Browse published articles attributed to Donald Mitchell, with full-archive search.
Chances are that any small business either won’t still be operating or will have been sold to someone else within five years. Why? The reason for both results is the same. The business results have failed to satisfy its owners’ needs and objectives . . . or have exhausted the owners’ ...
Due to recent cutbacks and until further notice, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off. -- Unknown If you are over the age of 55, you may assume you won't be around in 2030. Keep reading. The odds favor you being here then … unless you are already over 70. Even so, you may want to know what your descendants will face. If you are under 55, you might see threats ahead and describe 2030 in pessimistic ways due to your sense of certain troubling and deteriorating trends:
By staying alert to career alte atives, you can nimbly move from one occupation to another in ways that are personally and professionally satisfying and profitable. This article provides guidance for how to do so. Some people know exactly what they want ... and how to get it. They move single-mindedly forward and gain what they seek. When they gain something gratifying and enjoyable, the straightforward approach can feel as if it's perfect.
This article examines sponsorships and advertising as methods for making cost breakthroughs and generating extra revenues. Let's start with sponsorships.
Artists have long held a privileged role in society, allowing them to spend more time “seeing” what is going on than do most others. In addition, artists’ perspectives have often been sought by those who want to transcend the mundane to draw closer to the sublime. As a result, a greater artistic vision can open the door for ordinary viewers to experience a broader and more delightful world. What a wonderful gift! Such expansions occur today for fortunate viewers in these five ways:
Many people have trouble deciding where to start when considering possibilities to establish a better business model. With these questions, you'll make more effective changes ... and faster. Let me start by describing what a business model is so that you'll better understand the questions. A business model incorporates all the ways that a company provides its goods and services, receives value for its efforts, and affects others. Consequently, a business model is the combined
Have you ever counted the minutes until the work day was over? If so, you are not alone. Business work can be stupefying, leaving you feeling dull while randomly musing about more pleasant activities and places. That's the bad news. But... wait! There is good news, as well. Your time at work can, instead, be fun, stimulating, and personally fulfilling. What makes the difference? Use your business work to learn more about what fascinates you and then apply what you learn to make improvements.
When you watch most people working, you notice that they are doing many things at once: what is often described as multitasking. Recent research has shown that while such an approach seems to be highly efficient to the person using it, quality and quantity of results are actually less than when concentration focuses on one task at a time. A recent book, The One Thing: The Surprising Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, pays attention to the important implications of concentration by noting that in addition to such focus, you also need to: 1. Work toward the right goal.
Regardless of ability and experience, most people wish they could accomplish more in doing whatever matters most to them. The struggling golfer dreams of breaking 100, a score that would be a nightmare for a good golfer. The solid B student fondly contemplates the satisfaction that a single A would bring. Top performers have different kinds of goals. They may seek to pass their best prior accomplishment on every attempt. Their eyes might even be fixed on surpassing all others, feeling intense disquiet until they do.
Chances are good that you don’t know too many people who learned to run before they began to crawl. Likewise, you may not have met anyone who broke par while playing golf for the first time. As beginners, even people whose skill now causes us to marvel would more likely have produced laughter and grins rather than applause. Now, why is that?
The cost of investments that benefit many stakeholders can unfairly fall more on one organization than on another. Amtrak, the American government-owned passenger rail corporation, is an example of this problem.
When it comes to “making it” in business, many people feel as if they have more to hide than to display to impress employers, bosses, colleagues, and customers. To compensate for lacking credentials, skills, knowledge, and experiences some insecure businesspeople wish they had, some of them choose to adopt a “know-it-all” attitude.
Joe Girard was the champion vehicle salesman for many years in the United States, averaging more than five daily sales of cars and trucks. What were his secrets? According to Mr. Girard, it was simply due to offering a fair price and being someone customers liked to buy from. Mr. Girard made the car-buying experience pleasant; he asked for referrals from customers to family and friends by sending out preprinted holiday cards monthly to everyone who had ever bought from him that said on the front, "I Like You."
We consider an older concept in this article, one that has often been applied to cost-reduction thinking: zero-based analysis. You may know this concept as "zero-based costing." Zero-based analysis reverses the usual way of thinking in which many people start by looking at how to remove costs from what is already being spent. Zero-based analysis starts, instead, by assuming that no costs need to be spent and grudgingly adds costs only after being convinced that they cannot be avoided.
In 1900 few Americans finished high school. Those who did had a huge advantage over everyone else. By 1950 high school graduates were common, and gaining a career advantage from education required a college degree. By 1970 people with bachelor’s degrees often began adding master’s degrees to stand out from the crowd.
Entrepreneurial focus is immeasurably helped by finding engaging problems - ones to which you and others are irresistibly drawn. Many people make a mistake by instead picking problems to solve that are of interest only because of the potential financial gain that might result from solutions. Others make a different mistake: picking problems that bore them.
Eager business-evangelist customers are always telling others how wonderful your business is and encouraging potential customers to try your offerings. Most network marketing businesses are based on word-of-mouth promotion. You learn about a great product or service from a relative, friend, or neighbor who then helps you to experience the offering's benefits. Soon, you can't wait to share your happiness with others to improve their lives, too!
I recently watched a televised interview with John Scully, the CEO Steve Jobs recruited from PepsiCo in 1983 to lead Apple when Jobs was twenty-eight. Reflecting on what happened to Apple over the subsequent twenty-seven years, Scully commented that Apple's board made a mistake in hiring him.
Most people don’t realize how unique and valuable they are. How could personal characteristics seem to be unusual, or even rare, to oneself? After all, people are with themselves at every moment, view their own qualities as being normal, and cannot hope to perceive and understand others nearly as well. As a university professor, I am constantly astonished and filled with joy by the unusual, delightful qualities of my students. It’s as if God had convened a symposium of world-class learners about to accomplish amazing things just for my benefit.
This article describes a new concept for creating and implementing 96 percent cost reductions: fast-expanding exponential solutions. This is a subject I'm very excited about, and I hope you will share my enthusiasm for and interest in this process. When I was a youngster, controlled atomic chain reactions were being developed as a source of electricity. To help children understand the difference between an atomic blast (an uncontrolled atomic chain reaction) and an atomic power plant (a controlled atomic chain reaction), scientists designed impressive demonstrations.
People who want to lift heavy weights usually start with light ones. After that they gradually increase how much they lift. When their muscles strengthen enough, heavy weights that were impossible to lift at first are then raised with ease. Similarly, those who want to improve other capabilities often start by learning how to better perform simple tasks. When doing these tasks is mastered, the improvers move on to enhancing their performance of more difficult activities. Eventually, these learners can accomplish much more in less time with fewer errors.
With so much global competition, the customer is more in charge than ever. That doesn't mean that you need to offer services that cost you a fortune: Better designed pricing can be a great help. Let's consider an industrial example. A building materials manufacturer studied its customers in terms of how the mix of products they ordered affected profits.
This article explores three sources of cost-reducing help that most businesses ignore: strangers, volunteers, and unemployed people. Think of the unifying themes for this lesson as helping to overcome the unattractiveness and tradition stalls. Let's begin by considering what strangers can do to help your enterprise reduce costs for all stakeholders through applying zero-based analysis to providing the minimum core offering. How Can Strangers Contribute to Reducing Costs for all Stakeholders by 96 Percent?
Many business founders have encyclopedic knowledge about how their organizations work, as well as how to gain and to retain profitable customers. Why? Founders have probably either designed or done all of the major tasks at one time or another and may have played a role in attracting almost all of the key customers. Doing so was just part of what was required for their businesses to succeed.
Each individual's perceptions of what's happening and why are unique. Never assume that others share your perspective unless you tell them what your perceptions are. This article contains seven rules for better communications and increased mutual understanding. It's natural to assume that others see what's going on in exactly the same ways that we do. I was reminded several times in the last 24 hours that such an assumption is often mistaken.
Many children are shy, which can make them more dependent on their parents. If a shy child wants something, chances are good that the child will ask a parent to get it … even if the item is easily accessible and in plain sight. Since most parents understand the importance of encouraging independence, a frequently-heard response to such a request is, “Go and get it.” In reaction we’ve all seen a worried-looking child’s face shifting into a furrowed frown, flushed red with anxiety and near tears at the thought of possibly confronting a stranger or a situation that seems daunting.
In this article, we look at how simplifying management to develop the minimum business model reduces costs for an enterprise and its stakeholders. Consider Plentyoffish dot com and its founder, Markus Frind.
I was inspired to write this article after reading an essay arguing for becoming a salesperson, rather than a CEO ... claiming that a salesperson's hours are shorter, the stress is less, and moment-to-moment tasks are more enjoyable. That didn't make sense to me. While I certainly know some stressed-out, overwhelmed CEOs, I know many more hopelessly frustrated, discouraged salespeople. Yes, it's no fun to lead a failing organization. It's even less fun trying to sell offerings for such a faltering company.
Some of today’s ordinary activities were seen as “impossible” dreams just a few years ago. For example, 20 years ago decoding the human genome was viewed as being one of the world’s most difficult yet-to-be-accomplished projects. Yet today, an individual’s genome can be decoded in a few weeks for about $1,000, a tiny fraction of what was spent for the first one.
It’s easy to miss your most rewarding and satisfying career opportunities. Why? Most people assume that there are no better alte atives to whatever they are doing or planning. Such assumptions are almost always wrong. If people who are quick to assume they know about all the choices would just check and double check their assumptions about there being nothing better available, they would routinely find more interesting work to enrich their lives.
What is an overhead cost? Definitions vary, but most people agree that any cost not directly used to produce or to supply an offering to a customer is an overhead cost.
When I was in graduate school, my classmates didn’t always like the way that the courses were taught. After leaving such a class, they often quoted an old maxim: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” I didn’t take that saying literally until one day a law professor who was held in the highest esteem by scholars mentioned that he had lost every appellate case he had ever prosecuted before turning to full-time teaching. That was pretty a dismal performance considering how well he knew the law.
If you ask most people how they are doing, they will respond by saying something like "Good." What does that mean? Well, for some people it could mean that they aren't suffering from any illnesses, they are still employed, not one of their children is in jail, and they still have a place to live. For them it would, perhaps, be more apt to say, "Not bad." For an entrepreneur who has launched a successful new business, "Good" might mean instead that the business is growing 128 percent a year and is comfortably meeting its commitments to customers and investors.
Hollywood often captures the downside of changing jobs and careers with dramatic tales about unexpectedly losing a long-held position and not being able to find a suitable replacement. If I asked you to describe what such an experience would be like, you might choose words like “traumatic,” “depressing,” and “difficult.”
Many organizations seek to accomplish their purposes with so little effectiveness that it's as if they were literally chained to the past and to procrastination. Yet when away from work, and doing something they love, many of the same people act more like forces of nature... moving themselves and others with great emotion by drawing upon compassion and genuine conce to make needed improvements.
Many people dream of having their own successful business. Such dreams are much more likely to be filled with visions of innovative solutions for common problems that negatively affect and annoy people than with plans for effectively leading exercise classes, refilling vending machines, or assembling sandwiches, tasks that are core activities for so many small businesses.
Entrepreneurs are rarely indifferent to how others value their businesses, but their reasons vary in why they care. For some, valuation is a primary goal. For others, it’s a scorecard delivering a sense of what progress has been made. Still others like that increasing enterprise value can help attract and retain talented people.
Unless you receive an offering as a gift and try it out, ignorance will keep you from using a superior choice. When such ignorance is widespread, the market will not develop to its full potential. Let's explore back surgery as an example. Until a few decades ago, patients who underwent back surgery were as likely to be worse off after the surgery as they were to enjoy any improvement. Harmful outcomes included increased pain, reduced mobility, and serious infections.
Where can leaders find the next breakthrough business models and strategies that will delivery superior corporate performance? I believe that such innovations will come from having closer relationships with, greater mutual understanding of, and more meaningful interactions with all stakeholders (including end users, beneficiaries, customers, colleagues, colleagues’ families, partners, owners, lenders, suppliers, distributors, neighbors, communities in which the enterprise operates, those affected by the company, regulators, critics, and commentators).
Have you ever gone to a party and discovered that you had dressed quite differently from everyone else? How did that make you feel? For some people, this experience would be the height of embarrassment. For others, noting the differences might just draw a slight smile. No copycats need apply to these people! By just looking around most organizations you can quickly tell whether the norm is fitting in or standing out. Which work environment do you prefer?
What is your image of a graduate-school professor? Based on my student experiences, I think of an older person standing behind a raised lectern, well separated from the large number of students who are madly taking notes on the words that flow so composedly from the oracle’s lips. Such a scene feels a bit like being present at the fountain of all knowledge.
If for no other reason than expanding your business model to include new types of offerings, you will probably add new suppliers from time to time. In addition, sometimes suppliers go out of business or are unwilling to make necessary changes to improve their and your business models. In other instances, your rapid expansion may outstrip the quantities that current suppliers can provide. Regardless of the reason, working with part-time and nonprofit suppliers can add breakthrough resources for reducing your and your stakeholders' investments. Let's start by looking at part-time suppliersr
Now consider how to obtain one customer that changes the economic potential of your enterprise so much that it becomes practical to accomplish an overall 96 percent cost reduction after gaining just that one customer.
I was inspired to consider this question in 2008 when the two largest newspapers in Boston featured a headline that the larger of the two, The Boston Globe (which was owned by the same company that published The New York Times), had threatened to shut down the print version of the paper and to operate online only unless employees agreed to cut their salaries and benefits by over $20 million a year.
Many people haven’t yet found a great opportunity. In some cases they don’t even know that they are missing one. What a shame! Just in case you know someone like that, let me describe what I mean by a great opportunity so you can pass along the information: A great opportunity lifts you and those around you to greater heights of accomplishment, connection, and satisfaction. In the abstract those characteristics may do little to inform you beyond increasing your interest. Let me share three personal experiences to explain what I mean.
It's useful to want to build a major business by adding onto the base of your initial breakthrough. But what does that look like in practice? Let's examine the case history of Education Management to better understand the principle involved.
This article's topic will be controversial with some people. Why? Many business thinkers advocate that suppliers should simply work at making life easy and pleasant for customers so that they receive more and more benefits while only making minimal efforts of their own.
How can you gain enjoyment and accomplish more in your business career? It's easy: Just search for more of what you like ... and then do more of what you find. Let me explain by starting with what I don't mean: I'm not suggesting that those who love to eat chocolate ice cream at work seek out jobs that involve hourly samplings of such frozen treats.
Most business people use the same level of skepticism about everything they consider. Some are always optimistic that things will work out. Some are always pessimistic. Most people are somewhere in the middle. When a problem selecting the right choice is difficult enough, you will probably find that being very skeptical is the right route. How can you learn to be skeptical if that is not your usual way of thinking?
Give most executives the choice between some wild “blow-out” price-based promotion or taking time to first locate powerful new reasons to buy that are good for one and all, and the circus will soon be hired to tout the latest short-term deal. While such approaches can clearly add sales, doing so can also cause long-term damage that can more than offset the short-term gains. Here are three possible reasons for such contradictory results: