Maybe it’s Steve Jobs’ death. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m in the middle of some issues at Duquesne. Or maybe it’s because I just can’t seem to find the time to finish my book.

Je ne c’est pas. But one thing I can say for sure is that I just can’t seem to come up with one overriding topic for this week’s column.

So, I’ll instead give you three columns. These are ideas that perhaps someone under the age of thirty-five would distribute via Twitter, and over a number of days. But these are concepts that rattle around in my head and so might be of value to my fellow entrepreneurs.

Thought number one.

It seems to me that “winning” in business is not a helluva lot unlike winning a football game.

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Most big shots have one.

All bureaucrats crave one.

In my opinion, they are both a blessing and a curse.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about “Blockers.” Those people that stand between you and the individual you need to get to in order to “advance commerce.”

Usually they are salty, “seasoned” women. They have been performing their role for at least a decade. I hate to sound like a chauvinist, but most of the Blockers that I have met along the way are of the female persuasion.

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One of the “newest” buzz terms --- a buzz term I hear a lot lately --- is “Scalability.”

Simply, scalability means, “Can we ‘up-size’ this product, service, business as we grow?”

If you walk the halls of any MBA school, you’ll hear the phrase, “Yeah, but does it scale?” Or, “Let’s see what happens when we scale it up.”

It’s an important question. Let me give you an example.

Perhaps two decades ago, I was involved in the sale and implementation of an MRP (Manufacturing Resources Planning) system at the H.J. Heinz Company here in Pittsburgh.

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If you own a business in Pennsylvania you’ve probably, and recently, received one or more letters from the state demanding that you now reimburse them for various past “financial obligations.”

For example, just this week, I received a letter from a Harrisburg law firm telling me that a company I once owned must now remit to them the sum of $357.50.

It turns out that this amount represents not only the interest, but also an additional 25% “collection fee” (which goes to the aforementioned law firm) on top of the principal amount.

The original amount of my “obligation” (again, I have no way of even knowing if an obligation ever existed!) was all of one-hundred-seventy-one dollars. Apparently, it took them ten years to find this obligation --- as the $171.00 bill relates to a phantom Capital Stock and Franchise Tax from 1999.

I’ll save you the math --- this is less than half of what they are asking me to now pay. (The remaining $115.00 is what they call the “projected interest.”)

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It wasn’t until the year 2000 that I began investing in the stock market.

Prior to 2000, my attention was riveted on my business (whatever that business may have been) and nothing else.

Take politics for example. People would ask me, “Are you going to the political fundraiser for so-and-so?” My reply would be, “Who is so-and-so?” If I cared little about the stock market, I cared even less about investing in politicians.

In fact, I was so focused on my business that I didn’t even know who was running for political office.

I have always put all of the pennies earned by my business right back into the business. This is because I control my business. No one has any control over the stock market. To put my money anywhere else would have been foolish.

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I’ve said this many times on my radio show: If I ever choose a specific brand of religion to follow, the odds are very high that that religion will be Taoism. Why Taoism?

That’s easy. I choose Taoism because it is the closest philosophy to Mother Nature. And I personally believe that nature is perfection.

As I understand it, a Taoist believes that, and just as it is in nature, man is born, then goes through a rapid growth phase (this is when man is strongest and most energetic), begins to plateau, and then declines until death.

Upon death, the organism decays; ultimately becoming fertilizer for the next generation.

A perfect circle. No entrances, no exits. Beginning and end are indistinguishable.

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First and foremost, you need a niche. Those of you that regularly read my columns probably get very tired of hearing this.

But I say it so frequently because it is without question the most important thing that you can do to ensure your success.

Niches are critical. If you can find one where there is no competition, you’ll have a pretty good chance of succeeding. But you’ve got to find a business idea where competition is non-existent.

Which means that you have to have the only product or service of that type.

Think of the drug addict. (This example may make you squeamish, but I’ve never found a better way to illustrate the concept of an inelastic price curve than by talking about junkies.)

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In professional baseball, if your batting average is .250 you probably make somewhere between $2 - $4 million a year with the probability being you’ll stick in the League (so long as you’re a decent defender and runner) for a solid eight to ten years.

In other words, and by getting a hit one in four times, you’re doin’ OK.

But I’m not so sure that one out of four is all that wonderful when it comes to city government and taking care of the City of Pittsburgh’s economic woes.

Let me explain.

First Plate Appearance – The City of Pittsburgh, and back in the fall of 2010, hosted a conference (organized by the Marcellus Shale Coalition) that dealt with the natural gas industry. This conference was well attended, and from what I understand, it generated millions and millions of dollars in economic activity for: western Pennsylvania; all of the businesses involved with gas exploration in western Pennsylvania; and of course; the City of Pittsburgh.

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Some years ago (actually, too many years to even contemplate) I was in a position to learn the following story.

It’s a story of a sports team that was operating on a shoestring budget and yet had a multi-million dollar appetite.

Working for this organization was a young intern. He couldn’t have been much more than 19 years old. He had never before worked professionally and yet he was the entire “marketing department.” Let’s call him “Al.”

“Mr. Big” in this organization was doing what so many business owners do; he was using Al to do things that were way beyond his ken, and yet paying him the peanut-sized salary that interns traditionally earn.

Al wanted to succeed like no one I had ever seen before. Today, some three decades later, he is the owner of a very successful business. This doesn’t surprise me.

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I love to read stats. This probably started when I was a young man, trading my baseball cards. There was a time when I could tell you the batting average, number of RBIs, and number of runs scored for virtually every player in the National Baseball League.

These days, I’m more apt to go on-line and read demographic information. There is so much that can be deduced and inferred from raw data.

One of the data points that I picked up recently was the almost startling fact that approximately 45% of all Americans receive some form of government largesse. Handouts.

Things like food stamps. WIC cards. Free cell phones. Subsidized housing. And on and on and on.

How we got here, I’m not sure. It’s kind of like that frog that became dinner simply because he didn’t notice the water heating up gradually. It just happened over time. And benefits, once dispensed, are mighty, mighty hard to put back in the bottle.

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(With Apologies to Phil Musick*)

I’ve never written one of these columns, but in cleaning out my notes the other day, I realized I had many, many thoughts; none of which are expandable enough to create a full-fledged column.

Hence, this shortcut.

Sing along with me now.

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I was having lunch the other day with a dear friend who also happens to be a business owner.

I’m not sure if he’d appreciate me using his name, but I can tell you that he owns businesses throughout the country, about two dozen in all. I would guess that each of these businesses produces annual revenues in excess of $5 million.

We probably don’t get together as often as we should, but when we do it typically doesn’t take long for us to begin comparing notes; particularly vis-à-vis how we run our businesses.

At some point during our meal, a young man came up to me and extended his hand. I said to my friend (for sake of ease, I’ll just call him “Joe”), “Joe, I’d like you to meet (I’ll call the other guy “Charlie”) Charlie. Charlie is a young entrepreneur.”

At that point, Charlie began telling us about his newest start-up. Their offices happened to be right across the street from the restaurant, and it didn’t take him but a minute to launch into a monologue about the “venture dollars” they were in process of raising.

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The call was on my voicemail. “Ron, it’s me, Richard … I’m playing hooky today. I’m right now headed home to watch the USA/France soccer match.”

(It was 10:00 a.m. on a Wednesday. Richard is a life-long friend of mine who has a sales territory somewhere in Pennsylvania.)

He went on, “I’m just gonna sit back, open a beer, and kiss off the day.”

I thought to myself, “Can there be anything I would be less interested in doing on a beautiful summer Wednesday than sitting in front of a television watching soccer?”

I reminded myself of the fact that Richard has spent his whole life ‘working for the man’. Thus he has no idea of what he’s saying --- he has no idea as to what else might be out there.

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On my talk radio show the other day, I was speaking with the redoubtable Regis McKenna. To readers who do not immediately recognize this name, Rege is first and foremost, considered the number-one marketing and entrepreneurship consultant in Silicon Valley.

Rege’s fingerprints are all over such companies as Apple (his company actually designed the world-famous logo); Intel; Genentech (the people who gave us designer genes); and Microsoft.

Rege can pick up the phone and have a meeting with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Andy Grove, and/or Craig Venter that same day. He’s that highly regarded.

Regis grew up in Pittsburgh. Brookline, to be exact. His parents in fact still live here. But just about the time Alan Shepard took the U.S.’s first sub-orbital rocket ride, Rege, along with fellow Pittsburgher Bill Campbell (they apparently played high school football against each other) left western Pennsylvania to see what was going on in semi-conductors in the region that was to become Silicon Valley.

Regis has more than once regaled my listeners with stories of bucolic orange groves and wineries growing in places where today stand glass and steel buildings that house hundreds of thousands of Silicon Valley-based knowledge workers.

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The caller was angry. Very angry.

“You (he was referring to me, Ron Morris – primary host of The American Entrepreneur Radio Show [TAE]) are the son-of-a-(blank) that prevented me from getting a job for more than five years.”

Hell of an opening line.

“Can you put a little meat on that bone for me,” I asked, “I don’t even think I know you?”

He went on to say that while he didn’t know me, he did know my “type.” I was in fact the “type” who was (and this is a direct quote) “born with a sliver spoon in (my) mouth, and a guy who climbed the success ladder and then pulled it up behind him so that no one else could follow.”

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