This week my 5 favorite business and strategy post cover:
- Leveraging a business’ network to develop better solutions to wicked problems
- Business model generation, the who (putting together the idea target market profile), the what (your point of excellence), and the how (leveraging your unique assets).
- The path to better decision-making
As, always I’m looking to share with you quality information that helps increase your business development skills, enhance your level of business model innovation, and ultimately the quality of your professional relationships.
If you enjoy my weekend summary and would like even more practical, useable links than the five I highlight here every week, follow me on Twitter @DonaldMcMichael and Google Plus +DonaldMcMichael.
Good stuff I discovered this week:
Three Keys to (Much) Better Decisions
In this article the author, Tony Schwartz, offers three insights on how we can replace impulsive choices with more intentional decision-making. The first key is to cultivate awareness and perspective on how this helps, or hinders, our ability to achieve long-term goals, instead of present ones. Next, we must be comfortable accepting trade-offs in order to promote the values that are important to us. Schwartz hits it on the head when he wrote “The highest challenge we all face is doing the right thing — especially when it doesn’t necessarily serve our immediate self-interest”.
How to Discover Your Perfect Target Customer in 5 Steps
One of the most important activities any burgeoning entrepreneurs have to undertake is determine with piercing clarity who resides at the intersection of their passion, world-class skills, and the marketplace; often referred to as your Hedgehog Concept. It’s the third component, identifying what cohort highly values and will consistently need your service, which is more often than not the tripping block for many. John Jantsch helps us by proving an outline of 5 steps that can put us on the path to discovering our ideal target customer.
P.S. Don’t think that this is limited to newbies, many established concerns that are struggling to grow revenue are afflicted with the same woe.
Why Small Businesses Should Scrap Strategic Planning
- Observation: one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to how to manage a company; available resources, relationships, and brand awareness are all different.
- Fact: Most business management books focus on large companies because they have enough information (public, private, & historical) available to support statistically relevant observations.
- Thus, small companies that want to grow should not adopt the practices of large concerns.
Reading the above one might think that small, growth-oriented companies should ditch management books and just produce. Not so, what the author of this post proposes is that you embrace an “adaptive opportunistic approach to strategy”. He provides a 3-step framework on how you can deploy strategic thinking in lieu of not strategic planning.
Look Beyond the Team: It’s About the Network
Tiger Teams, 6-Sigma Teams, Project Taskforce, Team Newco…
If you have been around business for a minute you’ve heard of some, all, or far more names bestowed upon leadership groups charged with solving the unsolvable problem. But, how many of us considered harnessing the potential of focused networks. This HBR article lays out what might be a much better way of attacking an organization’s wicked problems.
If Not Excellence, What? Tom Peters & Business Models
“Better business models are built on excellent value propositions. To build one, you have to avoid trying to be excellent in all areas (differentiation, customer responsiveness, or lowest total cost)… You need to be competent at a couple, and excellent at one.” – Tim Kastelle
I couldn’t have said it better. Checkout this interesting post.
Bonus:
The Future Of Mobile [Presentation Deck]
This is a Business Insider presentation deck from their IGNITION: West 2012 conference. A possible sub-title could be ‘Up, up, and away’. It should be no surprise that mobile device adoption is projected to explode over the next few years, now guess who the big winner will be.