Every business in any industry depends on the ability of it's managing team to be able to make decisive and crucial decisions but there comes a time where a true leader has to put his/her feet down and make THE Final decision. The creative and innovative cycle of any product or service is never ending. You can always come up with a better idea, perfection is at infinite.

Executive Decision making is a quality true leaders are born with. It's the ability to say enough is enough lets make something happen with what we've got or else we're going to lose our chance.

The lack of Executive decision making is truly evident in web startups. They never run out of creative ideas to do with their web sites but what they mostly end up with is not just lost chances but totally wrong products for the wrong target market.

Tell if you've done this before:

You come up with an idea that a small team around you (or a few of your friends) label it "brilliant". You spend countless hours mapping all your ideas together. You start the development process but every other week another new idea hits you and with all excitement you add it to your production queue and push off the launch date by a few more weeks. It's been a year since you started, you were suppose to launch by now but because of all the things you've added you'd need another 6 months to develop. meanwhile you're on sites like mashable and techcrunch and they have just announced a site that is doing exactly what you originally thought of doing. you start crying. you keep telling youmeanwhile most of the blogs can't seem to get enough of the competitor site even though you think their glass is half empty.

Another year passes and you're site is finally done and you're ready to launch but you no longer have just one competitor but  4 other sites have joined the niche market. you contact all of the big blogs and any PR source you can get your hands on but they turn you down and label you as "Just another [blank]", you tell your self i came up with the idea first a little under 2 years ago but now it's prime time is long over, there are enough competitors dominating the market that no matter how much publicity you even get it won't help your cause.

you've wasted 2 years of your life, you've missed yet another opportunity wave and now you've have to go through the innovation process all over again for a totally new and unique idea. The question is "are you going to learn from your bitter experience?"

if this has not happened to you still the same type of question still applies. Are you going to learn from the mistakes many sites are making today?

Executive Decision Making is all about optimizing your opportunities instead of wasting them. It involves sacrifice, it's a hard and risky decision but at least you won't waste 2 years of your life and wonder about it after.r self this site only has half of the features you're going to have.

I don't care what people say but being optimistic at all times is the worst thing you can be. If you are optimistic at all times then you are in a state of fully daydreaming. In your mind the underdog always wins; web site traffic pours like thunderstorm; money grows on trees; and stock market always goes up and so on...

At the same time being Pessimistic at all times is equally worse. In your mind you have the worst luck; you can never win; there are too many other people better than you; everything you try to do the opposite happens. People who are pessimistic at all times tend to not do anything at all because they say to themselves "if i'm going to fail then why bother trying!" and my answer is always "but if you don't try, you never know!".

Here is where the balance comes in, both optimists and pessimists are only right about half of the things and in the real business world they fully compliment one another. since examples are the best way to convey a message here are a few of them:
 

1)

OPTIMIST would say:
"We have a web 2.0 idea and when we make it and launch it, within 1 year we'll be like google"

PESSIMIST Would say
"We can never beat or match google so why bother"

BALANCE of the two results:
"It's hard to beat google, but we still have a chance to make good grounds, and what if we never get the traffic we need to make decent money so what do we have to do? lets plan this to the smallest detail"
 

2)

OPTIMIST would say:
"We have an idea and millions of people would want it"

PESSIMIST Would say
"it's a stupid idea because nobody would want it"

BALANCE of the two results:
"What would make a million people want it? and what do we need to consider if nobody wants it? Either way lets put our target getting a 1,000 customers first then we can worry about the next 10,000 and the next 100,000 and eventual million target"

What is the BALANCE?

Balance allows you to see things in perspective, like seeing both sides of the coin, it helps you plan for the best and the worst. Knowing about the worst things allows you to be prepared in case they happen, also knowing there even worse things that could happen also gives you enough motivation to be optimistic about even the little gains. Balance allows you appreciate you gains, your efforts and your life. It's helps you avoid pitfalls and makes every mistake a step closer the ultimate success.
 

So go ahead and be pessimistic and optimistic at the same time. It's only good for you!

It is obvious that business is about managing money. You'd be surprised to know that majority of Online Businesses, web developers, designers, advertisers and bloggers cannot manage money. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why web 2.0 sites go after funding the VC firms look into management and want to see a manager with at least MBA running things.

Managing money is about what you can, cannot and should not buy. Just because you have money doesn't mean that you should spend right away. Sometimes the biggest mistake a starup makes revolves around spending money at the wrong time towards the wrong thing.

Managing Money is about being smart and thoughtful with money, here are a few ways to be smarter with money

Expenses

No matter who you are or what you do you've got expenses whether you like it or not. Being smart with money would allow you to analyze your expenses, take out the unnecessary ones or bargain for better deals. For example, there are hundreds of options for having a cell phone plan, but researching a little about you talking habits allows you select the most appropriate plan that over time saves you money. You can apply this to cars payments, office lease, Internet and tv bills, computers equipment, starbucks coffee, lunch and dinner.

Employees

If you are working on your own then you are your own employee and not your own boss. If you are in the online business and you're making money then the chances are that there multiple employees working in that company. Most startups, as soon as they come in contact with money they go crazy with hiring thinking that the same money they're making this is going to continue to next year and year after that. Not so fast, in the online work you can be on top one months and at the bottom by years end. Never estimate or speculate when it comes to online. Keep you team small, and hold on tight to your money.

Hosting

Hosting can be very cheap or very expensive, but did you know that it doesn't matter what kind of hosting you start with for as long as it is flexible enough to grow as you grow. If you have a blog, or thinking of starting one, think for a second what is your blog going to be, if it's a hobby blog then a cheap shared hosting with $5-10/month hosting is good enough, but if you intend to really promote the site and make a bit of income on the side while holding your day job then stay away from shared hosting and go with a small Virtual Server for $30-50/month and as the traffic to your site grow so can your server resources this way you don't have to spend more that you need.

I know a few startups that before they even had a decent application on their hand they were going around shopping for servers and co-location options. As a startup stick with small, go with a small Virtual Server, this way if you hit big you can easily upgrade to fully dedicated servers and multi server with load balancing options but don't blow the money you don't have right from the get go, what if you're doesn't pick up at all, all that money wasted!!!

Marketing

Every business, website or blogs needs to be marketed otherwise how would people find out about it. But did you know that in this day and age the most effective marketing doesn't actually cost a penny? all it costs it time! in the next article i will be talking a great deal about this.

As a designer i was trained to look past the beauty and aesthetics of any given project but for me to believe that beauty has nothing to with the attention and respect a design gets would require the entire world to be educated to look past beauty as well. For as long as people/businesses believe beauty and aesthetics equal to quality and performance who am i to go against the tide, yet i still do it because i BELIEVE!!!

I was reading couple design magazines the other day, Communication Arts and Print Magazine, each month they select a series of project dubbed as "creative and inspiring" and showcase them in their magazines. I enjoy looking at them and depending on the type of projects i have i may even get inspired by them but i couldn't help notice that from a functional and real creativity point of view almost all of the featured projects where severely flawed. Nothing is perfect in this world and i'm the first to admit that but these magazine are the primal voice in advocating real creativity yet many of the featured projects are based on beauty.

The best type of design is when you don't notice it at all!

Our biggest problem is that we don't really know what the definition of CREATIVITY is, and we can't help but to confuse it with beauty. I follow 15 web design and CSS gallery sites among hundreds of other feeds in my RSSFeed, each day i get a list of some 50 sites that are chosen by the editors of the site based on their beauty, most of them are not functional and if you look a bit deeper into their HTML code you'll also realize that everything is disgustingly put together and there is no more room for flexibility and expansion. What these gallery sites don't realize is that they are influencers and the new designs they publish inspires many other ones. In calculation if 9 out of 10 sites showcased is beauty without creativity and functionality and those 9 inspire another 20 sites to be the same then you do the math, that's right it's no wonder why this Internet is so chaotic, nobody can organize it, nobody can categorize it, nobody can help but to make it even worse than what it is now!

To me beauty is when i look at a site and say "hmmm, that's nice but how do i find the information pages" but a creative site to is when i say "i'm glad i found this useful site, lets bookmark it!"

a creative site can be very beautiful, sometimes the simplest sites that have no graphics or images are more beautiful than the ones packed with color, texture and images. It's how you use design to help people find the right material that ultimately makes you creative. Unfortunately we are creative so that people can notice our designs first, everything else is secondary!

These are the sites that keep advocating beauty for blogs rather creativity:

http://www.problogger.net/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/
http://performancing.com/
http://www.copyblogger.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://cssmania.com/
http://cssremix.com
http://www.webcreme.com/
 

It doesn't matter if you own a simple blog or a complex web app, to survive you need to be mentioned on other news blogs and editorial news sources as often as possible. While you might look at being mentioned on news sources as publicity, in reality what you getting is far more important; you're gaining respect and acknowledgment. So next time you're thinking about how you can be mentioned on popular sites like TechCrunch, Mashable, GigOm, CNET, Wired, or any other on constant basis think about how you can build up on your reputation first and everything else would fall into their place much easier.

important: A full featured website that has done all the needed development up front and doesn't need to do much else is unfortunately newsworthy only once. If you don't need to innovate or improve on your perfection then there isn't much else news sites can talk about other than what they have said at the beginning. Take the examples of Truemors, Pownce, and Answers.com for example, they have not done any major updates or upgrades since the last time of their world wide web coverage. They haven't even redesigned their site and as a result you don't see them being mentioned on news blogs. Why is that? well, they don't have anything news worthy.

The trick of publicity savvy and business minded innovators is to draw a very complete and solid plan but release in phases. revealing all your cards at once doesn't do you any good but having something new to show for every few weeks keeps blogs on their tails as to what you have in store for them. Though most of the things you want to do are pre-planned but a multi phase release shows that you are constantly innovating under the hood, it also shows that you are pretty serious when it comes to taking care of business not to mention that you are trustworthy when it comes to taking care of people and that makes you newsworthy on a constant basis. Take the examples of FaceBook, Apple and Google, none of the news sites can't get enough of them, not because their are brand names but because they have something new that news sites can talk about. How do you think great brands are built anyways???