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
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>5 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Overcome Business Failure Now that you have started a new business, brace yourself for failure. Sounds a little pessimistic – doesn’t it? Well, every entrepreneur needsRead More
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]]>5 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Overcome Business Failure
Now that you have started a new business, brace yourself for failure. Sounds a little pessimistic – doesn’t it? Well, every entrepreneur needs to be prepared for the worst. Even super successful individuals such as Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Colonel Sanders, or Henry Ford didn’t succeed at their first attempt.
In fact, it took most successful entrepreneurs and leaders multiple attempts to reach their goals. What was the likely key to their ultra success? It’s their approach that differentiated them. As Edison summed it up – “I haven’t failed; I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work”.
But the question is – why do startups fail often? The reason is simple – you just don’t have the necessary experience to run a business. This leads you to make many mistakes, and soon they start to make a significant impact on your day. No planning, forgetting taxes, emotional pricing, wasting money on unnecessary details, and so on lead to trouble.
And if you don’t identify your mistakes and rectify them on time, you end up as a failure. But if you think it is the end of the road, you are seriously on your path to a letdown in your life. It is at this time that you need to think and act and turn your failure into success.
How do you do it? Here’s how I’ve learned that top entrepreneurs overcome business failure:
Switch to a positive mode
No, it doesn’t mean you try to fake a smile and look happy even when you feel down in the dumps. It implies that you treat your failure as a life lesson. Don’t fight it; embrace it. Only then you will be able to understand what an experience it was. Create a spreadsheet and write down what you did right and what you didn’t.
Appraise your assets
Be it an office space that you have leased or great relationships that you have created – don’t ignore their potential. Consider what worked splendidly for your startup – was it your employees, or, your certain client relations, or, your intellectual property? Draw up a chart to understand and evaluate your best assets.
Sell off whatever you can
Whether you want to give away your business or sell it, you need to get in touch with the right people. If you think that it may still work, keep a percentage in it. If not, just give it away to a new entrepreneur. If you decide to sell, don’t be shy; contact everyone you know to see who you can sell it off to.
Read up
Akio Morita began Sony selling a rice cooker. But it burned the rice. Yet, Sony is one of the best success stories of today. Fred Smith almost failed his business management course with his business idea. It later developed into FedEx. And good old Edison actually failed more than 9000 times before he made the light bulb.
Most importantly, start again
Now that you have failed, you have two choices – you can leave it and go back to where you were before you tried entrepreneurship. Or, you can get up, brush off the dust from your fall and tread along towards your next venture. And when you choose the second option, you will have the lesson you learned to guide you.
Success in business, quite similar to success in life, is not dependent on whether you make it at the first jump. It relies on whether you have the courage to get up and get going and make your failure just a stepping stone on your journey to success.
The Art of War for Small Business by Becky Sheetz-Runkle | Listen to my interview with Becky here
The Road To Reinvention by Josh Linkner | Listen to my interview with Josh here
Getting Things Done by David Allen | Listen to my interview with David here
Invent Reinvent Thrive by Lloyd Shefsky | Listen to my interview with Lloyd here
The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz | Listen to my interview with Mike here
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Invent, Reinvent, Thrive according to Lloyd Shefsky: Introduction In this episode Lloyd Shefsky takes you on a deep dive into his book,Read More
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]]>In this episode Lloyd Shefsky takes you on a deep dive into his book, Invent Reinvent Thrive, where he unveils some keys to success for any startup, entrepreneur, or family business. In his book, Shefsky takes you on a journey of reinvention to explain the difference between generations, how to build confidence, how to reinvent yourself, how to deal with naysayers, how to reinvent a business, and the lessons learned from very successful entrepreneurs and family business owners. This book is perfect for the entrepreneur who is struggling to find success and is at a loss for moving forward.
It carries the concept of needing to invent and reinvent through various stages but it also uses real stories. They are captivating stories because they come directly from the people I interview. I jokingly say that my book may be the only book where the interviewees and the stories about them include the speakers at both the last democratic and republican conventions.
It’s up to the reader. Most people today don’t have the time to sit and read a whole book but certainly that would work.
I think it’s that while there is a key event in the creation of any new business, it’s not nearly one cataclysmic event that creates entrepreneurship they are all those things you do beforehand. There is no one key event; there are many events that lead to success as entrepreneurs or family businesses’.
I start with a preface that talk about the differences in generations because so many of the business concepts we have may work for that generation but not for the next one or the prior one. The introduction gives an overview that talks about the fact that people really can reinvent themselves without inventing all of themselves. And I talk about how to build confidence and your ability to do that.
In Part One I talk about the individual as an entrepreneur – how to reinvent yourself as an entrepreneur. I spend some time talking about core competencies’.
In the Second chapter I talk about ignoring the noise of descent. We all know people who tell you, you can’t do it or shouldn’t do it and each of the people I interviewed had naysayers. But how each entrepreneur dealt with them is what is interesting and I explain that you can’t ignore them, you have to do something about it. And I give lessons on how to properly deal with naysayers.
In Chapter three I talk about reinventing the business, not the individual. I explain when to start reinventing the business, how to deal with it and how often you need to do it.
Chapter five is about captains of industry and here I demonstrate that the lessons that have been taught up until then in the book are applicable at any size and I use 3 companies that demonstrate this.
In Part Four I tell stories of entrepreneurs who morphed to become corporate chiefs. I tell the story of a family physician, Dr. Jim Dan, who is now the head of 1,600 family physicians in the advocate healthcare system. It was not a one jump story; it was a series of steps that lead to that change in Dr. Jim’s career.
In Chapter eight I talk a little bit about entrepreneurs who had resigned as CEO of their company and had to come back. The two that I use as an example are Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Chuck Schwab of Charles Schwab and Company both of whom had to come back when things weren’t working real well. These are great stories of how to look at your company in order to know what to change but more importantly it demonstrates that sometimes people reinvent their business not to be something new but to be something old.
In Chapter nine I switch over to family businesses and the introduction of what I mean by family business.
In Chapter ten I talk about the Crown family, a family that a man started with $10,000 that he borrowed from friends and turned it in to a multibillion dollar fortune today.
In Chapter twelve we talk about leading the family verses leading the business.
In Chapter thirteen I talk about the Carlson family, family who owns the Radisson Hotels and TGIF restaurants.
“When focus causes you to wear blinders you’re far more likely to be blindsided.” – Lloyd Shefsky
I am a Clinical Professor at the Kellogg School of Management. I wrote Entrepreneurs Are Made Not Born which became a best-seller and now in eight languages. I have been teaching entrepreneurship for about 18 years both at the Kellogg School, China, Japan and other places. I consult with entrepreneurs; consult with family business people and the founder/co-director of the Center for Family Enterprises.
For quite some time I’ve been bothered by what makes some people successful both entrepreneurs and family business people and none of the typical factors were working. For a while I thought it would be confidence that I would be looking at but after a few interviews it became clear that what distinguished the successful and non-successful was the concept that they had to continually reinvent themselves. So when I was seeing all this it became clear that there was a great similarity in this reinvention concept.
An Actor Prepares by Constantin Stanislavski
Buy Invent, Reinvent, Thrive by Lloyd Shefsky on Amazon today
Visit InventReinventThrive.com to learn more about Lloyd and his book
Follow Lloyd Shefsky on Twitter
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 | The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field by Mike Michalowicz | The Road To Reinvention by Josh Linkner
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>Latest Books for Entrepreneurs in September 2014 The Entrepreneurs Library presents the latest books for entrepreneurs in September 2014. These books are brand new to the market and the authorsRead More
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]]>Latest Books for Entrepreneurs in September 2014
The Entrepreneurs Library presents the latest books for entrepreneurs in September 2014. These books are brand new to the market and the authors are in line to share their insights with me. Stay tuned this month for the release of the interviews with these great books and the authors.
The Seven Levels of Communication by Michael J Maher
The Seven Levels of Communication tells the entertaining and educational story of Rick Masters, who is suffering from a down economy when he meets a mortgage professional who has built a successful business without advertising or personal promotion. Skeptical, he agrees to accompany her to a conference to learn more about her mysterious methods.
Rick soon learns that the rewards for implementing these strategies are far greater than he had ever imagined. In seeking success, he finds significance. This heartwarming tale of Rick’s trials and triumphs describes the exact strategies that helped him evolve from the Ego Era to the Generosity Generation.
This book is about so much more than referrals. This is about building a business that not only feeds your family, but also feeds your soul.
Learn more about Michael J Maher | Buy The Seven Levels of Communication on Amazon
Invent, Reinvent, Thrive by Lloyd Shefsky
Invent Reinvent Thrive offers all the answers you need to get your business where you want it to be. You’ll learn exactly where new and multi-generational business owners fall short and miss incredible opportunities, why they fail to take the plunge or innovate–and how you can rework, revitalize, and reinvent your business not just to avoid the most common perils but to lead your business to the apex of your industry.
In Invent Reinvent Thrive Kellogg School of Management Professor Lloyd Shefsky provides the inspiration and insight any entrepreneur or family business needs for long-term success–and he backs it all up with proven models of what works and what doesn’t.
Shefsky reveals the common thread of all business success stories: reinvention. He explains not just how to reinvent concepts and ideas from the start, but ways to continuously innovate and reinvent your business to meet today’s constantly changing marketplace conditions. In addition to his own expert insight, Shefsky provides firsthand advice through case studies derived from dozens of original interviews with entrepreneurs and family business giants, consisting of the leaders of some of today’s most successful companies, including:
“If you think business books are boring, this is your chance to prove yourself wrong. Storytelling is an art, and Shefsky brings that art to business. Invent Reinvent Thrive is a treasure trove of valuable lessons.” – Stan Kasten, President and CEO, Los Angeles Dodgers
Learn more about Lloyd Shefsky | Buy Invent, Reinvent, Thrive on Amazon
Overfished Ocean Strategy by Nadya Zhexembayeva
Overfished Ocean Strategy offers five essential principles for innovating in this new reality. Zhexembayeva shows how businesses can find new opportunities in what were once considered useless by-products, discover resource-conserving efficiencies up and down their value chain, transfer their expertise from physical products to services, and develop ways to rapidly try out and refine these new business models.
She fills the book with examples of companies that are already successfully navigating the overfished ocean, from established corporations such as BMW, Microsoft, and Puma to newcomers such as Lush, FLOOW2, and Sourcemap.
The linear, throwaway economy of today—in which we extract resources at one end, create products, and throw them away at the other—is rapidly coming to an end. In every industry, creative minds are learning how to make money by taking this line and turning it into a circle. Nadya Zhexembayeva shows how you can join them and avoid being left high and dry.
Learn more about Nadya Zhexembayeva | Buy Overfished Ocean Strategy on Amazon
Sell Your Business for an Outrageous Price by Kevin M Short
In Sell Your Business for an Outrageous Price, investment banker Kevin M. Short — who for over twenty years has advised parties on both sides of the closing table — presents a structured playbook for sellers to win big. You’ll find out why some businesses sell for “outrageous” amounts — at least twice the EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) multiple of an average company in their industry — as well as how to minimize your risk going to market.
The book introduces you to the author’s Proactive Sale Strategy, a rigorous process for positioning your company to sell to a well-financed buyer at the best possible price. You’ll find out how to prepare yourself and your company for sale, understand your asset and how it benefits prospective buyers, and identify and remediate any issues that could prevent a sale or drive down sale price.
The book then helps you go to market. It guides you step-by-step through the Outrageous Price Process, designed to:
Learn more about Kevin Short | Buy Sell Your Business for an Outrageous Price on Amazon
Hello, My Name Is Awesome by Alexandra Watkins
Every year, 6 million companies and more than 100,000 products are launched. They all need an awesome name, but many (such as Xobni, Svbtle, and Doostang) look like the results of a drunken Scrabble game.
In this entertaining and engaging book, ace naming consultant Alexandra Watkins explains how anyone—even non-creative types—can create memorable and buzz-worthy brand names. No degree in linguistics required. The heart of the book is Watkins’s proven SMILE and SCRATCH Test—two acronyms for what makes or breaks a name.
She also provides up-to-date advice, like how to make sure that Siri spells your name correctly and how to nab an available domain name. And you’ll see dozens of examples—the good, the bad, and the “so bad she gave them an award.” Alexandra Watkins is not afraid to name names.
Naming a business or product has always been challenging—and sometimes costly— for entrepreneurs and inventors, but it’s one of the most important decisions they have to make. Alexandra Watkins presents a foolproof model that anyone can use to create and evaluate brand names like a pro.
“Zappos.com originally started out as ShoeSite.com, but that limited our potential future growth. A company’s name can be vital to its success. Reading the tips in this book can help anyone avoid the pitfalls.” —Tony Hsieh, New York Times bestselling author of Delivering Happiness and CEO, Zappos.com, Inc.
Learn more about Alexandra Watkins | Buy Hello, My Name Is Awesome on Amazon
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