Too many companies make innovation way more complicated that it needs to be. The best source of new product ideas or problems to solve will usually come from observing your customers or directly from a customer request. Once you have identified a few promising ideas, take them to your customers and get feedback – would your customers really find big value if you solved this problem or added this new benefit?
October 3, 2006
The Laws of Innovation – Rule 3: Hire the Best People
This aspect of innovation cannot be stressed enough. Your HR director must be elevated to the same level as your COO and CFO. In today’s competitive and uncertain times, you absolutely must find and retain the best people, period.
No strategy planning or decision should take place until you have the right people in the right places, and the wrong people are gone.
September 21, 2006
The Laws of Innovation – Rule 2: Share all information
Most companies, after they’ve identified an idea with potential, run in to a brick wall when they try to implement those ideas. One of those obstacles is a lack of internal support which leads to an absence of the timely information and data needed to transition from dream to reality.
September 21, 2006
Add Six More Figures To Your Bottom Line With Six Sigma
In an ongoing effort to improve the quality of product and service delivery, the premier tool for the job was and continues to be “Six Sigma”. This tool was created by Motorola for its own internal error reduction and quality improvement efforts. Due to its amazingly successful track record of saving tens of billions of dollars to industry annually, the service sector has adopted the “constant improvement” philosophy of Six Sigma.
September 10, 2006
The Laws of Innovation – Rule 1: Ideas come from everywhere
Ideas come from everywhere!
Innovation is crucial to the success of any organization. Innovation can be though of as “creative destruction”, rebirth or constant improvement. Innovation is the end result of traveling with and adapting to the currents of change.
Despite the importance of innovation, most companies have no idea how to make innovation a pro-active and standard way of doing business, as opposed to a reactive response, completely subject to the forces of “luck”.
September 3, 2006
Management Fact – Rule 7: Make the World a Better Place
New Rule: Watch me make the world a better place and admire my Soul!
Old Rule: Watch me make tons of money and admire my Might!
Word-of-Mouth marketing is widely known as the ultimate, most effective and least expensive form of marketing there is.
To take advantage of word-of-mouth marketing or “WOM”, a business needs to start with three ingredients. One, you need a compelling, honest, emotional story. Two, your business needs a meaningful purpose (to you) other than making money. Three, listen to your customers, partner with them, co-develop with them and help them to get what they want and what their customers customer wants.
August 18, 2006
Management Fact – Rule 5: Hire passionate people
New rule: Hire passionate people.
Old rule: Rank your players and always go with the “A’s”.
Ranking Employees
This approach to Human Resources is a byproduct of the internally focused obsession with “efficiency” and “productivity”. In these environments, Lean and Six Sigma (and other such improvement philosophies) become a monster and living, thinking, feeling people are reduced to statistics on a spread sheet and a slice on a pie chart.
This not the way to bring out the best out in your people nor is it the way to stimulate loyalty from your employees.
August 16, 2006
U.S. Economy – Inflation still a major problem
Fed’s Fisher: Inflation greatest risk to US
Wed Aug 16, 2006 3:46 PM ET
By Ros Krasny
DALLAS (Reuters) – Inflation is still the greatest risk to the U.S. economy, and policy-makers will not hesitate to raise interest rates again if incoming data shows it is necessary, Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher said on Wednesday.
“There is a definite increase in inflationary momentum,” Fisher said at a luncheon by a commercial real estate group. “The Federal Reserve will not tolerate inflation,” he added, terming it the Lex Luthor to the “Superman” United States economy, referring to the superhero’s nemesis.
August 11, 2006
When Offering Less Equals More Profit
In an effort to maximize profit and growth, companies introduce new products or variations on existing products, thinking that if they give the customer more choices, the customer will be happy, thus translating to larger profits.
What usually happens however is the opposite. Inadvertently, what ends up being created is additional complexity, superficial value add and a cluttered portfolio of products that can end up confusing, not helping customers.
August 10, 2006
Management Fact – Rule 4: Look out AND look in
4. New rule: Look out AND look in.
Old rule: Look in: Be lean and mean.
The Take Away
Should you be externally focused or internally focused? To mirror the grace and harmony of nature, you need to place attention on both perspectives.
In the best companies, the task and responsibility of maintaining the simultaneous balance of the inside and the outside faces of the company is coordinated by the CEO (external facing) and the COO (internal facing). The persons occupying these roles work together to achieve a “yin-yang” (or “in –yo” in Japanese) type of balance.
August 1, 2006
10 ways to make ITIL work for you
As ITIL is becoming more popular in the Information Technology arena as a management and best practices benchmarking tool, more people are looking for real-world examples of successful (and unsuccessful) implementations.
This Network World article sheds more light on this little understood topic.
