NetSudser Dick Kachelmeyer has joined HeatSeeker Technology Partners as a consultant. Dick comes from Lucent where he was Senior Director of Business and Technology Development in Lucent's High-Performance Routing Division. Dick was introduced to HeatSeekers at the Dec 5th NetSuds event. Dick may be reached at 612.889.9913 or dick.kachelmeyer@heatseeker.com.

NetSudser Susan Heilman, formerly with ADC's broadband wireless access group is now a Marketing Director at Optical Solutions in Plymouth. Susan started January 7. You may reach Susan at sheilman@opticalsolutions.com.

Peter Jew, formerly VP of Marketing at ADC's broadband wireless access group is now VP of Marketing at Optical Solutions in Plymouth. Peter started January 2.

NetSudser Tim Roddy is the Director of Product Marketing at Stellent. You may contact Tim at either 952.903.2127 or tim.roddy@stellent.com.  Tim did a 1-day internship at NetSuds in October and says, "... the networking helped and I look forward to a long association with you and NetSuds."

DC NetSudser Jonathan Forest started a new job at Hughes Network Systems as Director, Network Services within the Spaceway Service Development Group in Germantown, MD. Spaceway is a next generation satellite IP network. Contact Jonathan at JonathanPam@aol.com.

NetSudser Travis Smith, formally CTO of Inetium is now president of start-up Appolis. Appolis is an Internet Software Development company. Contact Travis at 763-546-9655 or traviss@appolis.com.

NetSudser Tim Ward reports starting a new job as Channel Manager at Veritas Software in Roseville. Contact Tim at either 651-746-7401 or tward@veritas.com. 

NetSudser Scott Boedigheimer has opened up the Minnesota office of DMS Technology Solutions where he is the General Manager. DMS is a Microsoft and Microsoft Great Plains Certified Solutions Partner. Contact Scott at either 952-852-7020 or sboedigheimer@dmsts.com.

NetSudser Russ Leverenz goes from Achievement Data to IndiVisual Learning to be National Sales Manager. Contact Russ at either rleverenz@indivisuallearning.com or 651-602-3118.

NetSudser Celia Chapura has joined Administaff as a consultant. You may contact Celia at either 952.960.5313 or celia_chapura@administaff.com.

NetSudser Tom Bozlinski has joined HeatSeeker Technology Partners as a consultant. Tom comes from Fingerhut where he was Senior Vice President of Information Services. Tom may be reached at either tom.bozlinski@heatseeker.com or 952.939.8181.

California NetSudser Matt Holdrege is now the Director of Technology Development for Sonus Networks. You may contact Matt at matt@sonusnet.com.

Optical Solutions has hired some marketing executives after having run rather lean in that area for quite some time. Warren Pillsbury originally held both Sales and Marketing roles until his departure in 2001. The marketing hires come amidst some layoffs in other parts of
the company which occurred in late 2001 and are occurring now.  Some OSI employees indicate that up to 40% of OSI Engineering is being laid off while Sales & Marketing ramps up.  OSI is in the midst of raising venture capital; primarily on the west and east coasts.

Interelate had a major layoff of executive management in early January. Wade Myers remains as Chairman but no longer is CEO.

I visited with Bonnie Bennett at Object Partners - bonnie.bennett@objectpartners.com - recently at their facility in downtown Minneapolis. OPI is working with the latest Java and EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) technology to create exciting web-based software solutions for the clients. They also run a monthly technical forum for professionals in the industry which is open to anyone. The technical forum gives them a chance to market their company but it also provides a valuable service to the software community interested in this exciting technology.

OPI had been on a tear in the last few years but slowed down somewhat (with the rest of us!) in 2001. However, they have a good business model which hasn't led them to layoffs even slowing down from 100% Y2Y growth to 50% Y2Y growth. As they move from a staff augmentation / custom software company to a mix of the former with product software, it is clear that OPI is betting on the new web-based software technologies to grow an exciting, cutting-edge company.

They seem to be tied tightly to BEA Systems; a world leader in the adoption and use of this technology for large enterprise applications. OPI is lean and chock full of experienced software programmers who enjoy using the latest technology to develop customer solutions.

It is hard to demo this kind of software but they walked us all through some EJBGen technology which claims to cut development cycle by up to 50% in most cases. It also reduces the occurrence of programming mistakes due to the automated nature of the process.

Contact Bonnie if you want to drop in on their next tech forum.

I met with Laurence Bricker - co-founder and creative director - and Sarah Bratnober - VP of market strategies. Both impressed me as people who knew their market and their technology. Check out Popular Front at www.popularfront.com

To reference the white paper, check out http://www.unimax.com/pdf/TruthAboutTelephony.pdf

Click on the following link to check out Kevin's book - http://hop.clickbank.net/?netsuds/gresumes

To help solve this problem, NetSuds has teamed up with Spoken Impact - www.spokenimpact.com - to create a 3-part workshop. The workshop starts with a group general session on April 11 and continues with 2 personalized sessions, also in April. Besides teaching some very convincing presentation skills, we will be addressing key elements venture capitalists are looking for in presentations. These include elements such as management team stories, addressable market opportunities, differentiating technology and go-to-market strategies. Common mistakes made by entrepreneurs will be pointed out and replaced by common recipes for successful fund-raising.

More information will be available soon at http://www.netsuds.com/workshop/

Minnesota Technology, Inc., the state’s technology-based economic development arm has compiled and updating this valuable resource for more than five years.   For more information, contact Ronald Levitus (612) 933-4142 rlevitus@mntech.org      

NetSuds in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina (Raleigh/Durham) is off to a strong start. The second gathering of NetSuds in NC drew a sold-out 240 people and included a kick-off speech by Raleigh's new mayor; Charles Meeker. The next quarterly gathering of NetSuds in Raleigh will be at and sponsored by the prestigious Capital Club of Raleigh on April 11.

3/5     MedicalSuds Evening Gathering - Minneapolis, UofM
          http://www.medicalsuds.com/eg/

3/5     NetSuds Evening Gathering - Minneapolis, UofM
          http://www.netsuds.com/netsuds/

4/11   NetSuds Presentations Skills Workshop Series
          http://www.netsuds.com/workshop/

The "Minnesota Venture Capital Conference" (SM) (MNVCC) and "Bleeding Edge Technology Showcase" (SM) (BETS) will be held May 8-9, 2002. The event website is www.mnvcc.com. The MNVCC and BETS are 2 conferences for the price of one.

If you are an entrepreneur at a 2-person start-up or a 200-person start-up looking for angel investment or venture capital, you can apply to present at the Conference. The deadline for applications is March 5, 2002. Apply at http://www.mnvcc.com/entrepreneurs/.

If you are a Minnesota company or if your division is based in Minnesota, you can apply to present at the BETS. University researchers are welcome to apply as well. If selected, your registration is free. We are looking for the best of the best in technology. Apply at http://www.mnvcc.com/bets/.

Venture capitalists, angel investors and investment bankers are accorded complimentary registrations to the Conference but must apply online at http://www.mnvcc.com/investors/ in a timely manner.

Members of the media are accorded complimentary registrations to the Conference but must apply online at http://www.mnvcc.com/media/ in a timely manner.

Registration is open now! The first 100 registrants are $295/person. Subsequent registration prices start at $495/person. Register at http://www.mnvcc.com/register/. If you qualify for a complimentary registration at a later date, your fee will be refunded.

Gold Sponsor - Messerli & Kramer - www.messerlikramer.com

Media Sponsor - MinnesotaBusiness magazine - www.minnesotabusiness.com

By MedicalSudser William Hoffman, hoffm003@umn.edu

Professor Porter Goes to Washington

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." - Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532)

The pavilion of the new Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, DC is a fine spot for a reception.

Second only to the Pentagon in size among federal buildings, the Reagan Building dominates space called the Federal Triangle along Pennsylvania Avenue. Its circular pavilion, on the second floor, features maple hardwood walls and oak board floors with gray center stone medallion inlay -- under a glass dome.

Add to the space subdued lighting, white-gloved waiters, and a harpist and you have an excellent environment for people to get acquainted in advance of a conference.

The conference was "National Clusters of Innovation." It was being put on by the Council on Competitiveness, a leadership group of business executives, academics, and government officials, and the National Governors Association.

The conference was yet more evidence of the expanding universe of the ideas of Michael Porter, the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at the Harvard Business School, the founder of Harvard's Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, and co-author of the annual "Global Competitiveness Report."

No one is in greater demand than Porter, here or abroad, on the theme of competition and strategy, whether the playing field is the global marketplace, states and regions, the inner city, or rural communities looking for a new role in the economic order.

Governments and regional development organizations on all continents except Antarctica have come calling. Cross-regional initiatives naturally look to him, initiatives such as the Baltic Development Forum, an organization of Scandinavian and Baltic states and Russia which pitches itself as the "Hanseatic League for the New Millennium."

In Minnesota, Porter's ideas have influenced key studies by the State and Local Policy Program at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, the Metropolitan Council, the McKnight Foundation, and the Citizens League of Minnesota.

They have influenced the annual benchmarking survey by the Great North Alliance, a civic leadership organization looking to enhance regional competitiveness. They were also at the heart of recommendations by University of Minnesota President Mark Yudof's Working Group on the Minnesota Economy, which were released a year ago this month.

I got to know about Porter in 1987 while doing some free-lance work for a longtime friend, then working for Wilson Learning. Porter was coming into his own in management consulting circles. A few years earlier Ronald Reagan had appointed him to his Presidential Commission on Industrial Competitiveness. About that time Porter co-authored "How Information Gives You Competitive Advantage," an influential paper in the nascent years of the PC revolution. It was that paper that got me thinking about the business world for the first time.

Porter's star soared with publication of The Competitive Advantage of Nations in 1990, which, according to the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Monitor Group, a strategic consulting group he co-founded, "develops a new theory of how nations, states, and regions compete and their sources of economic prosperity." It is in this book that Porter laid out his ideas on economic geography and the role of clusters -- geographically concentrated groups of interconnected companies and associated institutions in a particular field linked by common technologies and skills. These ideas have guided economic policy throughout the world.

Last December, Porter was appointed "University Professor," the highest professional distinction for a Harvard faculty member. His professorship is only the 20th in a line of such endowed positions since 1936, when the professorship was established by President James B. Conant to give distinguished faculty "roving commissions" so that their "teaching and creative work shall not be hampered by departmental considerations." He is just the fourth University Professor in the 93-year history of the Harvard Business School.

Unlike Jefferson Smith of the movie classic "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" fame [Frank Capra, 1939, starring Jimmy Stewart], Professor Porter's appearance in Washington was nothing new at all. He was on familiar turf as an advisor in the highest government circles. But like Smith he has an interest in change. This time his pull reached out across the country, bringing governors, academic and business leaders, and economic development and technology professionals together for a specific purpose -- to look at how regions of innovation contribute the nation's economic growth.

Porter's championing of regional innovation may seem harmless enough, but in the grand economic order it is nothing less than the Vandals appearing in force at the city gates. It is microeconomics asserting itself in the face of the dominant macroeconomics. It is economic regionalism taking aim at political borders. It is Machiavelli, the grand strategist, coaching the popularly elected and the highly elevated and their associates into a reconsideration of what generates wealth, where it is located, and the role of knowledge in how it comes about.

So, naturally, I was poised to find an opportunity to corner him.

Cornering a Guru - Porter is 54 years old, of medium height with wispy blond hair, piercing blue eyes and other features of aquiline intensity. He is not an imposing presence just standing there. But get him going on strategy and he is an engaging dynamo at the top of his game. I had heard him speak before, at the Biotechnology Industry Organization's annual meeting and trade show in Boston in March 2000. I had seen how his energy and enthusiasm conspire to transfuse his ideas into his audience. Listeners may have an advantage on some specifics but they are poorly equipped to challenge him on synthesis, on the "big picture," on how markets work globally, within regions, among regions, and on the street.

I was preparing myself for an encore.

The buzz in the pavilion tailed off when Duane Ackerman took the podium and the program commenced. Ackerman is vice chairman of the Council on Competitiveness and chairman and CEO of BellSouth Corporation. After the standard welcome he introduced John Engler, governor of Michigan who was also representing the National Governors Association, the co-sponsor of the conference.

During Engler's remarks Porter made his way along the wall toward the podium. I thought he was next to speak. When I turned out to be wrong and the program wrapped up in short order, I walked over to him and introduced myself.

I've heard that Porter's speaking fee these days can range upwards of $75K. If that's true, for an hour's talk, then I figure I got several K's worth free of charge.

I explained that the University of Minnesota had developed a Web portal to more than a thousand organizations in the state's life sciences and healthcare clusters [MBBNet] and that I thought this approach was a good strategy for clusters with close ties to universities. He liked the idea right off. He said he would take it to his colleagues in Massachusetts, which has big clusters in medical devices, biotech/pharma, advanced materials and other fields, and a wealth of university-based brainpower.

A short time later Paul Duncan got more money's worth of Porter's time than I did. Duncan is an entrepreneur and vice president of the Minnesota High Technology Association [MHTA]. His main job at MHTA is to help organize the state's existing and emerging technology clusters. Two of his initiatives, wireless and e-learning, are well along, and others, including a medtech/biotech cluster initiative, are underway. He came away from his visit with Porter stimulated and...what else?...with ideas to pursue.

Our chats while milling about the room confirmed that Porter's ideas are democratically dispersed across the land. They are operating in high income states, like Connecticut, and the lowest, like Mississippi which is forming a communications technology cluster around WorldCom, Inc. headquartered there.

It isn't all high-tech, either. That day [December 12], as a lead-in to the conference, the Wall Street Journal ran a story "Should Cities Always Pursue High-Tech? The Guru of Industry 'Clusters' Says No." According to the article, Porter stressed that "regions shouldn't ignore traditional, even mature local industries that may have equally good if not better growth prospects."

Angeline Dvorak of the Mississippi Technology Alliance, who Duncan and I visited with, told the WSJ reporter that her state isn't ignoring its traditional industries, such as furniture making. But its communications technology sector has grown 21 percent in the past four years, with the number of companies up 35 percent.

That a state like Mississippi is catching notice for innovation tells astute observers that something new is afoot in the economic order of things, something worth looking into.

Gearing Up for Innovation - The conference was held in the Grand Hyatt Hotel in downtown Washington, away from the concrete Jersey barriers that ring federal buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue and the Capitol Mall -- grim reminders of the anthrax scares last fall. Barriers are a big problem in regional development, too. No clear boundaries should exist between universities, government and business when the task is regional innovation, Porter stressed in his talk.

To make the point, he showed a slide of Minnesota's medical device cluster and how his famous diamond model for public-private cooperation works to upgrade clusters.

The focus was not on Minnesota, however, but on five regions that Porter's Monitor Group has studied in detail for the council's Regional Clusters of Innovation Project: San Diego, Wichita, Pittsburgh, the Research Triangle in North Carolina, and Atlanta. The results of these studies were presented in a glossy booklet entitled "Clusters of Innovation: Regional Foundations of U.S. Competitiveness" published by the council.

Porter discussed the studies in the context of Harvard's "Cluster Mapping Project", an analysis of cluster activity in regional economies. He made the poignant observation that innovation often occurs "at the intersection of existing clusters" where a culture of collaboration, shared leadership and organizational flexibility exists. He also noted that universities have played a fundamental role in regional prosperity, especially in recent decades.

Porter's high-energy presentation was followed by a panel of governors charged with exploring the role of state government in cluster-based development. They included Governors Engler of Michigan, Huckabee of Arkansas, Leavitt of Utah, McCallum of Wisconsin, Minner of Delaware, and Musgrove of Mississippi. Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Charles Vest provided the perspective of academia and Merck Chairman and CEO Raymond Gilmartin that of business.

As might be expected, each governor touted his or her own state's economic development initiatives, especially those that cooperatively engage higher education. Engler was typical, describing Michigan's "Smart Zones," its Technical Education Centers [M-TEC] and new Life Sciences Corridor, all helped along by funds from the state's tobacco settlement.

"We're also working on our information infrastructure, how to get more rapid broadband deployment," Engler said.

Vest, a council official as well as MIT president, said a lot of MIT's outreach efforts are channeled through its "centers of excellence." He cited the importance of a "loose matrix" of relationships between faculty and entrepreneurs, the "people-to-people contact" and "sharing among institutions" that can be facilitated today by business-to-business e-commerce models.

The panel was moderated by Washington Post business writer Peter Behr. Behr has covered the fast-growing technology cluster in Washington, DC and Northern Virginia and economic geography in general.

After a time Behr put the matter to the governors squarely: "How do you balance a need to build a critical mass around clusters and centers of excellence that have a narrow geographic focus and get that through legislatures that obviously have their own regional interests and priorities and really want to split the pie politically evenly throughout the whole state?"

No one had an answer that was convincing to me, though several governors tried.

Engler's response was at least a beginning. In his role as chairman of the National Governors Association [NGA], which is looking for ways to create high quality jobs, he affirmed that the council's work on "the 21st century economy for America" needs to be "at the center of everybody's agenda -- current governors and those running for governor."

The NGA has set up a task force to help guide its joint initiatives with the council to implement changes in state workforce systems; highlight current state best practices; enhance state cooperation with leading-edge and traditional industry clusters; and address economic opportunities and challenges brought about by globalization.

That will have to suffice for the time being. Porter himself counseled, as did Machiavelli to "the Magnificent Lorenzo Di Piero De' Medici" in The Prince, that good ideas often have long lead times before they come to pass. Plus a lot of follow-up is needed.

"The nature of people is variable," Machiavelli wrote, "and whilst it is easy to persuade them, it is difficult to fix them in that persuasion."

Clusters, Ants, and "Butterfly Economics"

Everybody wants clusters these days. The problem is how to get them. - Russell Gold, The Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2001

Economic clusters are believed to arise naturally, as naturally as trees and grasses on a prairie. They are part and parcel of the historic, cultural and economic experience of the inhabitants of a region.

Here I was, in a city where conscious planning is the lifeblood of human endeavor, near a maze of Jersey barriers protecting federal buildings, with a group of people who want policymakers to take naturally occurring things into account in ways perhaps they never have before.

They want the human and material assets that characterize a geographical space to be recognized for the contribution these assets make to the nation's prosperity.

Whether that will happen is anybody's guess. It is a reasonable hope if you consider what we are learning about the common ground of economics, biology, technology, and human behavior.

"It's about time economists discovered geography," wrote Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman some years ago. Krugman is also among those looking at biological patterns of emergence to explain economic behavior, as I wrote about in a previous column ["Neighborhood Outposts on the Economic Frontier," April 5, 1999]

Biological emergence has become a hot topic recently, and the heat has been focused on the ant.

British economist Paul Ormerod brought the ant into the economic spotlight with his book Butterfly Economics: A New General Theory of Social and Economic Behavior [Pantheon, 1999]. Conventional economics refuses to consider the influence the behavior of an individual has on other individuals. Ants, for example, leave chemical secretions in their wake. These secretions, called pheromones, influence the decisions of other ants in pursuing a food source.

"So an ant emerging from the nest for the first time would be influenced in its decision by the trails of the ants it encounters on its journey," Ormerod writes. "In economic terms this means the behaviour of agents is influenced directly by the behaviour of others.... The signals left by the creatures mean that the random choices of the first few ants to leave the nest could exercise a decisive influence on the behaviour of the whole colony."

It is a system in which positive feedback predominates. "It predicts that, once a few more ants, for whatever reason, start to visit one of the sites rather than the other there will be a strong tendency for that site to become the favoured destination for more and more ants."

Substitute "cluster" for "colony" and "people" for "ants" and you have a plausible explanation for the regional basis of innovation. A change in behavior can occur, of course, even a dramatic one [the theoretical "butterfly effect" in which the air turbulence from a butterfly's wings sets off a dynamic that later yields a hurricane]. But the underlying conditions must change first. In clusters, that means the condition of economic opportunity.

Steven Johnson also takes up ant behavior in his new book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software [Scribner, 2001]. Johnson takes a broader sweep than just economics, but his description of ant behavior serves as the metaphor for other self-organizing, decentralized complex systems, including some aspects of the World Wide Web.

Asked "What is the connection between ants, cities, brains and software?" by Salon.com in "The Emergent New Order" [Nov. 28, 2001], Johnson cited the ant colony "where you have this system of 10,000 ants, none of which are actually in charge but somehow they manage to do these very complex engineering tasks and social organization and resource management things that are mesmerizing feats.

"They look like they should be planned from above, but in fact they are entirely organized by local rules and local interactions. The catchphrase is that the whole is sometimes smarter than the sum of its parts. And when you look at something like an ant colony, the question that you ask is who makes this happen? Who makes this collective intelligence happen? And the answer is everybody and nobody at the same time."

So it is with regional innovation centers like Silicon Valley. Efforts to create silicon prairies, forests, fjords and countless other sound-alikes have not fared well.

So it is with cities, cities like Manchester, England and Florence, Italy. Manchester emerged chaotically, responding to the demands of the new industrial age which separated the working class from the rest of the city. Machiavelli's Florence began taking shape organically centuries before his time -- around the silk weaver's guild along the Via Por Santa Maria, where the trade is still at work. Self-organized neighborhood clusters in downtown Manhattan, Johnson contends, helped New York City deal with the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks.

Washington, DC, in stark contrast, is the work of human intervention at the highest levels. No better example exists than the Ronald Reagan Building, a product of the Federal Triangle Development Act of 1987 designed to cap a century long effort to transform one of the city's most run-down areas.

But can regions innovate through conscious design and concerted effort rather than through the independent decisions of their "ants?"

To Porter, the answer is clear: Regions should build on existing strengths rather than try to create clusters from scratch. They should foster a culture of collaboration and self-awareness to ensure their capacity to innovate into the future. Their goal should be to raise the productivity of all their industries, not just those in the high technology field.

For their part, the governors and academics, while acknowledging the new economic landscape, concurred that the best possible education of their "ants" was an essential first step to long-term growth of any region. Well-educated people, however complex and mysterious their interactions in clusters, are still key to regional competitive advantage.

It should come as no surprise. After all, we humans are the ultimate in self-organized entities -- whether it be the clustering of highly expressed genes along our chromosomes, the amazing feat of cellular self-assembly into our organs and tissues, or the indefatigable drive of people, the finished product, to create something new.

It is we who innovate.

The Internet is a virtual Main Street which creates opportunities for anyone with a domain name, e-Commerce, servers and a fulfillment infrastructure. The theory is simple. Location is irrelevant and brand identification is much less important than it used to be. A lot of this is true and that's both the problem and the solution.

Leveling the playing field is a myth. The Internet has created a new and different playing field and many of the players on this new field are irresponsible citizens. They have created an environment which causes suspicion and lack of trust. I'm talking specifically about the hackers, spammers and pornographers.

The easy target is the pornographer. Disagree with me if you want but I believe pornography is a debasement of our culture, exploits women, corrupts youth and desensitizes men. There is absolutely no good which comes of it. Most cities try to shelter mainstream society from its effect by zoning it to locations distant from ... everything. On the Internet, it seems there is no way to do this unless one were to force all pornography in its own ".porn" domain. Unfortunately, this would probably just end up being a convenient roadmap to the "red light district." However, at least it would be easier to filter --- out. Of course, if there were no market for it, it would dry up and go away on its own. I would favor banning it but assuming it won't or can't be banned, the ".porn" domain makes sense and is modeled upon what television has done with certain pornographic channels. Porn doesn't have to be so accessible on the Internet. Making something more difficult or expensive to obtain will help reduce demand and it's time some common sense legislator with a backbone started moving in that direction.

Spammers are truly an annoyance, and, in some cases, a disruption of business and pleasure. Let's look at the telephone for an analogy. In most States, it is illegal to have a computer call a person and play a pre-recorded message. Most telemarketers' predictive dialing systems hook up a real, live telemarketing person on the line once the computer has achieved call completion. In this way, the law is obeyed but the annoying phone call is completed. Most people don't know to say, "Take me off your calling program and never call me again" as a means to legally be removed from calling lists.

But how does one get off of a spammer's email list? First, one should never reply to the "remove me" instructions at the bottom of a spammer's email. It only verifies that the email address used by the spammer is a valid email address! Second, most spam derives from some bogus domain name or email account and the typical recipient of spam has no idea how to deal with the unwanted email. Worse yet, the sheer volume of spam would keep one occupied all day just tracking down the source. I have found it useless to be get off a spammer's email list. Instead, I just mark messages as spam and program my email client to dispose of email from certain domains or certain email addresses by moving the message immediately to my Deleted Mail box. I've also set up a super-secret personal email address which only accepts email from addresses I pre-approve; the email equivalent of an unlisted phone number ... in a sense.

Spammers get their email databases in very easy ways. There are countless automated programs on the Internet which will grab email addresses off of websites, etc. Run one on some websites and you will get hundreds, if not thousands of email addresses. I tried one on a major television networks' website and found they had cleverly disclosed only published email addresses. Instead of getting the entire network employee or partner email list, I only got addresses like "sales@tvstation.com" and "news@tvstation.com". I tried the same program on a website of a candidate for Minnesota governor and got their entire donor database, sans credit card numbers. One corporate website refused to 'publish' their employee list but explained how to reach each employee via email, "firstname.lastname@companyxyz.com".

There are ways to get back at spammers. The easiest way is to report them to your IT department, if you are so lucky. You can email abuse@... (their ISP domain, if given). There are even spamcops on the Internet who will attempt to blacklist and block spammers. All of this works to a certain extent. But given the sheer volume of spam, you can guess who is winning. Perhaps some of the creative geniuses at the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) can put some grey matter on the subject and help the world out.

I recently caught a spammer out of Chicago who had sent email to dozens of email addresses at NetSuds.com and netsuds.net. It was Matt Weller out of Brokerage Consultants - mweller@brokerageconsultants.com.  He is an executive search professional and he is a spammer.

The worst spammers are the spam scammers. I'll get at least one email each week from some rich exiled ruler in Africa who needs me - little old me - to do some small feat so that $24 million can be freed up to save his impoverished nation. I'll get 20%. I just have to keep it a secret, give them my bank account number, etc. so they can transfer the funds, and then I'm done. You can only guess how many times I've cashed in on this easy money! Preying on the weak-minded ...

The worst of the Internet is the hacker. I'll include those you launch viruses in that category. Virus launchers are nothing but broadcast hackers. This activity is probably the most criminal of all activities and is responsible for more lost productivity and financial drain than most anything else on the Internet.

Hackers can ruin companies in seconds by disabling their websites, disclosing critical account information, sabotaging their websites and making companies spend gobs of money to fight a hackers' attacks. The openness of the Internet is a major benefit but the engineers behind some of the protocols and some of the hardware have to start thinking more like businessmen and less like engineers.

I recently had a Linux box hacked. The hacker invaded my server, installed some nefarious software which started communicating illicitly with other computers and caused me to have to rebuild my server from scratch. Through some sleuthing, I and some others have identified this hacker - he had an email address anothermailbomb@onebox.com - and are working to see that he is punished. After I found his email address, I confronted him - via email - and he had the boldness to tell me it was just a game he and his bored buddy at work were playing. I found his game the equivalent of breaking and entering, theft and vandalism. Most hackers like this go unpunished and law enforcement is woefully unprepared to find and punish hackers.

This hacker identifies himself as [name withheld currently] The support staff at @onebox.com deleted his email account upon learning of his activities. After his account was deleted, he wrote me this message, "Now you have gone and escalated this. I had some great plans for that email address. I had started coding for it, now I have to re enter a few lines of code, I actually went through the process of debugging before I thought to check that account. That's $75 an hour ... Don't cost me money, ever again."  The person identifying himself as [name withheld currently] claims his phone number as 207.555.7791 and his email address as [email address withheld currently].  My hope is that whoever is behind this pays a high price for his hacking.  [Since this was originally written, a [name withheld currently] with the above phone number and email address claims his co-worker, Jon Barksdale, probably did all the hacking.]

One could write volumes on the issue of Internet pornography, spamming and hacking. I'll stop here. Feel free to submit an article with some good technical content. I'll probably publish it in an upcoming Monthly Report.

This from NetSudser Ken Thoresen. Ken Thoreson is the managing partner of the Acumen Management Group, Ltd., a North American-based consulting organization focused on improving the sales management functions within growing and transitional organizations. For more information call 952.944.7438 or e-mail ken@acumenmgmt.com. 

Sound investment portfolio-management advice ranges from "hold firm with your existing stocks" to "take advantage of a great opportunity to buy at today's basement prices". Holding firm assumes that your existing portfolio contains quality securities, is properly diversified and has been managed with an appropriate, long-term perspective.

For our sales management world, let's make the same positive assumptions - our sales team consists of quality people with good attitudes and successful track records, and has been properly managed. However, there's one big difference. Sales leaders must continually keep their sales teams focused on goals and activities that make their teams and companies successful. Therefore, their perspective must be short-term revenue generation.

Today's tenuous political and economic situation is very distracting and may be having a negative impact on your team's morale and drive. Lousy economic headlines and layoffs may have left staff suffering from survivor's guilt, lamenting about the loss of comrades and security.

Now is the time to rally your troops. The nation's leaders are encouraging spending and investing to boost our economy. This also is an opportunity to build a better sales team that will increase your market share as competitors lag. The following tactical program features 11 key sales and marketing management actions that will help your sales management approach take advantage of the opportunity of a lifetime during the lifetime of this opportunity:

1) Mobilize by motivating.

Keep your team focused on activity, and decrease distraction by tuning into the attitude and motivation of your sales team. Build belief in your company, and boost your team's confidence in its products/services with visits to your satisfied customers, reference letters, or customer visits and presentations to your entire organization about their satisfaction. Make your sales meetings fun. Create sales contests/games that are focused on achieving activity levels that will increase your sales pipeline and sales opportunities. Find out what is important to your sales team, and create rewards that will reinforce these.

2) Review your product/service packaging and pricing tactics

to ensure that you are capitalizing on your strengths and meeting competition. This is a perfect time to review your existing profit margins and sales-cycle length by product line, and make short-term adjustments to determine the elasticity of your product that will increase revenues and margins. Create or amend the features or offerings in your various packages or even create new packaged offerings. Confuse your competition with new offerings and you may even find new added-value options that have been overlooked. Find ways to be different.

3) Analyze and profile the sales team and distribution channels

that you need to penetrate your markets. First list the attributes necessary to maximize sales of your product, and then determine if this is best accomplished through a company sales organization or channels/partners or both. Second, create a customer focus group and ask them how to best serve them and what they are looking for in a relationship. What levels of support do they require? Third, make a decision on the five most essential attributes or profiles for your sales employees and channel partners.

Analyze your existing strategy and each channel partner as to how they match up to your profile. You may find new partners/alliances that will open up new accounts and even new markets. If your #1 choices for partners aren't interested, pursue #2 choices with the argument that you can help make them #1. You also may find it advantageous to discontinue some relationships.

Your channel partner strategy should complement the efforts of your team, not cannibalize them. Look to your partner's business model to determine how to capture "share of mind", and reward them for their achievements. Quantify the results of each partner, and keep senior channel management updated.

4) Muscle up your sales team.

With so many very good salespeople available and looking for the right opportunity, it's the perfect time to increase your recruiting and potential hiring. It is far better to hire the best person for the job, and not the best available person. Create the ideal five attributes of successful salespeople, and establish a "tight" interview process that ensures you increase the quality of your team. Guideline: spend 25% of your time interviewing.

5) Analyze and strategize each sales opportunity.

If your industry is facing fewer opportunities and increased competition, each opportunity is even more precious. Schedule time with salespersons individually or in a team setting to think through each near-term sales opportunity. Provide your team with effective tools that analyze the status of each opportunity and develop the various tactics to increase your probabilities. Specifically:

a. Pinpoint and develop ways to counter objections

b. Determine buyer decision criteria

c. Establish client decision makers and influencers

d. Initiate multi-level contact with multi-level influencers in the prospect's company.

6) Seek supporters who will recommend your product/service.

Analyze the type of organizations or people that impact your client's decision process. These "influencers" may be consultants that work in the same market or leverage the same prospect base, accounting firms, bankers, industry analysts. Consider other sales organizations that would benefit directly or indirectly from the sale of your product or service. Develop a plan to establish who the decision makers at these organizations are. Enlist your sales and management teams in a campaign to present these influencers with advantages of your firm, and secure a commitment from them to work with you. This on-going action can lead to the equivalent of a normal salesperson's quota value of sales!

7) Create new sales leads with an active target-marketing campaign.

Create a smart, targeted campaign, not a blast or mass-appeal plan. First, establish profiles of current clients, and determine the five reasons they use your products/service. Second, hit your market with a strong, clear message - ROI and productivity gains - through case studies in publications that your market reads and a customer reference list. Third, establish a plan of action for the next six months and make sure you have included a sales follow up contact - execute your management review.

8) Review your current compensation plan to ensure that it supports company goals.

Clearly document your current plan and tabulate payments against results over time. Is the plan achieving your original goals? Is the plan reinforcing desired sales activity behavior? If not, develop a new plan, and gain internal buy-in from your team. Focus on shorter-term goals, and implement a new plan with commitment to keep it in place for at least six months. Use the existing market opportunity to focus on short-term achievements.

9) Increase your investment in training - sales skills, product/service knowledge.

In tighter times your team must perform more effectively. Review your past efforts, and take an inventory of training needs based on individual salesperson comparisons against your desired profile. Schedule ongoing training programs. Develop your own internal programs to ensure your salespeople fully understand and can sell your product/services and then arrange for commercial sales skill training programs. You will experience both short-and long-term benefits. Focus on increased levels of training for six months.

10) Develop an active program to contact every customer.

This is a great time to establish a program to make contact with each existing client to fully understand their situations and use of your product/services, to offer new packages, and seek references for new potential clients. Make sure you are effectively using your CRM or SFA programs, and update your database with each customer contact. Verify that your sales team's recent contacts with every prospect and client are appropriate. Develop, execute, and monitor a program of continuing contact with all targeted clients, prospects, influencers and partners. Review your progress each week/month at your sales meetings.

11) Build better planning into your sales organization.

Failure to plan is the number one obstacle thwarting revenue generation. First, define the specific steps of your sales process, and ensure that each salesperson executes those steps effectively. Second, develop detailed six-month individual salesperson business plans. Third, create specific named account tactical sales plans for those key strategic accounts, and follow up on your salespersons' actual actions.

You'll find the word "execute" many times in this brief article, because action is critical. Successful sales managers plan, successfully focus, and execute their programs. Take these 11 actions, and you will enhance your sales team, increase revenues, and build a focus in your organization when it is critically important - NOW! Take Action. Stay Positive.