A summary of things you should know about Disruption by Design according to Paul Paetz: Introduction In this episode Paul Paetz takes a deep dive into his book, Disruption byRead More
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]]>In this episode Paul Paetz takes a deep dive into his book, Disruption by Design where he shows you how to create products that disrupt and then dominate markets.
In his book Paetz provides a handbook of lessons that describe the differences in innovation techniques as well as examples from successful innovators that have disrupted markets and ones that should have but failed. The goal of this book is to teach you how disruption happens, where to look for disruptive opportunities, what it takes to be disruptive, and how to market disruptive products.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs who have ideas big enough to change the way we live, but need help developing and launching their product into a specific market.
In Disruption by Design I have my own outline of methodology for predicting when disruption is likely and I provide a how-to guide that walks you through building a product, marketing strategy, and a business model that will enable your company to be disruptive. It’s also the only all in one book that summarizes everything from the theory, to prediction, to the practical how-to information and then gives you tips on how to stay on top after you’ve succeeded.
It has been written in a way that there is a flow from one section to the next but you can also jump in and out where needed.
The key idea is that you can design a company and a product to be disruptive and if you understand what the causal factors. If you follow these steps and design your business model correctly anybody can build a disruptive innovation from the ground up.
I hope entrepreneurs and innovators get a solid understanding of what causes disruption and how to do it on purpose.
The first section of the book is primarily about summarizing the theory and how to predict disruption.
The second section is the nuts and bolts of creating the product and marketing strategy and business model. I identify job to be done theory and how you identify products. And then I run through all the key marketing strategy points of segmentation position, pricing strategy, and so on.
And the third section is about what to do after you put the strategy in place and you’ve started to succeed at disruption.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 08:32
“The product is what you are for not what you do.” – Paul Paetz
I have been in the technology business over 30 years now and the first 2/3rd of that I was at a number of different startups and companies. I went out on my own after that and started a marketing services company and then joined a friend who was building a company providing services in disruptive innovation. From there I started Innovative Disruption which is a company that I run today providing services to disrupters and companies facing disruption.
There are a ton of books out today on disruption and most of what you see in the media is incorrect. The majority of startups aren’t in a position to afford my services and I think anybody can afford the $30 that the book cost.
The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton Christensen
Buy Disruption by Design by Paul Paetz on Amazon today
Visit InnovativeDisruption.com to learn more about Paul and his company
Follow Paul Paetz on LinkedIn and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Cause A Disturbance by Ken Tencer
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Steps To Promote Innovation At The Workplace
5 Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Stephen Key
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>4 Common Reasons Why Startup Companies Fail You have a superb business idea. The question is – how do you know it will be a success? The answer is simpleRead More
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]]>You have a superb business idea. The question is – how do you know it will be a success?
The answer is simple – you don’t. And unless you try it out, you will never know it for sure. You need to take the step to find out whether your brilliant idea will transform into a successful business.
But before you take the step, be cautious.
The facts can be dampening – 8 out of 10 startups fail. But if you are aware of the common pitfalls, you can try to steer clear of them. Why exactly do startups fail? Often a combination of reasons works together and ultimately leads to failure.
“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” – Robert F. Kennedy
Let’s take a look at the most common reasons why startup companies fail:
The idea may be too small, and attract only a small niche market, in which case you won’t be able to attract investors. Or, it may be the solution to only a really frivolous problem, in which case you won’t get customers.
Another possibility is that the product or service you offer really isn’t necessary, but only an addition to whatever is already available. In each of these circumstances, the possibility of building a successful new business will remain a distant dream.
Tip: The best way to assess the potential of your idea is to present it to investors.
Perhaps you miscalculated how much you may need, or you spent more than you can afford, or you misjudged the time you will need to break even, or maybe it was some other reason. Whatever it is, it can spell doom for a startup.
Also, if you want to run it as a lifestyle business, you may not want to involve investors. But this strategy won’t work if you want to build a big business. Running out of cash can forestall any chance of success, and eventually lead to shutdown.
Tip: Plan your budget; and double it. Also, keep aside an emergency fund.
Put together a directionless leader, an unmotivated team, and no advisors – and you have the perfect recipe for disaster! A startup needs a team with all the components right; and one that knows how to manage a startup.
You need to come up with a management that understands how to build up a new business, a team that works together with the same vision, mission and ethics, and advisors who can help overcome the hurdles on the way.
Tip: Don’t take it all on yourself; it will go haywire if you have to stay away for a week.
Unless your startup involves an original invention, you have to worry about competition, even in the first phase. Be it selling pencils or managing yacht charters, many new businesses are outcompeted by the established ones.
Again, sometimes your product may be too complicated to use, or your service may really be unnecessary. And customers prefer the time-tested solutions to innovations. If there’s a gap in your strategy, your idea may never become a successful business.
Tip: Do thorough market research, especially about your competitors, in advance.
A startup may fail for any of these, or some other reason. And even if yours does, it’s no cause to think of it as a failure and regret your step. Even Edison failed 1000 times before he came up with the light bulb.
Instead, analyze why you failed, and learn from your mistake. It’s the only way to success.
How to Ruin A Business Without Really Trying by MJ Gottlieb
The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz
Zero To One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Fail Fast or Win Big by Bernhard Schroeder
The Startup Survival System by Kurt Won
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Business Romantic according to Tim Leberecht: Introduction In this episode Tim Leberecht takes a deep dive into his book, The BusinessRead More
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]]>In this episode Tim Leberecht takes a deep dive into his book, The Business Romantic, where he argues that we underestimate the importance of romance and that it can be found through business.
In his book Leberecht takes an intriguing yet challenging look into the emotional side of business through the compelling stories of very successful innovators of our times. The goal of the book is to give you a different look on how you pursue your dreams while helping you develop a meaningful life, create something greater than the status quo, and rejuvenate your worklife.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are experiencing boredom in their work lives and are seeking an uplifting yet provocative approach to creating a radically unique life.
What’s difference about The Business Romantic is that it is a business book and it isn’t. It draws from the liberal arts, from philosophy, and it’s a very personal book that I’ve been meaning to write for years. It really is a reflection on the state of business philosophical discourse and yet at the same time it does provide very specific concrete tools and techniques. In terms of the argument that I’m making, My book is about romance which includes suffering a little bit, it includes a sense of danger and risk taking, so it’s not only about having a strong inspirational mission.
I think the reader can read it from front to back or cherry-pick as they go.
One thing that is really important is that we understand that we have the power of framing our experience in business. So the way we view our encounters at work is really important. We are the masters of our narrative; we have the power to make sense in what we experience in business and I encourage the reader to appreciate that and use it. The second thing I would say it to have the courage to be vulnerable and the experience you have will be much more meaningful.
The book starts with my own experience in 2014 working as an Advance Press Chief for the Olympic torch relay in Athens and it was probably the most formative professional experience that I had. It was very intense and I remember thinking in the intensity of the moment that that was exactly the kind of sentiment that I wanted to have for the rest of my career. And that became my question for the following 20 years or so. How can you keep the flame a light during the middle when routine and processes kick in and the magic of the beginning is gone? And this book is trying to find an answer to that.
The first chapter is called The New Desire for Romance in which I explore why I believe that the time is right for a re-enchantment, why there is dissolution with business. And what the parallels are of this mindset. It’s not a book against technology but it cautions us not to mistake the algorithmic world we live in with the old truth in business.
In the second part of the book I then introduce a number of business romantics. One of the greatest experiences that I had as I was writing this book is that it gave me a reason to connect with other people who were kindred spirits and it was very rewarding to see that I am not the only business romantic.
In the third part of the book, The Rules of Enchantment, is the gist of the book that provides the reader with 10 rules that he/she can apply in his/her respective work environment. These rules range from give more than you take to keep the mystique. Another principle I introduce is suffer a little bit which is pointing out that romance is not the same as happiness. The last rule of enchantment is called Stand by, Stand Still, Do Nothing, and it’s talking about solitude and the importance of doing nothing.
The book then concludes with a discussion about why business has become one of the main operating systems of our lives and it examines some of the ethical implications of romance in business.
The book offers an appendix which is called The Business Romantic Starter Kit. It’s almost like a library of books, films, and music that the reader can read up on to get into the business romantic mood. It also provides the 15 steps to becoming a business romantic.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 06:38
“There’s a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” – Leonard Cohen
I have been working in marketing for almost 20 years now, mainly in professional services. I worked for Frog Design for seven years which is a leading product design and innovation strategy firm. Most recently I’ve been working for an architectural design firm called NBBJ. I am a passionate marketer and that’s also the reason why I wrote this book based on my experiences in that field.
I’m a business person, like I said I’ve been in business for 20 years, and at some point I’ve realized that I’m also an unapologetic romantic. I believe we need more romance in our life and I believe we can find it and create it in and do all that through business. The romance I am talking about is notion experiences where your heart beats faster and you have adrenaline rushes, and moments in which we fall in love with everything. I believe it’s very important that we romanticize business and be enchanted because I believe we are facing a great disenchantment. So my book is making a case for more romance in business within the framework of business and then proposes these specific rules of enchantment that everyone can use to make their life at work more meaningful.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Buy The Business Romantic by Tim Leberecht on Amazon today
Visit TheBusinessRomantic.com to learn more about Tim and his book
Follow Tim Leberecht on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Zero To One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
The Happiness of Pursuit by Chris Guillebeau
Memoirs of Normalcy by Joleene Moody
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Accidental Entrepreneur according to Gerry Murphy: Introduction In this episode Gerry Murphy shares his book, The Accidental Entrepreneur, where he tellsRead More
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]]>In this episode Gerry Murphy shares his book, The Accidental Entrepreneur, where he tells the fascinating story on how he became an entrepreneur and how, with a small team, he turned a relatively small investment into a multi-million Euro business.
In his book Murphy gives you a step-by-step manual for launching a startup and building your own successful business even if you have no capital or commercial experience. The goal of the book is to help you grow a new business with very limited resources through real-life case studies, invaluable checklists, and a wealth of inspirational advice.
This book is perfect for aspiring entrepreneurs who want to create a small investment business on the side or for established entrepreneurs looking for some insights on selling their startup to larger firms.
Mine is different in that it’s presented based on my own life story.
You have to read part one from front to back. My readers tell me that once they start reading part one it’s sort of a page turner and they can’t put it down but you can dip in and out of part two.
I believe that entrepreneurs need to work on their business not just in their business.
Part one is autobiographical and it tells the story of me growing up in my hometown of Churchtown in North Cork in Ireland and my dream to renew my home place and how that turned me into a commercial entrepreneur. The book starts with an introduction and then there are seventeen chapters in part one. I talk about when I was born in 1954 to 1972 and I have some beautiful childhood memories of long summer days of harvesting the hay, milking the cows, and going to local village festivals. I give a little flavor of that in the beginning of the book and then I recall my first business failure as a 10 year old when my latest project failed to deliver. From 1972 to 1977 I write about leaving Churchtown and getting a job out of high school. I got married in 1979 and my two children were born in 1982 and 1988. During that period I could see that the village was not doing well and I wanted to do something about it. Seventeen years ago in 1997 I saw an article in the national paper about how the local pub had been closed and the inside of it had been shipped to Vienna to feed an Irish team. I was appalled by the idea and I realized it was time that I must do something and try to get my hometown renewed. At 43 years of age I made a dramatic decision and decided to give up my job and start working as a social entrepreneur and to lookout for non-executive directorship roles. So I set up the Churchtown Village Renewal Trust and then I bought some property in the village and I reopened the bar/restaurant pub. In 1999 I realized that I needed to build some houses in the village, creating some life, and I bought a field and got the planning permission for 77 properties. So my field of dreams worked and families decided to live in the village and the population grew from 70 to 600. After opening the pub and building the homes in the village I saw that the small shop came up for sale and realized that it was very important for the village and there needed to be a bigger one. The only way I could achieve that was if I bought it myself. So by accident I became a shop keeper but of course I wasn’t able to work in the shop on a day to day basis so it wasn’t making any money. Shortly after that another shop came up for sale locally and it had a filling station and I bought that to try and spread the overhead.
Part two of the book has 16 chapters. In this part we talk about the joy of business, the benefits of testing and dry runs, that implementation is the key, the need to be able to scale your idea and multiply it, and the idea that you need to solve a problem and find a solution to create a customer base. And then I talk about the business plan and how you might write that, what should be in it, and the marketing plan. We look at the importance of design and creating a brand. And I make a big point about recognizing failure fast and moving on if it’s not working.
“When you don’t know what to do, do nothing.” – Gerry Murphy
I grew up on a farm in Ireland and I was born in 1954 so I am 60 this year. I got a job immediately after high school and I started working in a commercial bank called Bank of Ireland. I spent 17 year at Bank of Ireland then I left the bank and went to a savings called First National. In 1997 I took a big plunge and went out on my own as a social entrepreneur and by accident I became an accidental commercial entrepreneur.
There were three reasons why I wrote the book. The first reason was that I wanted to encourage others not to risk staying in an unfulfilling job and to consider creating their own employment. Secondly I really like books and I felt that I had learned a lot over the years and so I wanted to distill my own ideas and present them to others. I also wanted to tell the story of how I renewed my hometown in Ireland.
Bring Out the Magic in Your Mind by Al Koran
Buy The Accidental Entrepreneur by Gerry Murphy on Amazon today
Visit AccidentalEntrepreneur.me to learn more about Gerry, his book, and his websites.
Follow Gerry Murphy on Twitter and LinkedIn
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Zero To One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Unstoppable Entrepreneurship by Ilkka Lavas
6 Months To 6 Figures by Peter Voogd
Relevant advice and tips:
7 Important Things You Need To Know When Selling Your Business
7 Signs That You Have What It Takes to Be An Entrepreneur
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Startupland according to Mikkel Svane: Introduction In this episode Mikkel Svane takes a deep dive into his book, Startupland, where he tellsRead More
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]]>In this episode Mikkel Svane takes a deep dive into his book, Startupland, where he tells the inspirational story behind creating his tech startup, Zendesk.
In the book Svane shares how he and his friends bravely left secure jobs to start something on their own, how he almost went broke several times, how they picked up themselves and their families to travel across the world. The goal of the book is to debunk the myths about startups and inspire and empower you to follow your own dream to create your own success story.
This book is perfect for aspiring entrepreneurs who are new to entrepreneurship and are thinking about starting their own online venture, but worried about failure.
This is not a guide to how to build a startup but it’s something that can give you some perspective and inspiration for your own journey.
It’s definitely designed to be read from front to back.
When you are in a situation to build a company like this you must understand what a privilege situation you are in because so few people actually get the opportunity to do that and to scale it. Make sure that you really appreciate what you’re doing and try to enjoy it. Building real relationships with your investors, partners, and customers is so critical for how you can grow yourself but also how you can grow your company. We are a company that is all about the relationships and we have seen how critical is it that you build real relationships even with their community around them.
The book starts off by giving a little bit of my background of how I’ve had a startup before and even how I started working with software when I was a kid. I had a company in the .com days that unfortunately didn’t turn out that well. It was during those days that I met my two co-founders for Zendesk. After some years the three of us got together and decided on building Zendesk. Two of us had some experience from the customer service software industry for a few years and was underwhelmed by that industry in general. By the lack of innovation and by how companies thought about customer service. We got the third founder involved and we tell the early days of us trying to build this product and all the difficulties there are with bootstrapping a company.
We then go on describing how we try to raise money and how that was a terrible thing to do in Denmark. We didn’t have a lot of success with that and we were even very close to take money from somebody but realized that they were not the right people to take money from. We ended up doing a round of family and friends investing and they helped us get over the initial bump. Right after that we got a German angel investor and suddenly we had momentum to start building and taking things a little bit more seriously.
In 2008 the whole credit crunch happened and that changed the whole investment and environment a lot. We started pitching in the US at that point and I traveled back and forth a lot. I also describe some of the heartbreaking experiences we had during this time. I explain how traveling back and forth can be tough on you and it makes you grow older in a non-positive way. We were very lucky that suddenly we met this investor out of Boston and he really gave us a chance and helped us move to the US. Even though San Francisco is fantastic compared to any other entrepreneurial environment, when you come here and start to hire an organization that can be very challenging. We go on to describing some of the initial building of the company in the US which has been a fantastic journey.
Now we are in the process of building a new company, this is the beginning of a very new journey, and it’s going to be very interesting too.
“We still feel that we are just in the very early days of the company and we are still feeling that we are just in to a new part of our journey. We are not ready for any of it to be over yet and I am much more excited about what is in front of us than what is behind us.” – Mikkel Svane
I am originally from Copenhagen Denmark and I moved to San Francisco five years ago. We moved my company Zendesk out of Copenhagen for two years before moving here and it’s been a fantastic journey building and growing this company together with my two cofounders. I’m also married, I have a bunch of kids, and we are happily situated here in San Francisco.
In my role I met a bunch of entrepreneurs and it’s always been hard for me to give advice but I found that they found some kind of inspiration in how we did things. I think that having something that tells the original founding story of the company is something that gives everybody a little bit of inside and confidence in our company.
The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest by Po Bronson
Buy Startupland by Mikkel Svane on Amazon today
Visit Startupland.com to learn more about the book
Follow Mikkel Svane on Twitter and LinkedIn
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: The Everything Store by Brad Stone | Zero To One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters | Startup Mixology by Frank Gruber
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Important Things That Every Entrepreneur Needs To Know About Starting a New Business
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Venture Capital according to Elaine Leong: Introduction In this episode Elaine Leong takes a deep dive into her and Kaiwen Leongs’ book,Read More
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]]>In this episode Elaine Leong takes a deep dive into her and Kaiwen Leongs’ book, Venture Capital where she teaches you how to raise funds for your business startup.
In her book, Leong shows you how to avoid the mistakes most businesses make and shares some secret tips and tricks to taking your business to the top when it comes to funding. The goal of the book is to bring you into the mind of successful venture capitalists to shape your experience in growing your business.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs trying to raise venture capital funds and need real-life financing advice from experienced venture capitalists and angel investors.
Kaiwen Leong and his colleague Wenyou Tan have the experience in helping others and the information is given in a way that is really for the absolute beginner.
If they are new to this I think they should read it from front to back. But if they have some experience I think they can jump in and out based on the chapters that they feel are most relevant to them.
If I had to choose one principle I would choose one from one of the case studies that we gave. This principle basically teaches you that you can get anything you want if you are creative enough about it and put enough effort into it.
Each chapter in this book is broken up into three parts. The first part is the appetizer which is just a brief overview about what the chapter is about.
The second part is the main course which is the meat of the chapter and gives advice on the topic that we listed in the brief overview.
The third part is the dessert portion and this is personal stories that we’ve come across and these tell specific lessons that are tied to the specific chapter itself. We find that people enjoy the dessert section the most simply because experience is one of the things you can’t buy. Apart from that we have a section called silverware which is geared towards those who are not so familiar with financial and entrepreneur terms. Some people only tell the success stories but we believe that it is equally important to inform the reader on what not to do because avoiding the mistakes is almost as important as doing the right thing.
In each chapter we have categorizations of different entrepreneurs. The first one is about the topnotch people who actually make it to the top.
The second category is the in-betweeners who are just average entrepreneurs. And the third category is the no hope entrepreneurs and these are entrepreneurs who do terribly.
We tried to structure the book in a way that is intuitive to a beginner. So we start off with what you need to get to the top. After this brief introduction to Venture Capital we launch into the tools that you need which includes how to give the elevator speech and how to write a business plan.
We hope that Venture Capital will really help beginner entrepreneurs understand the whole VC landscape better.
“Think creatively and put in a lot of effort and you will get something out of it.” – Elaine Leong
I graduated from Princeton last year. I have some experience in investments, division, and now also in some multinational banks. I have written a lot and also co-authored six different books so far.
Kaiwen and I’s first book was Singapore’s Lost Son and that was a biography about his life, how he made it from a drop-out to a millionaire Princeton PhD holder. Kaiwen was a social entrepreneur and created social enterprises to help the underprivileged but also make it sustainable. Before he chose which underprivileged group to help he did some extensive research and found out that the people who need the most help may not be the people who first come to mind. People who do need help and are not receiving it were actually ex-convicts. And what he found was that these people were making a lot before through illegal means and they were also used to being in a position of authority. He decided to train these people and teach them how to be entrepreneurs and help channel their energy to be productive. When the success stories from this project hit the newspapers people started approaching him and expressed interest which is how the book started.
Singapore’s Lost Son by Kaiwen Leong
Buy Venture Capital by Kaiwen Leong and Elaine Leong on Amazon today
Follow Elaine Leong on Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Zero To One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters | Show Me The Money by Alan Barrell | The Responsible Entrepreneur by Carol Sanford
Relevant advice and tips: Top Financial Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Creating a New Business
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>Who is Peter Thiel? What success lessons can every entrepreneur can learn from him? Starting any business is time consuming and lengthy, but doing it right from the beginning isRead More
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]]>Starting any business is time consuming and lengthy, but doing it right from the beginning is a lesson no one ever really learns. There is no formula for “doing it right” and there is no “right answer” to every question. The really successful business owners everyone wants to be like are the ones who work maybe one day a year and the rest of the time is theirs to do with as they wish. The best way to get to that place is to listen to these successful business owners and learn from what they have done.
One such business man is Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and investor in Facebook. His book Zero to One has been a smash hit and has a great amount of knowledge to share with readers. After learning more about Peter Thiel from Blake Masters, there are five really great and simple ideas found in their book. As a matter of fact these ideas are so simple one generally over looks them expecting some profound and life altering concept to pop out at them in the next chapter.
Five success lessons every entrepreneur can learn from Peter Thiel for beginning to lay the ground work for a new business followed with a basic definition of each:
Basically think outside the box. There are plenty of search engines and email accounts go for something different. Be unique in the search for your industry brain storm. Replicating other people’s ideas just causes market saturation, which drives down demand and then ultimately causes business to begin the downward spiral of the toilet. This is why, in Peter Thiel’s opinion, businesses fail. Make the business of your dreams truly unique and you can never fail.
Sounds the same as above but is completely different. One can be original and still be in the same market as the coffee shop next door. Bring something truly different to the table though. A personality is a nice place to start. Ever notice that the large chain coffee shops have barristers with personality and great attitudes? Yeah they do! Well that was a niche filled right there. Find the niche that needs filling and make a good fit. Make the originality seep from every pore of the business, play to your strengths and make sure that no one else has ever done it before.
That dreaded “M” word should not be dreaded. Monopoly +unique ideas=Money. That is truly what everyone is after in the business world money. It is what makes the world go round, and what pays the bills by the way. Answer some difficult question in the world, cater to some need which has been over looked too long and then run with it. Don’t open a restaurant in a city with six already you are not going to succeed. Don’t open a restaurant at all. Find a unique problem to solve in that town, find the answer to a question no one can answer open that instead. Work the business to grow quickly and be sustainable. This should be easy because you will be the only on in the market, right. So make it everything it should be from the beginning and success is just around the corner for you. OK so the plan you have isn’t very good and well you have no idea how it will work out and there are a ton of other excuses you can come up with. OK, quite but before you do tell someone else about the plan. They can do it then. Mr. Thiel believes that a bad plan is better than no plan, because a bad plan can be changed and evolve with the idea, no plan is instant death. Run with the bad plan until a better one shows itself. Then run with it. You are making a Monopoly; no one said it was going to be easy.
So no one understands what you are doing and no one else has ever worked on it before, awesome! That is the plan you want then. Back to number three for a moment, if no one else gets it then you are truly creating a Monopoly everyone will want in on in the future. Work it and take it to the next level. Create a plan good, bad, or otherwise and roll with it. Make it your baby and make it something that you can hang on to forever. Pass it down to children, grandchildren whichever but make it sustainable.
Always remember the future. Well isn’t that supposed to be” remember the past”? Sure if you want to fail. If you want to succeed remember the future. The future is what you are planning for; the future is what you should be looking too. Don’t spend too much time of the short term plan. Look at your long term goals 1 year, 5 years, 10 years and so forth.
Following these five rules can save a lot of time and headaches. Remember your goal is to work one day a year, this is only possible by listening to those who already do that.
Check out Blake Master’s interview about Peter Thiel and their book, Zero To One here
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]]>A summary of things you should know about People Tools for Business according to Alan Fox Introduction In this episode Alan Fox gives a deep dive of his book, PeopleRead More
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]]>A summary of things you should know about People Tools for Business according to Alan Fox
In this episode Alan Fox gives a deep dive of his book, People Tools for Business, where he shares 50 strategies for building success, creating wealth, and finding happiness.
In his book, Fox provides easy and practical tools, organized into 50 chapters, that each address a specific issue and gives a strategy you can use to overcome it. The goal of the book is to help you gain success in areas such as developing self-confidence, improving management skills, and how to respond to being fired.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who need a handy book of business shortcuts that are time-tested and help solve everyday business related problems.
I’m not so serious about it and I have short chapters. You do not have to start at chapter one and read all the way through.
You can read it from front to back or you can jump around from chapter to chapter.
The one chapter that is really the most important I call Stick it Out. In harsh economic times you need to stick it out. If your marriage isn’t working stick it out. You have got to stick it out and ultimately you will succeed by sticking it out.
I start with the importance of leaving your grumpy attitude at home and putting a smile on your face every day.
One of my favorite chapters in People Tools for Business is called The Magic Piano. I think if you look at the world as a magic piano you will have more fun and get deeper in to life. In terms of business I have a different take than almost anybody.
In my book I go over the dreaded annual review and how I believe it shouldn’t be something that we do at the end of the year but rather every single day or at least once a week. If we change our annual review to something we do daily or weekly perhaps it won’t be something that is dreaded and more useful for you and your employees.
I also go over hiring and firing in my book. I think that if you look at firing as an opportunity to get a position which is more suited to you and your talents I believe that you will do better. A number of people that I have personally fired are now doing much better in the new positions that they are now in.
I have a chapter about advertising your mistakes. When I make a mistake I advertise it to people and people seem to like me better because I admit I am human and secondly they own up to their own mistakes.
In another chapter I talk about the importance of delegating some of your work. Delegate all that you can and trust them to do a good job because when you show your trust they are more likely to do a better job.
These are some of the many ideas and business tools that I give in my book People Tools for Business.
“There will be days when the universe seems to conspire against you and when it does take a deep breath, give silent thanks that your misfortune wasn’t worse, and enjoy a good laugh.” – Alan Fox
I am 74 years old and I’ve had a long and very successful business career. At first I was a CPA with a national CPA firm, then an attorney with my own law practice for a number of years and finally I formed a commercial real estate company at ACF Property Management Inc.
I think that you can do what you want to do and have fun while doing it. People Tools For Business is about doing things a little differently in business and enjoying yourself at the same time.
The Book by Alan Watts
Buy People Tools for Business by Alan Fox on Amazon today
Visit PeopleToolsBook.com to check out Alan’s blog
For questions contact Alan by email here
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Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland | Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel | Smartcuts by Shane Snow
Relevant advice and tips: 7 Productivity Tools For Entrepreneurs To Make Life Easier
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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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]]>Things you should know about Hooked according to Nir Eyal Introduction In this episode, Nir Eyal shares his book Hooked where he teaches you why very few products see successRead More
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]]>Things you should know about Hooked according to Nir Eyal
In this episode, Nir Eyal shares his book Hooked where he teaches you why very few products see success and what makes consumers engage with certain products out of habit.
In his book, Eyal gives you a four-step process for figuring out exactly what you should build into your product to make it better than the rest. The goal of Hooked is to have your products bring consumers back continuously without depending on costly advertising and messaging.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are having troubles creating or getting a product to stick and need actionable steps for building products people love.
I couldn’t find that book out there that told me what resources and tools I could use to figure out what I should build into my product.
If you are working on the kind of product that requires repeat engagement then you need to have what I call the complete hook, a four step process to creating customer habits. However, even If you are building a one-time use service there is still a lot that you can learn from consumer psychology by understanding these deeper reasons that people do what they do and I believe you can get the outline of that by jumping in and out of the book. I really hope that the reader gets to the end because I believe that there is a lot here that can help people save a lot of time and energy in building their businesses.
The one principle I would want the reader to take out of the book is that your behavior is designed.
The book follows this model that I call The Hook which is basically a design pattern. It’s something that I found in my years of research that is in all sorts of habit forming products. So my research revealed this four step process which I detail throughout the chapters of the book.
The first step in The Hook is The Trigger phase. The trigger phase is something that cues the user to action; it’s what prompts the habit. These triggers come in two types, internal triggers and external triggers. External triggers are things in our environment that tells us what to do next. This is what most people think of when they think about cues to action. Internal triggers are these things that prompt the user to action and there information for what to do next is actually in the users head. So what people do when they are in a particular situation, routine or when they feel certain emotions this dictates what they do next. If your company can attach to these negative emotions, this is where habits are formed. It’s absolutely critical that if you want to build a habit forming product you have to figure out what that internal trigger is.
The next step of The Hook is The Action phase. The action phase is the simplest behavior that the user does in anticipation of a reward. If you can make a behavior easier to do you are more likely to get that behavior to occur.
Then the next chapter is about variable rewards. It turns out that at the heart of all sorts of habit forming products you will find a variable reward. I details three critical types of variable rewards found in all sorts of habit forming products both online and offline.
Finally, the last step of The Hook is The Investment phase. It’s the part of the hook that I find most companies neglect as well as where there is the most room for growth and opportunity. It turns out that this phase is absolutely critical in bringing users back and it’d defined as the step where the user does a bit of work to increase the likelihood of them returning. I detail how you can ask people to invest in the product so that they can come back in the future whereas the product gets better the more it gets used.
At the end of the book I give some case studies and I profile an app that’s one of the most successful apps in the world, the bible app and I detail how this app uses the principles of consumer psychology to keep people coming back to use it. I also talk about the morality of manipulation, that if you’re using consumer psychology to change people’s behavior, I offer up a guide for how to use this responsibly.
“Hooked gives you the blueprint for the next generation of products. Read Hooked or the company that replaces you will.” –Matt Mullenweg
I’ve started two tech companies and after my last company was acquired I dove into the more academic side of consumer psychology and habit formation which is what I’ve been working on for the past three years.
I was at my last company and was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why my customers weren’t doing the behaviors that I designed for them to do. I wanted to dive deeper into consumer psychology, into the things that people are not able to necessarily articulate and yet predictably drive their behavior. So I couldn’t find that book out there that told me what resources and tools I could use to figure out what I should build into my product.
Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham
Buy Hooked on Amazon today
Visit HookModel.com for bundles of content
Visit NirAndFar.com to read Nir’s personal blog
Follow Nir Eyal on Facebook and Twitter
Download the full transcript here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters | Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg | Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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