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donald mcmichael

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5 Fav Business and Strategy Insights #33

mpesa

Family, a revelation hit me this week about this blog series. The base premise has been that I would highlight the five most interesting post that I read during the week. I have always focused on posts that were delivered during the past seven days, but what if I read for the first time an interest post that was crafted outside of that week period? Better yet, why am I artificially limiting myself to blog posts?

The purpose of this vehicle is to present relevant insights that help propel our business knowledge and understanding forward. Want an example of what I mean? Checkout this week’s first of five.

That’s why I’m changing out ‘Posts’ in the title name to ‘Insights’. It better fits how we need to think in this cross-platform environment. As always, I’ll never going into depth about the finds, so I encourage you check them out if they sound interesting.

Looking for the Change
This week’s first item of interest is episode 2: ‘Looking for the Change’ of the WHAT THE FUTURE (WTF) Television series that comes to us courteously of CNBC World. It focuses on MPESA (Mobile PESA), the African mobile payments system that is leading the world. With 11,000 new cell phone signups a day it is definitely a trend to watch.
21 principles for innovating in the real world from IDEO’s Diego Rodriguez
Diego Rodriguez, a partner at IDEO and a founding professor at the d.school at Stanford talks about the 21 aspects of being a good innovator. The one that I find most interesting comes right off of the top ‘Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world’. This falls right in line with the business model generation (BMG) mindset that I have shift to over the last 12 months. After all, it’s all about making innovations happen which means that you need to take action, absorb feedback, and then adjust.

Am I Allowed? Nilofer Merchant on Innovation
An interesting TED-x talk by Nilofer Merchant on innovation and the internal (personal and organizational) hang-ups that derail ideas augmented with the takeaways that Tim Kastelle developed from the talk. 

Social Media. Listen. Learn. Respond. Repeat.
The bottom line is something that we all know, thanks new media for beating this into us, in this new economy we are all information companies. It’s all about building value by creating and delivering a desirable customer experience. Small business owners, this post takes a how best to first engage in the needed customer conversation. 
Making Networking Effective – Your Timing is Everything
It’s all about the timing, whether it be sports, cooking, or ideation. Granted that timing in each of these cases is slightly different it all boils down to understanding when to move to the next phase. In business encounters, when you deliver your story makes all the difference of whether or not a meeting is successful or not.

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Filed Under: blog, Business Management Tagged With: business development, Business Model Generation, digital media, Innovation, mobile

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Donald McMichael
Insights for entrepreneurial leaders that help them answer two fundamental questions "Where should we play?" and "How do we win?".

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