McKinsey Quarterly: Strategic Principles for Competing in the Digital Age - Growthink: The Stream The board of a large European insurer was pressing management for answers. A company known mostly for its online channel had begun to undercut premiums in a number of markets and was doing so without agents, building on its dazzling brand reputation online and using new technologies to engage buyers. Some of the insurer’s senior managers were sure the threat would abate. Others pointed to serious downtrends in policy renewals among younger customers avidly using new web-based price-comparison tools. The board decided that the company needed to quicken its digital pace. For many leaders, this story may sound familiar, harkening back to the scary days, 15 years ago, when they encountered the first wave of Internet competitors.
Free Books A lot of people keep asking about a good list of programming books. Hence, we are building this list to save your time and to spread the knowledge. Some of these books will definitely help us to evolve our coding skills and thought processes for developing better solutions. We will do our best to keep updating this list, hope you find this list useful, here we go. Meta-List Graphics Programming The Happy Startup School Guide to MVPs There are a lot of opinions about what minimal viable products (MVPs) are and to contribute to the confusion :-P I’ve put together my guide to what they really are… Assume nothing. That should be the phrase to live by for any startup.
The Start-up Owner's Manual: Customer Development Experiments Editor's note: This post is part of a series featuring excerpts from the recently published book, The Startup Owner's Manual, written by serial entrepreneurs-turned-educators Steve Blank and Bob Dorf. Come back each week for more how-tos from this 608-page guide. Once your Business Model Canvas is done, it's time for your team to "get out of the building" to test your hypotheses. You need to answer three key questions:
20 ways to validate your startup idea (other than landing pages) I was invited along to do a talk and mentor the teams at last weekend’s Lean Startup Machine in London. LSM is a fast-paced 3 day workshop where lots of budding entrepreneurs work in teams to validate one of their startup ideas through following the principles of lean startup – namely customer development and a lot of ‘getting out of the building’. This is the second time I’ve been along to LSM, having attended the first one in London more than 2 years ago, which even included mentors such as Brant Cooper and Eric Ries. It’s moved on a bit since the early days and now has had more than 100 workshops in more than 40 cities.
What’s A Startup? First Principles. Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill Everyone knows what a startup is for – don’t they? In this post we’re going to offer a new definition of why startups exist: a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.
Private military company A private military company (PMC), private military firm (PMF),[1] or private military or security company, provides armed security services. PMCs refer to their staff as security contractors or private military contractors. Private military companies refer to their business generally as the private military industry or The Circuit.[2][3] While the hiring of mercenaries is a common practice in the history of armed conflict, it is prohibited in the modern age by the United Nations Mercenary Convention, which is why PMCs make a specific differentiation between their commercial activities and the connotations surrounding the word "mercenary". The services and expertise offered by PMCs are typically similar to those of governmental military or police forces, most often on a smaller scale. The services of private contractors are used around the world.
Aegis Defence Services Aegis Defence Services is a British private military company with overseas offices in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Kenya, Nepal and the United States. It was founded in 2002 by Tim Spicer, who was previously director of the controversial private military company Sandline International.[2] In 2004 the International Peace Operations Association, an industry body, asked Aegis to apply for membership, but the application was rejected by a British competitor.[citation needed] It is a founding member of the British Association of Private Security Companies (BAPSC), a body lobbying for the regulation of the British PSC sector.[3] It is also a member of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq. Since 27 July 2010 AEGIS Group Holdings AG[4] in Basel, Switzerland, is holding 1,125,000 ordinary shares of Aegis Defence Services Limited, London. Aegis in Iraq and Afghanistan[edit]