Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Most of the time, if you ask someone about their agenda, it turns out that it involves doing what’s on someone else’s agenda.

I need to do this for my boss, this for my husband, that for the PTSA and this other thing for the kids. As soon as you turn over your agenda to others, you’re giving up one of the biggest opportunities you have to contribute. Setting an agenda is often as important as checking the boxes.

Obviously, you can’t be part of any system without engaging with other people and their agendas.

But perhaps we’ve absorbed that habit so completely that we’ve ceded all responsibility and in fact don’t even have an agenda any longer…

Eclipse Aerospace says it will restart production of one of the most controversial general aviation airplanes in history. The six-seat jet that was originally designed to form the backbone of an air taxi fleet whisking passengers around the country. With new owners, the new Eclipse 550 is expected to be flying again sometime in 2013 after the company was purchased for pennies on the dollar.

A decade ago the Eclipse 500 was still a year away from its first flight, but had already been responsible for the creation of an entirely new type of airplane, the very light jet. Less than seven years later, and more than $1 billion from a who’s who of investors including Bill Gates, the company had delivered 259 airplanes and was headed for bankruptcy.

The new Eclipse 550 was rescued from the ashes by a group of investors made up mostly of owners of the existing airplanes. The new company then received a boost thanks in large part to a major investment from Sikorsky Aircraft. The helicopter maker stepped with an investment and its global resources and expertise to help bring back the very light jet.

The original Eclipse company was founded by former Microsoft executive Vern Raburn. Raburn’s grand idea was to build a small, relatively inexpensive jet. Because of the low purchase cost and low operating costs, Raburn believed a network of air taxi services could use the Eclipse jet to fly passengers to and from the thousands of small airports around the country rather than using the airlines. And he believed he could do it for not much more than business class airfare.

There was a lot of hype surrounding the Eclipse 500. But from the beginning there were also the skeptics. Raburn said the jet would cost less than a million dollars, few in the industry believed such a price was possible. Eclipse did receive more than 2,500 orders for the jet, but endless delays and problems with development eventually stacked up to the point where the company had run out of money and the target of selling a few thousand a year was a long ways off.

The newly named 550 jet from Eclipse Aerospace, the name of the company built from the owners group, will be an improved version of the original jet. With a maximum of four passenger seats and two crew seats, the 550 can cruise at over 425 miles per hour (370 knots) with a max range of nearly 1,400 miles (though that is with just four people on board).

Sikorsky aircraft says the new Eclipse 550 will incorporate the interesting ‘friction stir welding‘ technique that was used to build the original jet. Though much of the work will be done by PZL Mielec, a Sikorsky subsidiary based in Poland.

Eclipse Aerospace hopes to be flying the new jet in 2013 and believes it can sell 50-100 of the aircraft per year over the following decade. There is no word on the revival of the air taxi concept, but another Sikorsky subsidiary, a charter company that uses Sikorsky’s S-76 helicopter, had already announced plans to incorporate the Eclipse 550 into its existing charter fleet.

Photo: Eclipse Aerospace

A friend was waiting to hear about the results of a job interview. He hadn’t heard in a while and he asked me, “how long before I should start worrying?”

Of course, the answer is, “you should never start worrying.”

Worrying is not a useful output. Worrying doesn’t change outcomes. Worrying ruins your day. Worrying distracts you from the work at hand. You may have fooled yourself into thinking that it’s useful or unavoidable, but it’s not. Now you’ve got one more thing to worry about.

Sony Corporation has acquired Ericsson’s stake in mobile phone joint venture Sony Ericsson.

The deal will place Ericsson’s 50% stake in the joint venture under Sony’s control. Sony will also acquire five wireless technology “patent families.” The two companies have also entered into a cross-licensing agreement for their intellectual property.

As part of the transaction, Ericsson will receive a €1.05 billion cash payment from Sony. That values the deal at $1.47 billion at current market prices.

“This acquisition makes sense for Sony and Ericsson, and it will make the difference for consumers, who want to connect with content wherever they are, whenever they want,” Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer said in a statement sent to Mashable.

Sony says that acquiring all of Sony Ericsson will enhance its “four-screen strategy” — televisions, laptops, tablets and mobile phones. The company intends to not only sell devices in all four categories, but sell content there as well through the PlayStation Network and the Sony Entertainment Network. Sony also has a large presence in film as well, thanks to Sony Pictures.

Sony and Ericsson started their joint venture in 2001 in an effort to turn their unprofitable mobile handset divisions around. The company has focused on Android devices in recent years with the Xperia Arc and the Xperia Play, best known as the “PlayStation Phone.”

As creators (or marketers), our role is to tell a story. Quite often, we make the “hero” of the story the focus of our time and our attention. If our customer is the hero, we talk about him or her. If we make our company the hero, we try to personify that experience that makes it worth it. If we write about ourselves, that’s probably the easiest kind of hero to write about.

What we miss, most times, is the importance of setting.

The Setting For Your Story

Spider-man swings from building to building in New York City. Can you imagine what it would be like to fire those web shooters and try to swing around in Billings, Montana? Hint: there aren’t enough skyscrapers to make it easy for Spidey to chase after the bad guys. Tarzan either gets to hang out in the jungle or the big city, depending on the telling of the story. He rarely hangs out in Pittsfield, Maine. Settings, as it turns out, are every bit as important to what we feel about characters and the plot as anything else in the story.

What does this have to do with marketing and business? Everything. If you think for a moment that your business exists without some kind of setting, even if it’s an online-only virtual business, then you’re missing a very important element to how you tell the story of your business to buyers and other important people. When we listen to a story (or watch it, or retell it), the setting is just as communicated as the characters in the transmission.

What is AJ Bombers if it’s not the local area place to gather and have fun with a side of burgers? Owner Joe Sorge just proved that you can have more than one AJ Bombers and still deliver that destination effect of fun, but he did it by making the setting of the restaurant be every bit as well-considered as the grass-fed beef he chooses for his burgers.

What are the Elements of Your Setting?

In a western movie, you know there will be gunfights. You know there will be wrongs that need righting. You know there will be a setting pairing off law enforcement with someone who feels they are above the law. Those are the promises of a western’s setting.

If I were restoring a classic old hotel in Tallahassee, Florida, and turning it into a destination boutique hotel, with a happening rooftop bar and an award-winning steak restaurant, I would do a few things to make this story sing. One, I would cast the guest as the hero of the story. No one comes to a hotel to meet the owner. It’s not the same as a restaurant. Two, I would tell the story from the front desk, through the lobby, into the elevator, down the halls, and all the way into the room, such that my guests understood what the “promise” of this setting would be.

Beyond the promise, there’s interaction. At AJ Bombers, I interact with their p-nut bombs: metal bomb-shaped containers that travel on rails from the bar to various tables, “bombing” guests with peanuts. The whole thing is absurd, kid-approved, and unique. Settings have interaction.

After promise and interactive elements, there’s the ways in which the setting helps or hinders the hero. In my hotel example, perhaps the setting helps me feel more metropolitan. In the western, the creek might rise and cut off Mother McCluskey’s farm, requiring me to ride out with my men to get her to safety (thus, a hinderance).

But Why Think About All This When Thinking About Business?

Because we humans build this in, whether or not you supply it. What is the iPod? It’s the opportunity to be the salvation DJ at some party, where you bring your tunes to help fix the setting of a sleepy party about to fail. That’s the story we might consider, whether or not we do it consciously. What is the setting for the car you drive? If you’re a Prius owner, you’ve set yourself as a hero who saves the planet and a few bucks at the same time, and so the setting of your vehicle travels through is a world seeking answers about making the world better. As a Camaro driver, my setting is the unintentional race course.

I’m saying that we all fill in the gaps in a setting, whether or not you’ve considered them to be part of your business. If you’re a PR company in Des Moines, how do you tell the story to your buyers such that it incorporates your locale? Maybe you do it by talking about how important community development opportunities are for your business. Maybe if you’re a business technology firm in Tallahassee, you talk about being situated deep in the heart of the growing Midtown area, which is cutting edge and trendy.

What About You?

How do you view setting? What does it mean for your business? How does it impact what you do or say about your company or yourself? And how replaceable is setting to your story?

The race to replace the space shuttle continues as Boeing is wrapping up wind tunnel testing on its crew transportation vehicle. The aerospace giant is building the CST-100, a capsule that will be launched atop an Atlas V rocket with room for up to seven astronauts. Boeing is one of several private companies vying for NASA contracts to transport cargo and passengers to the International Space Station as well as other future missions for the space agency and private companies.

Boeing has been testing a model of the CST-100 at the NASA Ames Research Center in California since the middle of September. The 12 inch diameter aluminum wind tunnel model is about 1/14 scale and is heavily instrumented to provide detailed data for engineers during the high speed wind tunnel testing.

The model is being positioned in several different attitudes to simulate the aerodynamics that could be experienced during an aborted landing according to Boeing. The engineers want to ensure the design is structurally sound and the vehicle can be controlled during various phases of flight.

The real CST-100 capsule is expected to be tested with the Atlas V rocket beginning in 2015.

Boeing is one of several companies chosen by NASA for the commercial crew development program. Space Exploration continues work on its Dragon capsule which is expected to perform an unmanned docking with the ISS early next year. Blue Origin which recently suffered a setback when a launch ended with the loss of a spacecraft in an explosion, and Sierra Nevada Corporation are the other companies working on the CCDev program.

More photos after the jump.

The 12×14 inch aluminum wind tunnel model of Boeing’s CST-100.

Model of CST-100 mounted inside the wind tunnel at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

Boeing’s CST-100 space vehicle.

Images: Boeing

James L. McQuivey, Ph.D. is a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research serving Consumer Product Strategy professionals. Follow him on Twitter at @jmcquivey.

Growing up in the ’70s, I was the world’s biggest fan of The Bionic Man. Every Sunday night at 7 p.m. you could find me glued to our Trinitron TV to watch Steve Austin battle every villain from Bionic Sasquatch to the evil Dr. Dolenz. The appeal of the show was simple: Amplified by technology, the Bionic Man is better, stronger, and faster than his enemies.

It turns out to be a morality tale for our own day. But you are not the bionic man in the drama I’m unfolding — you are his target. Because while you were carefully planning your business strategy, hundreds — if not thousands — of individuals and competitors have been exploiting technology to make themselves better, stronger, and faster than you.

We call these people digital disruptors. And they’re coming right for you.

No matter what industry you are in, you are their target. Where you could once dismiss digital disruption as the sole province of the music or other media industries where it destroyed billions in value, digital disruption has now expanded. These disruptors employ technologies — and the platforms they enable — to build better products than you can, establish a stronger customer relationship than you have, and deliver it all to market faster than you ever thought possible.

Oh, and it doesn’t cost anywhere close to six million dollars for them to get started. I offer Lose It! as one of many case studies worth considering. Targeting the weight loss and fitness business — one of the most analog industries on the planet — Lose It! is disrupting the more than $40 billion Americans spend on weight loss each year. It’s a costly industry to enter — think of Jenny Craig’s marketing budget alone, then add its hundreds of physical locations, prepared meals, and all the infrastructure to support the entire enterprise. So while franchises like The Biggest Loser have succeeded in entering this business recently, they have done so at great cost.

Meanwhile, a single app that helps dieters keep track of the calories they consume on their smartphones has gone from 0 to 7 million downloads in just a few years. FitNow, the company behind the app, pulled this off with four employees, establishing an unheard of customer-per-employee metric of 1.75 million.

This is digital disruption at its finest: better, stronger, faster. The app got to market quickly, partly because as a digital disruptor, FitNow could afford to launch something that didn’t try to solve all the problems in the weight-loss world. As Charles Teague, CEO, told me recently, “Let’s not pretend that we know the endgame here. Let’s do the least amount of features to know if it will work. Then improve it if people use it.” And improve it they have, adding fitness tracking and more recently a robust social community of like-minded dieters.

Because it sounds so easy, a CEO I shared this with asked me why, if digital is so quick and dirty, his company’s website redesign was over time and over budget. I told him it was precisely because he staffed up his business under assumptions about design and functionality that were true in 2005 but are no longer the case. Digital disruption has even disrupted the digital businesses that preceded them.

While digital disruptors are better, stronger, and faster, they are not untouchable. Their ease of entry comes from the fact that traditional barriers have fallen to zero. That means your direct cost to emulate their practices can also be low.

That’s why I recommend you steal the digital disruptor’s handbook. Use the iPad, the Kinect, and whatever platform is next to build a digital bridge to your customers. Like with Lose It!, your bridge must engage customers more often than your current product can, packaging and delivering benefits that you didn’t realize were part of your consumer contract because before now, they weren’t. You have to change your understanding of your product so you can then change your customer’s understanding of it as well. This will require better thinking than you currently do – I previously explained how digital disruptors take advantage of a type of thinking called “innovating the adjacent possible.” It’s crucial to generating more ideas more quickly so that you can find the nearby opportunities that will succeed while quickly culling those that will fail.

There’s more to do, but before you can even begin, you have to know: Are you ready to do this? Does your company have the energy, skills, and policies to turn into a disruptor or are you more likely to be displaced by the digital disruptor nearest you?

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Nikada