Suppliers, partners, and employees need to enjoy your new offerings as well, or their bad moods will spoil the experience for customers and beneficiaries. If you go to a restaurant where the host and servers are all having a ball, don't you have more fun too? After you check into a hotel late at night and the desk clerk looks at you like a enemy invader who is spoiling his nap, you probably...
All organizations should begin their search for high growth by looking into just the key questions they need to answer. This saves time, money, and effort while producing better results.
Having scaled down the search, you should also get help to reduce the costs of the search. There may be a database that already exists containing much of the information you want. There may be people who...
Until Robert McEwen, CEO of Goldcorp (a gold mining company based in Canada), attended a conference at MIT about the free software movement, no one had probably ever thought about accessing experts inexpensively to help find more gold. Mr. McEwen took that powerful software example and applied it in a new way to his own industry. In the process, an important business model innovation was born....
The gold mining industry slashed its cost of finding gold by holding global contests where geologists proposed ideas for where to explore following Goldcorp's success with such a contest. Inspired by that example, Procter & Gamble began using a similar online approach to locating new product opportunities and technical development solutions.
Smaller organizations often don't have the...
Mistrust of your organization is a learned behavior that costs you most of your potential profits. Some scientists claim that we are born with few fears. Fear of heights is one, but our families, friends, and acquaintances help us appreciate the benefits of caution in many other circumstances.
In some cases, we learn to avoid certain things on a general basis, such as fire. These learned...
The Titanic was aiming to set a speed record for crossing the north Atlantic when it hurt a large iceberg and sunk. Over a thousand people died. It was the ultimate example of trial-and-error management: Go straight ahead as fast and you can and don't worry about obstacles until you hit them.
You can avoid being harmed by trial-and-error management when you identify profit obstacles to...
The beliefs of potential customers can be deceiving. Here's an example of what I mean: Many people mistake what their interests truly are by framing the issue in the wrong way.
Given the choice between flying and driving from Las Vegas, Nevada, to El Paso, Texas, few people would choose to drive except to save money. After all, a discounted one-way air ticket is usually available for just a...
Most potential customers wouldn't use your offering if you paid them a lot to do so. Many factors contribute, but a particularly difficult problem is presented by those who feel disbelief about what your offering can do for them.
Let me give you an example. My wife and I had dinner with good friends a few years ago. The husband described with great enthusiasm how he had just agreed to buy...
I have always found that the world pretty neatly divides itself into those who understand and act on optimizing performance of almost everything they come into contact with . . . and those who ignore optimization. Maintaining automobile and motorcycle tire pressures is a good example.
Keep your tires at the right pressure and you gain advantages: The ride is smoother; your brakes work...
Most people imagine that customers and beneficiaries are always eager to improve their situations. A close look at those who need the most help reveals how untrue such imaginings are.
Social workers anywhere in the world will tell you that they spend most of their time trying to persuade those who need help to seek the right aid. Those who are poor, ill, abused, unemployed, and overwhelmed...
