Leadership

Make a Little – Sell a Little – Commercial Experimentation

In case you’re not familiar with 3M’s “make a little – sell a little” philosophy, I’ve always found it very useful when launching new to the world products. When dealing with new markets or what Clayton Christensen calls “competing against non-consumption,” any pretense that you can know the market size and scale the supply chain [...]

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The allure of doing it all

The single biggest problem companies struggle with in both creating and executing growth strategy is having too many priorities at the same time. Even after elaborate prioritization exercises, the natural inclination is to want to figure out how to work on them all. As a result, both execution speed and quality suffer. But early on, [...]

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Should money be your company’s goal?

The Theory of Constraints holds that “the goal” of for-profit businesses is normally to make money both now and in the future. That’s certainly the case for most companies that I work with. But not always – there are successful businesses where money is not the goal. Note here that I’m talking about goals – [...]

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Is your market dying for change?

In the Fast Company Article Change or Die, Alan Deutchman, shared a statistic that blew me away.  After just  a year, more than 90% of heart bypass patients return to the 5 behaviors (overeating, not exercising, too much stress, excessive drinking, and smoking) that put them on the operating table to begin with. Ninety percent! [...]

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Teaching old markets new tricks

Many companies write old markets off – relegating them to either cash cow or harvest status.  How can you blame them? They keep investing and don’t see any return so the easy thing to do is to tell yourself that it’s a “mature market.”  One where new product or service innovation just won’t provide the [...]

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Is multitasking getting us anywhere?

Chief Executive Magazine recently took leaders to task in an article that hits one of the problems of multitasking on the head. What message does multitasking send to those around us? Multitasking, whether as an organization or individually kills focus and reduces productivity and innovation and among other areas the development of new products.  The [...]

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