Several times a month, I’d have lunch with one of my CEOs, and each time we’d find ourselves digging into the intellectual property developed by the company over the years, just to refresh ourselves about what the intended use was back then, and whether new developments or technologies might make these older ideas and patents […]
Dave Berkus
Bottom Up Budgeting Creates Waste
Many people believe that bottom up budgeting leads to waste and misdirection. The advocates of top-down budgeting are strong in their belief that if you give each person or department no guidance, they will budget to their wants or specific needs, not to those that support a corporate goal. So, they argue: Give your people […]
5 Kinds of Risk in Building Your Business
If you could predict a crisis within your business before its occurrence, wouldn’t you move to prevent or reduce its impact? Making such predictions is a skill that can be developed, and here’s one method of doing so.
Nail It, Then Scale It
So your business has begun to take off. You’ve figured out your channels of distribution, pricing model and how to support your growing list of customers. Don’t be alarmed by this next statement. That’s relatively easy.
Premature Scaling Kills Businesses
Venture capitalists sometimes make an error in directing their portfolio company CEOs to push resources to the limit and scale the business to immense size quickly, all to seize market share.
5 Simple Steps to Executing the Plan
It is all about execution. Waiting over a year to see results is too long, since your chance of mid-course correction is greatly reduced. To make the point, Harvard’s Robert Kaplan believes that less than 10% of corporate strategies are effectively executed. Ouch!
Fish in the Giant Ocean, Not in a Shallow Creek
There are big fish and small fish, potential customers, all swimming in the sea that is your potential marketplace. You, the lonely fisherman, have to weave a net to catch your fish.
Money Motivates
There are many studies that can tell us how various industries reward employees for achievement above a base pay, or beyond expectation.
The Coffee and Wine School of Innovation
Here’s one for debate around a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. Most innovation occurs when creative people are relaxed and thinking about other things.
Reward Success and Failure. Punish Only Inaction.
Reward failure? That may be a difficult concept for an executive. And there are limits of course. We wouldn’t reward a failure to follow laws, or protect lives, or deliberate endangerment of the company or its people.
