Tag Archives: strategy

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How To Save $30,000 a Month Using OneNote

Staying organized and focused in today’s fast paced world is a basic requirement for any business leader. However, differentiating yourself and your business requires a whole new level of organization!

A differentiated leader must have instant access to all of their past and current business notes, data, ideas, and plans. All of this information must be organized and indexed electronically in a manner that allows easy access from anywhere, at anytime, using any platform. This is not a simple product but a system that contains two distinct elements:

  1. A cloud based software tool (the subject of this blog post)
  2. A systematic approach to organization for an effective business leader (the subject of next week’s post!)

Gone are the days of taking notes in a paper notebook!

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Are You Being Killed By Your Business Plan?

If your business plan was written more than one year ago, chances are it is out of date and not in tune with the current marketplace.

The classic business plans in the past relied on 5 year and 10 year horizons that gave the organization a vision and a direction to dominate in their market. But today, the marketplace is changing so quickly that any long-term business plan is a waste of time and, if you follow it, will probably result in your business failing.

Motorola and the Iridium Business Plan

In the late 1980’s Motorola launched an initiative they called Iridium. This was an ambitious 12 year program to launch 66 satellites that would provide global satellite phone coverage. They came up with this business plan because they saw that cell phone technology was expensive for the users and for the companies providing infrastructure.

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Why You Need to Eliminate Your Single Point of Failure

A single point of failure, SPoF, in your business can literally devastate your business overnight yet many business leaders spend little or no time at all protecting their business against these risks!

In 1995, a rogue trader brought down Barings Bank through fraudulent, unauthorized, speculative trading. The bank, which had been established in 1762, had a single point of failure and did not have controls in place to protect itself. It’s SPoF destroyed it!

Similarly, uncontrolled trading of oil futures has crippled more than one oil company in recent years. Other businesses have been bankrupted due to manufacturing shutdowns caused by natural disasters, social uprisings, political unrest, wars, etc.

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Differentiate or Die!

If you do not differentiate your business from your competitors, you are just another commodity! Being a commodity means that your products are no better than anyone else’s. This drives down your prices, erases profits, and eventually kills your business.

I wrote about what causes commoditization and how to avoid it in a post called Why Does Your Business Exist and Why Should We Care.

In this post Apple entered the MP3 market as a late comer. They were not the “first mover” and the market space already had a large number of competitors who competed on price. The market space was already commoditized.

Apple knew this but they understood that they could still dominate the space by clearly differentiating themselves from their competitors. They identified their key differentiators, measured themselves against their competitors, and realized that they were head and shoulders above the others. They entered the market and still dominate it today!