For most of my working life I have worked with Small & Medium-sized Enterprises and occasionally large companies and I can tell you they are very different. Not just in the obvious way in that one is bigger than the other but in almost every way. What so many people…
A while ago we discussed why Effective Organisations Respect Their Competitors and why getting better is the most effective way of competing. Don’t look on your competition so much as competitors and more as rivals. There will be some things they do better than you (not necessarily cheaper) and so learn…
If you spend any time looking at economics you will come across the concept of price makers and price takers. This is all good stuff in theory but in practice competing on price is a very dangerous thing to do. So, how to effectively avoid competing on price. Economics identifies…
How to be effective against competition in both our business and personal lives? Competition is the biggest worry for so many. Businesses are always worried about the competition and how to beat them. Individuals are subject to competition every time they go for a job interview or try to buy…
George Bernard Shaw no doubt said many wise things in his life but unfortunately it is a stupid phrase from Man and Superman which has stood the test of time. I refer, of course to “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” The problem with this phrase is that…
The problem with market research is that it attempts to find out what the customer wants, but the customer can only answer based on experience. As such, the answer to the question is market research really effective to find solutions in an innovative world is no. We have already looked…
For most organisations the necessity to have people working in the old way of turning up at a certain hour, doing work for a certain number of hours and then going home at a certain hour has gone. This is even true in many areas of manufacturing where prior to…
David Allen the author of Getting Things Done famously said “your mind is for having ideas, not holding them” and this is how to effectively use Evernote to solve that problem. During the day (and often at night as well) we are bombarded by ideas, some useful, some just interesting…
We have / are all guilty of it. The six and seven day working week, the 50, 60, 70 or more hour week. The funny thing is that if you ask almost anyone to describe to you the Law Of Diminishing Returns they will be able to do it. The…
It’s important to understand what your customer really wants and not what they say they want or even worse what you think they want. Take books for example. I am a huge fan e-readers. For me, my Kindle is just about perfect. It’s small enough to carry anywhere with a…