Some of you may have heard the name Jonathan Zuck who was, in his day, a bit of a VB, Smalltalk and Delphi maven, speaking and teaching all over the world. With hundreds of articles, components, 5 MVP awards and a few books to his name, some of the older of you may have learned a lot of programming from him.
After selling his third company 10 years ago, Jonathan became astutely aware of the growing influence politics and public policy were having on the IT industry generally and on small businesses in particular. The Association for Competitive Technology is a trade association that represents small IT companies around the world on issues as far reaching as trade, public procurement, intellectual property protection and overregulation on privacy and online safety. Jonathan and ACT have been devoted to creating an environment which is open to all comers and as free as possible from the kind of bureaucracy that cripples small businesses.
Every day, policies are being discussed in Lansing, DC and around the world that could have an adverse effect on your business including rules for your website, procurement biases in government agencies or internet taxation. You have made various technology decisions for yourself and have invested a great deal of time and money in those technologies to gain expertise and command premium dollars. Politicians are lobbied by big players to enact policies to advance their specific business objectives most often at the expense of your interests. Their size and incumbency lead to policies of stagnation and protectionism that are generally antithetical to entrepreneurship. If politicians create policies that would create a bias against those technologies you would potentially lose some of that hard earned competitive advantage. Very seldom is it a technical decision to do something sweeping but is, instead, more often a political one.
Jonathan is making a few stops here in Michigan to talk about these issues and how they affect you as a businessman or technology professional. Topics of discussion include:
- Examples of legislation from Michigan and elsewhere that could stifle the potential of your business
- Technology preferences that could devalue your investment in expertise.
- Opportunities to become more involved at the right time for maximum impact.
You probably have followed some of this stuff in the news so you might have questions about it as well such as the implications for the ISO vote to accept OOXML as a document standard the role small businesses played in making that happen.
Please join us for a dynamic and informative session about a part of your business and career that often gets overlooked.