Category Archives: Tools and Tips

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40 Things Your B2B Customers Value Most

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the 30 Things Your Customers Care About Most. I summarized a study that was published in the August 2018 issue of Rotman Magazine where the authors presented “The Elements of Value” model for consumers and for business to business.

That post described the Business to Consumer model while this post summarizes the Business to Business Elements.

The B2B Value Pyramid

According to the authors and their research, there are 40 fundamental building blocks of value in the B2B model. These 40 elements organize nicely into a four level Maslow Hierarchy of Needs pyramid. They are shown in the diagram below and, for the most part, the model is quite easy to follow.

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Tripping Over the Truth

How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine's Most Entrenched Paradigms

The book review for this week is Tripping Over the Truth by Travis Christofferson

Christofferson takes the reader through the history of the diagnosis and treatment of cancer over the last few hundred years. Along this journey, science and doctors have made some dramatic discoveries and some dramatic errors in the detection, prevention and treatment of cancer. Essentially, the author is laying the scientific groundwork to support the metabolic theory of cancer.

The metabolic theory of cancer is, in simple terms, that cancer is caused when a cell is damaged so that the cell no longer generates its energy through an oxidative process but rather through a process that involves the fermentation of sugar. This means that limiting the amount of sugar that a cancer cell has access to would logically dramatically impact the ability that the cancer cell has to function and proliferate.

My takeaway from this book is that people need to live healthy lifestyles which include exercise and a healthy, carbohydrate limited diet. People with cancer need to do their own research and look at supplementing (NOT replacing) the doctor recommended treatments with doctor supervised therapies like; calorie restricted ketogenic diets (R-KD) and hypobaric oxygen treatments.

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Ideas and Stuff Podcast!

Thinking Business

This week’s book summary is a podcast link. I was recently featured on the “Ideas and Stuff” podcast episode 50! We covered a lot of ground in about 30 minutes, including:

  • Vision, Mission, Values
  • BHAG
  • Strategy
  • Goals
  • Managing risk
  • Business failure
  • 15 Minute Business Blueprint
  • Mastermind Groups

Check it out here and let me know what you think in the comments below!

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Are You Struggling To Get A Grasp On Your Project?

I will start this post with a warning . . . this article focuses on project management!

Now that I have given you “fair warning,” how many project or portfolio managers struggle to get a grasp on the key indicators for their projects? These indicators give advance warning of pending problems or a heads up on an opportunity that you don’t want to miss.

There is so much information coming from so many directions it can be confusing and overwhelming. Yet we all know that if we don’t understand where our projects are at, it is next to impossible to finish them successfully!

While I was a business executive running a large engineering company, I sat through countless project reviews in many different countries all over the world. Through the experience I gained in these reviews, I was able to develop a one-page  summary that succinctly shows the status of a project.

For the purposes of this post, I will call it the Financial Update Tool. However, this report goes so much deeper than a financial report. The finances can be a gateway into the rest of the project so this report must be coupled with “common project sense” to drill down and ask some tough operational questions. See this post for more details on great questions for your projects.

So what does the Financial Update Tool look like?

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Is Your Business More Like a Lamborghini or a Lada?

A Lada may get you from point A to point B (if you are lucky), but a Lamborghini is a highly tuned engineering marvel! Not only will it get you from point A to point B, it will do it quickly, efficiently, and in style! It is a thing of beauty!

Just like a Lamborghini, a finely tuned, high performance business is a beautiful thing!

Understanding what to monitor in your business to ensure that it is finely tuned and highly performing is not an easy task. As you can imagine, there are as many opinions on the definition of high performance as there are businesses. And for good reason.