Articles in the Business Category
Business, Business Skills, Guest Posts, Marketing »
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Business, Business Skills, Guest Posts, Leadership »
Business, Business Skills, Effectiveness, Marketing »
Business, Business Skills, Career, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing »
Book Nuggets, Business, Business Skills, Effectiveness »
Business, Business Skills, Effectiveness »
“A strategy delineates a territory in which a company seeks to be unique.” — Michael Porter
Strategy guides your tactics. One of the most effective tools I’ve used for designing a strategy is a Strategy Diamond, which outlines the five key components of your strategy: arenas, vehicles, differentiation, staging, and economic value.
Business, Business Skills, Marketing »
Book Nuggets, Business, Business Skills »
“Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.” — Walt Disney
Whether you are a “one-man band” or a large organization, your customers are why you are in business. By having clarity on the customer segments, the customer needs, and the potential profitability of each segment, you can choose more effective segments to serve for a more sustainable business.
Book Nuggets, Business, Business Skills, Leadership »
“There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction.” — Winston Churchill
To predict explosive change before it occurs, you need to be able to distinguish a “spider” from a “starfish.” A starfish can replicate and spread a fluid set of ideas, beliefs, values, and norms. This is the hidden power behind things like Wikipedia, craigslist, Skype, and even the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Business, Business Skills, Effectiveness, Innovation »
What are the key stages in an innovation life cycle? What is the end-to-end value chain for bringing innovation to market? In “Smart Spenders, the Global Innovation 1000,” an article in strategy+business magazine, Barry Jaruzelski, Kevin Dehoff, and Rakesh Bordia write about the four key stages of innovation that the 94 high-leverage innovators have in common.
Business, Business Skills, Creativity, Effectiveness »
I’m a fan of learning from the best. What are the high-leverage strategies that the leaders in innovation use? In “Smart Spenders, the Global Innovation 1000,” an article in strategy+business magazine, Barry Jaruzelski, Kevin Dehoff, and Rakesh Bordia write about the successful strategies that the 94 high-leverage innovators use.
Book Nuggets, Business, Business Skills, Effectiveness, Leadership, Management »
“What do you want to achieve or avoid? The answers to this question are objectives. How will you go about achieving your desire results? The answer to this you can call strategy.” — By William E Rothschild
How do you create effective objectives? Effective objectives are not straightjackets. Instead, effective objectives are more like flight plans. They set directions and guide the resources and energies.
In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter F. Drucker writes about creating and setting effective objectives.
Key …
Book Nuggets, Business, Business Skills, Effectiveness, Innovation, Leadership, Management »
What is your business? What will it be? What should it be? These are powerful questions to ask.
In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter F. Drucker writes about asking what your business is, will be, and should be to avoid spending your energy defending yesterday and instead, spend your energy exploiting today and the future.
Key Take Aways Here are my key take aways:
Ask what your business should be.
Systematically abandon what no longer adds value. …
Book Nuggets, Business, Business Skills, Effectiveness, Innovation »
What leads to the downfall of established companies? In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter F. Drucker writes about five bad Entrepreneurial habits that let small companies leapfrog over the big companies.
The Five Bad Entrepreneurial Habits
According to Drucker, the five bad habits are:
NIH (Not Invented Here)
“Cream” a market.
The belief in “quality.”
The illusion of the “premium” price.
Maximize rather than optimize.
The Downfall of Established Companies
Drucker writes how the bad habits let small companies use Entrepreneurial judo:
There are in particular five fairly common …
Book Nuggets, Business, Business Skills, Effectiveness, Learning, Personal-Development »
Working on your business, is working on your life. Life if what business is about and your business should create more life for everyone. In The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, Michael E. Gerber writes about how going to work on your business, is going to work on your life.
Going to Work on the Business, is Going to Work on Your Life
Gerber writes that working on your business development is a metaphor for working on your life:
“On a more practical level, …
Book Nuggets, Business, Effectiveness, Innovation »
According to Michael E. Gerber, Innovation, Quantification, and Orchestration are the backbone of every extraordinary business. They are the essence of your Business Development process. In The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, Gerber explains how Innovation, Quantification, and Orchestration are key to your business development process.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:
Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration are the keys to your business. Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration are the backbone of business development.
Innovate in how you do things. Innovate in how your business …
Book Nuggets, Business, Business Skills, Communication, Effectiveness, Innovation, Interpersonal-Skills »
How do you make an idea stick? Mark Twain noted, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." Meanwhile, people with important ideas, struggle to make their ideas stick. In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip Heath and Dan Heath write about six principles to make your ideas stick and help you get your point across.
Key Take Aways Here are my key take aways:
Be a master of exclusion. Less is more. Ruthlessly prioritize …

