Category: Strategy
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#64: Have we revisited our boneyard recently?
In your business career, how many new ideas for products, services, improvements, etc. have you had that should have worked … but didn’t? My guess is it’s a very large number. Is that a fair assumption? If so, is it also fair to say that once they ‘failed’ – you cut your losses and sent…
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#61: What’s our customer’s worst nightmare?
As a young salesman, my sales manager taught me that ‘knowing anything about your customer is more important than knowing everything about your product or service’. A philosophy I was able to embrace easily because from an even younger age I’d always been insatiably curious. However, my early attempts at being curious about customers took…
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#58: Have we done our homework?
Billionaire founder of KB Homes and SunAmerical, Eli Broad has a reputation for being unreasonable and going against the grain. Shortly after being fired from his accountancy job, Eli decided to go into the construction business and build single family homes in Detroit. He picked out a large potential pool of buyers (baby boomers) and…
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#52: What’s our NEXT limiting factor?
In all aspects of life and business, there is always a limiting factor when it comes to growth. There’s no doubt you’re experiencing this right now and even if you’re in the process of smashing through … You’ll soon be faced with another. And another. Ad infinitum. However frustrating this may seem – it’s what…
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#50: Do we know what we don’t know?
At a news briefing in 2002, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld attempted to explain the limitations of intelligence reports: “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are…