

In looking into why the pace of change today is so fast, we discover some of the key drivers of the shrinking of the world. These are referred to as “flatteners”, as Thomas L. Friedman describes in his book The World is Flat. They include global competition, outsourcing, the China Boom, knowledge economy, and telecommunication. When these drivers are coupled with the constant advancements in technology, the result is higher productivity, easier access to information, and exponential growth in emerging markets. The increased pace in a variety of areas combine to speed up that wave of life in a geometric progression.

To apply this to my situation, here at my organization, Artemis Solutions Group, we strive to ride on the coattails of change. Rather than approaching change with resistance and fear, we embrace it. We love it. We seek to help our clients achieve the same. Many of our clients are now used to the concept of meeting frequently – several times per year, just to ask ourselves – what could we be doing better? How could we use technology to leverage our organization’s asset to make us best in class? By sitting down and consciously going through the exercise, we are most often able to find innovative ways to do more with less; and to strategically position such clients differently in the market place.

Within our company, we find that the best way to adapt to change is by bringing new improvements to our processes, services and methodologies each and every day - continuously reinventing ourselves. We listen to our instincts and take action. Because we are not afraid of treading ground we have never seen, we know we will make mistakes. But we also know that we will learn from them, and those mistakes will make us stronger. Although uncharted territory is unnerving, the truth is that the greater risk lies in mediocrity. This is yet another reason why here at Artemis, constant improvement is everything. “Some people make change happen, some people watch things happen, and some people say shoot, what just happened?”

In order to support our craving for change, we’ve engineered an effective process to develop new ideas and concepts. We achieve this for our clients through client consultation, internal concept brainstorming, researching client competitors, observing the shifts in market forces, and evaluating new technology platforms that can energize our clients’ business.

We also hold bi-weekly innovation sessions, where ideas for products, add-on modules, future services, practices and processes are vetted. From there, we advance to the research and development phase, and an initiative champion pushes the concept into production as quickly as possible.

Is your change cycle in sync with the wave of life?

What about your business, or our beloved state of Michigan? If not, there’s no time like to present to ask ourselves what we can do to get up to speed.

My feedburner feed

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 23:00:00 GMT

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