Dow Jones Industry Average has been very volatile recently. Although it may come back and test the recent high at 11308.95 as its intra-day high set on April 26, it is on its journey to the previous bottom around 6,500. From longer term point of view, we are yet to finish cycle beginning in 1987 follow the crash in July that year.
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STRATEGY & MARKETING
Can You Describe Your Business in a Few Words?
If you ask people what their businesses are or sit in a presentation, you will likely to find that many companies have hard time to describe their business. People often try to cover every area of their businesses’ expertise, all of their industry experience and each qualification they have attained in an effort to paint the full picture of what makes them stand out. Consequently, the messages are diluted, sounding like everyone else, and audience is confused. A process of distilling the essence of your business from various aspects is mind-wrenching. What you gain from going through the process, however, are a crystal-clear understanding of the business in your own mind and clean, exciting message in the minds of your customers and staff. Meredith Vaughan, president of Vladimir Jones, introduces her agency as “an agency of exciting minds.”
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Giving Customers License to Enjoy Luxury
Many consumers hesitate when it comes to spending money on luxury items. The feeling of guilt, conscience and sub-conscience, plays a significant role in purchasing decision-making. Furthermore, the financial crisis and economic downturn transformed consumers’ mindsets and in the process of turning luxuries into socially discouraged opulence. Research at MIT suggests that people will spend more freely if you first help them feel more virtuous…
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Google Fails to Revolutionize the Cellphone Market
Business model is one of the critical elements in business success. An effective business model is dictated not only by the grand strategy of the business but also by the key attributes of the product and the key preferences of the target customers. Google’s decision to bring an end to its online sales of its Nexus One handset shows how a poorly-configured business model led to a failure in marketplace…
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INNOVATION IN BUSINESS & TECHNOLOGY
Do You Have to Ask Your Customers to Pay for Your Products and Services?
One of my former students is in a process of building a new online business. When it comes to the question of business model, I suggested that she validate her assumption that the online users will indeed be willing to pay for her services. If her customers are not willing to pay for the services, she does not have to squeeze money out of their wallets. Innovation in business models has made it possible to separate the users and payers, allowing the users to enjoy the services for free, the advertisers to reach their target audience and service providers get paid through ad revenues. Horizon Air started to provide ad-support foods to its passengers now…
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Is Your Advertising Not Working? Try Games
Traditionally, sellers push their advertising messages to customers. The problem with this approach is that people don’t want to be sold to and they usually resist the selling unless the offerings are overwhelmingly attractive. Consequently, messages of many good products fail to get across. If people instead pull bits of information into their lives through a game, they are more likely to feel a sense of ownership. And, if the game is cool enough, it can bring you the viral success like the ones achieved in social media…
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Is Rheumatoid Arthritis Linked to Mutation of Genes?
Researchers conducted studies involving thousands of patients in Europe and North America and the results show that mutation occurred in at least 10 genes leads to higher risk of rheumatoid arthritis…
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LEADERSHIP & ORGANIZATION
Giving a High Performer Productive Feedback
Giving feedback, particularly constructive feedback, is often a stressful task. As counterintuitive as it may seem, giving feedback to a top performer can be even tougher. Top performers may not have obvious development needs and in identifying those needs, you can sometimes feel like you're being nitpicky or over-demanding. In addition, top performers may not be used to hearing constructive feedback and may rankle at the slightest hint that they're not perfect. Amy Gallo, who writes at Harvard Business Review, suggests that, to high performance producers, managers should give both positive and constructive feedback on regular basis, identify development areas, even if there are only a few, and focus on the future and ask about motivations and goals. The expert also advice managers not to presume that a start has reached the limits of her performance, leave the top performers alone, or assume that they know how appreciated they are. ..
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Learning When to Stop Momentum
In May 2000, events overwhelmed a fire crew working to burn out an overgrown 300-acre area at the Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. A tiny patch of flame, which kept flaring up every time firefighters thought they had put it out, eventually escaped and grew into the Cerro Grande wildfire, one of the most devastating in our nation’s history and the cause of $1 billion in damages to the city of Los Alamos and the adjacent Los Alamos National Laboratories. Eighteen thousand people were evacuated; and two weeks later, by the time the fire was finally stopped, some 47,000 acres had been consumed and 300 homes and laboratory buildings destroyed. Michelle A. Barton and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe at MIT call this failure “dysfunctional momentum,” which occurs when people continue to work toward an original goal without pausing to recalibrate or reexamine their processes, even in the face of cues that suggest they should change course. They suggest that managers who had experienced projects spiraled out of control to look back and ask questions: How did we get there? How did we miss the cues that might have signaled huge problems ahead? Or, if we did see the cues: Why didn’t we change the course?
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Five Key Strategies for Making Metrics
Innovation has become increasingly important in terms of competitive advantage. Initiatives to encourage innovation won’t be effective unless they are operationalized. Operational success, on the other hand, depends largely on implementing appropriate metrics. Dev Patnaik, who writes at Business Week, lists five key strategies for developing useful metrics: 1) use people, product, and process metrics; 2) connect the metric to the rhetoric; 3) start with incentives instead of control; 4) set up multiple tracks; 5) beware of false precision.
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