Category Archives: Strategy

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The Cost of No Change

We have all experienced a situation where a potential client refused to purchase our product or service because they were happy with the status quo and afraid of change. Basically, their fear of change outweighed any concerns and frustrations that they were experiencing with their current way of doing business.

Until we are able to convince the client that what we offer can add more value than pain, we will typically have a hard time selling anything.

I ran into a great example of this about five years ago when I bought a Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad.

I had been using my iPad for doing a lot of writing while traveling on business. The iPad was light, very convenient to pack and perfect for doing some simple document editing or article writing. When I bought the iPad, one of the sales people was trying to upsell and get me to buy a wireless keyboard. At that point I saw this as simply an upsell attempt. I had not experienced any of the pain of trying to scroll and type on a small screen.

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Why Business Dynasties Fail and How to Avoid It

What causes a highly successful business, that outperforms the stock market by 6.9 times for over a decade, to all of a sudden become irrelevant and fail?

Jim Collins’ book, “How the Mighty Fall” takes a detailed look at companies that were great companies as defined by Collins’ previous book “Good to Great” but fell to irrelevance. Collins defines a great company as one that had to significantly outperform the market for at least 15 years in a row. On average, the companies that Collins studied as great companies outperformed the general stock market by at least 6.9 times.

. . . And then, they failed!

There were quite a list of companies that were studied for this book but some of the more dramatic failures include:

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Exponential Organizations

Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it)

This week’s book review is Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and  Yuri van Geest.

According to the authors, “An Exponential Organization is one whose impact (or output) is disproportionally large—at least 10x larger—compared to its peers because of the use of new organizational techniques that leverage accelerating technologies.” An exponential organization can be characterized by an MTP – Massive Transformational Purpose (a strong Vision) and at least 4 of the following 10 attributes that are leveraged to achieve the exponential growth:

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WARNING: What Fuels Your Business May Be Killing It!

12 Steps to Business Transformation – Step 9

Over the last eight weeks, I introduced my Ebook 12 Steps to Business Transformation and I defined the first 8 of the 12 transformational steps. This week we are going to talk about step 9.

Step 9 in my new Ebook “12 Steps to Business Transformation” is very simple yet many businesses fail to complete it! Step 9 is where you take the Vision, Mission, Values, Strategies and Goals and feed them into the Operations Engine. Essentially, you are providing the “fuel” to power your Operations Engine and substandard or contaminated “fuel” can kill your business!