PRIMO-F - The Business Growth Model | RapidBI - Rapid Business Improvement PRIMO-F Business Growth Model The PRIMO-F model was developed as part of a SWOT analysis of an organization. It provides a consistent framework for comparison either from within the organization or to benchmark against a previous analysis or benchmark against other organizations. The PRIMO-F model was based on some work from the Durham University Business School (DUBS), and what makes an organization and its management effective. This research demonstrated that an effective organization needed to fulfil the following equation: Organizational Growth Effectiveness Performance to date * Potential for the future Where Performance to date (FiMO) included: Finance,Marketing andOperations and Potential for the future (RECoIL) included: Resources,Experience,Controls and SystemsInnovation andLeadership This was sometimes called FiMO/ RECoIL. One of the problems with the model in the ‘field’ is that often key issues were missed. The PRIMO-F Model: PRIMO-F Performance of the business. Potential for Growth
The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell The city was strange and the society was unnerving, but what disturbed me most about my Dubai experience was my job as a business consultant for the Boston Consulting Group. I really had no idea what to expect, going in. In my mind, consulting was about answering business questions through analysis. It was supposed to be Excel sheets and models, sifting through data to discover profit and loss, and helping clients make decisions that would add the most value for themselves, and by extension, society. It was worrisome to enter a new job without any guarantee that I would be qualified. The first clue that my mental picture of consulting was off came with “training” in Munich. After a pleasant week of pseudo-partying, I returned to Dubai and was assigned to writing case proposals. Case proposals were despised by the rank and file — one had a dozen bosses, unclear objectives, and virtually no coordination with co-workers. I worked hard at MIT. I’m a free marketeer. I spoke up once.
The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List: The 77 Best Business Books In Print “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.” Will Hunting (played by Matt Damon), Good Will Hunting MBA programs don’t have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work. The Personal MBA features the very best business books available, based on over ten years and thousands of hours of research. So skip business school and the $150,000 loan: you can get a world-class business education own your own at very low cost by reading the best business books. This page lists all Personal MBA recommended books and resources for easy printing, bookmarking, and reference. Here are the 99 business books The Personal MBA officially recommends… click on the title of each book to read a detailed description of each book and why it’s important, or the buttons to the right for additional reviews. Read This First For Best Results... Buy the Book: Business Creation Sales
McKinsey’s corrupted culture | Felix Salmon | Analysis & Opinion John Gapper makes a good point: management consultants in general, and McKinsey consultants in particular, have made their entire business out of exploiting the moral grey zone surrounding confidential information. The reason you hire McKinsey is that its consultants have seen strategic business issues like yours before, and therefore might have developed good insights into how to approach them. But the reason they’re familiar with those issues is that they’ve been given highly confidential information about your competitors. Here’s Gapper on McKinsey: The accumulation and sharing of privileged knowledge is integral to how it works…The calculation every client makes is, in the words of Christopher McKenna, a professor at the Oxford university’s Saïd Business School who studies professional services firms, that “consultants will carry information in and information out. None of this remotely explains or excuses what Gupta is accused of doing, of course.
How do CEOs spend their time? Corporate leadership attracts enormous attention, both from scholars and from the public. Yet, despite this strong interest, very little is known on what activities leaders engage in. Most texts that purport to define and explain the role of corporate leaders are based on a small amount of evidence, often just a single case. What is widely considered the authority in this area, John P Kotter’s (1999) classic, “What Leaders Really Do?,” is based on recording the activities of 15 general managers of non-randomly selected companies for 35 hours each. To fill the gap, we have developed a methodology to collect and analyse information on how CEOs of top companies use their work time. To collect the time use data, we ask the CEO's personal assistant (PA) to keep a diary of the activities performed by the CEO during a pre-specified week (from Monday to Friday). Our data reveals that, as expected, CEOs spend the majority of their time with other people (85%). Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3.
The 8 dumbest business decisions ever | The Best Article Every day Written by Minyanville These dead-wrong determinations seemed like reasonable choices to somebody at some point. But time has exposed them as mammoth mistakes. Mistakes they’d like to take back “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes,” Oscar Wilde wrote. And so it can be said that business history has endured some tremendously embarrassing and shortsighted experiences. At one point, a Texas tycoon looking to buy a software company decided that a young Bill Gates was asking too much for his startup, Microsoft (MSFT) . In London, an experienced music executive felt that four young men from Liverpool, England, weren’t worth his record label’s financial backing. Ten years ago, the chiefs of two major media companies thought their fortunes would be richer if they merged their operations. Click through the gallery to read about these corporate missteps and other business decisions that proved to be stunningly ill-considered. 1. Remember Excite? And Excite? 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 8.
Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn Take the case of chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: "Stop counting. Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected. The experiment was then repeated with a second group of people, who were offered a large financial reward for accurately watching the centre dot, creating more anxiety.
Every Worker Should Be C.E.O. of Something Q. What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned? A. And the one thing I learned from that was that I actually could tell what someone would be like in business, based on how they played on the soccer field. So even today when I play in Sunday-morning soccer games, I can literally spot the people who’d probably be good managers and good people to hire. Q. A. So I’d rather be on a team that has no bad people than a team with stars. And are you a playmaker? Q. A. And that, to me, is a huge amount of what it means to manage. Q. A. Q. A. I think that was a big lesson for me because what I realized was that if you give people really big jobs to the point that they’re scared, they have way more fun and they improve their game much faster. Q. A. Q. A. I also like to hire people into one position below where they ought to be, because only a certain kind of person will do that — somebody who is pretty humble and somebody who’s very confident. Q. A. Q. A. Q.
Web 2.0 Companies Do Not Have Any Women on Their Board of Directors In one memorable episode of the famous old short films “The Little Rascals,” after not getting invited to a party, the Our Gang little dudes decided to form their own group, comically called “The He-Man Woman-Haters Club.” In other words: No girls allowed! While it was wink-wink cute when Spanky, Alfalfa and Buckwheat huffed and puffed about keeping out Darla–which they never ever could do–back in the last century, it’s not quite as adorkable when it comes to the boards of all the major Web 2.0 hotshots these days. That would be Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare, none of which have any women as directors. As in zero. What’s most remarkable is that most of these start-ups are run by what I consider enlightened and open-minded entrepreneurs, mostly young enough to be part of a generation more inclined to value equality and diversity in the workplace. In addition, each of these companies has a massive base of women consumers, in some cases well over 50 percent of its audience.
Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? Photo Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one: Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud. Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault. Case 3 (heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud. There was a pattern to the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the men’s ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences. The odds favored the prisoner who appeared at 8:50 a.m. — and he did in fact receive parole. There was nothing malicious or even unusual about the judges’ behavior, which was reported earlier this year by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University. Baumeister tried to be optimistic. 1. 2.
Interview de spécialiste : Pierre Falga, journaliste à l’Express, spécialiste des données publiques Pierre Falga : Mon titre, c’est journaliste chargé des enquêtes statistiques. Concrètement, je suis rattaché au service Régions où je conçois et rédige des dossiers locaux de 12 ou 16 pages avec plein de chiffres. Les 3 dossiers sur lesquels je travaille en ce moment résument bien mon travail : « Isère – Où vivent les riches ? Où vivent les pauvres ? », « Toulon – Où vit-on le mieux quartier par quartier ? » et « Bordeaux – Toulouse, où vit-on le mieux ? Je m’occupe par ailleurs des classements nationaux de L’Express. C’est important car la première mission du data-journaliste est d’établir un périmètre de base de son étude le plus parfait possible. DP : Sur les classements des villes dont vous vous occupez, les données sont-elles faciles à obtenir ? PF : Voilà un sujet dont je pourrais parler des heures mais je vais essayer de me résumer… En France, les données brutes ne sont jamais faciles à obtenir. « Wikileaks notamment a fait beaucoup avancer les choses !