Should corporations give?

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A few years ago I happened upon the concept of Tzedakah.  It has to do with the way we as people give to others in need.  I hope you will read it, and then help me work out how it relates to if and how corporations should give to others.

The Eight Degrees of Tzedakah

There are eight degrees of giving tzedakah (doing justice), each one higher than the last.

The lowest degree is when one gives grudgingly, reluctantly, or with regret.

A higher degree is when the donor gives less than is required by the poor person, but does so willingly.

A still higher degree is when the donor gives what is required by the poor person, but only after being solicited.

A yet higher degree is when the donor gives before being asked.

The fifth and higher degree is when the recipient knows the donor, but the donor does not know the recipient.

The next degree is when the identity of the donor is not revealed.

A higher degree of tzedakah is when both the donor and the recipient are anonymous.

The highest degree is when the donor helps the recipient become self supporting by means of a gift, a loan, or by finding employment for the one in need.

-Moses Maimonides, twelfth century Jewish philosopher

My mom taught me early in life that it is wrong to make a big deal out of helping others, and it is especially wrong to do it just to get the recognition.  I doubt if she had heard about Tzedakah, but she got the idea of it. 

So then, does this apply to corporations?  I believe corporations are a strong force in making the world a better place – they provide jobs, they bring people together into communities and ultimately they are simply groups of people working together.  But should they as an entity make charitable donations or should they leave that to their shareholders and owners?  I can see it both ways.  What do you think?  Don’t be shy, please comment.

Whether you choose to help others as an individual or through your company, I’d like to suggest one way that is as close to level eight as I can figure.  Heifer International is a non-profit organization that will take your donation and will turn it into a cow, or a pig or a goat that will go to a person in need.  That person can use the animal to support their family, and part of the deal is that they then are supposed to share the offspring of the animals with others.  It is self-sustaining and Heifer seem to do a good job of making sure most of the money they collect actually gets to the people they are trying to help.  It’s as easy to give to Heifer as it is to buy a book on amazon.com. But if you do it, don’t tell me or anyone else about it.  Do find a way to pass on the idea though.

In the United States in just a few generations we have prospered to the point where most of us have too much to eat.  There are still too many starving children around the world.  (One is too many)

Airline security, in-flight cell phones and knitting needles

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I’ve traveled every week except for one since about mid-October, and I’ve got a few observations. A couple of days ago I heard a news story that cell phones had been approved for use on airplanes by the FCC. It is expected that they could be allowed by the FAA by 2006. I’m a pilot, though not current, and I still read the aviation newsletters. There does seem to be some anecdotal evidence that cell phones and other devices have caused problems with navigation systems, which is why they were banned in the first place. Some say they were banned to protect the airphone revenue, but I do believe there was some legitimate concern for safety. Which brings me to airline security. If a cell phone could potentially bring down a plane, why are the airlines letting us on with our phones, laptops and PDAs, but making us throw away our pin knives?

I’ve always thought that much of the security efforts in the airport are there just to make people feel better about traveling. Brian Doherty wrote a great article on John Gilmore, a multi-millionaire (Sun Microsystems employee number five) who is suing the government to try to protect our rights to privacy. Here is an email from John Gilmore describing how British Airways ejected him from a flight for wearing a button that said "Suspected Terrorist". (As I write this a flight attendant is standing next to me in the aisle and I’m wondering if even writing the word "Terrorist" could get me ejected from the flight.)

I wouldn’t mind the extra security measures if I thought they did any good, but what is the logic in taking away a person’s safety razor but letting the young woman board with 12" anodized aluminum knitting needles? They are definitely on the list of things my Mom warned could poke my eye out. I’ve noticed this twice in the past couple of weeks and the flight attendants see them, so they are being allowed.

We’ve also seen a couple of stories lately about the crack security teams losing their training bombs. In the Newark case the bomb was fake, but in the Paris case it was real explosives that went missing. The article mentions that in tests the screeners in Newark missed one in four bombs planted in luggage. Can you imagine getting home from a trip, opening your suitcase and finding a real bomb? How do you explain that and who do you report it to?

I see that Lufthansa is now offering wireless internet access on their flights out of Denver. Has anyone tried using a VoIP SIP phone on their laptop to make what would probably be a legal call from the air? By the way, I’m not in favor of allowing people to use cell phones in flight. Travel is tough enough without having to sit in the middle seat listening to somebody yak about whatever it is people find SO IMPORTANT that they just can’t possibly wait until they have some privacy.

I guess I’m done. The woman in front of me just leaned her seat back into my lap and since I’m up against the back bulkhead, it is really awkward to type. At least she isn’t talking on the phone too.

TelePodcasting Part 2

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In my previous post I said "I think I’ve invented something – comments please!"  I went on to describe an idea I had for making it easy to create PodCasts using nothing but an ordinary telephone.  Maybe the term TelePodcasting is new, but others have clearly thought about this already.

Daniel Gerges left a comment saying that his company had developed a capability to post MP3 files to their website.  I found a few other references to this, so wrapping them up in RSS is just a slight improvement that makes it possible to automatically turn the recordings into PodCasts.  I like to check out the websites of people who comment and got a real treat at Daniel’s blog.

Daniel has written Should you open source your ideas? and he used my TelePodcast post as kind of a case study.  Open Source Ideas – check out Daniel’s post.  I felt like a rock star when I realized he had also picked up on my post about vacations.

Derek Scruggs of Fanprints (check it out!) pointed me to Instant Audio and suggested I send a link to Adam Curry, who is a Big Name in broadcasting and an active PodCaster.

Jim Curry of Whole Wheat Radio pointed me to OpenPodCast.org who has had a call-in capability, though it doesn’t seem to be in service right now.  I spent a couple of hours this morning listening to Whole Wheat Radio.  It’s great, and it is another example of how the Internet is changing the world.  Jim’s inspired me to figure out how to stream music throughout my house because I kept listing to "just  one more song" and didn’t want to leave my computer this morning.

So what have I learned?  When I was a developer I learned to not be too quick to blame another’s code, because as sure as I did, I found the bug in MY code and looked stupid for pointing the finger at someone else.  I *may* have come up with a new term, and a slight twist on other good ideas.  I don’t think I’ve invented anything.  The idea may still be worth pursuing and my first experiment with Open Source Ideas has been great.

At Gold Systems we focus mostly on applications, though we do have one product that is more of an infrastructure product.  I think the power of TelePodcasting will be in the applications that can be built with the concept to solve real problems.  That’s what I’m going to be spending my time thinking about.

TelePodcasting

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I think I’ve invented something – comments please!  I was playing with PodCasting earlier this week.  PodCasting is RSS with an attachment, in this case an mp3 file.  Rather than read the blogs, you can, if you get everything set up just right, automatically download recorded blogs in the author’s own voice directly to your iPod or MP3 player.  If blogging is personal printing press, PodCasting is personal radio broadcasting with TiVo.

Engadget has a tutorial on how to create a podcast.  It assumes the reader has a Mac and that they are willing to use three or four different pieces of software, a sound card, microphone, etc., to make a PodCast.  It’s not rocket science, but it is far from easy.  (No offense Engadget, it’s a great tutorial; I’m just thinking there could be an alternative that would be easier with only some sacrifice in sound quality.)

What I’ve come up with is what I’ll call "TelePodcasting".  The idea is really, really simple.  To create a PodCast, rather than sitting down in a studio, you simply call in your TelePodcast post using any telephone.  This is the very first ever recorded TelePodcast.  If you clicked on the previous link, you should have heard me talking – if not, maybe your speakers aren’t turned on?  The script wasn’t very well thought out and I could have spoken clearer, but if I had redone it, then it wouldn’t still be the Very First Ever recorded TelePodcast, would it?

The point of PodCasting is not really to listen to the recording directly, but to take the RSS feeds and use them to automatically grab the audio and download them to your iPod or MP3 player.  If you are ready to try that, than this RSS feed should do the trick.

If you haven’t encountered PodCasting before, you might be wondering "what’s the point?"  Lots of people prefer audio to visual, which is why Books on Tape and Audible are popular.  But there are a lot more uses.  How about politicians delivering their speeches in their own voice to your inbox?  Or State of the Company addresses, or Sales Team Updates – all delivered from any telephone and distributed automatically and instantly.  PodCasting  seems to be growing as fast as blogging and surely a lot of the people would like to have an easier way to update their sites.

I’m not ready to go into how this works exactly, but it is easy to make a post.  You dial a phone number from any telephone, you’re prompted to record your message and then magically it appears on the blog. 

I think there is something to this.  I’m not sure if it is a potential product for my company, Gold Systems, or a neat idea or a dumb idea.  What do you think?

Take a vacation already!

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One of the first blogs I started reading was by Matt Blumberg, the CEO of Return Path.  His post on Why Entrepreneurship is like Windows made me smile.  If you are an entrepreneur you’ll get it and if you are thinking about becoming an entrepreneur make sure you think about what it might be like to be in screen saver mode most of the time.  I’m a big believer in vacations, though it took me about five years before I didn’t feel guilty about taking them.  (I still do a little)

If you only take a week at a time, I think you’re only getting the mental benefit of about one day off.  Think about it – the first three days you’re still thinking about work.  You get one good day and then spend the next three days thinking about going back to work.  I think it takes two weeks at least, consecutive, with little or no thoughts of work to really recharge.

Your employees could probably use the break too, and they get to prove that they can run the business without you.  If you must think about work, keep the thoughts big and bring back a good idea or two.

Carrots or New Products

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In an earlier posting I warned you to Beware of Carrots.  I’m not a big fan of vegetables unless they are in a big bowl of Burgoo, but the carrots to be most wary of are the kind that come in the door looking like new product ideas.  It goes like this – out of the blue you get a call and the person on the other ends says "If you build this product I know I could sell/buy hundreds off them!"  You ask about their budget and they say "Uh no, I don’t have any budget to fund the effort, so you build it and THEN I’ll sell/buy them."

It’s like the little boy riding his donkey who gets the donkey to go wherever he wants by holding a carrot dangling from a stick in front of the donkey’s nose.  The donkey catches on that he’s not getting any closer to the carrot so he just doubles his efforts hoping to catch it.  It’s so easy to be a donkey when a new product opportunity shows up unannounced.  So how do you avoid it?

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That’s enough for now

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I’ve just finished moving most of the content from my personal website to this blog.  I think I like the way it is working, so next I’ll work on figuring out how domain mapping works and commit completely to the blogging format.

Photography

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One of my hobbies outside of work is photography, particularly night photography.


“Belize


“Northern


“Seattle


“Napier

 

 

 

I’m currently using a Canon Digital Rebel and a Nokia 33650 Camera Phone.  The Canon makes taking good photos easy, but the Nokia makes me work for it and learn in the process.

A few tips

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Tips for Entrepreneurs

This is a random collection of tips for entrepreneurs.  Join a peer group, get an advisory board, buy a Pocket PC and read more.

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Management

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This essay on management was originally published on my website www.terrygold.com

Management

It would be a good idea to plan your management team from the day you start your company, but if you’re like a lot of entrepreneurs you wait until you are overwhelmed and going crazy to start dividing responsibilities.  If you are on your own you might be able to manage six to ten people yourself.  If you have a partner you can a go little longer but not twice as long because you will find you start contradicting each other and confusing the people working with you if you don’t lay out clearly how responsibility is divided.

Read more . . .

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