Entrepreneurial spirit

I was recently told that 2010 was the first year in Finnish history that more than half of Finland's companies are single-owned - seeming to verify a feeling that many people have that growth businesses are on the decline in Finland. Of course numbers can be spun in many different ways, but there is a continued concern by many in Finland that "entrepreneurial spirit" is shifting towards a sense of doing business for oneself rather than creating business that has the potential to expand.

But is there really an entrepreneruial crisis? Might this be an indication of a shift of perspective towards different ways to create and sustain business? Is this only a Finnish phenomenon, or is this one level of a dynamic of how societies conceive of their business base?

http://ezinearticles.com/?How-To-Define-Entrepreneurial-Spirit&id=738736

http://www.prh.fi/en/uutiset/I_23.html

Processes

Processes don’t always have to be complex. Sometimes a process is defined by a need. Sometimes common sense wins the day and processes provide enough leeway for things to happen in common sense ways. Sometimes it might even seem like complexity itself steps aside to let certain things "just happen". And many times, one of the essential elements of this sort of almost magical sense of easeful flow is comon sense communication.

It doesn't take time and preparation and detailed analysis of options to use common sense. A good many times it is about paying attention to your surroundings, what there is at hand, who is there as part of the moment, and then communicating in a very clear and realistic way. But maybe behind this is a sometimes long practice of acknowledging that clarity is an art...

The Zen painter

I once heard a story of a Zen painter who had been asked by someone to create a very simple rendition of a tiger. The Zen painter told the person to come back in two weeks.

When the person showed up at the Zen painter's door two weeks later, he asked the Zen painter if his painting was ready. The Zen painter looked thoughtful and took some time before replying.
"Please, come inside," he finally said. The two went inside and the Zen painter took out a blank piece of paper, a bottle of ink and a brush and sat there staring at the blank paper. The person wondered if the Zen painter had remembered that he would be coming back, and wondered if the Zen painter had even given any thought to the painting at all. Just when the person was about to get flustered and ask the Zen painter if he had in fact remembered the painting, the Zen painter took up the brush, dipped it in the ink bottle and made three quick brush strokes on the piece of paper.

The person was astonished. The painting was very simple, very beautiful, a perfect balance of three smoothly flowing lines that presented an amazingly clear sense of being a tiger.

"Wow," the person said. "That's amazing... Did you..." But before he could finish his question the Zen painter put a finger to his lips to indicate that maybe the person shouldn't ask the question that was on his mind. The Zen painter stood up and walked to a closet at the far end of the room and opened the door. Out poured a four foot high pile of papers all with various brush strokes - two weeks of attempts at finding the perfect flow of ink that would culminate in those three brush strokes.

The ways we communicate can be said to have a similar journey, if we are to bring them to a similar type of culmination. And to articulate this, there are many stories, sayings, adages, suggestions and sets of instructions, many of which tend towards this same understanding - that we need to pay attention to the ways we build our own ways of consructing (and presenting) the details we want to share with others.

Sometimes the journey may not be so straightforward as with individual acts of communication. For instance, when we seek to build an overall personalized style, tone or mood that we can call our own, there are many levels of considerations. I think that within this journey is more of a sense of a need to watch ourselves as if from outside - to objectively, without sentiment, observe what it is we do to effect that style, tone or mood, and what we might do to create it as tightly tied to "the ways about us" as possible. It is sometimes a quite long journey, potentially evolving throughout the full course of one's life...

The moon

Communication is like the moon - aspects shift as the seasons change, the weather shifts, the days and nights entwine with our own senses of reason, intention and wonder. We see these shifts in almost everything we do as we engage with others.
Like our relationship with the moon, communication is a necessity and - if we care to explore it - an art.
Recently, I founded a company called HalfMoon Communications. The focus of this company is to help people identify ways to bring the most essential, relevant and advantagious elements of their communication practices to the forefront of their daily activities, from both a personal and a business perspective.
It's been a while since I have owned my own company - so I too am once again exploring what it means to build one's interactive presence in the world of business. I look forward to taking this up at many levels - building valued relationships with clients, readers, correspondents and friends.
A full moon is a half moon, from a certain perspective. My take on this is that there will always be spaces of vision, thought and communication that remain full of potential.