Forbes magazine puts out an annual ranking of the best small companies in America. Most people are familiar with the Inc. 500, a ranking of the 500 fastest growing private companies in America. The Forbes rankings are more comprehensive and take many more factors into account. Forbes also includes publicily traded companies.

I definitely recommend you take a look at the rankings. It is worth the read. Watching small companies, helps identify trends in what will be happening next.

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A great article from Forbes on the emerging freelance economy:

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/1116/careers-lisa-steinberg-labor-statistics-freelance-economy.html

This is nothing new to freelancers and companies that use their services and have been taking advantage of the Internet to come together to create a new type of labor market for years. Thomas Friedman described just such a phenomenon emerging in 2005 in his book The World Is Flat.

This article helps break the news to the mainstream.

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Great Forbes article on MetroPCS strategy. Briefly,  Roger Linquist (MetroPCS CEO) is positioning his company to be a cost leader in the area of digital voice transmission. He wants to commoditize cellular phone service squeezing the margins of his competitors and positioning his company to take advantage of increased consumer demand for cheaper cell phone service.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/1116/technology-mobile-4G-telephony-metropcs.html

Businessweek ran a great article on some of Steve Jobs‘ presentation tactics. While presenting like Steve Jobs will not turn your company into Apple, these tips will definitely help any entrepreneur or sales person make more effective presentations.

Uncovering Steve Jobs’ Presentation Secrets – BusinessWeek.

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A business plan is essentially a formal cost-benefit analysis.  The process of writing a business plan forces an entrepreneur to try to look at his or her idea from another person’s point of view. When writing a business plan, an entrepreneur should be thinking about what do investors/stakeholders want to know about my business. This train of thought and process leads to what basically amounts to a value proposition and the how much time, effort, or money is necessary to deliver that value proposition.

A thorough and well put together business plan requires a significant time investment. In the days of brick and mortar businesses, a business plan was a necessity for most entrepreneurs to secure the funding necessary to begin operations. But in today’s web-enabled world, some business ideas take less effort to implement and get to market than the process of writing a business plan. I propose a rule of thumb that if you estimate that a business idea will take less time to get to market than it takes to gather all of the necessary details of your idea and synthesize it into a coherent plan, then do it. Moreover, the process of trying to bring an idea to market and adopting the viewpoint of the customer can prove very beneficial in crafting a more accurate business plan.

The results of the experiment have definite implications for the business world. One needs to look no further then the recent economic slow down we are facing due to risky financial behavior. Bankers were issuing hundred-thousand dollar mortgage loans to individuals who did not have the assets or income to be able to afford such a loan. Even though bankers understood the problem with their actions, they were able to rationalize their actions by the profit that they were making. Such a system also encouraged loan applicants to apply as they understood and saw from the people around them that their loan application would not be turned down. And they were able to rationalize this through the larger house or apartment that they could acquire.

If these individuals, would have listened to their instincts telling them that something feels wrong about the whole process, we may have had a much more stable mortgage lending system.

This lesson has special applications for individuals working at and founding new companies. Trusting your instincts may be a better decision then you think.

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