"Free is good -- but read the small print."
-- Anonymous
"People want economy, and they will pay any price to get it."
-- Lee Iacocca
Setting the right price structure is like owning the mint. You can always make more money whenever you want or need it. On the other hand, you have to guard the mint well or others will come in and take what they need, too. Since pricing is so...
Our daily lives are filled with reports of tragedies: Children are abandoned, parents are murdered in senseless crimes, terrible tenement fires kill whole families, and children die of starvation with horrible frequency. People often wonder why these things happen, but they keep happening.
Wouldn't it be great to find ways to avoid some of these tragedies? That thought first got my...
Many educators debate what the purpose of a graduate education should be. Some believe that such education is all about teaching a way of thinking, as law schools often do with their emphasis on the Socratic Method for using dialog to find solutions. Others argue that you should be learning a best practice way to perform a profession, as medical schools attempt to do. Still others attempt to...
As with improving customer benefits at similar price levels, you need to focus your organization's thinking first on producing solid pricing test proposals. Watch out for the tendency for everyone to want to defer to those in sales for price-adjusting tests. Although sales people will certainly be a good source, they will often not know about key operating factors that should influence your...
Several times a day, you probably get a telephone call offering you some new product or service that the tele-marketer claims will be really helpful to you. You don't have time to listen or to try out all of these things, so you probably avoid whatever is being offered. Your potential customers may see your new pricing structure the same way. How can you overcome that barrier to attention?
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While it would take a much longer article to describe all of the things I tried that didn't work in writing a book, it's worth noting some of the many mistakes I made that others might see as opportunities to make faster progress.
Hopefully, others will avoid these pitfalls in similar projects. Here's an example: Many public speakers will tell you that you can simply dictate 10 hours worth...
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
-Niels Bohr
The only thing better than having perfect self-discipline is having a responsibility to continually communicate your progress to lots of people you respect. I learned about the importance of continuing communications while directing the early days of a program designed to demonstrate how improvements could be made...
Put it before them briefly so they will read it,
clearly so they will appreciate it,
picturesquely so they will remember it and
above all accurately so they will be guided by its light.
-Joseph Pulitzer
I planned to create a series of books and articles that would begin sharing helpful information about our project to help the world make improvements at 20 times the usual rate between...
Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and above all accurately so they will be guided by its light.
-Joseph Pulitzer
All of our communication eggs for the 400 Year Project (demonstrating the feasibility and encouraging people to make improvements 20 times faster from 2015 through 2035) were not in the...
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow.
-Charles Browder
I was intrigued by finding a way to capture public imagination for the 400 Year Project (finding ways to demonstrate and encourage making improvements 20 times faster in all areas from 2015 through 2035). With...
