It’s consequential to love, honor and cherish someone. If you choose your partner wisely, your capacity to act and take of your concerns, whatever they may be, is increased exponentially. If you choose poorly, it can lead to unprecedented despair and breakdowns that affect your whole life.

I was talking to my teacher the other day and she told me that the same is true in business. You must love, honor, and cherish your customers as well.

Your customers don’t care about the breakdowns you face. They care about their own needs, their own concerns. They are trusting you to take care of them. In fact, they are paying you to do so.

We could write for days on the philosophy of money and what it means when a customer transacts with you. Suffice it to say that it is a unique and wonderful relationship because money allows us to take care of our own families.

As I begin to talk to small business people and how busy they are, they seem to have an attitude like they are entitled to the money BECAUSE they are working so hard instead of focusing, not on what the customer wants, but rather what is the customer concerned about that ONLY YOU can help them with because that’s the business you are in.

This applies to employees too. Your boss is your customer. They need to be loved, honored and cherished too.

What do you think? Can you love, honor and cherish your boss? Your customer? How you think customers should be feel after doing business with you?

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I am feeling different about my life and my prospects for it. I’ll elaborate . . .

I do enjoy being lighter and more healthy. I eat better, run and work out regularly and have literally never felt better in my life.

I am beyond excited at marrying my new bride. She is a beautiful writer, teacher and partner. The greatest indication I have that my life is moving in a powerful direction is the fact that a woman of her quality said yes to marrying me.

I started the Vaughan Practice because the situation is ripe for small businesses to seize territory. The cost of rapidly evolving technology has never been lower. Small businesses must leverage social media, mobility, and search technology in order to compete in the global marketplace and grow their business.

These are just symptoms of a more significant change. My most important change? I have committed myself to further education. You should hear about what I’m doing.

In April of 2009, I joined a discourse for Business Professionals,The Aji Network out of Silicon Valley California. They offer a two year course as well as face to face workshops. They also offer a way to learn exclusively online.

They are selective. Those selected are taught about the concerns for business. But instead of learning only from lecture and books, as in academia, this discourse is teaching business from a completely different perspective. The majority of students are already ambitious businesspeople and owners. In addition to business, students invest their time learning about physics, biology, language, history and philosophy.

The discourse has been taught at one of the most prestigious private corporate business universities in the United States, GE’s Crotonville in New York.

I’m a little over half way done with the course and just returned from the Aji Network Conference in San Francisco. It was a three day celebration with almost 200 other business leaders. I met fellow students from Wal-mart, Sprint, GE, Google, Symantec as well as fellow entrepreneurs like myself. What I found most valuable? Learning with them and from them about topics like Designing and Making Offers to Building Powerful Organizations.

The Aji Network delivers on its promise for learning unlike any other business course or university class I have taken. I do not benefit in any way from making that statement. I receive no referral fees should you sign up with the Aji Network. I have simply not found ANYTHING like this in the marketplace and HIGHLY recommend this to ambitious businesspeople who know they must have a competitive advantage to survive in this new economy.

What are you doing to stay educated?

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I hired a personal trainer and I am finding the physical limits my body can take.

It’s been apparent to me that I have lived a very comfortable existence for much of my 43 years. I had a good paying job. I was single. I ate what I wanted. I chose comfortable things to do like playing video and card games over exercising and eating healthy. Living comfortably was more important than living healthy.

Here is what I have learned. The only way to know your limits is to “find” your limits. Find out what you are capable of. I wonder exactly how many people do this. I speculate that people don’t know how useful this practice is.

I also speculate this is because our culture is so focused on being comfortable. To live with discomfort is so foreign to people. We feel entitled to comfort. Something is wrong or un-natural if we aren’t comfortable. I’ve come to find the whole thing so interesting. I’ve begun to notice the conversations I’ve had with people when I talk to them about some concern I’m struggling with, like my body. For those who think and act with their body as a concern, they listen. I can have a real conversation with them about different strategies I can employ to provide a more meaningful impact. For those who don’t think and act with their body as a concern, they look at me with incredulity and tell me how great I look. It’s as if they think I have a self-esteem problem because I feel a need, finally, to do something about my body at the ripe old age of 43. I speculate its because misery loves company. People getting healthy makes the unhealthy very uncomfortable.

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Business and Technology work best when they are planned within a powerful interpretation of reality. Human beings have concerns that they cannot ignore. If these concerns are ignored (for instance: choosing not to exercise or eat healthy), you will reach a point in your life that you will suffer. Because business exists within the same reality that humans exist, the same laws apply to companies. If you neglect your concerns related to marketing or technology, your company will eventually suffer. I will call this “not taking care.”

Science is coming up with ways to explain this phenomenon. Cosmologist, Sean Carroll speaks to the University of Sydney about “Entropy” and “The Arrow of Time” to illustrate that answers can be found in physics for consequences related to those who don’t take care.

Why isn’t the universe and our concerns more static?

Part One:

Part Two:

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We begin to suffer.

We live in an increasingly mobile world. According to recent studies, one in four households are cellphone only. Of those that have cell phones, 40 percent of those are what we refer to as “SmartPhones.” What is driving the use of Smartphones? First I claim biology. Our bodies are limited by what we can do without technology. Second, I claim sociology. We see others (friends, family, colleagues) using technology, now readily available and we marvel about how much more convenient and practical they are able to move in the world with one of these devices.

Assuming this all sounds reasonable, how are we suffering? Consumers are noticing and demanding this technology, businesses aren’t readily listening fast enough.

Case in point: The iPhone and AT&T.

According to the latest AdMob report, the iPhone accounts for 50% of all Web traffic coming from a “SmartPhone.”

Ad Mob Metrics - SmartPhone Requests

Also, the iPhone has capabilities embedded in the device that AT&T can’t allow because of the breakdowns they are experiencing with their network. Only in September did AT&T make available, a seemingly basic ability, picture messaging. Tethering with the iPhone (the ability to use the iPhone as a modem for a laptop) while existing on the iPhone as evidenced through hacks, won’t be available officially until sometime in 2010.

We are living a lifestyle the world isn’t quite ready for. Consumer demand is a pandora’s box that can’t be reversed. What does this mean for our future? Come back tomorrow and I’ll help you notice what I speculate this will mean for our future.

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I can certainly relate.

Before I got my iPhone, I had a Moto Q. When I got the Moto Q, I loved how sexy and thin it was. Also, I loved that it had a calendar and Exchange support for email. I soon grew weary of Windows Mobile, though, and a battery that would last about 3 hours before I had to charge it again. I grew to hate the phone and ended by contract with Sprint early because I couldn’t stand carrying this “thing,” that I hated, with me everywhere I went.

In our conversations, we found a woman who just received a new phone. Even the basic phones today offer more capabilities than simply calling someone.

For this woman, it was obvious that she had only used these devices historically. In other words, her only context came from “calling” people. She appears intimidated by this new “phone” and if her wireless carrier hadn’t sent her this new device to use, she probably never would have purchased it. But because we take our phones with us everywhere, they become incredibly personal devices and as she’s started to use it, she’s looking at the device differently. She’s only beginning to understand how personal and powerful these devices have become when she talks about how the phone has “ringtones” and that she will begin text messaging her sister. She admits she’s not the type to “personalize things” normally, but this device is throwing her into a new situation where now she sees herself and the world a little differently.

See for yourself:

*Update* More proof about how we are changing, How Cellphones are Changing Our Brains

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As human beings without technology, we are limited in what we can do. Our voice extends only so far. Our hearing is limited to those immediately around us. Our ability to plan around what we can taste, smell or touch is limited to what is around us to observe and notice. Human beings with technology, however, are infinitely more powerful. For instance, with a mobile phone commonly found in our world today, we can see, talk and listen to friends, family, or business associates no matter where they may be in the world. We can organize around where we might want to eat that evening or plan for an event in the future. We can coordinate and cooperate with others so that we can meet them later for a drink, a meal or to simply catch up.

The mobile phone business is growing, particularly related to these new devices. According to a recent study, one in five individuals surveyed had accessed the Internet on their mobile phone at some point within the past day. According to an article in The Economist, one in four households are now Cell-phone only. Email is growing obsolete as a means of communication in real time. More and more people are turning to “texting” as a means of cooperating and coordinating in real-time.

The Mobile device extends the capabilities a human being can perform. They are able to do so and appear almost transparent to either the user or anyone observing them. They are small enough to fit inside a pocket or purse. They are light enough to not cause discomfort while traveling. Many of them also behave in a way that commonly relates to real world physics. We touch and we drag screens of information, aka applications, aka “apps” with the touch of a finger. Screens bounce, as if made of rubber, when they are stretched to a finite point. They play our favorite songs when our friends or family call us. With some apps, the interface responds, when we breathe, talk, yell, scream, throw. It reacts in ways we have become accustomed to expect by living in this real world, dominated by physics.

I claim we are being thrown into a new paradigm. When the automobile was first introduced, people referred to it as a “horseless carraige.” A few companies are trying to think and act with this new data but most companies are thinking and acting with these new devices by referring to them as “Smartphones.” It’s difficult to notice immediately when the world changes. We need people to help us understand when the world is suddenly “different.”

I’m just here to help.

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