With the release of the Catalyst House SBIU eNewsletter, CAT turned 11 years old.  July 16,1999 was the official launch of Catalyst House, when a small eclectic (and eccentric) group of visionaries and innovators decided to engage in a new business model that emphasized philanthropic entrepreneurship, social justice, and a bit of radical chic.

The name Catalyst House was bestowed upon it by that marvelous name-smith and CAT Advisor Fred Lehrman

In nostalgia of the day, the very first newsletter issue of Catalyst eNews can be found here – 

Volume-1 Issue-1 September 1999 may be found here.

We initially started Catalyst House, Inc., summer of 1999, while I lived in Cambridge, Mass. shortly after I returned from Brazil, working on a very special project with officials of that country and the founder of AOL Clive Smith.

(Read more…)

Pull is in the air. Everyone knows and loves Google. We pull movies and news items on demand. But this is just the surface of a more profound movement that is reshaping the world around us. The growing stress we all feel in our professional lives is not just a reflection of the current economic downturn. It reflects the mounting pressure we feel when we start to realize that our traditional ways of living and working are increasingly broken.

THE POWER OF PULL: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (Basic Books; April 2010) by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, goes beyond the often distracting surface events and examines the deep forces reshaping our world. It helps us to understand that pull is far more than search or accessing media on demand. Drawing on stories and examples from around the world, the authors show us how pull can be more systematically used to shape serendipity. Harnessing the power of pull can also bring us together in new ways to drive more rapid performance improvement (the authors highlight such diverse arenas as extreme surfing and China’s emerging large scale business networks) and provide powerful platforms to more fully achieve our potential.

(Read more…)

Our latest findings are in, and while not earth shattering, that many small business owners have learned to work smarter and do more with less.

Latest polls show –

– Nearly seven out of ten (68%) disagreed that healthcare reform efforts would benefit their businesses

– Nine out of ten small business owners agreed that current stimuli do not benefit small businesses

– 62% will invest more in marketing; specifically, lead generation

– More than 60% said they will run their business more aggressively in 2010

Pollsters for the above data included Forbes, Businessweek, and MerchantCircle.

(Read more…)