Those clever, creative and confident folks at Personality™ have put together a Confidence Evaluation that can help you, well, evaluate the confidence of your business or organization. It’s really about figuring out if your organization knows itself well enough to communicate effectively.

It’s a quick little eight-question PDF, and if you have the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader you can fill in your answers on the PDF, submit your info and get a free download of another PDF that thoroughly explains what you should do now that you know how confident (or not) your organization is.

It’s a pretty slick little tool and can help you begin to ask the right questions when it comes to marketing and communication. Check it out. Not only do I recommend it, but I also helped edit it (that’s my way of giving you the full disclosure).

I love this story of Youngstown, Ohio, embracing their dwindling population and lack of growth:

Youngstown, Ohio, has seen its population shrink by more than half over the past 40 years, leaving behind huge swaths of empty homes, streets and neighborhoods.

Now, in a radical move, the city—which has suffered since the steel industry left town and jobs dried up—is bulldozing abandoned buildings, tearing up blighted streets and converting entire blocks into open green spaces. More than 1,000 structures have been demolished so far.

It’s sad for the town and all the people who have lost jobs and homes, but at some point you have to accept the fact that growth isn’t happening and try something else.

“We’re one of the first cities of significant size in the United States to embrace shrinkage,” said [Mayor Jay] Williams.

I talk a lot about how continual growth doesn’t always work, and I think this is a good example. Despite the hardship, it’s cool to see something new rising out of the city. It won’t be as big, but that’s OK. Bigger isn’t always better.

These two magazines showed up in the mail the other day and I can’t tell them apart. On the left is American Funds’ Investor magazine. On the right is the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s Decision Magazine.

Wow, how weird is it that they’re so similar. And what does that say about their respective designs?

Waking up to see the falling stock market as the main article on CNN is getting old. Hearing the NPR newcasters skirting around the r-word (that which must not be named—recession! Gasp!) is beyond tiring. Watching the federal government throw money at us in order to fix the economy is a little backward.

I’m happy to finally see someone talk about the up side. And of course, it’s Seth Godin:

“Change (and the fortunes that go with it) is almost always made during the down part of the cycle. It might not be fun, but it’s exciting.”

Losing your job is never easy, but it is an opportunity. Despite what everyone is saying, recession isn’t the end of the world.

This week I got a letter in the mail from Gotham Tax Service/Martial Arts. I immediately opened it. I already have a tax guy, but a ninja tax guy? That’s worth looking into.

Turns out it’s a husband/wife team–the husband does the taxes and the wife does the martial arts–and they were just sharing an envelope and splitting the mailing costs. The envelope had a separate flier for Gotham Tax Service and Gotham Martial Arts. There was also a letter from “Gotham Family Businesses” that pitched each as a separate entity.

And that, my friends, is an opportunity lost. There are plenty of places to get your taxes done and plenty of places to learn martial arts. But very few, if any, that combine both. A CPA with a blackbelt? It’d be unique, it’d be interesting, it’d be fun (and when are taxes ever fun?)–and it’d get people talking.

Sometimes you have to go for something crazy and risky. A little risky might save on postage, but there’s also little risk of a big payoff.

Ever since starting my own business I’ve found the unending thirst for growth in the business world to be a bit bizarre. Maybe even perverse. How can a company continually grow? At some point you run out of people willing to buy widgets. What’s wrong with simply doing well?

Every now and then I come across somebody smart who backs up my anti-growth leanings. This time it’s Ricardo Semler, the CEO of the Brazilian company Semco. He shared these thoughts at MIT’s Sloan Business School:

The assumption that growth is good for companies is a very difficult one to sustain. There is no evidence whatsoever that companies that grow a lot do better than companies that don’t grow a lot.

(link via 37Signals)