Tag: Business Strategy

Successful stategy: start with the simple

One of football/soccer’s renowned strategist kept detailed accounts of his opponents’ strengths and weaknesses, but he also kept his eyes on the game’s essentials: “The ball is round” and “The game lasts 90 minutes”.

Not unlike “What is our business?” and “Who is our customer?” that are part of Drucker’s essential five questions you must ask about your oganization..

Adviser or Stategist?

clipped from www.nytimes.com
What’s the semantic difference between adviser and strategist?
Hint: In ancient Athens,
the strategi were generals elected by the citizenry to defend the city-state.

“A strategist is someone who has a plan of battle,” observes Joe Pickett,
editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, “and the situation is always one
of contention. There are military and political and investment strategists,
but in all of these cases there is some sort of competitive struggle going on.
Advisers come in more colors. People have spiritual advisers and even
personal advisers. But note that they don’t have spiritual strategists, science
strategists or academic strategists. In these situations there is no other side
to compete with, no one to outfox.”

Your value proposition: Who do you help?

  • If your value proposition starts with “We have” or “We do” or “We make” or “We are in the business of”, then you’re NOT talking about the value your prospects or audience can gain. It’s not a value proposition, even if you declare it to be so. Instead, it’s an obvious (and too typical) declaration about what you want to sell.
  • If your value proposition starts with “We help”, you’re on the right track. If you then get specific (with one to three items) about tangible gains or objectives they can achieve, you’re really dialed into a powerful value proposition. (The YouBlog)

Wi-Fi cafe, a shot of squatting… and what business are you in?

The proliferation of Wi-Fi cafes brings with it a moral dilemma: If you’re one of these people sitting around and working on your laptop in a cafe, how much coffee do you need to buy?

Every cafe owner has wrestled with the flip side of that question: How much do I need to sell to make it worth letting someone take up space in my cafe? (…)

“This is just confirmation that Starbucks and its cousins are all really in the commercial real estate business,” he said. “They’re giving very cheap real estate for a very pricey cup of coffee.” (SF Chronicle)