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"How do you capture a new market? There's a lot of traditional business strategy you need to throw out the window. New markets are too poorly understood and change too quickly for the standard approaches of graphing trend lines and computing market share. Here are 10 approaches that work—for businesses and the people within them—when the market is fuzzy and in flux ... "
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"Let's face it: All too often, life is a succession of hassles. There's an endless array of frustrations, inconveniences, complications, disappointments, and potential disasters lurking in most of our daily experiences. Even very good products and services (we'll call them simply "products" for simplicity's sake) have their weaknesses and drawbacks. My new smartphone sometimes drops my calls; my favorite hotel chain sometimes loses my reservation; those new lightbulbs last longer but produce less light; my new hybrid car gets better mileage but the engine feels less peppy ...
Managers, marketers, designers, service suppliers, and salespeople for the companies that provide these products don't focus on their weaknesses. That's understandable. They devote their lives to making products that are as good as they can possibly be and then to promoting them as enthusiastically as they can. Who wants to concentrate on the negatives? Yet we've found that organizations that excel at demand creation do exactly that. They examine the lives of customers through the lens of what we call a Hassle Map—a detailed study of the problems, large and small, that people experience whenever they use their products."
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"According to the Kauffman Foundation, we are seeing approximately 6 million new businesses created every year. Most of those aren't driven by innovation and if recent history is an indicator, they won't grow or even exist five years from now.
If we are going to hang our hat on entrepreneurship, we need to ensure more successes, avoid the number of true failures and make sure that we have the right people pursuing the right opportunities at the right time with the right preparation.
Friends don't let friends start businesses under the influence."
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"We cling on to the idea that successful business people are talented leaders running objectively brilliant corporations. But the world is far too complex and changes far too rapidly for us to have any confidence that this fondly held idea is true.
It's easy to list corporations which have enjoyed periods of great success, only to stumble and fail to adapt: think of US Steel and Cudahy Packing a hundred years ago, Atari and Pan Am in the 1970s, and General Motors and MySpace more recently. Or think of eBay, McDonald's, and the Nobel-prize winning Grameen Bank, which have suddenly sprung from nowhere, almost by accident, because somebody happened upon a brilliant idea.
So does economic success happen despite business failure? I'd go further than that. Economic success happens because of business failure. It's the failure of once-dominant companies that makes space for new business ideas."
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"When you build a team, are you focused on joining links in a chain or weaving together a strong rope of intertwined employees? While I may have started out building a chain–mindful that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link—I came to see that interweaving the threads of a rope came much closer to meeting my goal of a cohesive, interactive team.
That way, I eliminate the inevitable spaces between chain links, replacing them with a 'rope' team, where every thread is bound together. [...]
This is the model I used as I found, trained and deployed my staff—my Army—and I could not be more satisfied and proud of the results we've had and the achievements I see on a daily basis."
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