Create Competitive Advantages by Hiring Globally

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The biggest takeaway from Jeff Barrett's article for Entrepreneur, "Why Small Businesses Should Be Thinking (and Hiring) Globally During Covid-19 Isolation," is that even though we are going to be globally isolated for a while, there is still a lot of opportunity out there and the technology to allow us to make things happen. He goes on to say, "Everyone has to pivot. Top global talent will be temporarily looking for different avenues and that will benefit the entrepreneurs willing to think beyond isolation."

Read his entire article here.

How Do Doctors During a Global Pandemic Relax? Playing a Board Game Called Pandemic

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What's your favorite board game?  How about Pandemic?  For doctors, that's their board game of choice.  Why?

Players try to stop diseases from spreading across the world while racing for cures. “It’s stress relief,” said Dr. [Sonali] Advani [associate medical director of the Duke Infection Control Outreach Network in North Carolina], who plays over Zoom video calls with her friends—other infectious-disease doctors.

Learn a little more about how and why Pandemic was created via Wikipedia (surprise, surprise) but here's a snippet:

Pandemic is based on the premise that four diseases have broken out in the world, each threatening to wipe out a region. The game accommodates two to four players, each playing one of seven possible roles: dispatcher, medic, scientist, researcher, operations expert, Contingency Planner, or quarantine specialist.

Tricky to be selling a board game called Pandemic considering we are living it right now.  But just think, it's similar to what it must be like to sell Corona beer right now.

Oh, see if you can save humanity.

For Small Business Owners in Mexico, Going Global Just Got Easier

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According to a news release published by GlobeNewswire:

UPS and Estafeta Mexicana, S.A. de C.V. announced a commercial agreement between the two brands to provide Mexican businesses with international shipping services to help them reach more than 220 countries and territories around the world.

The agreement will also make it possible for Mexican companies to reach their customers in the U.S. within one business day.

Learn more to see how you might benefit from this new partnership.

Own Your Future

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Small businesses, hit by the economic impact of the coronavirus, have had to pivot, pivot, pivot to survive.  I call that resilience.

But their goal is the same: to continue their dream, to do what they had been doing on their own terms before the world changed abruptly. They want to own their future as they had owned their past.

These entrepreneurs share their story and it's all about the power to pivot.

Today in Global Small Business: 'Black is King' by Beyonce

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What's affecting me, my clients, my colleagues and other global small business owners:

• Basey banig weavers build a name for Filipino export products.
• LIVE updates from The New York Times on COVID-19 
• Quote of the week:  "It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get." – Confucius
• The upside to embracing your own madness.
• 'Black Is King,' a new album by Beyonce, will celebrate Black resilience and culture, and premiere globally on Disney+ on July 31, according to a press release. 
• Whoa, look out, Starbucks says it will pause advertising on social media platforms including Facebook.  They are not the only one starting to take this path.  Could be impactful.

I Just Stuck With It

©2013 Laurel J. Delaney.  All rights reserved.

"My father left his piano at the house when he left, and I wasn't allowed to play it when he was there because I wasn't as good as him. So when he left, I was determined to get as good as him, and I taught myself how to play music, and I just stuck with it, and I did it all the time." – Prince

Worldometer

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World population?  Government and economics?  Society and media?  Environment?  Food?  Water? Health?

Say you want to know how many births we had this year, how much public military expenditure, number of television sets sold worldwide today and the number of tons of toxic chemicals released in the environment.

We've got you covered.  Enlighten yourself.  Worldometers.info – it's a reference website that provides counters and real-time statistics for diverse topics.

Chill with Alecia Keys (Music Video)

Lessons from the Great Recession in 2008

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"Flexibility — both in product lines and operational structure — will help vulnerable businesses survive," says Michael Chow, lead data analyst and economist at the National Federation of Independent Business (N.F.I.B.). The key is listening to customers and anticipating their needs, both today and after the pandemic.

Now is the time to scale up in the spirit of collaboration.

Read more about how small businesses today must focus on adaptability and prepare for timid consumers going forward.

Which Global Small Businesses Are Most Vulnerable Right Now Due to COVID-19?

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According to McKinsey & Company, before the crisis, small businesses accounted for nearly half of all private-sector jobs. Widespread business exits wreak longer-lasting unemployment and economic damage than temporary shutdowns do, so it’s important to understand which small businesses may remain shuttered permanently.

McKinsey & Company goes on to say that that knowledge can help business leaders and policy makers develop interventions to protect small businesses in the short term, ensure that they can participate in the recovery, and put more of them on a more resilient footing in the years to come.

Discover which sectors are most at risk, and which global small businesses might close permanently.

Today in Global Small Business: Cross-Cultural Marketing in a Pandemic

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What's affecting me, my clients, my colleagues and other global small business owners:

• COVID-19 has destroyed 41% of Black small businesses. 
• SMEs remain the backbone of our economy.
• Quote of the week:  “Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport." – Pope Francis
• COVID-19 metrics matter.  Check some robust ones out here and provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
• Building resilience in a world disrupted.
• Cross-cultural marketing in a pandemic:  key tents for business leaders.

The Abstract Wrong of Slavery

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"You know I dislike slavery; and you fully admit the abstract wrong of it." – August 24, 1855 Letter to Joshua Speed by Abraham Lincoln