College Presidents Expected to Produce Results

Like all leaders of American colleges and universities these days, Massachusetts Bay Community College President John Oâ��Donnell is under pressure to increase graduation rates and turn out students ready for jobs. And like a small but growing number of his counterparts around the country, Oâ��Donnell has a new incentive to meet these goals: His salary partly depends on it. â��College presidents need to be accountable,â�� Oâ��Donnell — a self-professed advocate of the idea that presidential pay be used to reward good performance, and whose board of trustees has recommended that he get the relatively modest maximum allowable incentive bonus of $7,390 for this, on top of his $211,150 base pay — told the Hechinger Report. Taking a page from the corporate playbook, public and private…

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Like all leaders of American colleges and universities these days, Massachusetts Bay Community College President John O’Donnell is under pressure to increase graduation rates and turn out students ready for jobs.

And like a small but growing number of his counterparts around the country, O’Donnell has a new incentive to meet these goals: His salary partly depends on it.

“College presidents need to be accountable,” O’Donnell — a self-professed advocate of the idea that presidential pay be used to reward good performance, and whose board of trustees has recommended that he get the relatively modest maximum allowable incentive bonus of $7,390 for this, on top of his $211,150 base pay — told the Hechinger Report.

Taking a page from the corporate playbook, public and private college boards are beginning to tie at least a portion of annual merit raises to how well presidents and their campuses meet performance targets.

“Corporate concepts are just starting to drift into academia, and they have to,” said Stephen Pollack, a partner in the San Francisco office of the human resources consulting firm Mercer, who specializes in nonprofit organizations, including in higher education. “Institutions can’t afford not to have competent people in these jobs.”

“Institutions can’t afford not to have competent people in these jobs.” – Stephen Pollack

The trend exposes the reality that presidential evaluations historically have been almost a formality at many colleges, and raises often rubber-stamped, said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. The process appears to be undertaken “just to justify extravagant salaries, or is way too focused on fundraising,” he said.

In other cases, “it’s like they put the presidents on trial,” and every constituency—faculty, donors, students—is invited to weigh in, said Callan. “That’s just a killer. It creates presidents who won’t take risks.”

Now salary raises and bonuses for college leaders are being linked to results, just as public funding for the institutions themselves has been.

“It all goes to the idea of putting money behind the goals you’re trying to achieve,” said Dennis P. Jones, head of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems and an expert on outcomes-based college funding. “If that’s more graduates, let’s pay for graduates. If it’s something else, let’s pay for that.”

The idea of tying executive compensation to specific performance goals has been drifting slowly into higher education from the corporate world, where leaders are financially rewarded for meeting business goals. Universities and colleges are increasingly under the same kinds of pressure from parents and politicians that CEOs are from shareholders.

About a third of presidents of private colleges and universities are now eligible for so-called variable pay, or pay for performance, according to Yaffe & Company, an executive compensation consulting firm. Sixty-four percent of those received their maximum possible incentive bonuses last year, the agency said, which it said came to a median of $34,000 each.

Public universities are jumping on the presidential performance compensation train, too.

This month, for the first time, the heads of the nine universities and six health centers of the University of Texas System were given bonuses equal to as much as 10 percent of their salaries based on their cost savings, growth in research grants, fundraising, graduation rates, and other measures.

And former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who took over in January as president of Purdue, is paid $420,000 a year with the potential to earn an additional $126,000 tied to such things as lowering students’ debt.

Not all of these arrangements have been met with praise. Some critics complain that presidents should not be paid extra for doing things that seem to fall under their job descriptions—especially with money tight.

There was grumbling along those lines when the Arizona Board of Regents voted in September to give $40,000 each in incentive pay to the presidents of Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, who make base salaries of $475,000 apiece, plus more than $250,000 a year in other benefits. Each is due for another $40,000 in incentive bonuses next year and up to $180,000 the year after that if they can trim the cost of health care, attract more students and research funding, and lower the number of dropouts, among other things.

In Massachusetts, O’Donnell and the presidents of the state’s other 14 community colleges and nine state universities are being evaluated under new guidelines linked to policy priorities set by Commissioner of Higher Education Richard Freeland, including raising graduation rates, closing achievement gaps, and aligning educational programs with the needs of local employers. The presidents will be eligible for bonuses of up to 3.5 percent based on how closely they meet these goals. “We’re being very clear about the educational outcomes we’re trying to produce for the state, with a growing emphasis on performance,” said Freeland. “Our intention is to cause presidents and local boards to give greater attention to advancing statewide goals for public higher education.”

As to whether merit raises of only 3.5 percent of presidents’ salaries are enough to drive change, Freeland said he wished the proportion was higher. “It’s nowhere near as meaningful as I would like it to be,” he said. “I wish there were more headroom.”

It’s not just presidents who are being held to performance measures to get bonuses and raises. Nineteen percent of provosts and 18 percent of chief financial officers at private universities and colleges are, too, Yaffe & Company reports. In Texas, the new incentive pay plan includes vice chancellors.

It’s too early to judge how much of an impact this will have, advocates and observers said. But performance-based raises are effective in the corporate world, said Pollack.

“To do it well, you have to be willing to … communicate with people at the beginning of a year about expectations and goals,” he said. “If you’re willing to do that and then hold them accountable, it works.”

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Nine Webcasts to Learn From

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. Our fall webcast series concluded on a high note with three extraordinary conversations about the origins and implications of Lean Startup. If you missed these when they went out live, we encourage you to watch them now, as they lay a strong foundation for The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 -11 in San Francisco—less than two weeks from today. You can also listen to any of the webcasts, which, at the suggestion of a webcast attendee, we’ve turned into podcasts you can stream or download (from iTunes or SoundCloud). None of the webcasts included slides, so the audio versions work really well. Below are just a few highlights from our final three webcasts: 1) Eric Ries’s one-on…

via Start Up:

Nine Webcasts to Learn From

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.

Our fall webcast series concluded on a high note with three extraordinary conversations about the origins and implications of Lean Startup. If you missed these when they went out live, we encourage you to watch them now, as they lay a strong foundation for The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 -11 in San Francisco—less than two weeks from today. You can also listen to any of the webcasts, which, at the suggestion of a webcast attendee, we’ve turned into podcasts you can stream or download (from iTunes or SoundCloud). None of the webcasts included slides, so the audio versions work really well.

Below are just a few highlights from our final three webcasts: 1) Eric Ries’s one-on-one conversation with Kent Beck about influencing other people; 2) Eric’s conversation with John Shook about the origins of Lean, and 3) a conversation between Diane Tavenner and Steven Hodas, moderated by Sarah Milstein, on applying Lean Startup ideas in education.

Eric’s chat with Kent Beck was among our most entertaining webcasts (video; iTunes; SoundCloud). Kent, a veteran programmer, a founder of the Agile method and the creator of Extreme Programming, came armed with anecdotes and lessons from his own experience, as well as a few questions for Eric. For example, at 12:56 in the video Kent describes how he made the move from programming to a role that he at one point describes as “Full Metal Guru”:

“It turns out you can be a bad enough programmer to sink a project, but you can’t be a good enough programmer to make a project successful. So I quickly ran out of gas on projects being more successful, and I was forced to take a bigger, broader view of the context in which programming happens. I started to pay attention to things that worked, and to things that didn’t seem to make a difference or actively harmed development. I’ve always been a contrarian, and so if someone says, ‘X is always true, I always think, then what are the implications of not-X?’ As a reflex, I always think that. So if someone says, ‘You need comprehensive documentation for software documentation,’ I think, ‘Well, what if you didn’t have any documentation at all? Would that really be a disaster?’ And I looked around at projects, and it wasn’t a disaster. So I thought, well, maybe a commitment to communication is good enough and the actual form of the communication is something we could be a little bit flexible on.”

The result of that kind of contrarian thinking was Extreme Programming, a method for running programming through feedback loops, testing and iterating on it as quickly as humanly possible. Nowadays Kent is programming again, this time at Facebook, which he describes: “It’s a laboratory. It’s really smart people working on unprecedented problems at ridiculous speed. So I get to see this hothouse of software design. I get to see generations of technology that last six months instead of lasting for six years. And so I can see many more cycles through the loop of how software evolves, how innovation disperses in a community, and so on.”

The enjoyment Eric and Kent shared in talking to one another comes through clearly in their conversation and led to an interesting exchange when Kent asked Eric how he had made the move from building things (programming) to an interest in influence in a broader sense. At 32:30, Eric offers this candid explanation:

“When I was younger I was convinced that programming was the most fun thing I would ever do and I’d be very happy to program increasingly large systems myself. And I think basically what happened was I kept doing that, and not having the impact I wanted to have. Because in my fantasy I could produce a massive program that’s used by billions of people and has enormous complexity and is incredibly innovative, by myself. Just, you know, with my bare hands. But the truth of any program is, it requires teams, and customers, and it’s this complicated ecosystem…. So the person who’s considered the ‘founder’ or the person who created the complicated system, it doesn’t matter if it’s Linux or Facebook or anything, somebody had to plant that initial seed, and that’s very satisfying.

“But in order for us to remember it and to care about the fact that they are the founder of that thing, they had to do an incredible amount of management of people to get them to grow that seed into something that is significant. And what’s frustrating to me–it was then and it still is–is that as soon as I became a manager and a team leader and an architect and really thinking out how to do that stuff, I was doing human systems engineering and I was no longer making things with my bare hands. And so I’ve also had that frustration. Now, that’s frustrating but also very satisfying, in that I’m very proud of the things that teams that I’ve worked with have built. But for me anyway, that transition from being a team leader to whatever it is that I do now, to try to cultivate this community and try to share these ideas on a wider scale–that was actually a much easier transition than going from an individual contributor to a team leader. Because to me, it’s like, as soon as I was not making things myself, with my bare hands, it’s all about, ok, then what activities will give me the greatest influence to have the impact I want to see in the world?”

The conversation also turned to a subject on everyone’s mind the last month or so–the healthcare.gov website. Kent’s analysis, which is largely political-process-driven, begins at 41:30. Eric offers a different account, seen through a Lean Startup lens:

“To me the great irony of healthcare.gov is that the current healthcare.gov that people are complaining about is actually the second version of healthcare.gov that was built. The first one was built right after the Obamacare law was passed…. And you couldn’t sign up for insurance in those days, it simply gave you information about the insurance options in your jurisdiction. But it was still pretty complicated, and it still required a lot of cooperation from the insurance companies–there was a lot to it. And they did it exactly opposite of this current healthcare.gov in the three dimensions I think of as key: they put a small team on it–a cross-functional small team, I think there was no more than 10 people; they gave them 90 days to deliver; and I think their total budget was so small as to be close enough to zero. Classic minimum viable product. They did it all open-source, so from an ethos point of view it was opposite, and from an infrastructure point of view it was all cloud and modern like you would expect. And they were able from that point to do the build-measure-learn thing and to iterate and get feedback from the insurance companies and from the public. And they turned that from a tiny little seed into a quite useful, complicated project by gradually increasing its complexity in a highly polarizing political environment where everybody wanted Obamacare to fail. Which is what to me is deeply frustrating–thanks to the president’s creation of the CIO and the CTO, he has really great people from Silicon Valley, from our communities, that could have been instrumental in creating this website, but those people were bypassed because of the IT procurement process in the federal government, which is a nightmare.”

For further highlights see Kent at 57:10 and Eric at 59:00 on the importance of measuring team members on impact rather than effort. Eric: “It’s a fundamental waste of human energy and talent to have people working on things that nobody wants and that have no impact. That’s actually morally wrong to have a system that does that. Couldn’t we expand our horizons and see that there’s actually another way? I find that very motivating.”

Eric’s conversation with John Shook, CEO of the Lean Enterprise Institute, covered the origins and applications of Lean principles (video; iTunes; SoundCloud). John moved to Japan in the 1980s to work at Toyota, which at that point had the most advanced manufacturing practices in the world. He took what he learned there back to the US, first to work with American auto plants as part of the GM-Toyota partnership, and then as the founder and president of the Lean Enterprise Institute.

Here’s John at 12:20 describing the turnaround Lean Manufacturing methods were able to make at Nummi, a GM plant that was, as he describes is, “the certified worst plant in the world,” both in terms of product quality and the attitude of the workforce:

“So I joined Toyota really exactly 30 years ago, it was late 1983. We built our first car there at Nummi in the old General Motors plant, in December 1984–so just one year. And with the same workforce–a lot of people don’t realize it was actually the same workforce, the old ‘troublemakers’ were offered their jobs back, and I worked alongside them–and in one year we built our first car. When GM did their first quality audit, it set the record for the very best quality score any GM plant had ever gotten. With the same workforce. And the same employees who were so disgruntled before became powerful advocates for the system, for this way of working. So the turnaround was powerful and in my mind at the time, this just proved that this could work, and this could work anywhere.”

To Eric, the scope of the turnaround is so unbelievable that it can be difficult to draw lessons for it for other companies. So he asked John how he had effected this incredible change in the culture at Nummi. John’s reply has the force of a new adage (at 16:44):

“We changed the way we behaved. That then changed the attitudes of the people that worked there, that brought forth a whole new culture…. Rather than think your way to a new way of acting, try to act your way to a new way of thinking. So how is it we want to think, ‘What’s the culture we want? Let’s try to draw a picture of that, and what do we need to do to get there?’ So we started working on the behaviors, what do we actually need to do? We changed the work.”

In response to a participant question about what you do if the problem isn’t the workers, rather the management, John said (at 26:48):

“It’s always the managers and not the workers, and we have to realize that. So if we are the managers, if we are the leaders, then we have to look in the mirror. That’s where it starts, that’s not where it ends. People often ask where do you start, do you start at the top, do you start at the middle, do you start at the front lines? And honestly, wherever you start, it’s going to be the other areas that are the problem, that have to be somehow brought along. And if you’re working with someone that’s a frontline manager or supervisor, they’ll often say, ‘Well, I could do this if I were one level higher up, because my bosses, those managers, they don’t get it, I get it.’ You go to them and they’ll say, ‘I get it, it’s one level higher up.’ You go all the way up to the CEO and the most frustrated person in the company is the CEO because he or she can’t get anything done that he or she wants done.”

Take a listen to John at 35:00 on what the company of the future will look like, and Eric’s closing question and anecdote at 39:43, a poignant narrative of waste centered around a visit he made to a factory floor and a revelation about his microwave.

Our final webcast of the season was organized in response to intense interest from our community around Lean Startup in education. We brought together Diane Tavenner, founder and president of Summit Public Schools, a network of charter schools in the San Francisco area, and Steven Hodas, who heads the markets initiative for NYC Department of Education, with Sarah Milstein, co-host of the Lean Startup Conference, for a webcast on Testing Lean Startup in Education (audio on iTunes and SoundCloud; we do not yet have the video for this webcast). The conversation centered around a few key topics: customers, bureaucracy, and MVP.

Diane at 5:13 describes her customers as students, but notes that their parents, the post-secondary education system (colleges and universities), employers, and even society at large are invested in students’ public education. Steven at 6:45 describes a useful distinction between customers, users and audiences, where these may be competing as well as overlapping interests. As he puts it, “Teasing out who is the customer is part of the work itself.” In response to a question about the bureaucratic and regulatory barriers to action–barriers that, given the intensity of personal and public interest in education one would expect to be quite high–both Diane and Steven surprisingly agreed that there was more excuse-making than actual obstacles to action (start at 12:18 for this portion of the conversation).

The practical how-tos of running experiments on actual students in an education environment was a major feature of this webcast. Here’s Diane (at 18:30) on the relationship between getting buy-in and creating an MVP, where the two can serve each other:

“Really the key concept here is that to win people over, you have to identify a problem that is particularly challenging for them, or even a small problem for that matter, and then demonstrate that using these processes actually solves that and gets them to a place that’s much more desirable. And one very exciting example for us, an early example and an easy win, was our teachers really needed a way to differentiate and personalize instruction for students, because when you’ve got 25 students and they’re all in different places, how do you meet their individual needs? It’s humanly impossible. And so they came to this idea if we had a playlist for kids that was really intuitive for them, that we could curate all these different resources so that kids could actually choose how they learn best. And if we could collaborate as teachers across different schools and across subject areas in courses, it would be helpful. So taking that wish and seeing that it doesn’t exist out there, we partnered with a software company, shared this wish and ultimately ended up co-developing, co-designing and building an MVP, testing it, involving our teachers and students all along the way, and ultimately this fall launching it as a free product that’s available to every teacher in the world, where they can collaborate and share and use it with their students.”

As a counterpart to the question of how to create and test an MVP, Steven and Diane discussed how to use metrics to measure progress. Steven at this point (34;28) launched a defense of vanity metrics– not to measure student progress, but to help create, again, buy-in from stakeholders:

“Given the public nature of public schooling, and the tremendous political pressure, and this fear of failure that Diane mentioned, which is really ubiquitous and the higher up in the organization you go the worse it gets–in order to get collaborators to come along with you, you need to make them feel good. By focusing on things that matter to them. Not only do you need to identify problems that are important to them, but they’re looking for certain indicators of success that may not overlap with your indicators of success. And so depending on the situation and what it is you’re trying to accomplish, for example, a certain number of newspaper headlines that speak positively about the work can be far more important, for better or for worse, in getting you the buy-in to take you to the next step than some increase in student achievement on a formative assessment. Because those particular people who [are] your audience, who you’re trying to impress at the central level, their concerns are not immediately about student achievement at that moment. It’s about what does this mean for me, and my career, and what is the potential downside, how is my boss going to feel about it. So when I think of vanity metrics I think of things that can be bad because they can be deceiving when you apply them to yourself.

“But I think things that demonstrate popularity–again, in a politicized context–are really important, so we do rely on them. When we do software challenges, for example, participation in those challenges is a really important metric, in fact it’s one of the things we optimize for. And I’m not embarrassed to say that sometimes we’ll optimize more for participation than for the quality of the software that comes out the other end. Because at that stage in our MVP what we’re trying to demonstrate is not that our software challenge produces the silver bullet that’s going to solve all our middle school math problems, but that if we have an open, embracing process, new partners will want to come participate with us.”

–

All of our webcast speakers will be at The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 – 11. Register today to join them and dozens of other speakers, as we explore advanced topics in entrepreneurship.

via Lessons Learned:

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.Our fall webcast series concluded on a high note with three extraordinary conversations about the origins and implications of Lean Startup. If you missed these when they went out live, we encourage you to watch them now, as they lay a strong foundation for The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 -11 in San Francisco—less than two weeks from today. You can also listen to any of the webcasts, which, at the suggestion of a webcast attendee, we’ve turned into podcasts you can stream or download (from iTunes or SoundCloud). None of the webcasts included slides, so the audio versions work really well.Below are just a few highlights from our final three webcasts: 1) Eric Ries’s one-on-one conversation with Kent Beck about influencing other people; 2) Eric’s conversation with John Shook about the origins of Lean, and 3) a conversation between Diane Tavenner and Steven Hodas, moderated by Sarah Milstein, on applying Lean Startup ideas in education.Eric’s chat with Kent Beck was among our most entertaining webcasts (video; iTunes; SoundCloud). Kent, a veteran programmer, a founder of the Agile method and the creator of Extreme Programming, came armed with anecdotes and lessons from his own experience, as well as a few questions for Eric. For example, at 12:56 in the video Kent describes how he made the move from programming to a role that he at one point describes as “Full Metal Guru”:“It turns out you can be a bad enough programmer to sink a project, but you can’t be a good enough programmer to make a project successful. So I quickly ran out of gas on projects being more successful, and I was forced to take a bigger, broader view of the context in which programming happens. I started to pay attention to things that worked, and to things that didn’t seem to make a difference or actively harmed development. I’ve always been a contrarian, and so if someone says, ‘X is always true, I always think, then what are the implications of not-X?’ As a reflex, I always think that. So if someone says, ‘You need comprehensive documentation for software documentation,’ I think, ‘Well, what if you didn’t have any documentation at all? …

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Nine Webcasts to Learn From

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Study pinpoints cell type, brain region affected by gene mutations in autism

Asbestos Industry-Backed FACT Act Passed by House GOP’s—But Not Likely…On MyBiologica.comHealth is the level of functional or metabolic efficiency of a living being. In humans, it is the general condition of a person’s mind and body, usually meaning to be free from illness, injury or pain.Alternative medicine is any of a wide range of health care practices, products and therapies, using methods of medical diagnosis and treatments which, at least up to the end of the twentieth century, were typically not included in the degree courses of established medical schools teaching medicine. Examples include homeopathy, Ayurveda, chiropractic and acupuncture.On MyBiologica.com all you are looking for about alternative medicine and health.Coming soon section with best cheapset health insurance offers for self …

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Study pinpoints cell type, brain region affected by gene mutations in autism

Researchers have identified the disruption of a single type of cell — in a particular brain region and at a particular time in brain development — as a significant factor in the emergence of autism.

via ScienceDaily: Top Science News:

Nov. 21, 2013 — A team led by UC San Francisco (UCSF) scientists has identified the disruption of a single type of cell — in a particular brain region and at a particular time in brain development — as a significant factor in the emergence of autism.The finding, reported in the Nov. 21 issue of Cell, was made with techniques developed only within the last few years and marks a turning point in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) research.Large-scale gene-sequencing projects are revealing hundreds of autism-associated genes. Scientists have begun to leverage new methods to decipher how mutations in these disparate genes might converge to exert their effects in the developing brain.The new research focused on just nine genes, those most strongly associated with autism in recent sequencing studies, and investigated their effects using precise maps of gene expression during human brain development.Led by Jeremy Willsey, a graduate student in the laboratory of senior author Matthew W. State, MD, PhD, of UCSF, the group showed that this set of genes contributes to abnormalities in brain cells known as cortical projection neurons in the deepest layers of the developing prefrontal cortex, during the middle period of fetal development.Though a range of developmental scenarios in multiple brain regions is surely at work in ASDs, the researchers said the ability to place these specific genetic mutations in one specific set of cells — among hundreds of cell types in the brain, and at a specific point in human development — is a critical step in beginning to understand how autism comes about.”Given the small subset of autism genes we studied, I had no expectation that we would see the degree of spatiotemporal convergence that we saw,” said State, an international authority on the genetics of neurodevelopmental disorders.”This strongly suggests that, though there are hundreds of autism risk genes, the number of underlying biological mechanisms will be far fewer,” he said. “This is a very important clue to advance precision medicine for autism toward the development of personalized and targeted therapies.”Complex Genetic Architecture of ASDsASDs, which are marked by deficits in social interaction and language development, as well as by repetitive behaviors and/or restricted interests, are known to have a strong genetic component.But these disorders are exceedingly complex, with considerable variation in symptoms and severity, and little consistency in the mutations among affected individuals.Instead, with the rise of new sequencing methods over the past several years, researchers have identified many rare, non-inherited, spontaneous mutations that appear to act in combination with other genetic and non-genetic factors to cause ASDs. According to some estimates, mutations in as many as 1,000 genes could play a role in the development of these disorders.While researchers have been heartened that specific genes are now rapidly being tied to ASDs, State said the complex genetic architecture of ASDs is also proving to be challenging.”If there are 1,000 genes in the population that can contribute to risk in varying degrees and each has multiple developmental functions, it is not immediately obvious how to move forward to determine what is specifically related to autism,” State said. “Without this, it is very difficult to think about how to develop new and better medications,” he said.Focusing on Nine GenesTo begin to grapple with those questions, the researchers involved in the new study first selected as “seeds” the nine genes that have been most strongly tied to ASDs in recent sequencing research from their labs and others.Importantly, these nine genes were chosen solely because of the statistical evidence for a relationship to ASDs, not because their function was known to fit a theory of the cause of ASDs. “We asked where the leads take us, without any preconceived idea about where they should take us,” said State.The team then took advantage of BrainSpan, a digital atlas assembled by a large research consortium, including co-author Nenad Šestan, MD, PhD, and colleagues at Yale School of Medicine. Based on donated brain specimens, BrainSpan documents how and where genes are expressed in the human brain over the lifespan.The scientists, who also included Bernie Devlin, PhD, of The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine; Kathryn Roeder, PhD, of Carnegie-Mellon University; and James Noonan, PhD, of Yale School of Medicine, used this tool to investigate when and where the nine seed genes join up with other genes in “co-expression networks” to wire up the brain or maintain its function.The resulting co-expression networks were then tested using a variety of pre-determined criteria to see whether they showed additional evidence of being related to ASDs. …

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Study pinpoints cell type, brain region affected by gene mutations in autism

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Open to All: Scholarships for The Lean Startup Conference

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. We’re dedicated to making The Lean Startup Conference unlike other entrepreneurship conferences. That includes not only selecting terrific speakers you don’t already know, but also making registration broadly accessible. So we’ve got scholarships for people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend—early-stage entrepreneurs, particularly those from beyond Silicon Valley; staff from small non-profits; and students. Here are the details for each group. Early-stage entrepreneurs; people participating in startrup incubator or accelerator programs; and bootstrappers. As Lean Startup takes root around the world, we’d like to learn from and help people working in geographically diverse areas connect with each other. But travel, particularly for early-stage and bootstrapped entrepreneurs who are physically far away…

via Start Up:

Open to All: Scholarships for The Lean Startup Conference

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.

We’re dedicated to making The Lean Startup Conference unlike other entrepreneurship conferences. That includes not only selecting terrific speakers you don’t already know, but also making registration broadly accessible. So we’ve got scholarships for people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend—early-stage entrepreneurs, particularly those from beyond Silicon Valley; staff from small non-profits; and students. Here are the details for each group.

Early-stage entrepreneurs; people participating in startrup incubator or accelerator programs; and bootstrappers. As Lean Startup takes root around the world, we’d like to learn from and help people working in geographically diverse areas connect with each other. But travel, particularly for early-stage and bootstrapped entrepreneurs who are physically far away, can be hard to swing. To ease the financial load, we’ve got a scholarship program that strips away luxuries and offers you a ticket that’s under-cost for us.

We’re interested not only in bringing folks to San Francisco, but also in helping Lean Startup communities take root beyond Silicon Valley. So on the partially-validated theory that Lean Startup methodologies will thrive most readily in areas where people can support each other, we’re giving priority to groups. Individuals can apply, but the scholarship application form is designed for a community leader to bring in a group from a geographic area or from an incubator/accelerator program. There’s no group size requirement per se, but we’ll look for a bigger group from say, New York City, than from a region with a smaller existing Lean Startup community. There’s also no deadline for applicants, but we’ll let people in on a rolling basis, and we anticipate running out of spots well before the conference, so apply now.

If you live outside the San Francisco Bay Area, and you’re simply unable to consider travel, you can apply to host a free livestream of the conference in your town. Last year, we had 300 livestream groups worldwide.

Non-profit staff and volunteers. This year’s Lean Startup Conference has a number of talks on Lean Impact—the movement to apply Lean Startup ideas in mission-driven organizations. For small and minimally funded non-profit organizations who could benefit greatly from participating in these sessions but can’t afford the conference fee, we have a special scholarship program.

Students. Students, particularly undergraduates, are some of the most open-minded and avidly interested people in our orbit. They’re also some of the least able to afford registration. The good news is that The Lean Startup Conference relies on top-notch volunteers to keep our events running smoothly, and we’ve found that students often make the best volunteers. We take the volunteering commitment very seriously, so please apply only if you’re able to offer us both time and friendly dedication. The deadline for applying to volunteer is this Friday, November 8 (that’s three days from now!).

This is the first year we’ve offered the scholarship program, which means we can’t yet tell you what the experience of coming to the conference on scholarship is like. But we did have volunteers last year, one of whom, Sourabh Chakraborty, is returning this year as a scholarship program participant. Sourabh is a college student deeply engaged with entrepreneurship issues, but located outside the usual tech geographic nexus. We wrote to him to ask him about his experience at last year’s Lean Startup Conference, and what he hopes to learn this year.

LSC: You were a volunteer last year at the Lean Startup Conference. Can you give a little intro to how you came to Lean Startup—what you do, what interested you about the conference, and how those two things are connected?

Sourabh: I’m a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and part of the local community of entrepreneurs and startup folks in Lincoln and Nebraska. I’ve tried a few ideas of my own in the past, and tried to help my friends with their ideas. I was under this impression that because I could code and build something, I could solve a problem. But every time we started, whether it was my idea or my friends’ ideas, we would keep getting struck with this intangible smack at the beginning — What is or isn’t our solution? Does anybody really want it? How will we decide pricing? Didn’t Steve Jobs say that customers don’t know what they want…? So I guess we should build what we as entrepreneurs and ideators think is right. Why is it taking so long to get something out of the door? Oh, right, we have an impossible list of features that will take months to build.” And that’s all not to mention the hours and hours we spent at the coffee shop discussing equity. Boy, did we all put up a hard fight in our heads for those dreamy millions!

This repeated frustration forced me to look at other processes, and I came across some material from Steve Blank’s book The Startup Owner’s Manual, and his Udacity course, How to Build a Startup. Very soon I was doing Business Model Canvases for everything (of course, I hadn’t even read the entire book yet). That process lasted a few months before I got frustrated that it also wasn’t helping. After reading the first few chapters of Eric’s book, The Lean Startup, and investigating some other blogs and listening to other people’s processes, it slowly dawned on me what Lean meant and what Steve Blank and Eric Ries were talking about—and how common-sensical it was.

Following Lean Startup stuff online, I came across the Lean Startup Conference. Because I’m a student, I emailed the organizers to see if there was any way I could attend by volunteering. I learn best through osmosis and asking questions, so putting myself amidst other Lean Startup entrepreneurs would, I thought, be an incredible opportunity for me to get better at my process.



LSC: What role does Lean Startup play in your work now, post-conference—both in terms of approach and practice?

Sourabh: I’m exploring concepts like starting with the riskiest assumption, rapid prototyping and testing our assumptions by getting feedback, and then iterating our solution. Through our university’s student group we built software products for a couple of startups in the summer, and we advised our clients based on these principles. We’ve also been adopting this with our other creative clients, like, for example, the advertising campaign we are working on.

Personally this process has been a relief, because the focus has turned from, “How successful was our solution?” to “How much did we learn from the last iteration?”—and getting that pressure off our shoulders has been incredible. Now we can fearlessly go back to square one if we have to, even if much work has been invested, because nobody is to blame. We just move on as quickly as we can to the next iteration/experiment.

I should say that I still feel I understand only some principles of Lean Startup—I haven’t gotten into Lean Analytics and Build-Measure-Learn yet, which is part of why I’m so glad to be coming to the conference again this year. I’m still in the beginning stages.



LSC: What do you think was the most valuable thing you learned at last year’s conference? Did you have an experience with particular impact at the conference, or meet someone you otherwise would not have?

Sourabh: I learned how widespread the Lean Startup concept was among the entrepreneurs who were at the conference, and what I needed to bring these principles to my friends back in Lincoln and at my university. After attending the conference the first time, my answer to most things in life has become “I don’t know, but I’ve got a hypothesis, and let’s find out if its right.”

In terms of the talks, the most eye-opening experience was right towards the end when the winner of the Lean Startup Machine [Mark Abramson] talked about their team’s process of pivoting two or three times over a weekend as they discovered new insights. Another very memorable talk came from Barath Kadaba, speaking as part of Scott Cook’s Intuit Panel, who described conducting an experiment in India to try and help Indian farmers judge the market for their goods by sending them a daily SMS with personalized agricultural information. As an Indian student, I was happy to see problem-solvers using Lean Startup principles in my country and getting amazing results. This is especially impressive since it’s so hard to understand the context of the customer in India, because of the differences in social structure, class and culture between the problem-solvers and the customers.

Of course, meeting people was the biggest thing, and the serendipitous meetings were the best. The volunteer staff, some local startup folks, old friends, a random startup guy in my dorm room who’s in his eighties—all that was just amazing.



LSC: Anything else you’d like to say about Lean Startup, its value for your work, or the experience of going to the conference?

Sourabh: The only thing I can think of for any student or entrepreneur who is trying out different strategies to start a startup and is struggling at the ideation stage is—give these principles a shot. And The Lean Startup Conference really is the best place to get started, because you’ll meet hundreds of people who’ve done it before, and tens of people who are taking the first steps, just like you. The Lean Startup Conference is the safest place to fail.

via Lessons Learned:

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.We’re dedicated to making The Lean Startup Conference unlike other entrepreneurship conferences. That includes not only selecting terrific speakers you don’t already know, but also making registration broadly accessible. So we’ve got scholarships for people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend—early-stage entrepreneurs, particularly those from beyond Silicon Valley; staff from small non-profits; and students. Here are the details for each group.Early-stage entrepreneurs; people participating in startrup incubator or accelerator programs; and bootstrappers. As Lean Startup takes root around the world, we’d like to learn from and help people working in geographically diverse areas connect with each other. But travel, particularly for early-stage and bootstrapped entrepreneurs who are physically far away, can be hard to swing. To ease the financial load, we’ve got a scholarship program that strips away luxuries and offers you a ticket that’s under-cost for us.We’re interested not only in bringing folks to San Francisco, but also in helping Lean Startup communities take root beyond Silicon Valley. So on the partially-validated theory that Lean Startup methodologies will thrive most readily in areas where people can support each other, we’re giving priority to groups. Individuals can apply, but the scholarship application form is designed for a community leader to bring in a group from a geographic area or from an incubator/accelerator program. There’s no group size requirement per se, but we’ll look for a bigger group from say, New York City, than from a region with a smaller existing Lean Startup community. …

For more info: Open to All: Scholarships for The Lean Startup Conference

Lessons Learned

Open to All: Scholarships for The Lean Startup Conference

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Lean Impact Webcast on Tuesday

Lean Impact Webcast on Tuesday Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. Lean Startup techniques have beentaking off in the social-mission sector, helping people solveproblems more effectively, and earning the name Lean Impact. To explore what’sworking on the ground, we’re hosting a webcast, Lean Impact: Implementing Lean Startup in Mission-driven Organizations, next Tuesday, November 5at10a PT. It will feature a conversation that gets into the details of how non-profitand mission-driven organizations are making use of Lean Startup methods to getcloser to their goals, faster. This webcast is free with registration, and ourspeakers will answer questions live from attendees. One other note—we’re introducinga special scholarship program to bring non-profit organizations’ staff andvolunteers to the conference in December. More …

via Start Up:

Lean Impact Webcast on Tuesday

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.

Lean Startup techniques have been

taking off in the social-mission sector, helping people solve

problems more effectively, and earning the name Lean Impact. To explore what’s

working on the ground, we’re hosting a webcast, Lean Impact: Implementing Lean Startup in Mission-driven Organizations, next Tuesday, November 5at

10a PT. It will feature a conversation that gets into the details of how non-profit

and mission-driven organizations are making use of Lean Startup methods to get

closer to their goals, faster. This webcast is free with registration, and our

speakers will answer questions live from attendees. One other note—we’re introducing

a special scholarship program to bring non-profit organizations’ staff and

volunteers to the conference in December. More details on that at the end of

this post.

Few people are

better positioned to talk about bringing Lean Startup techniques to

mission-driven organizations than Akash Trivedi and Christie George, both

speakers at The Lean Startup Conference in December. Akash is a business lead

for Kiva’s pilot program Kiva Zip, which seeks to make microlending even more

direct—for example, by facilitating payment via mobile. Christie is director of

New Media Ventures, the first national network of angel

investors supporting media and tech startups that disrupt politics and catalyze

progressive change.

We asked Christie to give a sense of how she sees the

relationship between Lean Impact and Lean Startup.

LSC: Do you see Lean Impact as a direct application of Lean

Startup ideas in non-profit and mission-driven organizations, or is there

another element to it that’s not so obvious?

Christie: There are huge opportunities to build better

mission-driven organizations using Lean Startup principles. And “Lean Impact”

offers a reference point for people to start that conversation—there is real

power in naming. I think of Lean Impact more generally as the conversation

about the challenges in addition to

the opportunities of applying Lean

Startup ideas in mission-driven organizations and businesses.

There are some specific challenges that I’m looking forward to

discussing, both with Akash and at the conference:

1) Measuring Impact: For

organizations that are in the “business” of social change, questions

of measurement are notoriously tricky. How do you measure a movement for social

justice? How do you measure that it’s actually your work that’s moving the needle on an issue? The clear

focus on users and revenue is hugely useful for

measurement, but for organizations serving a population and not

building a ‘product’, the language and culture of Lean Startup is still finding its

focus.

2) Vanity Metrics: Especially for

those working to increase awareness, social change groups often

report member numbers, Facebook likes, and news hits as proxies for

impact (which may in turn generate further

revenue). Metrics around petition signatures or Facebook likes are

relatively easy to track, but of course, they don’t tell you whether

you’re winning. How can we come up with impact metrics that go

further than vanity and get to the core outcomes we’re working to achieve?

3) Customer Development: In the

social change space, the customer who “pays” (e.g. a foundation) is

often not the beneficiary of the service. In some cases, this is a standard

three-sided market problem, but it often goes deeper than

this. Mission-driven entrepreneurs are disrupting more than markets, and

are therefore choosing to address issues of power and culture that may not fit

neatly into the customer framework.

4) Failing Real People: Entrepreneurs

in the social sector are solving big, gnarly, complicated problems. The costs

of experimentation (and failure) can be high. I’ve been reminded by social

entrepreneurs, “When we fail, we fail real people.” That is humbling,

even daunting. But it’s important to remember that it is a privilege to be able

to run experiments in order to fail fast.

The most exciting thing for me is that

a community of practice is starting to develop around Lean

Impact, with best practices and actual case studies, to guide

entrepreneurs navigating these issues. And we’ve got some great examples of

people and organizations doing it well—from the data-driven culture of online

advocacy groups to the relentless testing that Kiva Zip has

done, something that Akash will speak to directly. [Editors’ note: The Ultimate Glossary of Lean for Social Good, from the folks at LeanImpact.org,

has some great examples (PDF).]

LSC: One key element of Lean Startup is the idea of organizing a

startup around multifunctional teams. In mission-driven organizations, how do

you see teams reorganizing to apply Lean Impact ideas?

There is a pretty wide variety of organizations that fit into

the social sector—from large, traditional non-profit organizations to

nimble technology enterprises. Some of these organizations are just

beginning to be exposed to Lean Startup thinking, while others have deep

experience with experimentation.

The space that I work in—online advocacy—has a long history

of running controlled experiments and using A/B testing to

measure and optimize campaigns. I’ve also observed that these groups—everyone

from MoveOn.org, Change.org, UltraViolet, Upworthy—have comparatively flat

structures.

But even more than reorganizing teams, the work of Lean Impact

seems to be one of making a change in the organizational culture. Social entrepreneurs are working to get institutions to

understand the value of taking risks. I see digital teams gaining influence

within larger organizations, as well as a generation of entrepreneurs building

new types of social businesses and organizations

that are embedding Lean Startup principals from the start.

–

For a deeper dive into the challenges and opportunities facing

Lean Impact organizations, register for our webcast on November 5 at 10a PT. And

join us at the Lean Startup Conference, December 9 – 11 in San Francisco. If

you’re part of a non-profit organization and are interested in Lean Impact

ideas, we strongly encourage you to apply for our scholarship program. We are

offering a dedicated group of scholarships specifically for non-profit

organizations, their staff and volunteers. We are particularly interested in smaller

organizations that otherwise would find the conference financially out of

reach. So, the smaller your org and the tighter your budget, the more we want

to hear from you. Just fill out an application, and we’ll follow up with you asap.

via Lessons Learned:

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.Lean Startup techniques have been taking off in the social-mission sector, helping people solve problems more effectively, and earning the name Lean Impact. To explore what’s working on the ground, we’re hosting a webcast, Lean Impact: Implementing Lean Startup in Mission-driven Organizations, next Tuesday, November 5 at 10a PT. It will feature a conversation that gets into the details of how non-profit and mission-driven organizations are making use of Lean Startup methods to get closer to their goals, faster. This webcast is free with registration, and our speakers will answer questions live from attendees. One other note—we’re introducing a special scholarship program to bring non-profit organizations’ staff and volunteers to the conference in December. More details on that at the end of this post.Few people are better positioned to talk about bringing Lean Startup techniques to mission-driven organizations than Akash Trivedi and Christie George, both speakers at The Lean Startup Conference in December. Akash is a business lead for Kiva’s pilot program Kiva Zip, which seeks to make microlending even more direct—for example, by facilitating payment via mobile. Christie is director of New Media Ventures, the first national network of angel investors supporting media and tech startups that disrupt politics and catalyze progressive change.We asked Christie to give a sense of how she sees the relationship between Lean Impact and Lean Startup.LSC: Do you see Lean Impact as a direct application of Lean Startup ideas in non-profit and mission-driven organizations, or is there another element to it that’s not so obvious?Christie: There are huge opportunities to build better mission-driven organizations using Lean Startup principles. And “Lean Impact” offers a reference point for people to start that conversation—there is real power in naming. I think of Lean Impact more generally as the conversation about the challenges in addition to the opportunities of applying Lean Startup ideas in mission-driven organizations and businesses.There are some specific challenges that I’m looking forward to discussing, both with Akash and at the conference:1) Measuring Impact: For organizations that are in the “business” of social change, questions of measurement are notoriously tricky. …

For more info: Lean Impact Webcast on Tuesday

Lessons Learned

Lean Impact Webcast on Tuesday

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Lean Impact Webcast on Tuesday

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Reader Mailbag: Happy Halloween

What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to five word summaries. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.1. Wedding gift conundrum2. Cheap and healthy lunches3. Refund concerns4. Prayer and personal finance5. Unsure about next investment steps6. Child’s expensive birthday requests7. Getting rid of documents8. Inexpensive couple’s therapy9. Which crockpot should I get?10. Completely unsure about futureWhen your home has three young children, Halloween becomes a major event, with lots of planning and preparation and costumes and candy and anticipation.The big day is finally here. Tonight, we’ll be out walking around town for hours, collecting piles of candy, and, most likely, wearing both parents and children ragged.What do we do with all of that candy? I’m …

via The Simple Dollar:

What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to five word summaries. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.

1. Wedding gift conundrum

2. Cheap and healthy lunches

3. Refund concerns

4. Prayer and personal finance

5. Unsure about next investment steps

6. Child’s expensive birthday requests

7. Getting rid of documents

8. Inexpensive couple’s therapy

9. Which crockpot should I get?

10. Completely unsure about future

When your home has three young children, Halloween becomes a major event, with lots of planning and preparation and costumes and candy and anticipation.

The big day is finally here. Tonight, we’ll be out walking around town for hours, collecting piles of candy, and, most likely, wearing both parents and children ragged.

What do we do with all of that candy? I’m actually going to write a bit about that later today…

Q1: Wedding gift conundrum

My best friend is getting married in a few weeks and has an online gift registry.

I asked him if he’d prefer an actual product from the registry, a voucher for the registry, or cash. He said that he’d prefer cash to use towards his honeymoon.

As much as I prefer experiences over things in my own life, I feel strangely torn about this. Rather than give money that will be pooled with other people’s and pay for his trip, a (selfish) part of me wants to get an item from the gift registry so that they’ll think of me whenever they use it.

What should I do?

- Pete

You asked him what he would find most useful. He answered you honestly. It feels to me like they made a registry because they felt obligated to, but they could use the cash most.

That doesn’t mean you have to give him what he asked for. You are the one giving the gift. It’s a decision you have to make, and I can’t tell you what the right decision is here.

However, if I were in your shoes, I’d probably just give them cash after asking that question.

Q2: Cheap and healthy lunches

I eat leftovers about half the time, but quite often we don’t have any leftovers for me to take the next day. What do you do in this situation when you just want a cheap and healthy lunch?

- John

I usually just do the best with whatever we have on hand. I’ll dig through the refrigerator and try to use up anything that will go to waste if I don’t use it. If that doesn’t work, I’ll look in the pantry, focusing again on things that are perishable.

Even if I have a perfect grocery list, I usually wind up with an extra fresh item or two that needs to get used (for example, I’ll buy carrots and end up with more than I need).

If you need to take these to work, look for them the night before and just figure out what you can make out of them. Don’t worry about making a “perfect” lunch – instead, focus on making a great dinner and look at lunch as a small secondary meal.

Q3: Refund concerns

I am having a dispute with a company in Florida. I paid $2539.19 for a product that does not work, and now the company say it’s not a fault on their end but my end. I want a refund and they want to only pay a certain portion back to me, about $2359.19 plus I have to spend almost $300 in shipping just to send back part of the product. (the rest of the product is online streaming – it’s the streaming part that never works).

Is this even legal? Are there any laws that govern this? Where would I look to find those laws, so that I can get a full refund? It’s a lot of money!

- Archie

What does your purchase agreement say? Does it clearly say “all sales final”? If it does, then you’re out of luck.

If it doesn’t, it should outline a clear return policy, which you should follow to the letter. If they are still giving you trouble, then they’re violating a contract, which is a legal matter.

The difficulty with paying for internet streaming video or audio is that it’s easy for them to claim that the problem is with your internet connection and that you’re not fulfilling your end of the agreement. This has actually happened to me in the past.

Your best bet is to take a copy of your purchase agreement and other documentation to a lawyer. My guess is that you have limited avenues to do anything, though.

Q4: Prayer and personal finance

Do you think that prayer helps people fix their financial issues? I have been a Baptist all of my life and I’m curious about your feelings on prayer and money.

- Leon

I have no interest digging into the specifics of the theology of prayer. I’m simply commenting on the practice of prayer here.

Having said that, I think prayer helps regardless of whether or not there’s a higher power listening to your prayer. Prayer encourages mindfulness and causes you to take a calm moment to focus on a particular problem in your life.

That type of focused mindfulness and mental calmness invites better behavior in your life, whether you directly see it or not. Often, it’s just a nudge in the right direction, but enough little nudges add up to profound change.

Q5: Unsure about next investment steps

I graduated college in 2008, I was very fortunate to be a pretty decent poker player and came out of college with my loans paid off and a car paid off. I worked at my first job for almost 5 years while living at my parents, paying nominal rent to them, and saving some money. I contributed up to the match in my companies 401k and put about 2-3k/year into my Roth IRA.

I recently moved to San Francisco (from NY) with my girlfriend for a new job. New job pays more, but we’re living on our own, in an incredibly expensive city. We are each putting half of our monthly net to rent, utilities and food. I don’t see that situation improving much for a little while, but I am still able to save some. Here is where I am in 2013:

After taxes I’m probably making ~55k/year. I have $9k in my 401k, and 15k in my Roth IRA. I’m contributing up to the match on my 401k at my new job (6% @ 50%match), and I’ve maxed out my Roth for this year. I have 70k in the bank making ~ 1% APY. I don’t know what to do with the 70k, and I don’t know how to best invest my 401k/Roth funds at the moment – should I just put it in a target year fund for now until I can do more reading?

- George

A target retirement fund is a very good choice for the situation you describe. In fact, for the most part, I recommend them to everyone, because I consider the drawbacks (occasionally higher fees) to be less important to most people than the benefits (automatic rebalancing according to sensible logic).

I think you’re in reasonably good shape financially. With the $70,000 sitting in the savings account, I would consider investing some of it and leaving the rest there for other purposes, such as an emergency fund and any major upcoming expenses you know of.

How should you invest it? I’m investing my excess savings with Vanguard, putting most of it into their Total Stock Market Index fund. Mostly, I’m just letting the money build until we’re ready to purchase some land in the country.

Q6: Child’s expensive birthday requests

I recently talked to my son about what he wanted for his birthday. He only asked for four things, which is a completely reasonable list. The only problem is that each item on the list is really expensive – large LEGO sets and the like. I can afford to get him one item and my parents say they’ll get him another one, but my wife’s parents can’t afford this stuff, nor can the aunts and uncles who might get him a gift. Any thoughts?

- Tony

My honest suggestion is to look for supplemental items to the big gifts and suggest those to any other potential gift-givers.

For example, if he wants a big LEGO kit, there are probably small ones that will supplement it well. If he wants a video game system, there are probably inexpensive games that will supplement it.

I can’t really suggest specifics since I don’t know exactly what your son has asked for, but I would focus on supplementary gifts here that will add a little more “oomph” to the big gifts.

Q7: Getting rid of documents

My husband developed this method to get rid of old check copies because the carbonless copy chemicals are so unpleasant to handle/shred/burn. Put the papers loosely in a five gallon bucket until about half to three-quarters full, then use the garden hose to fill the bucket with water. Wait a day or so. Put the longest drill bit on and drill the papers into paper mache. Dump out the bucket and start again. It’s easy and cheap and the papers can never be reassembled, plus if you want to you can make something out of the paper mache.

- Anne

This is a really good idea, actually.

My wife and I have done something similar to this in the past to get rid of shredded paper. We let the “pulp” completely dry out and then used chunks of it as firestarter for campfires.

As you mentioned, the pulp also works really great as the basis for paper mache if you’re doing a paper mache related project.

Q8: Inexpensive couple’s therapy

My wife and I have discussed marriage counseling, but when we actually shopped around a bit for a counselor, we were stunned at the prices. Most of our arguments are about money so we don’t really think that an expensive counselor will help. Ideas?

- Andy

Most successful marriage counseling comes down to re-establishing communication between the partners because, at its core, that’s what marriage really needs. It requires an open and strong communication channel between the two people.

If I were you guys, I’d spend some time reading about fixing marriage issues and see what they have to say. Most of the suggestions – at least from my experience – will be to simply have conversations about things and how to handle emotional surges during those conversations.

I do not know what has prompted you to seek a marriage counselor, but I will tell you this. No matter how much you want to pile the blame on your spouse, there is no troubled marriage that isn’t caused by both people, whether they see it or not. The very first thing you should do is ask yourself what things you’ve done wrong in this marriage. These things should not involve your partner. They should be on you. What are you doing to be the best possible partner?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that a sincere effort to work things out yourself will go a long way toward fixing problems without a counselor. A counselor mostly just massages and pushes you toward these things anyway.

Q9: Which crockpot should I get?

I never owned a crockpot. Do you have a suggestion as to a good one to buy?

- Jane

Most of the ones on the market are good ones. It really depends on your needs at home.

If you’re a single person or a couple without children that will never entertain using the crock pot, I’d suggest getting a small three quart crock pot like this one. It’s great for making small meals and small batches.

If you have a larger family or if you will be using it for entertaining guests, you should get a larger one. This one is an excellent large programmable model.

If you find a great deal on a non-programmable one, that’s fine – just get an outlet timer and you can essentially make the pot into a simple programmable one.

Q10: Completely unsure about future

My biggest problem is that I really have no idea what I want to do in the future. I’ve never been a planner at all and I’ve always just kind of rolled with whatever life has handed to me. It’s worked well for me, but it doesn’t really go hand in hand with planning ahead.

- Paul

For people like you, I mostly suggest making sure you’re saving for retirement (through your work’s 401(k) plan or through your own IRA) and then keeping most of the rest of your money pretty liquid, meaning I’d keep it either in a savings account or in an investment account.

Flexibility is the thing you need, so I wouldn’t invest the money into things that would be potentially difficult to turn over at the drop of a hat.

What should you specifically invest in? It really depends on how much risk you can tolerate. If you’re not going to get bothered by ups and downs each year as long as you’re consistently spending less than you earn, investing in stocks is a good idea. If that bothers you, then keep it mostly in cash, as that will maintain a balance and grow slowly.

Got any questions? The best way to ask is to email me – trent at thesimpledollar dot com. Iíll attempt to answer them in a future mailbag (which, by way of full disclosure, may also get re-posted on other websites that pick up my blog). However, I do receive many, many questions per week, so I may not necessarily be able to answer yours.

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Reader Mailbag: Happy Halloween

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