A summary of things you should know about Strategy Rules according to David Yoffie: Introduction In this episode David Yoffie takes a deep dive into his book, Strategy Rules, whereRead More
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]]>In this episode David Yoffie takes a deep dive into his book, Strategy Rules, where he unveils 5 five timeless lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs.
In their book Yoffie and his co-author, Michael Cusumano, share the successes, failures, commonalities, and differences of world famous leaders like Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs. The goal of the book is to teach you 5 new strategic rules for doing business, the best practices that come with high-tech entrepreneurship, and how to take your leadership to the next level.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who own or plan on owning a high-tech company and want to learn strategy techniques from the best leaders in the business.
The thing that makes this book different from others is most people write biographies on these particular individuals or they write histories of the companies. There is no book, that I am aware of, that dives deep into looking at three CEO’s, comparing and contrasting them, and trying to understand what they were able to do in similar ways that produced such extraordinary performance. We think that by looking across companies and across great leaders you get a deeper insight. It’s not about the individual personality traits; it’s about the ways they think and the ways they deliver performance.
Like many books we have an introduction and concluding chapter which gives you the high level overview of everything you might want to know. Then we go into and talk about each of the five rules in great depth. For each rule we have a single chapter so you can jump in where needed if you want.
The idea of what we call Look Forward Reason Back is the critical idea that ultimately determines what makes a great strategist. It’s that ability to look ahead, to have a vision, and then figure out what you need to do today to get to that particular end game. It’s also about anticipating what customers are going to need tomorrow, not what customers are needing today and then figuring out what they capabilities are that you have in your organization today that will deliver those customer needs of tomorrow.
The way we begin the book is by trying to first understand how these individuals were different and how they were similar. At a very basic level they could not be more different as individuals. Bill Gates was the classic nerd but grew up in a wealthy family, Andy Groves was a holocaust survivor and made his way to get a PhD in the United States, and we all know about Steve Jobs. But beyond that these individuals had some incredibly important similarities which we think are important for any entrepreneur who wants to be successful. Number one they were incredibly ambitious not just to make money but to build great companies and to change the world. Number two they worked incredibly hard and they also provoked incredible debates inside the company. Finally, they were all slightly paranoid and never took success for granted even when they were doing extraordinarily well.
All three of these individuals were able to build the most valuable companies in the world and the question is how did they do it and this is where the five rules come in. The five rules are what we call Look Forward, Reason Back, Make Big Bets Without Beating the Company, Build Platforms and Ecosystem not Just Products, Exploit Leverage and Power, and Shape the Organization Around Your Personal Anchor.
The first three deals with strategy and the last two deal with tactics and execution. If you want to be a great strategist you have got to be able to do things at a high-level as well as at a much more micro level and ultimately be able to execute. The idea of Look Forward Reason Back is that you got to be able to think several steps ahead into the future and then think about what you have to do today in order to reach that position.
We then break that down into a number of different activities that a great CEO is going to do if they follow these rules. The first one is that you have to start with some vision of where you want to go. This vision becomes critical in driving the success of all of these organizations which we define in great detail.
The second idea is that you got to be able to think big and make big bold bets that could potentially change the game but you have to do it without beating the company.
The third big idea is that you have to build platforms and ecosystems not just products. This is the notion that ultimately its great platforms that win, not great products that always win. The fourth idea is about the tactics and this is the notion that when you’re an entrepreneur you’ve got to be clever, you’ve got to stay under the radar, and you’ve got to employ tactics.
The last critical idea is the idea of how you execute when you have an organization that’s trying to do all these things. Ultimately this is about the CEO figuring out what they really do that is special, what it is that they have in their own capability set that enables them to do things that give them a comparative advantage to help their organization understand what will be successful. The notion here is that if you are going to be a successful CEO or entrepreneur first you have to know yourself and exactly what you can do well and don’t do well. All of these rules were quite similar across all three CEO’s and helped them start as entrepreneurs and ultimately build three of the most valuable companies in the history of the world.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 04:27
“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” – Andy Grove
“Here’s how it’s going to work. I’m going to teach you electronics, you’re going to teach me retail. Let’s go walk the mall.” – Ron Johnson
I have been a professor at Harvard for 34 years and my co-author, Michael Cusumano, has been a professor at MIT for about 30 years. I have been involved in trying to understand the world of strategy and specifically the world of strategy and technology since the mid 1980’s. I had the fortunate experience of joining the Intel board of directors in 1989 which gave me an opportunity to meet Andy Grove and then Andy introduced me to Billy Gates and Steve Jobs. Today I continue to work broadly in this field and it has been the core of my research for most of my career.
I wanted to try to understand how an entrepreneur could develop into a leader of a great company and also think about what would lead to great performance. Ultimately when you think about companies that have done extraordinary well, the leaders who have done it better than anybody else have been Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs. And all three of them we know their history from beginning to end and know they have done a really great job. This was an opportunity to dive deep into three extraordinary individuals.
Judo Strategy by David Yoffie
Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter
Buy Strategy Rules by David Yoffie and Michael Cusumano on Amazon today
Visit HBS.edu to learn more about David, his book, and his profession
Follow David Yoffie on LinkedIn
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail
Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
Winning the Long Game by Steve Krupp
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Do Less Better according to John R Bell: Introduction In this episode John R Bell takes a deep dive into his book,Read More
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]]>In this episode John R Bell takes a deep dive into his book, Do Less Better, where he explains why sacrifice in the right places cuts through complexity and clears the way to competitive advantage.
In his book Bell provides a tool-kit of road-tested strategies for keeping companies lean, creating cultures of innovation, and knowing when to expand and yet, remain streamlined. The goal of the book is to teach you how to “think smaller,” when everyone around you is firmly entrenched in the “do more” strategy in order to become more agile, adaptable, and resilient than your competitors.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are struggling to outweigh the competitors in their market and need a new yet effective approach to reinvent their current strategy.
It’s certainly not the first book on focus and nor will it be the last but I think the element that separates it from the rest is how people can successfully cut through complexity and achieve focus.
I’ve written it to flow as a beginning to end read and I think that will benefit every reader.
The most important takeaway is the fact that leaders and managers don’t have to keep doing more and more to be affective and successful. Doing less and doing it better is a viable strategy at all levels within the company.
I begin the book by establishing the breadth and depth of complexity, the fact that it’s pervasive. Complexity in business is a cancer that stifles and if you leave it unchecked it can bring a company to its knees so I establish that as the main problem. The other thing is that companies have chosen diversification as the means to grow and these seem to be the ones that suffer the most.
The second chapter I call The Steel and Steal of Strategic Sacrifice. The whole idea here is that the strategy is a steal because good strategies cost no more to develop than bad ones.
None of this happens without leadership so I move to a leadership chapter. It certainly helps when top management buys into the idea of doing less better and if top management does it can become the culture of the company.
From there we go into The Urgency for Action chapter. I suggest that it doesn’t matter whether you’re entrepreneurial or not, success comes from those who think like entrepreneurs. And until the digital age innovation was the way of the entrepreneur. Giant corporations have a habit of gobbling up competitors and dominating markets and in the process many of them have lost their competitive edge. I go through the reason for the complexity; I talk about the strategy being important and leadership leading the way.
Chapter six is for marketers but it will benefit every reader because I reiterate the power of differentiation and I titled this chapter KISS is not a Rock Band. If you want differentiation you have to ask yourself this question. What are you prepared to sacrifice to get it? You have to be prepared to give up a benefit or two or three.
That leads into branding which everyone knows is big business today and my chapter on it is about those who do it well and explains why others have lost their way.
Towards the end of the book I make it clear that there is more to clarity and coherence than cutting back product lines, markets, and projects. I make the point that coherent companies align every function and every aspect of their organization with their capabilities.
The last book is titled Regrets: I’ve had a few. In this chapter I share with the reader some of the regrets and mistakes I’ve made along the way so that you can learn from my mistakes.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 7:35
“20% of the new initiatives deliver 80% of the rewards. Choose carefully and you save money, reduce complexity, and ride the fastest race horses to the future. “- John R Bell
I am a retired CEO of a consumer packaged goods company that was sold to Kraft back in the 90’s. After the sell to Kraft I decided to become a management consultant and I did that until I retired about two years ago. By the time I hung up my hat I’d helped a couple dozen companies including Campbell Soup, Starbucks, and Interbrew. I love to write and still like to play games such as golf and tennis.
Earlier in my career I was faced with the challenge of turning around a near bankrupt company. This company had too many products, too many brands, and too many categories. So by closing or selling the majority of the brands we trimmed that company down to a shadow of its former self. We decided that we were going to be an expert in one category and at the time that happened to be coffee. By focusing on coffee and nothing else we were able to swim out of the raging river of red ink and we called that means to the end the do less better strategy. I describe that as the opposite of doing more with less or even doing more with more and that whole idea stayed with me for the rest of my career. So when I became a consultant I saw a similar pattern of unnecessary complexity in both troubled and successful businesses and I think today business complexity has reached pandemic proportions and there has never been a greater need for simplicity and focus.
The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Buy Do Less Better by John R. Bell on Amazon today
Visit DoLessBetter.ca to learn more about the book and download a free chapter
Follow John R Bell on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
The Road to Reinvention by Josh Linkner
Aligning Strategy and Sales by Frank Cespedes
Invent Reinvent Thrive by Lloyd Shefsky
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]]>A summary of things you should know about How to Solve Problems and Make Brilliant Decisions according to Richard Hall: Introduction In this episode Richard Hall takes a deep diveRead More
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]]>In this episode Richard Hall takes a deep dive into his book, How to Solve Problems and Make Brilliant Decisions, where he shares practical skill and techniques to think better, faster, and more productively.
In his book, Hall teaches you how to shape, train, and inspire your thinking to deliver more effective results. The goal of the book is to help you improve your thinking skills, become more confident in making decisions, and become more effective at problem solving.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who need to improve their decision making skills in order to achieve success at a faster rate than currently able.
This book is very accessible, practical, energetic and optimistic. If you read this book it will save you a lot of time reading a whole lot of other books. I summarized and used some of other ideas and made an accessible primer for anybody who wants to think about thinking.
It’s set out in such a way that the reader can go in and out of it or read it back to front. It is very user and reader friendly.
Look around yourself and see what is going on around you. Listen to people and learn to change your mind. I would like everybody to start thinking about thinking and that is a big step forward.
We know little about the brain but what we do know is that there are two parts of our brain, intuition and rationality. Through the book I have tried to look at the various things we need to have in business. I start the book with a reflection on what I think the most four potent words are in English language which are what do you think. We should all be asking ourselves these four words and it’s not easy to do. The book constantly advices us to slow down and don’t get so stressed because the more stressed you are the less effective you’ll be. I talk about how to think better and give advice for that. The first advice is to not multitask. The brain is not designed to multitask and you need to concentrate on one thing at a time. The second advice is to loosen up, take time and be in a good mood.
The key thing to know about problem solving is the brain is lazy and we worry more about what other people think. I advise people to just sit down, look out of a window and work things out. It’s amazing that when you are stopped and not rushing around your mind suddenly starts working in a way that you wouldn’t believe. Another important thing if you are going to be a good problem solving is to ask questions and listen to what other people have to say.
A second part of the book is about decision making. I used to think making decisions was very easy but it turns out that it is actually difficult because of all the things going on around us. Good decision making is well judged risk taking because some you win and some you lose. But in the end good decision making is based on experience, breaking problems down in to small pieces and giving yourself the most amount of time to make those decisions.
Creativity is another part of the book. The logic of creativity is searching for alternatives and the ability to make connections and I don’t think it’s more complicated than that. It’s not wacky or inexplicable but it’s about a form of thinking which enables people to look at what’s in front of them and say is there another way of doing this. The most important thing about creativity is that you need to be a bit of a rebel. I think one of the joys of good creative thinking is you need to have a sense of humor because if you make people laugh they behave accordingly. In the end if we don’t engage with other people and get them to do the things we want them to do, it won’t work. I have come to the conclusion that the only thing that makes a difference between success and failure is working with other people and getting other people to be on board with what you want them to be on board with. Increasingly we are living in a world which is group driven, not solo driven, and it really matters that people hear what you want them to hear. What matters is not what you said or what you think you said but what they think you said. And unless we crack the understanding of how to get other people to think then we are not going to be successful.
The key thing about the book is for people to make the most of the amazing engine they have in their heads.
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Mike Tyson
I have been around in business for a long time. My background is in marketing, advertising and consulting and I’ve worked with a lot of major companies. I have had a fantastic time and am very enthusiastic about the prospects of the changing world.
I have written a number of books before on presenting career development marketing and they are all very specific in their topics. I began increasingly concerned and aware of the fact that we’ve stopped thinking in the way that we used to and there are a number of reasons for that. And this seemed to be an issue worth looking at. The second thing is that it became increasingly clear to me that we don’t know very much about the mind at all. It seemed to me that if you are going to succeed in business today you need to be thinking about thinking at the top of all things that you do.
Enthusiasms by Bernard Levin
Back To Blood by Tom Wolfe
Buy How to Solve Problems and Make Brilliant Decisions by Richard Hall on Amazon today
Visit ColorfulThinkers.com to learn more about Richard and his book
Connect with Richard Hall on LinkedIn
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Powerhouse by Mike Clayton | The Discomfort Zone by Marcia Reynolds | The Upside of Your Dark Side by Todd Kashdan
Relevant advice and tips: 10 Bad Habits That Successful People Avoid
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Exponential Organizations according to Salim Ismail Introduction In this episode Salim Ismail gives a deep dive of his book, Exponential Organizations whereRead More
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Exponential Organizations according to Salim Ismail
In this episode Salim Ismail gives a deep dive of his book, Exponential Organizations where he shows you how any company, from a startup to a multi-national, can become exponential.
In his book, Ismail unveils years of research learning how organizations can accelerate growth through the use of technology. The goal of the book is to provide you with the knowledge to leverage assets such as big data, communities, algorithms, and new technology to achieve performance ten times better than your competition.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who need a guide for harnessing and strategizing the hyper growth of a company that feeds off of modern technology in the 21st century and beyond.
Because we focus on accelerating technologies and the future we identified an inflection point in how we build businesses that has never noticed before.
You can jump in as needed but I would suggest reading the first two chapters first because it lays the premise and basis of the book.
As we finish the book the core economic basis of these new exponential organizations kind of bubbled up. When you are building and running a business you are worried about money and cost of supply and worried about cost of demand. The internet allowed us to drop our cost of demand exponentially.
We open chapter one basically by saying the world is moving exponentially quicker. As we digitize things we hop onto what we call Moore’s Law and the pace of change moves very, very quickly at an accelerating pace. Where we saw computers move at this pace over the last 50 to 60 years based on Moore’s Law we’re not seeing six, seven or eight technologies hop onto that same curb. The first chapter is to give a hard reality check that the world is moving more quickly than we’ve ever seen it before and we give some specifics on how that works.
The second chapter talks about our organizational structures and the fact that how we organize ourselves is very linear and has been for a long time. All of our businesses have inherited a local and linear characteristic where if you had twice as big of a farm you need twice as many people to farm it. We are seeing today that an information based environment actually accelerates and doesn’t just stay linear. We are seeing new organizations that are scaling at an accelerating rate and not just as a multiplier. In this chapter we teach you how to make your organization adapt to this new accelerated pace.
Chapter three looks at the five externalities of these organizations and I open this chapter by saying all these exponential organizations have one single visionary mission statement characteristic. Each has what I call an MTP (Massive transformative purpose). Chapter three continues to describe five externalities and map onto the acronym SCALE. S stands for Staff on Demand. C stands for Community and Crowd. The A stands for Algorithms. The L stands for leveraged Assets. And the E stands for Engagement.
Chapter four dives into the five internal control mechanisms that these organizations are using to manage and track themselves. This maps on to the word IDEAS. The I stands for Interface Processes. The D stands for Dashboards. The E stands for Experimentation. The A stands for Autonomy. And the S stands for Social Technologies. What we found is if you implement four out of the 10 attributes that we described in chapter three and four you will get to the 10x level.
Chapter five summarizes all of it and explains the implications of this new model. This chapter goes through a whole set of implications about how to think about the future.
The second half of the book, chapter six to chapter ten, explains how to apply it. Chapter six is about how to apply this to a startup. And when you are starting a company from scratch what sequence to go in. This chapter will give you the specific steps to take to launch a startup with these principles in mind.
Chapter seven is about how to apply this to a midmarket company. There are a lot of midmarket family style businesses that have grown early on but have now plateaued and this is about taking that and blowing it open.
Chapter eight is about how to organize a big company because you can’t take a big organization and turn it in to one of these new animals, it’s too disruptive of a change. What you need to do is take a disruptive set of changes agents that exist in all organizations and build one of these exponential organizations off the edge of your own attacking in another marketplace.
Chapter nine is a set of nine success stories of what big companies are doing.
In the final chapter we talk about the role of the executive in the future.
“Any organization built for success in the 20th century is doomed for failure in the 21st century.” – David Ross
I am the founding executive director and currently global ambassador for Singularity University. Our mission statement at Singularity University is to create a new generation of leadership that can leverage accelerating technologies to solve major global problems. I have been doing this for about six years and was the head of innovation at Yahoo and Tech Entrepreneurship before that.
As we launched Singularity six years ago we noticed at the same time that a very different model has become of how we build organizations. We’ve learned how to scale technology really well but scaling the organization and building that is painfully incrementally and linear. In the last five years or so we are seeing a new breed of organizational structure that can scale in the same seamless way that we scale technology. I noticed that as a weak signal five years ago, started tracking it, and over the last three years we have found over 60 organizations that are scaling at an average 10 times better, faster and cheaper compared to their peers. We started documenting those 60 organizations and tracking them and decided to write a book on the model.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin
Buy Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail on Amazon today
Visit ExponentialOrgs.com take the diagnostic survey and learn more about the book
Visit SingularityU.org to learn more about Singularity University
Follow Salim Ismail on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters | The Innovator’s Method: Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization by Nathan Furr
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Aligning Strategy and Sales according to Frank Cespedes: Introduction In this episode Frank Cespedes takes a deep dive into his book AligningRead More
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]]>In this episode Frank Cespedes takes a deep dive into his book Aligning Strategy and Sales where he brings business strategy and sales together in order to make your business scale.
In his book Cespedes teaches you how to bring together your strategy with the behaviors you’re going to need in selling in order to execute that strategy. The goal of the book is to offer a road map to articulate strategy in ways that people in the field can understand and that will fuel the behaviors required for profitable growth.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs or CEOs who are looking to scale a new startup or create new sustainable growth of an already established business.
The world needed a book that brings together strategy and sales. My book is not simply a strategy book or a selling tip book but it is about how to bring together your strategy with the behaviors you’re going to need in selling in order to execute that strategy.
Value is created or destroyed in the marketplace not meetings.
I start from an assumption that I think is a pretty darn good assumption. In business value is created or destroyed in the marketplace with customers. The market includes the industry you compete in, the customers segments where you choose to play and the buying processes of the customers that you sell and service. If a company has a strategy, as opposed to a wish list, those factors should inform a strategy and that strategy sales task. From there you need to align actually selling behaviors with the required task and ultimately entrepreneurs, managers and incorporations basically have three levers to do that.
First and most importantly are people; who your sales people are and what they know. The second lever is control systems; the company’s performance management practices. And the third lever is the sales environment; the wider company context in which sales initiatives get developed and executed. I think companies can use this framework to do a few important things. First, make sure in their strategy meetings they are having the right dialog and part of that dialog must include what that strategy means for people in the field. Secondly, if you are a CEO, entrepreneur or an investor I think the framework can save you money and redirect how you spend that money.
The book has four parts. Part one outlines the basic idea and framework in the book and provides examples of what happens if you don’t think these things through.
Part two of the book is Linking Strategy and Sales. This part of the book focuses on the core elements of each side of linking strategies and sales. In this section there is a chapter that looks at the foundational prerequisite which is the presence of coherent strategies. Many companies confuse strategy with their value, mission and purpose and those are all important things but very different.
Another chapter in the book is about communicating strategy which is a very, very big issue because companies are typically very bad at this.
The last chapter of section one provides a step by step process for thinking about how to identify what I call the idea of core customers for your business.
From there I take you into a chapter about hiring, development and organizing sales people. The average American company has a turnover in sales somewhere between 5% and 30% annually. That means that every four years or so the average American company has to replace its sales force. So hiring is a very important issue.
The next chapter is about sales compensation and incentives. You must think about the appropriate compensation system as a necessary but not sufficient cause of getting the behavior that you want.
The final chapter in that portion of the book looks at a key the dimension of sales performance do’s which in my experience is probably the most underutilized lever for effecting behavior in most companies.
The final portion of the book is called closing which is about making connections. The connections I am talking about in those final two chapters are of two sorts. One is developing sales managers that can actually manage. The other is about the cross functional connections that require for effective selling.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 06:00
“The desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” – John le Carre
I am currently a professor at Harvard Business School. I was a professor at Harvard for 11 years before leaving to run a business for 12 years, sold the business and returned to Harvard about five years ago.
My academic research always focused on go-to market elements including channels and sales management but when I left Harvard and ran a business for 12 years I had to meet payroll and sales. After getting lucky in business and returning to Harvard I taught strategy for a few years. The fact is that despite decades of attention to so called strategic planning there really is remarkably little research about how to link strategy with the nitty-gritty of field execution.
Managing for Results by Peter Drucker
Buy Aligning Strategy and Sales by Frank Cespedes on Amazon today
Visit FrankCespedes.com to learn more about Frank
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Hyper Sales Growth by Jack Daly
High Profit Selling by Mark Hunter
The Trusted Advisor by Robert Galford
Relevant advice and tips:
7 Reasons Why Your Sales Skills Suck
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Overfished Ocean Strategy according to Nadya Zhexembayeva: Introduction In this episode Nadya Zhexembayeva takes a deep dive into her book, Overfished OceanRead More
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]]>In this episode Nadya Zhexembayeva takes a deep dive into her book, Overfished Ocean Strategy. This book is not your typical guide on how to be innovative, but instead is a survival plan for your business during times of recession. The goal for Zhexembayeva is to provide you and other small business owners with a look into the future of the global economy along with successful stories of businesses that are driving innovation and strategic realignment in order to survive.
The exciting part for me was to create an experience rather than a book. My hope was to help business owners, executives and business students have a conversation around disappearing resource base and how to not only survive but thrive in that market reality.
The introduction and first two chapters of the book lay the foundation of what is going on in the economy and after that it is all about principles of innovation where you can enter and exit wherever you need to.
If your company doesn’t have a strategy to deal with the resource depleted world, it’s time to develop one.
As a business owner I have been trying to understand what is going on in the last five to seven years with the global economy and how I should be preparing my own company and customers company for what is ahead. The stories in the media are saying that we will come out of recession and then everything will be alright but what I’ve noticed is very few people are talking about the disappearing resource base.
The story of the book is about how businesses understand this reality and I discovered that a number of companies that are taking this challenge as an opportunity to drive innovation and strategic realignment in a drastic way. In the book you will find five essential principles of innovation.
Principle #1 is moving from linear economy to circle economy. This is really about the stories that have been showing up in different media or scientific research but hasn’t been taken mainstream.
Principle #2 is moving away from vertical to horizontal. This principle is about moving your way from a very narrow focus to entering a much wider focus. Most of the time we are taught to look nearby for ideas for new company advantage but the pioneers of Overfished Ocean Strategy don’t look nearby, they actually expand their horizon.
Principle #3 speaks about new sources of growth. The grown in traditional companies comes from selling more things to more people. The pioneering companies try to look at the product of service they provide and perspective of value.
The last two principles in the book I take you from plan to model and from department to mindset. It’s all about how to organize inside the company and what we need to do to prepare ourselves for a resource depleted world.
“The stone age did not end because we ran out of stones.” – Sheikh Yamani
I am a business owner in the consulting world and teach at business schools around the world to primarily executives. I have been working in executive education since 2006 nonstop.
I wanted to find a new way of innovated business models and strategies for companies and started researching ways to do that. I was trying to understand what makes companies enter this new domain and what makes the path successful for those who succeed in this approach. This was kind of accidental research and a few publishers asked me if I’d consider writing a book about this particular topic.
The Birth of the Chaordic Age by Dee Hock
Buy Overfished Ocean Strategy by Nadya Zhexembayeva on Amazon today
Visit OverfishedOceanStrategy.com to learn more about Nadya and her book
Follow Nadya Zhexembayeva on Twitter
Download the full transcript here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters | Aligning Strategy and Sales by Frank Cespedes | Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Small Business Lifecycle according to Charlie Gilkey Introduction In this episode Charlie Gilkey takes a dive into his book, The SmallRead More
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Small Business Lifecycle according to Charlie Gilkey
In this episode Charlie Gilkey takes a dive into his book, The Small Business Lifecycle. Unlike other business books that focus solely on marketing and sales, The Small Business Lifecycle discusses how to grow your business through different lifecycles. This book is unique in that it offers entrepreneurs and small business owner real challenges, opportunities, and inconvenient truths about running a small business.
This book is what to expect when you’re expecting for small businesses and entrepreneurs. We see a lot of books on small business, and a lot of small business books are focused on sales and marketing. Sales and marketing are huge but there is more to business than marketing and sales. My book really discusses how small businesses grow and that’s one of the things that make it unique. Another key element is it’s not about so much the tactics but about where you are and what you need to do to grow to the next step. It’s intentionally concise and short book because it provides a map for growth for your business and that’s really what all it’s meant to do.
It’s both. You don’t have to read it straight from front to back. The overview gives an idea what the stages of the different life cycles are and you can decide where you are and read from there.
Figure out where you are in the business life cycle and focus on those things that matter now. You have to do the right things, at the right time, in the right order.
Small Business Life Cycle is what to expect when you’re expecting for small business owners and entrepreneurs. There are five different stages to the business life cycle.
Stage Zero is The Aspirational Stage, the stage by which everyone that thinks, reads and dreams about starting a business but hasn’t fundamentally started a business.
Stage One is The Entry Stage. This person has moved to starting a business, has a few customers, small number of services and products and they are officially in business.
Stage Two is The Growth Stage and this is where the business has more customers, more products and services but basically they are starting to take off. They have figured out the market to product fit that allows them to actually start growing and scaling. This stage is the most fun part of the journey for small business owners and entrepreneurs.
Stage Three is called The Crucible Stage. In the crucible stage you’re at the position in which you can’t keep going the way you’ve been going and you’ve got to do something completely different to take that next step. Most people find in this stage that there is not nearly as much business under the business as they had thought.
Stage Four is The Cruise Stage. I like to describe it like you’re a supersonic jet. You have your people, processes and positioning in place and you can go really fast but you can’t turn. This is where we see businesses that pull in that good 3% to 10% growth every year, not making any radical changes but it’s a solid business and runs well. This is a life-cycle because what happens is people will get at one point along the journey and go backwards. They’ll get to this stage and get bored.
I take each one of these stages and explain them. Each stage has a certain amount of challenges, opportunities, inconvenient truth and a way forward.
“The more you understand where your business is, the more you can focus on taking meaningful action on the stuff that matters for your business now.” – Charlie Gilkey
I founded and run a website called Productive Flourishing which is about helping creative people take their ideas and make something good happen in the world. It’s not so much for the dreamer; it’s for the inspired doer. Before starting Productive Flourishing I was simultaneously completing my PhD in Philosophy which I am still working on and I was an Army Joint Force Military Logistics coordinator.
I’m a business coach and worked with a range of people who would come to me trying to do things that they were either told to do or read about that were inappropriate for their business. I found that it was just too early for that particular business lifecycle for them to be focused on that particular thing. This book came from speeches where I would try to help entrepreneurs and small business owners really figure out where they were so they could take the appropriate next steps. And it eventually folded into a book where I added more to it. So the inspiration was largely based on observation and the amount of pain that people were in just because they were doing the wrong things at the wrong time.
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
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Related books: Profit First: A Simple System to Transform Any Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine by Mike Michalowicz | The Risk Driven Business Model by Serguei Netessine | Startup Mixology by Frank Gruber
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Risk-Driven Business Model according to Serguei Netessine Introduction In this episode Serguei Netessine shares his book The Risk-Driven Business Model withRead More
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]]>In this episode Serguei Netessine shares his book The Risk-Driven Business Model with four questions that will define your company. This book is perfect for the entrepreneur or small business owner who is seeking advice and innovation on creating a new business model. The goal Netessine sets with The Risk-Driven Business Model is create a road-map for rather than simply describing business models that already exist.
Our book is on the topic of business model innovation which is a less traditional topic of innovation. Our book is different because we were aiming to create a roadmap for someone to create new business models rather than simply describing new business models that are already out there.
I hope that the book is interesting enough that once you start reading it, you won’t want to stop.
We believe that one of Steve Jobs’ greatest innovations was not necessarily an iPhone or iPad, it was actually a singular business model of the iTunes store. And the reason is that the business model of iTunes store actually makes all of the other innovations of Apple work.
In the introduction of the book we talk about the fact that business model innovation is often an overlooked way to innovate. A lot of value can be created through business model innovation and it’s really a very attractive way to innovate.
In the second chapter we explain our approach to business model innovation and it’s very different from inventing new products and technologies. Typically new product and technologies start with identifying some kind of a market meet. Business model innovation is different in that there is already a need and a product which address that need. What you need to do is find inefficiencies in the existing market. And we talk about how the business model can go about identifying those inefficiencies and fixing them.
The rest of the book outlines our four different approaches, what we call our four W’s which can be used to invent new business models. The first W is our WHAT innovation. WHAT innovation is essentially an innovation about changing the kind of decisions that the company makes within its business model. The next W we talk about the WHEN innovation. The WHEN innovations are all about changing the timing of your decisions and you can do this by moving you decisions around relative to when you obtain information to make those decisions. After that we talk about the WHO innovation which changes who makes decisions in a business model. In the next chapter we talk about the WHY innovation where in the business model you can change why people make the decision. So these are a key four chapters which talk about four different approaches to business model innovation.
After this we go into an action chapter that discusses how TerraPass went about innovating its business model. This chapter describes how ideas for TerraPass were generated, how they were selected and how the company was developed. It’s an illustrated chapter talking about the details of the innovation process.
We conclude with The Call for Action which we say that the time has come to really change the discipline of business model innovation to make it into a systematic process that is governed by certain rules. We have a lot of examples of established companies changing their business models. We try to demonstrative in the book that the discipline of business model innovation has a very wide applicability and very often business model innovation works well in situations when other types of innovations don’t work very well.
“We shouldn’t forget about the power of business model which very often offers a much more sustainable innovation than innovations from new products of technologies.” – Serguei Netessine
I was born in Russia where I did most of my studies and moved to the United States to earn my PHD in Business. My first job was at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where I worked for about ten years. Now I work with companies and startups on multiple continents.
While reading multiple books I noticed they focused on the wrong side of innovation so I decided to write a book unlike any others.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Buy The Risk-Driven Business Model by Serguei Netessine on Amazon today
Visit DefineYourCompany.com to learn more about Serguei and his book
Follow Serguei Netessine on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: The Innovator’s Method: Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization by Nathan Furr | Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland | The Small Business Life Cycle by Charlie Gilkey
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Important Things That Every Entrepreneur Needs To Know About Starting a New Business
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