You can now download the August issue of Better Business Focus HERE. Please feel free to e-mail Better Business Focus to your friends or colleagues.
Below is a selection of articles from this month’s issue, and we hope you enjoy the read!
Better Business Focus: Expert Inspiration for a Better Business.
Better Business Focus is the essential key for business owners and managers. It achieves that by focusing on the way in which successful businesses compete and manage their organisations. It focuses on how people are recruited, coached and developed; on how marketing and selling is undertaken in professional markets as well as in markets with intense competition; on how technology and the Internet is reshaping the face of domestic and home business; and on how people are being equipped with new skills and techniques. In short, it offers expert inspiration for a better business.
August 2019
This Month’s articles include:
Grant Leboff
The difference between sales and marketing: People often say that marketing is there to generate leads and opportunities and sales is there to convert them. But in today’s marketplace, we can all quote examples where that just isn’t the case anymore.
August J. Aquila
Succession planning best practices: Succession planning today is more complex for professional services firms than it was 15 years ago. Practices have become more complex, the traditional business model that served firms so well in the 20th century, no longer works today, and clients have become more sophisticated.
Amy Vetter
How to cultivate a future-facing mindset: As somebody who travels the country speaking about the role of technology in the professional environment, I’ve had the chance to talk with countless business owners and team members about innovation. Far and away the most frequent question I’m asked is how somebody can create a workplace atmosphere where innovation is seen as a benefit, rather than an obstacle.
Mike Shipulski
The right time horizon for technology development: Patents are the currency of technology and profits are the currency of business. And as it turns out, if you focus on creating technology, you’ll get technology (and patents) and if you focus on profits, you’ll get profits. But if no one buys your technology (in the form of the products or services that use it), you’ll go out of business. And if you focus exclusively on profits you won’t create technology and you’ll go out of business. I’m not sure which path is faster or more dangerous, but I don’t think it matters because either way you’re out of business.
Sari van Poelje
Leaders need members – optimising versus maximising: I help businesses innovate their business more quickly than they innovate their products. What that means is I help businesses modernize their leadership to become more coaching and co-constructive. I help businesses create cooperation across silos. I help businesses engage their customers, to co-create their products. And I help businesses to integrate their commercial and their innovation functions, so that they can actually sell, what they make.
Yoram Solomon
How a Shortage of Innovation Leads to Unemployment: Some believe that robots will take over all our jobs and therefore innovation (specifically in the area of robots) will cause unemployment. But in reality, it’s the other way around.
Tom Koulopoulos
Successful kids are taught this most important lesson: Our kids look to us for answers, advice, and guidance, but what if the best advice was letting them figure it out?
Soren Kaplan
Six trends shaping the future of health care: The healthcare industry is an ecosystem. So are the companies disrupting it.
Robert B. Tucker
13 guidelines for navigating the new decade ahead: In 2009, after a speech at the St. Petersburg International Economic Summit (Russia’s Davos), I wandered into a panel discussion on the topic of trade wars, led by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. My thought was: “why this topic?” Trade wars were not on most people’s radar, certainly not mine.
Andy Bounds
Brilliant communicators – are they born or made? Some people just seem to be brilliant communicators, don’t they?
Michael Graber
FourSight: Innovation when it works and when it fails: Last year Innov8rs embarked on a year-long research project to better understand: who are corporate innovators? What makes them tick? What makes their efforts succeed and fail?
Tamara Ghandour
What my suitcase taught me about stress, change and innovation: I’ve been living out of a suitcase for the past three weeks. That doesn’t sound too bad if you are on vacation. But in my case, it involved two kids, a dog and not having any idea where we were going to live. I sold our home of 12 years faster than expected and couldn’t find a new place that met our needs, or really was liveable at all. I put us all in total limbo. I thought I was handling it well. If people asked me how it was going I’d put on a smile and say things like, “oh, it’s an adventure” or “hey, someone makes my bed every day.”
Paul Matthews
“Leadership and Learning and how leadership programmes can fail!” If your leadership development programmes are not quite getting the results you had hoped for, this might be the reason. And the good news is, it can be fixed.
Greg Satell
These are the skills your kids will need for the future (Hint: it’s not coding): An education is supposed to prepare you for the future. Traditionally, that meant learning certain facts and skills, like when Columbus discovered America or how to do long division. Today, curriculums have shifted to focus on a more global and digital world, like cultural history, basic computer skills and writing code.
Paul Sloane
Twenty great sales and marketing questions to ask about your product: If you are launching a new product or service or if you want to review sales and marketing tactics for an existing product or service then here are twenty probing questions to ask. They are intended to challenge conventional assumptions and to take you back to the basics of sales and marketing.
Anthony Mills
Five reasons companies fail at customer experience delivery: In my discussions with business leaders around the world, I continue to be impressed with the growing recognition of Customer Experience as an engine of sustainable growth. Well-conceived, well-designed, and well-delivered customer experiences are the core foundation for achieving the sort of marketplace leadership that has become the hallmark of companies like Amazon, Apple, Disney, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos.
Drayton Bird
What’s wrong with this picture? … And what’s right with this commercial?
Barry Urquhart
The future is ‘fusion’: Get the word right. Fusion, not confusion, is the future for most sectors, products, services and entities.
Drayton Bird
What I told Britain’s best marketing director – And what he said about me: I have been known from time to time to say rude things about marketing directors, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some damn good ones.
Janet Sernack
Why mindsets matter in innovation, transformation and digitisation: In our blog “Taking the Path to Digital Transformation” we described how leading innovators, R&D and new-product development have become digital endeavours. How eleven of the fifty companies named in BCG’s 2018 ranking of the most innovative companies – including seven of the top ten – are digital natives and thus digital innovators by definition