Business Model Engineering

   The customer has always been king, but social media -- Facebook, Twitter, chat, blogs and email -- have profoundly affected customer expectations, changing customer relations, and giving them more power and influence in ways we never imagined even a decade ago.

 

   Companies of all stripes need to change their thinking, reassess their strategies and adopt new tools. Or risk alienating customers, and as a consequence, lose market share. How have the ground rules changed, and what should companies do to manage relationships and retain customers in the social world?

 

Bonus - page 2 for the Solutions: http://bit.ly/V5u4qm .

 

   Three momen­tous forces — tech­no­log­i­cal, social, and eco­nomic — have con­spired to rock the busi­ness world and caused things to become more com­plex and uncer­tain. The symp­toms of which are man­i­fested in con­cerns such as:

- The busi­ness mak­ing only a frac­tion of its profit potential;

- Things not being bro­ken, but not feel­ing right either;

- Mak­ing the num­bers because the old ‘go to’ meth­ods have fallen flat.

 

   It is a fun­da­men­tal change in how ven­tures will sur­vive … or be castoff. The impact of this change has per­ma­nently burned two con­cerns into the back of busi­ness lead­ers minds:

- ‘What game should we play?’ (what’s the busi­ness model);

- ‘How do we win?’ (what’s the pivot).

Hav­ing dis­cussed this point with numer­ous indi­vid­u­als the most com­mon ques­tion I get asked is:

- 'How do I work my way through this problem?'

 

   Let's address HOW you can get unstuck and blow past your expectations. It’s about care­ful reflec­tion and cal­cu­la­tion; here are the 7 ele­ments that make sure you do that.

- Get lib­er­ated;

- Bench­mark;

- Undergo dis­cov­ery;

- Develop then design;

- Get out of the build­ing;

- Mea­sure;

- Rinse & Repeat.

 

Bonus Information: Part 1: http://www.donaldmcmichael.com/business-reignition-the-7-rock-solid-elements-of-execution-business-model-innovation-part-1.htm ;

Bonus Information: Part 2: http://www.donaldmcmichael.com/business-models-part2.htm .

 

   As with most things in life, there are a variety of ways you can slice and dice what defines “good user design” but here are 5 principles of good User Experience Design:

1. Purpose – Good design serves a number of purposes;

2. Understanding – While it is very important to understand what your clients are looking for, to create a meaningful and successful application it is paramount to understand the user;

3. Efficiency – The primary goal of experience design is to make things efficient for the user before making them efficient for the computer;

4. Empathy – Unfortunately, companies often overstate their relevance to the lives consumers which can generate cynicism and undermine trust;

5. Simple & Intuitive – Yes, these are two separate concepts but they are so closely linked that it makes sense to talk about them as one.

 

   Where did the idea that startups write business plans come from? In the early days of venture capital, investors and entrepreneurs were familiar with the format of business plans from large companies and adopted it for startups. Without much thought it has been used ever since.

 

   A business plan is the execution document that existing companies write when planning product-line extensions where customer, market and product features are known. The plan is an operating document describes the execution strategy for addressing these “knowns.”

   A startup is notabout executing a series of knowns. Most startups are facing a series of unknowns – unknown customer segments, unknown customer needs, unknown product feature set, etc.That means that writing a static business plan first adds no value to starting a company, as the plan does not represent the iterative nature of the search for the model.

 

Bio & Books: http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/steve-blank/ .

Free & Near Free Tips: http://steveblank.com/2012/11/27/open-source-entrepreneurship/ . 

 

   Shell heeft vandaag het lid flink op de neus gekregen. De President van de Rechtbank Amsterdam noemde in zijn vonnis over burgerlijke ongehoorzaamheid de protesten van Greenpeace van 14 september, waarbij bij 72 tankstations van de 600 tankstations werden stilgelegd met fietskettingen, proportioneel en dus rechtmatig. Ook geeft hij aan binnen welke grenzen toekomstige acties naar zijn oordeel eveneens rechtmatig zullen zijn.

 

   ‘Een bedrijf als Shell, dat activiteiten verricht of wil gaan verrichten die in de maatschappij omstreden zijn en waar velen zich tegen verzetten, kan en moet verwachten dat acties zullen worden gevoerd om haar op andere gedachten te brengen. Dergelijke acties zullen – om effectief te zijn – Shell ook nadeel kunnen toebrengen’, aldus de rechter.

 

   Redactie: De tijden voor Bezettingen en een Boycot van Shell lijken daarmee in Nederland teruggekeerd. Deze rechterlijke uitspraak laat zien dat de C-levels van grote bedrijven nu echt naar eindgebruikers en andere belanghebbenden moeten gaan luisteren. Maatschappelijk Verantwoord  Ondernemen (MVO) en Customer Care (CC) zijn nog zeer nieuw en onbekend voor Shell. Wellicht helpt een maandje boycot ze anders over hun verantwoordelijkheid voor de Noordpool en Nigeria na te denken.

 

   In teir new book, “Outside In: The Power of Putting Your Customers at the Center of Your Business”, Harley Manning & Kerry Bodine, both VP's at Forrester Research, explain the most basic errors that organisations make, and how you can address them.

   The book provides strong evidence of the impact of customer service in dollars and cents terms. In the book they compare total returns from a portfolio of customer experience leaders identified from their Customer Experience Index study, versus a portfolio of customer experience laggards over a five year period to demonstrate stunning findings.

   Manning & Bodine say that the conclusion is simple: it is unlikely that anything else you do as a company has more of an impact on getting new business. The authors demonstrate a connection between financial performance and customer experience, and also conclude that customer experience is one of the most misunderstood elements of corporate strategy. Three of the most fundamental errors that organisations make when it comes to customer experience:

1. Businesses don’t define ‘customer experience’;

2. Businesses do not treat the customer experience as a business discipline;

3. Businesses assume customer experience is a frontline issue.

 

Bonus Information 1: Short video about the book: http://outsidein.forrester.com/ .

Bonus Information 2: Picture of the Customer Experience Ecosystem: http://outsidein.forrester.com/book.html .

 

   The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) estimates a trillion dollar value (10E12) in using social tools to enhance communications, knowledge sharing, and collaboration within and across enterprises. MGI’s estimates suggest that by fully implementing social technologies, companies have an opportunity to raise the productivity of interaction workers—high-skill knowledge workers, including managers and professionals—by 20 to 25 percent.

   In this report, 'The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies', they explore their potential economic impact by examining their current usage and evolving application in four commercial sectors. 

   To reap the full benefit of social technologies, organizations must transform their structures, processes, and cultures: they will need to become more open and nonhierarchical and to create a culture of trust. Ultimately, the power of social technologies hinges on the full and enthusiastic participation of employees who are not afraid to share their thoughts and trust that their contributions will be respected. Creating these conditions will be far more challenging than implementing the technologies themselves.

 

Bonus Information 1: Full PDF Report: http://bit.ly/OOUbfI .

Bonus Information 2: Executive PDF Summary: http://bit.ly/MHJOQs .

Bonus Information 3: Video Interview with Michael Chui of McKinsey: http://bit.ly/O0wEwF .