If you are running a business, it is important to ask yourself now some key questions now about how you are going to develop your business in 2011. Here are 5 powerful questions to help get your thinking started: What frustrated you the most in your business in 2010? What do you want to accomplish…
Bud Cadell posted a great diagram a little while back for helping entrepreneurs and small business owners think about how to find a great niche and be happy and successful at what they do: It’s an extension of the Jim Collins Good to Great Venn diagram model of the three intersecting circles of Passion, Market opportunity…
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I was recently having a look at some of the ideas from the Heart Of Business website. One idea that caught my eye there is Mark Silver’s definition of business as “the relationships you have around your livelihood.” That is such an evocative definition. It immediately gets one thinking of the web of relationships surrounding…
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Business Week has posted a review of the McKinsey web 2.0 executive survey report that I posted on recently. Business Week note that: Executives report three main uses for Web 2.0 technologies: Seventy percent of companies rely on them to talk with customers. Fifty-one percent use them to talk with suppliers and business partners. And…
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A recent post from BusinessWeek Online reminds us that when starting a business, the Field of Dreams approach – “Build it and They Will Come” – is entirely the wrong approach: instead we should first go out and find one or more customers, at the earliest possible opportunity. This may be, perhaps, before we even…
Business Week’s NussbaumOnDesign recently posted an interesting article on “How Should We Educate Designers? And For What?” Nussbaum noted that: The business model is shifting away from mere efficiency to innovation and that requires a different culture and people able to operate in that culture. Consequently, . . . corporations should be looking to design…
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In a previous article, I discussed 2 models for starting up a business: the funded venture vs. the bootstrap. Since how to start a business is a topic that comes up frequently on discussions over at LinkedIn, I’d like to recommend two books that I think offer great advice: The Art of the Start: The…
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One of the hottest approaches to creativity and innovation in business right now is the design approach. In the United States, D-schools (design schools) such as the Stanford Design School are springing up in competion with (or complementing) traditional B-schools (business schools). The basic idea of the design approach is to (i) understand the client…