Fran is going to be a guest on The Fred Thompson Radio Show, a national talk radio program, today at 1:45 PM ET.  The show will be guest-hosted by Dom Giordano, a Philadelphia media personality, and they will be discussing current events as they pertain to small business.

Click on the link below to see the Station Finder:

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An interview of Guy Kawasaki, a co-founder of Alltop, a news aggregation site, and managing director of Garage Technology Ventures.

Q. At what point in your career did you first become somebody’s boss?

A. I was probably 28 or 29 years old and in the jewelry business. I started my career counting diamonds and schlepping gold jewelry around the world. The jewelry business is a very, very tough business — tougher than the computer business. You truly have to understand how to take care of your customers.

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The thing I love most about America is that there’s always somebody who doesn’t get the word — somebody who doesn’t understand that in a Great Recession you’re supposed to hunker down, downsize and just hold on for dear life. I have a couple of friends who fit that bill, who think a recession is a dandy time to try to discover better and cheaper ways to do things. They both happen to be Indian-Americans — one a son of the Himalayas, who came to America on a scholarship and went to work for NASA to try to find a way to Mars; the other a son of New Delhi, who came here and found the Sun, Sun Microsystems. Both are serial innovators. Both are now shepherding clean-tech start-ups that have the potential to be disruptive game changers. They don’t know from hunkering down. They just didn’t get the word.   View Full Story

Fran’s continuing to be interviewed about his new book, Every Day is Game Day. You may want to catch some of Fran Tarkenton’s interviews this week. See details below:

Wednesday, October 14, 2009:

LIVE Telephone Radio Interview
Interview Time: 4:00 PM ET
Station: 1140 KHTK-AM
Show: “The Jim Kozimor Show”
Hosts: Jim Kozimor
Show Description: With his Midwest upbringing, “Koz” knows there’s more to life than scores and stats. “The Jim Kozimor Show”
is a daily slice of life inside and outside of the games.

Thursday, October 15, 2009:

2nd Radio Tour with ABC Radio Network Stations (all times TBD):
WBZ RADIO - Boston, MA
KEX RADIO - PORTLAND OR
KBOT RADIO - Detroit Lakes, MN
KWNG RADIO - Red Wing, MN
WDUN RADIO - Gainesville, GA
WXZZ RADIO - Lexington, Kentucky
WHWK RADIO - Binghamton NY
WKKX RADIO - Wheeling, WV
WCSX RADIO - Detroit, MI
KIBZ RADIO - Lincoln, Nebraska
WKLH RADIO - Milwaukee, WI
KFMA RADIO - Tucson, AZ
KCAL RADIO - Redlands, CA
WQBW/WZEE RADIO - Greenfield, WI
WRXR RADIO - Chattanooga, TN
KMOX Radio - St. Louis, MO
KZOK RADIO - Seattle, WA
KLOS RADIO - Los Angeles, CA

Friday, October 16th, 2009:

LIVE Telephone Radio Interview
Show: Morency
Outlets: Sirius/XM Radio (across North America), The Score
Television Network (across Canada)
Hosts: Gabriel Morency
Interview time: 6:00 PM ET
Audience: 12 million subscribers on Sirius radio and roughly 50,000 Canadian viewers on The Score and web

Hear Fran interviewed on ESPN and on Fox Business Network tomorrow, Wednesday, October 7. He will be talking sports and promoting his new book, “Every Day is Game Day.”

All Times Listed are Eastern Time and approximate:

LIVE at 1:10 pm-The Herd (ESPN Radio also shown on ESPNU TV)

LIVE at 2:10 pm-ESPNews

LIVE at 2:40 pm-Scott Van Pelt (ESPN Radio)

LIVE at 7:30 pm - Fox Business Network on “America’s Nightly Scoreboard” with David Asman.

Also, look for Fran’s appearance on these channels. He is pre-taping these appearances tomorrow:

ESPN Digital Media
ESPN.Com Chat (15 minute chat)
NFL LIVE on ESPN
Outside The Lines on ESPN
The Doug Gottlieb Show on ESPN Radio

Schedule subject to change without notice.

The more I do business. The more I live. The more convinced I am that other people cannot tell you how to run your business. Consultants that you go to, books that you read, tapes that you hear are done by people who have never run a business. They make money selling ideas. Making you think that they’re the intellectual thoughtful ones and you and I as operators of business are dumb but the problem is you and I are running to to these people and paying outrageous sums of of money because we really think they have got the silver bullet — they’ve got the magic They’ve gotten the genie out of the bottle that will give you the secret to have success. The secret to have success is very simple. The first thing you have to have and I’ve asked that question of 50, 60, 70 people and nobody’s gotten it right. The first thing you have got to have is a product that consumers want or that people will buy — not a product that you think is great that they think is great. You’ve got to have that first.

The second thing you’ve got to be able to do is to make a sale. How do you take that product to market and how do you get it in front of more people? Because the only way that anybody can grow their business, whether you’re Coca-Cola, Google or Mary Sue or Billy Bob, is to get your message in front of more people and some consultant is not going to figure that out for you. There’s a new book out that I’ve read called The Management Myth that really talks about this. And in The Management Myth, the author is a guy named Stewart — never heard of him before — but what he says he undermines the very basis of the science of management by revealing that the founding father of management and consulting, a guy name Frederick Winslow Taylor, basically fabricated his classic 1899 study of pig iron production at Bethlehem Steel. The calculations were pulled out of thin and when they seemed too good to be true they were reduced magically — just enough to make the results seem more plausible. More recently in 1982 the greatest selling business book in the history of the world - I think the greatest selling book other than the Bible — was by Tom Peters In Search of Excellence. He outlined 43 companies that were ideal perfect run companies that set the standards. Well one-third of those companies were in trouble within the next five years. Waterman and Peters became great gurus. They never ran a business. Academic. Pontificating. And what happens with all that the consultants and the authors that are trying to tell you how to run your business and have never done — they’re going to tell you what you want to hear. They’re going to bloviate to make their point with nothing to back it up.

So what does this mean to you entrepreneurs? Stop listening to all the loud noises of consultants, of gurus, of marketing experts because they are of little or no value to you. Most entrepreneurs don’t make it because you are bombarded with “use my methodology”, “use my lead generation,” “do my deal and I’ll double your income overnight”. You have chased that silver bullet time and time and time again because it sounds so good and you’ve lost. Most entrepreneurs don’t make it because of that. And I’m going to just plead with you. When you hear those loud voices barking at you, run as far as you can run. When you find people trying to put the hard sale on you and the hard close on you, they’re doing it for a reason. Run. Run. When it’s too good to be true run, run, run!

Bernie Madoff. $75 billion ponzi scheme. Why did people take their money out of safer investment strategies and put them with Bernie Madoff? Because he promised and guaranteed a minimum of 14% return and as much as 52% return and people were clamoring to put their money with Bernie Madoff and not even question. Question everything. Assume nothing and understand this: Nobody can make you successful. That has to come from you. Make sure you have the right partners. Make sure you have the right people that you’re talking to and asking questions of. People who you can trust. People who have your back. Not the people that are the silver bullets that are promising you gargantuan returns and doubling your business and all those things. You are the one that’s got to have the work ethic. You are the one who has to find the product that has value.You’re the one that’s gonna have to figure it out.

And these people that are selling this to you who have never run a business, who never had the experiences are not the answer to you. They are there to make money off of you with their slickness and pomposity but there’s no substance there. Beware!

For all of you who come to the blog, I have just published an autobiography. It’s called Every Day is Game Day. It’s not just about the wins and losses of football, the agony of defeat and the thrill of victory. It’s about the people and the lesson I’ve learned in my entire life. It’s about the notion that life is about relationships. The secret to happiness in life is relationships that come from caring about your people. It’s on the football field caring about your teammates and in business caring about your customers and your partners.

It’s in all the bookstores. It’s on Amazon.com. I hope you go find it, read it. I think there’s something in it that will serve you well and be an inspiration to you. Thanks for coming to the blog.

[Note: An autographed copy of Fran's latest book can be ordered for $16 + shipping at TarkentonSports.com. Click here to go there now.]

All of us are interested in peak performance. How do we, in the most stressful situations perform at the highest levels? Isn’t that a great challenge?

The model for all of us is to look at sports figures, is it not? We have watched Tiger Woods over the years and marveled at how he can make putts of any length when he has to make the putts to win a tournament. We have marveled during this year’s Olympics at Michael Phelps, who has won more gold medals than any athlete in the history of the Olympics. You watch him in the relays, you watch him in his individual events, and you see that he is able to swim against the greatest swimmers in the world, under a tremendous amount of pressure. Of course, he is nervous, as all of them are. It’s a real pressure situation. And he is emotional, but he is able to focus all of those energies that come from anticipation, that come from pressure, that come from wanting to win so bad. And rather than have these emotions detract from him and pull him down and have doubt, he makes it into a positive energy that enables him to post better times than HE’S ever posted. In many of the cases, he is breaking world record times in getting these gold medals in each one of the events that he is doing.

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What do you say to an employee who wants a raise now? Do you say, “NO! Times are tough. Our revenues are down. Our profit margins are down. I cannot give you a raise!” That’s not an acceptable response. If you’ve got valuable employees that you really want to keep, then you cannot give that response. If you make that employee mad, they might quit or become non-productive. Trying to replace that employee is going to be so expensive, and if they stay but are not inspired because you turned them down for a raise, they are not going to be as productive or as valuable to you. So have a little sensitivity towards them when they say they need a raise.

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These are tough times. Not only are they tough times, but everywhere we look it’s doom and gloom. Read the newspapers. Read the editorials. Look at MSNBC or Fox News at night and they are going to talk about the market going down, mortgages are a mess, real estate won’t recover for two years, joblessness is up, and we see no end in sight. It’s easy to be despondent. It’s easy to be discouraged. It’s easy to just want to feel sorry for ourselves, but this is the opportunity of a lifetime for you and me. This is a time for the tough…for the mentally tough…for the people who will not give into the conditions of the day, because your competitors and so many other people in business are going to slack off. They are going to be in the turmoil and stupor of depression and discouragement, and they just won’t be able to do anything.

Here are some tips for you.
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