(This guest post was written by Ryan Bukoski, start-up enthusiast)

Like many people I’m sure, I was brought up and taught the ideologies that nothing comes easy and if you want something badly enough, you’ve got to go out and get it yourself through a combination of a strong work ethic and an even stronger desire to achieve the goal you’ve set for yourself.  The benefits/results are two-fold; first is the feeling of self-accomplishment in knowing that you gave your all and were successful with your endeavor.  The second isn’t necessarily as cut and dry, and it’s the impression you leave with those around you.  In other words, if you bust your hump, whether you realize it or not, it won’t go unnoticed to those around you.

Fast forward to my first job, starting at the bottom of the totem pole for a start-up.  In an office of less than twenty people, I knew everyone and everyone knew me by the end of my first week, mostly from hand delivering their lunches to each of their desks.  This intimate setting was perfect; everyone knew the roles of one another, and more importantly, everyone held each other accountable for their workload, and if you screwed up, you were sure to hear about it.  Conversely, if you did your job correctly, efficiently, and most of all, exceptionally, you would seldom hear your name.  This seems like no big deal, but it’s something that C-level executives within earshot surely notice in a start-up office, however subtle it may come across over the span of weeks and months to everyone else.

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(This guest post was written by Patrick Iselin, sales strategist)

That’s right, I said it.

Few would agree right off the bat – but I still maintain that it is the truth.  The more somebody is micromanaged, the less accountability they have, the less pressure to perform.  They also no longer need to think for themselves once their manager is making every  decision for them.  People are fundamentally lazy and thus they get comfortable, or even worse complacent.  So what starts off as an annoyance to the employee (while the manager is asserting himself), soon develops into a sort of Pavlovian response whereby when decisions are required they need not use their own initiative but instead simply wander into the manager’s office and ask what to do.

Micromanaging starts you on a vicious cycle resulting in a grinding halt to productivity, and here is why.

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(This guest post was written by Rick O’Brien, serial entrepreneur and President of SemperCon):

As co-founder and CEO of early wireless internet application company Airput, I learned the hard way that it’s important to be as capital efficient as possible with your limited development funds.  Airput successfully raised money from several local VCs based on the initial success of our mobile applications and we then hired aggressively to expedite application development to meet critical market windows.  The problem was that the large overhead of our development team could not be supported by current sales.  When the internet bubble burst, we had spent our initial funding and found it impossible to raise additional capital to sustain operations.

Later while running the Product Development Group at iBiquity Digital, I started using a blend of in-house and outside development resources which allowed me to stretch my budget and also gave me the flexibility necessary to ramp development to hit critical deadlines.  The success I found using this cost-effective mix of development resources was the impetus for me to launch SemperCon and try to help other companies better leverage their precious development dollars.

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(This guest post was written by Muhammad At-Tauhidi, corporate lawyer and entrepreneur):

I created Runt.ly as an easy way to share ad-hoc content over Twitter and other micro-blogs.  Runt.ly was designed as a “mini-blog” — for you when you have more to say then you can fit on a micro-blog but not so much that you would be inclined to create a traditional blog post for it.  Runt.ly makes it really easy to create multimedia posts that contain WYSIWYG text, photos and video that can be shared with a single short URL.  Although Runt.ly is similar to other “light-blogging” tools like Posterous or Tumblr, the focus is less on giving users their own personal homepage and more on making it easier for users to share individual pieces of content.

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(This guest post was written by Ryan Underwood Wall, SEO expert and entrepreneur):

Search engines are an international marketer’s new best friend. It’s a lower cost, effective, and efficient global marketing channel.  However, even though the world has flattened and costs have dramatically decreased to deliver marketing messages abroad, it’s still not cheap to roll out or easy to perfect.  Tactics such as foreign language keyword research, translations and trans-creations are usually expensive if you want the job done right.  Not to mention all of the other costs that are accrued through building a separate Web property.  So before you decide to cross the pond, be sure to test market demand by leveraging your current Web site and pushing several international SEO strategies live.

For example, let’s just say your Website domain is http://www.desklamps.com/ and you’re trying to enter the French market.

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