Archive for February, 2009

Change is accelerating – what are your plans to keep pace

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

Its easy to sit back, and let the world change outside.

Within your walls of your company and family – your world isn’t changing.

But perhaps your customer’s world is changing.

Very definately your kids world is changing.

You need to be fired up about change, as change is the new mandate.

You should hear what Obama is saying … He’s tearing down virtual walls by appearing on arab TV. Obama is getting rid of Guantonomo Bay. Both of these are symbols of integration and peace. A big change from the US stance of scare and hate.

Change – what change …..

Get fired up about change, its impact, and the opportunity it allows. This youtube video should really get you fired.

more honours students in india – than the US has kids

I can’t help but feel the move to everything digital and online. I need to grab my piece of online.

I also previously blogged about change – more about business and business models than people.

What are your views on change ?

What are you doing about change ?

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The velocity of business

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

Its important to not only achieve profit, its the time period in which you can achieve it in.

For small business – this doesn’t seem obvious at first.

You need to become successful and profitable NOW, not next year, and definately not ‘one-day’.

You need to make the hard decisions, make the big changes, and have your success now.

If you wait, and go slow, your life will dribble away, and your business will just be wasting your time.

So when you are planning – move the horizon to something closer, make it immediate.

A lot of this depends on the owner of the business to implement, and its the old “work in the business, versus working on the business’. I think you need 30%-60% of your time spent working ‘on the business’ – being planning strategy, marketing, and working with partners etc.

If you are a public company, you have shareholders demanding profit this year, so generally there is a mandate to get things done. If you are privately owned, you can just wonder around, with little or no growth if you don’t get stuck into the changes now.

Google talks about velocity of business.

If its worth doing, is worth planning,
if its worth planning its worth doing,
if its worth doing its worth doing NOW.

Bring those plans sooner and faster. Bring the profit NOW.

In order to achieve sooner and faster you need:
– time – reorganise your time to work on the business (see above)
– skills – for planning growth, marketing, branding, sales – perhaps outsource some of this
– motivation / inspiration

If you need motivation / inspiration, read these :

Think Big – Donald Trump

Think 10x – Michael Hewitt-Gleeson

Be passionate – Charles Kovess

Two of these guys above I wrote about here

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4 stages in technology lifecycle – and how to profit from it

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

It will help you if you can better predict innovation.

You will be able to take advantage of trends before and as they occur.

Just listening to Wired Magazine editor – Chris Anderson, he notes 4 stages:
– critical price
– critical mass
– displacement of other technology
– price approaches zero

At each stage, there is opportunities for smart entrepreneurs. These opportunities are both with that product, and with adjacent products and services.

You should identify where you and your products are. If they are about to go through some of these inflection points.

I really believe there are opportunity if you are first to commoditize a product. You dont want to be a competitor in a commoditized market. But if you take someone else’s market, and commoditize it on them …. now that has some profit potential.

Some of this parallels what I have observed from open source software, and how it competes with commercial software.  Open source software cant compete with all of the features, or all of the support of commercial software. So when the price is high, and the market smallish, open source doesn’t have a chance. It when the market expands, and features are less important, and support is less important, then open source can more easily compete. Clearly the commercial software guys can’t compete once price approaches zero, but open source, and SaaS can compete at those levels.

I see lots of opportunity for SaaS and commoditing products/markets. So long at there is already wide adoption, its a product that is well understood, you can help push the price towards zero and make some money on the way.

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