"I'm going to be a producer" so say thousands

Grassroots television productions by the over 60 crowd

An Interview of Bruce Camber, written by Andrew Caster

Dallas, San Diego, Denver, Palm Beach, Glendive, Montana, and Damariscota, Maine: Hundreds of small business owners throughout the USA are beginning to produce docudramas for television and the web, and according to Bruce Camber, “Soon millions will.”

Camber speaks from 14 years of weekly television productions. His series, Small Business School, opened on PBS television stations back on September 3, 1994. Right from the beginning he has been telling any body who would listen -- every PBS station, all their independent producers, and every business owner, “Mel Brooks got it wrong! We are all producers. Get a website and get busy producing.”

He continued, “Everything was getting cheaper, faster, and easier. There were virtually no barriers to entry. It was a no brainer then, and it is common sense today." He believes that video productions are about where word processing was in 1980, "Today, nobody talks about word processing . We all just do it. In just a few years even the over-60 crowd will be producing television.”

Camber is teaching people to do it. Instructions and tools are all online. For every episode of their show, over 200 businesses are nominated. They have 60,000 businesses that have been highly recommended to them by local business advocates. "These are businesses that have created jobs for at least ten years. They are loved in their community for their generosity and ethics, and they are respected in their industry for their leadership and integrity," he said. Of that group he says about 1000 businesses are developing the B-roll and answering questions online to develop their transcript and a case study guide.

"Our goal is to have over 2000 businesses each year profiled on their local PBS station. That is about 210 stations, each doing about ten episodes per year. The best of those episodes will air nationally and globally." The show, Small Business School, has aired on most PBS-member stations over the course of 14 years. It has been airing on the Voice of America around the world since 1995.

To be sure, these are not hot and flashy productions. They say that these are just good stories about good people doing good things, “This is a Pollyanna production. We believe in the goodness of people and we go out to find the best role models we can to tell a story that is not being told on television – most business owners are fair, ethical and very decent people.”

Camber rather whimsically cautioned all the young, sassy producers, “All of a sudden we turned 60 and now the kids think we’re old. Sorry, kids, we ain’t. We’re not going away. We’re not retiring. Retirement is boredom, then death. We’ll die with our boots on. Now, we may have become slow adopters, but just remember, we invented this stuff in the first place.”

For more information, contact Bruce Camber,
Executive Producer 214-801-8521 camber@SmallBusinessSchool.org
Small Business School, Inc. http://SmallBusinessSchool.org

Tuesday is about transactions

Albert Black of Dallas, an American hero

A hard-nosed, well-grounded visionary. He lives, breathes, and acts on his two most basic faith statements. First, he asks for 100% then gives 125%. You won't believe the results. He sees the deep potential within everybody. His human resource strategies are more than innovative; they are life-changing and heart-transforming!

Great business owners understand that people can't be shoved into cubicles and forgotten. People's lives can't be cut into work and personal with the owner ignoring the personal part. Get to know this true leader who sees his role, not as a CEO but as a coach, mentor, teacher, guide, and even a parent (when they never had one) to his people.

Read more, watch the video, see for yourself.

Saturday's Systems and perfected states in space and time

First, and foremost, business is a system for creating value. The more perfect a product or service is, the more perceived value it has.

Back in the 70s, I worked with a group of physicists on one side of me and a group of theologians on the other. Each group was striving to understand the most fundamental aspects of life. Pushed to their logical limits, each wanted to understand the very nature of perfection. In the physical world, there is only an ideal perfection that exists in our mental constructions alone. In the theological world, the ultimate world or God's world, it is always perfect. The place where these two meet -- an interstitial, nexus, or transformation point -- is a perfected state in space and time.

What does that all have to do with business? Everything.

Business is a system for creating something of value:

• In Big Businesses -- over 5000 employees (Wal-Mart is the biggest with over 1M) -- people tend to think of business as where you go to work and get compensated for it. It's a job. Very, very few are looking to create a perfected moment for the business, oneself or the customers.
  

• In most mid-size businesses -- from 500 to 5000 employees -- people still tend to think of their work as a job. It is where you go to get paid at the end of the week. Though a greater percentage of people see the end product that is sold, very rare is Total Quality Management and Continuous Improvement something that is within one's guts and being, from head to toe.
  

• In small businesses -- up to 500 employees -- most people know the founder. Most people know the company's stories. Most people know the mission, the vision and the products and services. They participate. Their compensation is often closely related to their contributions in moving the products and services to a higher perfection.

So, we all have to look at the processes within our business. Processes open the way to systems. Once those systems begin working well, you have a sustainable business on its way to rapid growth.

Small businesses have the greatest probability of getting these systems so dynamic, that the corporate culture becomes one focused on continuous improvement within one's business domain.

Though each business in this library is a great example, one of the best businesses to examine where all the people are caught up in continuous improvement -- making it perfect -- is Ziba Design.