Lisa Petrilli offers real proof that successful companies consider their values, purpose and culture to be extremely important. Not only that they live and breath it.
What CEOs Really Think About Values and Culture
This is something I have believed in strongly for quite a while and have even been building into our new product; because it is important.
What is your experience and thoughts on this?
As soon as something becomes popular, someone tries to figure out how to make money on it. Nothing wrong with that… that is a free market in action.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. are essentially free for the end user. The companies building and running them can't afford to do so forever without a revenue stream. So free means harvesting the data and selling it in some way, shape or form; and some advertising.
Businesses in general are experimenting with how to interact with customers and potential customers via these platforms. Some have been remarkably successful which is causing […]
The other night I woke up with a burning sensation in my left eye. It felt like something major was in there and my eye started watering like crazy. I spent 30 minutes flushing out my eye to no avail.
I was starting to think I would be heading off to emergency. My eyes seem to attract problems for some strange reason. I was also thinking there go my business plans for the next few days.
From past lessons I knew that rubbing is very bad. Scratched corneas take a while to heal and are quite painful.
I decided to have another go […]
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the influence of criticism and negative thinking on yourself and others. I have two major motivations:
Have you ever met someone who is perpetually positive about everything? How about the opposite?
Yet the reality is most people, myself included, are usually somewhere in the middle. We go through highs and lows emotionally and express those feelings externally in how we deal with others.
Our frame of reference, beliefs, other feelings and a host of other things […]
Are you a business owner wondering how you can engage your employees and get them to think like you would when making decisions?
I recently read "Ownership Thinking: How to End Entitlement and Create a Culture of Accountability, Purpose, and Profit" by Brad Hams.
Brad talks a lot about entitlement and how it is "destroying companies, our economy, and crushing potential". Entitlement is basically the idea that you should get paid just for showing up at work; no matter what your actual impact is.
Brad's personal mission is "to eradicate entitlement".
Basically it starts with the idea that given a choice, people actually want their […]
Today I was reading a post about "Being Right at Someone Else's Expense" by Bob Burg (recommended blogger).
I decided to comment on his post. Rather than take my normally more serious approach (in business anyways), I decided to post a fun comment where I started out in a negative over the top tone and then switched tone midway through. In fact, one commenter (Amy Wells) replied "Doug, LOL. I was gonna offer you a Jack Ass to carry all that rightness of yours…" which shows how over the top my intro was. See the post and the comments in detail for yourself. […]
Good business advice is to build products and services around things you already know well. Then you can focus on one hard thing at a time; building a great product.
But not all innovators do so with something they already knew. In fact sometimes innovators are successful precisely because they brought fresh insight into an area where the experts already knew everything there was to know.
You can build a product that relies on expertise that you have to learn as you go. This is a lot harder, but possible.
The trick is to truly commit to becoming an expert in the new area; […]
If you are building a product (or service) that is intended to help companies and people over the longer-term you have a dilemma on how to get them to long-term.
People have short-term attention spans and may not have the staying power to see things through if they don't start seeing benefits over the short-term. If they abandon your product before they see the value, you have a problem.
You might try to lock them into a longer term contract. The problem is that while you have the money, they still might stop using your product or at least have lost interest. If […]
We are in the midst of launching our new Manifast product. In fact we are committing to launching our MVP in November 2011. This has gotten me to thinking about marketing, sales and most importantly our revenue model. Do we have our engine of growth defined?
In “The Lean Startup” Eric Ries talks about three engines of growth for startups:
Ok, I admit it. I was caught in a trap… actually a few; partly of my own making.
After reading “Lean Startup” (see review) and rethinking what I’ve learned from Seth Godin over the years the message is loud and clear. Build and ship, measure and learn, adapt and ship. This needs to happen sooner than later.
The fear comes from putting a product out there that is conceptually good on paper, but not yet feature complete nor as perfect as I would like. After all you only get one shot at a first impression, right?
But after reading Lean Startup […]