Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack’s Notebook » Blog Archive » Innovat. All American Mardy Gilyard I’m still giddy over the University of Cincinnati Bearcats (UC) victory over the University of Pittsburgh Panthers yesterday. Don’t worry, this is not going to be a post about sports, it’s about what it takes to make a great success. Creating a winning major college football program at UC, while not some earth stopping innovation, is surely a story about creating a culture of excellence — and all innovators can learn from that. Let me take you back to the early 60’s for a moment. I was a young lad living near the UC campus in Cincinnati. I attended a few football games with my father and brother, and usually, UC got trounced. Sometimes they would eek out a narrow victory over cross town rival Xavier, or Marshall and people would go nuts. Everybody in Cincinnati dreamed back then of having a real major college football program (okay, not everybody, some dared not dream that big) to compete with the likes of Ohio State, Michigan, and Notre Dame.
Ideas so fresh--they should be slapped!: Even in a recession, it. America - and much of the world - is in the midst of a recession. Customers are only interested in purchasing items at the lowest price and the only way to thrive now is to slash prices to rock bottom. Right? I don't agree. Granted, people have less money to spend than every before. But I don't think that the fact we're in a recession means price cuts are mandatory. Yes, customers always want to pay the lowest price (or not pay at all) for generic products or services. In my opinion, the price of a product or service only becomes a major issue when creativity is lacking. The key to justifying a higher price is to provide something that is of more value.
Customers are always open to paying more for a product or service that is more than a bare bones approach. Take Apple for example. But is being cool enough to sustain Apple in a time of financial crisis? I'll let you decide. The same goes for nearly any product or service. Seven Advertising Insights for the New Year - Small Agency Diary. United States, Media & Entertainment, 5 Useful Marketing Answers.
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Top 10 Corporate Time-Wasters - Latest inno. By Mike Myatt Time is the only thing we all have in common, yet it's how we choose to spend it that defines and differentiates us as individuals. Even though time is a key success metric, I am always amazed at how many executives don't manage it as such. Time is indeed a precious and finite commodity, and those professionals that manage it wisely are those that achieve the greatest results. Show me an executive that doesn't leverage time to its highest and best use and I'll show you an executive likely to be replaced by one that can. In today's blog post I'll examine the value of time. The proper understanding of how to use time directly impacts income.
I have a bit of a different take on the subject as I work very hard at working intelligently. Whether you are a sales person, professional advisor, entrepreneur, or executive, you only have 24 hours in a day, which consists of 1440 minutes, and when reduced to the ridiculous amounts to 86,400 seconds. Multiples of a day you ask?
The Best Business Model in the World - Umair Haque - HarvardBusi. By Umair Haque | 11:25 AM April 30, 2009 “Nice content – awesome presentation! What did you use to make it?!” That’s what everyone who sees my BRITE presentation asks me. It’s a new service called Prezi. And it’s insanely great — the minute I saw it I had to have it, no questions asked. So, for the first time in half a decade, I found myself doing the unthinkable: paying for software. And that made me reflect on something that I thought I’d share. Everybody’s searching desperately for business model innovation: Detroit, newspapers, record labels, banks.
Yet, the best business model in the world is also the simplest: make stuff that’s insanely great. The converse is also — and perhaps more importantly — true. Business model innovation is often self-defeating and self-destructive. Why? Business model innovation creates a kind of adverse selection. For most companies, the costs of business model innovation exceed the benefits. Let’s summarize. Chris Brogan & Success-Benchmarks, Business Objectives & Balance. I woke up this morning to this post from Chris Brogan and the accompanied video: I found myself responding to Chris with Success to me is finding balance between professional success and being a good son, significant other, friend, sibling and when I get married- a great husband and father. From there I looked at some official Chris Brogan stats: When I look at those numbers I think “critical mass”.
Chris has in fact reached critical mass! Any brand that builds and maintains a following such as above is sure to have success. Yes, getting up at 5AM is necessary, but at what cost? These observations got me thinking about the obvious need to having a brand strategy. Do yourself the favor and spend some time with the people closest to you today. Like this: Be the first to like this. How to protect your ideas in the digital age. If we're in the idea business, how to protect those ideas? One way is to misuse trademark law. With the help of search engines, greedy lawyers who charge by the letter are busy sending claim letters to anyone who even comes close to using a word or phrase they believe their client 'owns'.
News flash: trademark law is designed to make it clear who makes a good or a service. It's a mark we put on something we create to indicate the source of the thing, not the inventor of a word or even a symbol. They didn't invent trademark law to prevent me from putting a picture of your cricket team's logo on my blog. They invented it to make it clear who was selling you something (a mark for trade = trademark).
I'm now officially trademarking thank-you™. Another way to protect your ideas is to (mis)use copyright law. The challenge for people who create content isn't to spend all the time looking for pirates. So, how to protect your ideas in a world where ideas spread? Don't. Instead, spread them. Business Success Made Awesomely Simple by John Spence : The Worl. Storytelling Tips from Salesforce's Marc Benioff. Software-as-a-service pioneer and salesforce.com (CRM) co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff credits storytelling as one of the primary reasons for his company's rapid success.
"Communication is probably the most essential part of my job," Benioff told me in an recent interview about his new book, Behind the Cloud. The book describes how salesforce went from idea to $1 billion company in less than a decade. Whether you own a small business, run a large company, or have a great idea for The Next Big Thing, consider these seven tips from Benioff about how to shape and articulate your vision. Commit to transparent communication. Customer relationships take work, and a big part of that work is dedicating yourself to constant communication with customers and prospects, says Benioff. "We invited them to come in and see what we were working on. Creative Think: What's Your Creativity Style? Find the 15-Minute Competitive Advantage - Rosabeth Moss Kanter. By Rosabeth Moss Kanter | 9:26 AM November 9, 2009 Just because this is a time of transformation doesn’t mean that it’s easy to sell transformational ideas. Economic uncertainty has reduced the audience for bold, grand rhetoric.
Besides, even in boom times innovation is risky. Innovators often have to ease anxieties by sounding conservative while doing something radical. We all want breakthroughs; it’s just that we can’t know exactly which of the bold new ideas will break through. As many technology companies have seen to their peril, you can leap much too far into the future by seeking revolution, not evolution, leaving potential users in the dust. Consider Woody Allen’s comedy routine about the first landing of UFOs on Earth and our first contact with an advanced civilization (AKA advanced competitor).
Call this the “15 minute competitive advantage”: changing in short fast bursts rather than waiting for the breakthrough that transforms everything. Company Overview. You view knowledge sharing between your employees, partners, and customers as a strategic priority. Essentially, their knowledge leads to your success. Kenexa's portfolio of inter-related mobile, social, and learning Knowledge Solutions accelerates and broadens access to colleagues and the knowledge they need to respond to business requirements more quickly and make better informed decisions.
Together you excel. The results derive more worth from your people assets and enable them to more effectively collaborate, converse, and learn while increasing their social and knowledge capital. Our Knowledge Solutions accomplish this by: Delivering personalized, modular contentContributed and shared by experts and peersSupporting learning anytime, anywhere through mobile devices.
Kenexa’s award-winning solutions include: How to Get Found : The World. Fallback for the 2% If you ask one hundred people to do a task (particularly one that involves following instructions or using a computer or both), figure that two of them will mess it up. It doesn't matter if you use ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.
It doesn't matter if your instructions are crystal clear. It doesn't matter if you ask them to sign a release. Two percent will mess it up. Which means you only have two choices: Design systems that have the good sense and gracefulness to permit the 2% to proceed, orAnnoy, demonize or lose these people Technologists hate this choice, but it's true. [Can I just clarify that the first choice isn't the only choice. Drew McLellan - The Marketing Minute: 5 reasons why other people.
I was part of a panel (with Claire Celsi, Nathan T. Wright & Dr. David Bulla) talking to journalists about personal branding this morning. Part of my message was that it's fine and dandy to have a personal brand…but one of the keys to its success is in how you share your brand with the world. I used the analogy of a dandelion. Once you figure out what your personal brand is all about….you hold it out to the world, like a dandelion. Sure…the wind will gently blow some of the seeds along, letting them land somewhere and take root.
But…if you really want your personal brand to be spread far and near…you need other people. When someone holds a dandelion close to their mouth and gives a big blow….those seeds go everywhere. Here are five reasons why someone else might make the effort to spread your personal brand: Are you a go-giver? People tend to want to help those people who help others. Are you a credible resource? Do you actually have something to say that is real, relevant and of value? Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age - Part One. In the circles that I travel the Internet is often breathlessly embraced as the herald of all things good; the bringer of increased choice, personal empowerment, social harmony…and the list goes on. And yet, as with any powerful technology, the truth of its consequences eludes such a singular and happy narrative. Here is the first of three paradoxes of the Internet Age.
I would love to see Radar readers point out others. <br More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us. Elizabeth Kolbert has a piece in this week’s New Yorker reviewing Cass Sunstein’s new book, “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done.” People’s tendency to become more extreme after speaking with like-minded others has become known as “group polarization,” and it has been documented in dozens of other experiments. The Internet is becoming a vast petri dish for the group polarization phenomena. (Thanks to Jim Stogdill for surfacing this link via email) How I Tweet : The World. 5 Marketing Tools Every Startup Should Use. Seven suggestions for messy times « THE COMPASS POINT. Lean startups aren’t cheap startups. (Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany.
This column originally appeared on his blog.) At an entrepreneurs panel last week questions from the audience made me realize that the phrase “ For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries’s description of the intersection of Customer Development, Agile Development and (if available) open platforms and open source. A Lean Startup is not about the total amount of money you may spend over the life of your startup. It is about when in the life of your company you do the spending. Over its lifetime, a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup. Lets see why. In times of abundant venture capital if you miss your revenue plan, additional funding from your investors is usually available to cover your mistakes. This is the most important sentence in this post and worth deconstructing.
Photo by Lee Carson via Flickr. Principles Of Effective Search In E-Commerce Design - Smashing M. Advertisement While product findability is a key factor of success in e-commerce, it is predominantly enabled by simple search alone. And while simple search usually doesn’t fulfill complex needs among users, website developers and owners still regard advanced search as just another boring to-do item during development. Owners won’t go so far as to leave it out, because every e-commerce website has some kind of advanced search functionality, but they probably do not believe it brings in much revenue.
On the contrary, well-devised advanced search offers several benefits and can be more than just a clumsy, complicated tool. First of all, effective search can accelerate the sales process. And faster sales can increase conversions, because you will not be losing customers who give up trying to find products. Furthermore, fast, precise and successful searches increase your customers’ trust. Also consider our previous articles: 1. The word itself is scary: “advanced.” 2. From here 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.