Business Motivation for Getting America Back to Work

The Biz Desk
President Obama recently issued a proclamation marking November as National Entrepreneurship Month. Two individuals who are happy about this are Howard Schultz and Alfa Demmellash. Schultz who is Starbucks’ CEO has launched the campaign CreateJobsforUSA.org. Demmellash is the founder of the Global Entrepreneurship Week, a grassroots business incubation initiative that’s gone global.

Both campaigns are committed to spawning new economic activity through:

1. Job Creation: – Small businesses are the economic engine of new jobs in the marketplace
2. Business Motivation:- It takes more than just an idea to build something from the ground, up
3. Media Distribution:- They’re connecting with traditional and social media networks.

These efforts are striving to make an impact in local and global commerce. The Starbucks Foundation contributed five million dollars to jumpstart their effort. While Demmellash, an immigrant from Ethiopia, is an example of how the American Dream is not dead.

The Biz Desk invites you to post your comments below or you can send a personal note on Facebook or Twitter to @DocCunningham; on Linkedin to @DOCCommunications.

Work Life
Who knew that people would pay $5 for a cup of coffee? Howard Schultz had a hunch and has turned Starbucks into an international brand. After traveling to Milan Italy in 1983, he was impressed with the popularity of espresso coffee. By 1985 he launched his own company in the U.S. which would later buy Starbucks. Schultz’s story shows how like his coffee, “A Business Connection Can Make Cream Rise to the Top.” This provides a way for you to:

• Maximize your professional calling
• Become a shining star
• Deliver satisfaction guaranteed

Now that he’s built the world’s largest coffee house franchise, Schultz is also working on other aspects of the company’s mission. They include responsible growing practices, caring for the environment and community involvement.

Life’s Work
In 2009, Alfa Demmellash was named among the CNN Heroes of “ordinary people making an extraordinary impact.” Her interest in entrepreneurship was as a result of seeing her mother being underpaid as a seamstress. Her mother had the dress-making skills but didn’t have the business skills.

Demmellash went on to study at Harvard and later started a Venture Capital and Business Incubation company. Much of her life’s work is about preparing small ‘Mom-and-Pops’ type businesses to compete in the mainstream. Having survived on little money growing up in Ethiopia, she focuses her efforts in underserved communities, including immigrants/refugees and other minority groups.

Street Talk – (Social Commentary driving change!)
It was recently reported that the world population has reached 7 billion. Seemed like yesterday when we heard it hit 6 billion. The population growth is increasing in leaps and bounds, similar to how technology improvements cut speeds down from seconds to nanoseconds. So how is our human technology doing?

A Grand Jury report indicates that officials at Penn State University allowed young kids to be abused and kept silent. Maybe firing coach Paterno and the President was recognition that their moral compass could do with major fine-tuning. Is our understanding for human decency lagging behind the technology gains?