Thanks to the InfoChachkie blog for introducing this 3-minute video:
High-tech marketing guru Richard St. John…invested the necessary time to ensure that his 2006 talk at the TED Conference was succinct and highly impactful. Over a seven-year period, he interviewed over 500 very successful people in order to answer this question posed to him by a high school student: “What leads to success?”
It’s a nice model and a clever presentation. InfoChachkie adds:
It is not the presence of one, two or even a few of these traits which will lead to success. Rather, it is the combination of all these factors, consistently executed in concert over an extended period, which leads to personal and professional success.
To which I would add that most entrepreneurial successes have far more to do with St. John’s simple model than with genius, a revolutionary idea, or a brilliant business plan.
Topics: Competitive advantage, Opportunity
Whether you’re starting, repairing, renewing, or reinventing your enterprise, the Infochachkie blog offers a well-considered assessment of the downturn climate and how it can be seen positively.
I found it a worthwhile list — except for the first item which implies that reduced prospects for investor funding may be more blessing than curse. Instead, I’d add one of my favorite benefits of a downturn: customers are desperate to repair, renew, or reinvent their own enterprises. Accordingly, despite tight budgets, they are often in search of faster and cheaper ways to do things, new partnerships, and generally open to new ideas from firms they haven’t worked with before.
Topics: Customers, Farming the gaps, Innovation, Opportunity, Productivity, Strategy, Substituting
This short article is 5-star advice for any enterprise facing a threat — from veteran entrepreneur Norm Brodsky (Inc.’s Street Smarts).
Facing the giant disruption of a 1979 NYC transit strike in the first year of his start-up Perfect Courier, Brodsky goes looking for advice from a customer who’s been through strikes before. The dialogue he retells is priceless — a remarkable insight into adaptive enterprising.
By pivoting on a dime into providing a contingency car service during the strike, Perfect Courier survives and Brodsky gets wiser:
Aside from the additional cash and the new sales, I took away from the episode one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in business: When in doubt, go to your customers. They will tell you what they want and lead you to solutions you’d never come up with on your own. Indeed, just about every successful new initiative I’ve taken in business since then has come from listening to customers.
Topics: Adaptation, Customers, Opportunity, Pivoting, Survival
Here’s my online “kiosk” explaining the credit crunch:
Three exquisitely complementary articles pull back the curtain on how this crisis happened and why it will take years before we’re on solid ground again.
Links and brief excerpts below the fold.
Topics: Economy, Opportunity, Productivity
Truly scary graph.
www.visualizingeconomics.com
To me, this trend is exhibit A for why we have to pursue health care reform sooner rather than later. To solve the problem and create a sustainable health care system for the future, we need to unpack the sources of the increases. I heard a statistic once (hope it’s right!) that in the 1950s, we spent $500 on health care per person per year. Now we spend $5,000. Adjusted for inflation? I don’t know. But think about it: all the new procedures, treatments, prescriptions.
And the medical revolution is just getting started.
Rationing is a dirty word in health care, but look at that graph and tell me how we crack this nut without applying an 80/20 mentality to what we fund and what we don’t.
And note that we’re at about $2.3 trillion — about 16% of GDP and climbing.
This is the kind of “turbulence” where entrepreneurial opportunity resides. To find it though, segmenting costs by funding source doesn’t tell us much. Instead, what are we spending money on? Where are the big expenditures ripe for innovation and process efficiency? Where can innovators substitute more cost-effective substitute products and processes?
To that end, there’s a article today about Wal-mart entering the market with a high-volume, low-cost scheme to sell electronic medical records to the millions of small physician offices that are now paper-based.
For entrepreneurs looking for opportunities, I recommend learning a bit about the vision of strategy gurus Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg to apply innovation and “volume-based competition” to develop highly efficient, cost-effective treatment protocols for the most common and expensive medical conditions. Diabetes, for example. Two resources for those who want to learn more:
Review of their 2006 book Redefining Health Care: Creating Volume-Based Competition on Results
Link to Porter and Teisberg’s resource-rich Web site
To bring this back to recessioneering, find the greatest pain points for suppliers, patients, and payers, and go from there.
Topics: Economy, Health care, Innovation, Opportunity, Substituting
