So Not Sarah Barracuda.

Tomorrow, Saturday September 6, 2008 is the Ladies Who Launch Live event, also known as BYOB, Be Your Own Boss. Jam-packed with energy and inspiration plus plenty of practical tools for designing your own destiny, the daylong workshop is a true celebration of creativity and entrepreneurship as a lifestyle.

When Name Generation Isn’t About Naming.

Whether it’s the R-word, job loss, midlife crisis or simply some kind of cosmic tipping point, the Guru is getting inundated with Name Generation projects for small businesses.

Normally, name generation centers on coming up with a new brand name, tagline, descriptor and sometimes promise statements, triggers or testworthy concepts for products, services and websites. In the past year, however, probably 60% of my projects have actually been about what my friend Claire calls woo-woo. That is, self-discovery, transformation and ultimately ‘getting’ who you are as a businessperson and your place in the competitive landscape.  The naming process itself, which forces a deeper dive into everything from product to sales to legal to marketing, is provoking more realistic strategies for building businesses. The ones I’ve seen — and helped guide as provocateur — are likely to have a better chance of surviving and thriving.

Planning for the future has always been a significant part of the name generation process:

How scale-able is the name?
Will the name stay relevant? (Hello, dotcom era)
Will the name allow you to migrate into new categories as the marketplace evolves?
And these days, how do you avoid being the plastic bag of the future?

But what’s happening here is more akin to: Does this name fit who I am? Who I want to be 5 years from now? A sizeable portion of these clients are seeing the future via potential names and saying: No way. I don’t want to be perceived in that light. I don’t want to try to squeeze into that slot. Or simply: That’s not me.

This afternoon, one of my all-time favorite client teams called me and rejected all of the names and taglines I presented yesterday.

I was thrilled.

This is because, by wholeheartedly engaging in the process, they learned exactly what they did not want to do or be as a business. They grappled with each of the platforms and names. Some were spot on strategically. Some were spot on creatively. Some were spot on for where they thought they wanted to be when we launched the project.

The good news: The new brand name and strategy they came up with is inspired.  It’s as tongue-in-chic and kicky as they are. Thankfully, they happen to be risk-takers with a history of significant success and the guts to pull this off with panache.

I’m psyched.  I love to watch woo-woo at work.

Live From LA! It’s Ladies Who Launch.

The only thing to do after a Friday night of Sex and The City is to continue the femme fun. So on Saturday morning, I headed out to the Ladies Who Launch Live event featuring a powerhouse of panelists including:

Jane Wurwand: Founder of Dermalogica
Paige Adams-Geller: Founder of Paige Premium Denim
Daryn Kagan: Founder of darynkagan.com and former CNN News Anchor
Heather Stephenson: Co-Founder of idealbite.com
Patricia Handschiegel: Founder and West Coast Bureau Chief of Stylediary.net
Amy Swift: Ladies Who Launch Editor-in-Chief and Los Angeles Leader

I’m going to let you explore the site and discover this phenomenon yourself. Over the years, I’ve been involved in countless women’s groups — and even founded a couple. Given my quirky alone personality, groups of any kind are seldom my cup of white pear tea. Then I discovered Ladies Who Launch, a group devoted to creativity and entrepreneurship as a lifestyle.  I signed up for the Palo Alto Incubator, under the leadership of Hazel Grace Dircksen, whose social media smarts and creative intelligence guided us through the four weeks of intensive ideation, visualization and inspiration. As a longtime focus group moderator and Idea Generation Facilitator, few of the Incubator’s methodologies were new to me.  But what was new was the wellspring of support, shared brilliance and confidence boosting flowing through every session. I had been desperately seeking fresh perspective on my business. I got it in droves from a wildly diverse group of positive, powerful women who are way more than business cards stashed in my pocket at some random conference.