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David C. Baker was named a "mentor" for the Entrepreneur Center. EC Mentors come from all backgrounds and types, however they all love helping innovative and driven entrepreneurs turn their ideas into reality. The EC Mentoring Program helps individuals apply their lifetime of business experience to helping startups launch successfully.

In an article Fast Company by Lisa Nirell, she featured my article with many bullet points that describe a customer-driven company (you should be customer-focused, not customer driven). The article had 250,000 page views.

This blog post was written for Raven Tools, to appear on their well-read blog.

For just a few minutes, I want to get you thinking about how the mix of things you do for clients can have a significant impact on the value they place on your services.

In many cases there’s no simple way to avoid providing both higher- and lower-level services to clients, but unless you combine them in a manner that carefully takes your positioning into account, you may find yourself swimming upstream all the time, wishing for a different kind of client relationship.

This was a four-part series written for the inHOWse blog. Here is the introduction to Part 1. If you follow the link to the article, you'll see the other three parts.

What are the characteristics of a leader that others want to follow? As you’ll soon see, this list is a very personal one. In other words, we’d all come up with different elements when building the list.

What I’ve tried to do, though, is to think of a complete leader. So I’ve asked myself this question: can I imagine a leader who isn’t fair, for instance. The answer is obviously no. Each one of these, then, describes a leader’s characteristics, any one of which might hinder their effectiveness if missing in any significant proportion. What I’d encourage you to do--maybe even before you read this list--is to first make up your own list and compare it with mine. (These are not presented in any particular order.)

Sraman Mitra leads a global initiative that aims to nurture a million entrepreneurs to reach a milion dollars each in annual revenue. She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant and connector to investment firms.

ReCourses was recognized as a "Rare $1 Million Solo Consulting Firm" by her company.

David C. Baker was appointed to the Advisory Board of SVA's MFA program in Design for Social Innovation. The MFA in Design for Social Innovation will prepare students to apply the principles and ethics of social innovation as filters for understanding and as a discipline for engaging with and improving the world through design. Graduates of the program will be more than graphic designers, filmmakers, advertising creative directors or interactive systems designers. They will be all these, mastering all the skills and knowledge of how to apply them to have a positive impact on business, society and their own lives.

This article, published by Smart Customers-Stupid Companies, highlights the advantages of customer control when you focus narrowly. It also provides sample websites that illustrate excellent positioning. Written by Bruce Kasanoff.

Most of my work (through ReCourses) is with independent, small- to mid-sized firms in the marketing space. But I get asked to consult with in-house departments, such as Verizon, Hallmark, PriceWaterHouse, Whole Foods, Hartford Life, Toyota, Compassion Intl, etc. Probably 40 in all over the years.

In some cases, I've been asked to "audit" the output of the in-house department to justify its existence on financial grounds. In other words, some C-level executive is questioning whether or not they should even have an in-house department.

Here's something I think you'll find interesting: in every case that I've done such an exercise, having an in-house department has proven to be more expensive than using outside firms.

Jeff Haden featured me in an article that described my interaction with him as "ideal business networking". Jeff writes a column for CBS's Interactive Business Network.

Valuable Content, Ltd., of Bristol, England awarded us their monthly "Valuable Content Award", which put us in very esteemed company, like David Meerman Scott, Ian Brodie, and Charles Green (of Trusted Advisors fame).