Have you ever seen an ad from someone on Facebook (or while conducting a Google Search) that claimed the presenter was an “expert” or a “guru” at some business-related topic? For example, imagine an ad that says something like this: “I’ve helped businesses generate $1MM+ in new leads” or “I’m the marketing guru who can help you double your ROI.”That’s because every independent contractor, agency, and consultant in the world is competing on a global stage to win business. And if you want to win business, you have to be <a href="https://readwrite.com/2021/10/27/brand-building-101-learn-how-to-build-a-brand/">perceived as an expert </a>– or at least, that’s the way it used to be.

Experts And Gurus Everywhere

Online platforms like Google attempt to incentivize high-quality content by disproportionately promoting and rewarding content that serves as an authoritative take on a given subject. For example, a History professor’s 50-page dissertation should be ranked higher than a middle-schooler’s 50-word blog post, despite their similar subject matter. It’s why <a href="https://seo.co/pillar-content/">developing pillar content </a>is so important for SEO and other marketing strategies. Additionally, consumers tend to prefer working with experienced and knowledgeable professionals in all matters: this is common sense.

The Role Of Google And Consumers

It’s highly rewarding to be an expert.If you can establish yourself as a knowledgeable and respected professional in a given industry, you’ll enjoy more leads, a higher retention rate, and even more satisfied customers (as long as your performance isn’t terrible).

Reasons For The Overabundance Of Self-Proclaimed Experts

Anyone can call themselves an expert. What is an “expert” anyway? Is it someone who gets a certain degree or has a certain number of years in the field? Or is it someone who reaches a suitable threshold of knowledge in a given area? On some level, it doesn’t matter – because anyone can call themselves an expert in the digital age. A person may claim to be a PhD-holding serial entrepreneur, despite being a 19-year-old still in college and trying to start up a freelance business.

Visibility reinforces expertise. Thanks to the mere exposure effect and a handful of other cognitive biases, it’s natural that repeated exposure to a person (or a brand) makes us think more highly of them. If we see a collection of different ads from an individual marketing guru over the course of a few months, we’ll begin to think of them as being a more prominent and well-respected expert than they actually are – even if the effect is subconscious.

“Experts” force “experts” to emerge.If you only have a year of experience, you can’t exactly find success marketing yourself honestly. How does this ad sound: “I’m not very experienced, but I’ll try my best – and I’m probably cheaper than my competitors!” The mere existence of competitors who all bill themselves as experts means you need to bill yourself as an expert if you want to keep pace.

The nature of the internet incentivizes echo chambers and misinformation. The internet contains practically unlimited access to information and connective potential with everyone in the developed world. While this can be a tremendous strength, it also leads people to develop their own echo chambers – and makes it easy to find misinformation. Whatever your opinion is, you’re only one quick search away from finding a so-called “expert” who agrees with you, and a full community of people ( along with intelligent bots ) who will regurgitate your own opinions back to you.

Consumer trust is declining. It’s not all marketers’ faults, but generally, consumer trust is declining. After years of iffy coverage from the mainstream media, lies from politicians all over the political spectrum, and the overwhelming prevalence of misleading marketing and advertising, average consumers take everything they hear with a grain of salt. If you call yourself an expert with years of experience and tell them you can help them improve their business, your work is cut out for you – you’ll have to go to extensive lengths to prove this.

Consequences For Marketers (And Creators)

Terms like “expert” and “guru” are losing meaning. If you want to use terms like “expert” or “guru” in your marketing as a way to describe yourself, you’ll have to revisit that strategy. These terms are so popular and so widely misused that they’ve begun to lose their meaning. Once distinguishing markers of authority, these words have become cheap and easily exchanged.

Competitive differentiation is becoming harder. Most of your competitors are probably heavily invested in content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing , and other strategies meant to establish them as popularly perceived experts. They’re also pushing themselves as experts in your specific industry, making it harder for you to make the same claim. As a result, competitive differentiation is becoming harder and harder.

Understand and review your competition. If you want to stand out from the competition, you have to understand your competition. That means taking the time on a regular basis to read your competitors’ core pieces of content, review their lead generation strategies, and possibly even evaluate their customers. The more you understand about them, the more you’ll be able to grow your own strategies; you can find more ways to creatively distinguish your business from theirs and get ideas for how to promote yourself innovatively.

How To Thrive In A World Where Expertise Is Dead

Focus on a narrow niche. Some brands attempt to market themselves as broadly as possible, trying to reach the largest possible target audience to win more sales. But this isn’t the best idea when the market is flooded with competitors. Instead, it’s better to focus on a narrow target niche . Instead of describing yourself as a general “marketing expert,” you can become an expert in a very specific strategy, or become an expert at serving a specific industry or type of business.

Show, don’t tell.In the world of fiction writing, a common piece of advice is to “show, not tell.” In other words, you want to demonstrate something to your audience rather than explaining it to them explicitly. Instead of saying, “Bob was nervous,” you could say, “Bob padded the sweat from his brow and began to fidget.” Similarly, instead of calling yourself an expert, you can simply show your audience how much of an expert you are. The best way to do this is to develop consistently good content over time, then publish and syndicate it.

Prove your claims. Make sure you prove your claims. You’re an expert – but why? How much experience have you had? What miracles have you been able to work?

Expertise is “dead” in the sense that pretty much everyone is a self-described expert. But you still need to show your expertise is you want to continue competing in this landscape. Find a way to differentiate yourself – and still showcase your authority – if you want to thrive.

Differentiate & Showcase

Expertise is dead. And experts killed it. 

When experts get involved, expertise dies. Here we discuss why experts have killed expertise and what to do about it.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

communication

Communication

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

business

Business

Expertise Is Dead: How to Stand Out When Everyone's an Expert

We typically define product discovery in contrast with product delivery. Product discovery is used to describe the work done to make decisions about what to build, while product delivery is the work done to build, ship, and maintain a production quality product.
Good product discovery includes the customer throughout the decision-making process. through: customer interviews, usability tests, A/B tests, demand tests, customer journey mapping, experience mapping, story mapping, OKRs, opportunity solution trees, ethnographic studies, customer visits, and so on.

Product Discovery

The best teams are recognizing that digital products are never done. They can always iterate and improve. Good product teams know they can always create more value for customers and in turn create more value for their business. This shift in mindset often gets referred to as “product thinking” or as a “product mindset.”

The Product Mindset

As product teams build digital products, they build expertise in their products. They know what the product is capable of. The challenge is that the customers don’t share this expertise.Product people suffer from a bias called the “curse of knowledge": they develop expert knowledge about their product, they forget what it was like before they had that knowledge. And they can't imagine what it’s like for customers to not have this knowledge.This becomes a significant problem when they make daily product discovery decisions without input from customers.

The Curse of Knowledge in Product Development

Good product discovery has a simple underlying structure: Start with an outcome, discover opportunities, discover solutions.
<ol>
<li>Good product discovery starts with a clear outcome. A business outcome measures the health of the business and is usually a financial metric or measures progress against a strategic initiative.</li>
<li>Once a product outcome is selected, the product team needs to discover the opportunity space. The team’s goal is to discover opportunities that have the potential to drive their product outcome.</li>
<li>Teams need to discover solutions that will address those opportunities. </li>
</ol>

The Underlying Structure of Product Discovery

Product discovery is a hot topic in the product world. This article covers what it is, the history and evolution, and today's best practices.

product

Product & Design

Product Discovery Basics: Everything You Need to Know - Product Talk

A business has to be customer-focused, it has to speak the language of the customers. You can’t be pushing what you think is cool, or pushing the technology. You need to understand what’s important for your clients.

Be Customer Focused

Community is the best marketing. You need to leverage your community to do your marketing for free. How do you build communities?Look for places where people post or talk about problems your product/service can solve.Find groups or pages that people are creating on Facebook, Reddit, Quora etc.

Leverage Communities 

Your Circle Of Influence is the people and networks you already have in place. You can use other people’s knowledge or relationships to get other people’s business. If what you are selling is both valuable and scarce, then you can leverage your Circle of Influence to close more sales. This doesn’t mean treating people like commodities.

Leverage Existing Circle Of Influence

You don’t need to come up with ideas for your content. People give you their problems all the time — 1) in blog posts, tweets, and reader comments,2) in email submissions and3) in events or conferences.Think about what motivates people.Content, not sales.

Content First Marketing Strategy

Be consistent and put in the hard work. You can’t expect to be successful with 0 dollar marketing if you don’t put in the work of creating content, distributing, engaging and adding value. Be bullish. It’s not enough to show up every now and then. You have to be there regularly, contributing quality content that others know about well enough to read and share with their friends.

Be Consistent, and put in the hard work

Thoughtfully marketing a product or service can cost a good deal less than a penny. It only takes a few minutes of active time invested per customer, and costs can be as low as zero. To be clear…

career

Career

How to market with 0 dollar budget

“When we challenge ourselves to move beyond what we know and can do well, we rebel against the comfortable cocoon of the status quo, improving ourselves and positioning ourselves to contribute more to our partners, coworkers, and organizations”

These five key ‘rebel traits’ represent paths to engagement:<ul><li>Novelty: It allows us to fight the boredom that comes with routines and traditions.</li><li>Curiosity: It allows us to combat the tendency to stick with the status quo.</li><li>Perspective: It allows us to rebel against our narrow focus when we approach problems or decisions, which usually include only one view – our own.</li><li>Diversity: It allows us to defy the stereotypes that are so ingrained in human nature.</li><li>Authenticity: It allows us to be honest about our preferences, emotions and beliefs.</li></ul>

How “rebels are engaged

Exploitation involves improving and refining existing products and processes. This typically happens through a focus on efficiency and execution.In contrast, the focus of exploration is on identifying new ideas and ways of doing things. This involves things like risk-taking and experimentation.

Novelty: exploitation and exploration

When we open ourselves to curiosity, we are more apt to reframe situations in a positive way. Curiosity makes us much more likely to view a tough problem at work as an interesting challenge to take on.Curious people seem to have a natural inclination to ask questions – both at work and in life as we get older. To foster curiosity means to be open in saying “I don’t know but let’s find out” or encouraging people to ask “What if …?”

Curiosity

Counterfactual thinking means forgetting what you know and considering a situation from a fresh perspective. This way of thinking is also referred to as “the beginner's mindset” or “unlearning”.Rebel talent will always try to broaden their perspective and thus mitigate the “curse of knowledge” (overestimating the amount of knowledge that we or others have).

Perspective: counterfactual thinking

“If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”

Rebels know that to effectively leverage differences, their organizations should work beyond race and gender.In the rebel mind, all differences matter, and diversity isn’t a quota system but a long-range vision for growth.

The role of diversity

It means being able to be your ‘true self’ at work, and throwing this into the mix when tackling tough challenges or coming up with new ideas. This doesn’t mean that one’s ability to be authentic can be abused to behave negatively or to disrespect other people’s authentic selves. Instead, the value of authenticity and humor comes particularly in times of change, where it can help people thrive.

Authenticity

This is important in an environment for rebel talent to thrive in. Members of psychologically safe teams aren’t afraid of admitting to errors and discussing these openly nor would you fear being embarrassed about asking unorthodox questions, ideas or doubts.

Psychological Safety

To be able to question, challenge, and innovate, we need to constantly frame our work around learning goals.These learning goals can cover us developing our competence, acquiring new skills, or mastering new situations.

Continuous Learning

“In this groundbreaking book, Francesca Gino shows us how to spark creativity, excel at work, and become happier: By learning to rebel.” — Charles Duhigg, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better Do you want to follow a script — or write your own story? Award-winning Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino shows us why the most successful among us break the rules, and how rebellion brings joy and meaning into our lives. Rebels have a bad reputation. We think of them as troublemakers, outcasts, contrarians: those colleagues, friends, and family members who complicate seemingly straightforward decisions, create chaos, and disagree when everyone else is in agreement. But in truth, rebels are also those among us who change the world for the better with their unconventional outlooks. Instead of clinging to what is safe and familiar, and falling back on routines and tradition, rebels defy the status quo. They are masters of innovation and reinvention, and they have a lot to teach us. Francesca Gino, a behavioral scientist and professor at Harvard Business School, has spent more than a decade studying rebels at organizations around the world, from high-end boutiques in Italy’s fashion capital, to the World’s Best Restaurant, to a thriving fast food chain, to an award-winning computer animation studio. In her work, she has identified leaders and employees who exemplify “rebel talent,” and whose examples we can all learn to embrace. Gino argues that the future belongs to the rebel — and that there’s a rebel in each of us. We live in turbulent times, when competition is fierce, reputations are easily tarnished on social media, and the world is more divided than ever before. In this cutthroat environment, cultivating rebel talent is what allows businesses to evolve and to prosper. And rebellion has an added benefit beyond the workplace: it leads to a more vital, engaged, and fulfilling life. Whether you want to inspire others to action, build a business, or build more meaningful relationships, Rebel Talent will show you how to succeed — by breaking all the rules.

books

Books

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Human Resources

“In this groundbreaking book, Francesca Gino shows us how to spark creativity, excel at work, and become happier: By learning to rebel.”   — Charles Duhigg, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better Do you want to follow a script — or write your own story?Award-winning Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino shows us why the most successful among us break the rules, and how rebellion brings joy and meaning into our lives.Rebels have a bad reputation. We think of them as troublemakers, outcasts, contrarians: those colleagues, friends, and family members who complicate seemingly straightforward decisions, create chaos, and disagree when everyone else is in agreement. But in truth, rebels are also those among us who change the world for the better with their unconventional outlooks. Instead of clinging to what is safe and familiar, and falling back on routines and tradition, rebels defy the status quo. They are masters of innovation and reinvention, and they have a lot to teach us.Francesca Gino, a behavioral scientist and professor at Harvard Business School, has spent more than a decade studying rebels at organizations around the world, from high-end boutiques in Italy’s fashion capital, to the World’s Best Restaurant, to a thriving fast food chain, to an award-winning computer animation studio. In her work, she has identified leaders and employees who exemplify “rebel talent,” and whose examples we can all learn to embrace.Gino argues that the future belongs to the rebel — and that there’s a rebel in each of us. We live in turbulent times, when competition is fierce, reputations are easily tarnished on social media, and the world is more divided than ever before. In this cutthroat environment, cultivating rebel talent is what allows businesses to evolve and to prosper. And rebellion has an added benefit beyond the workplace: it leads to a more vital, engaged, and fulfilling life.Whether you want to inspire others to action, build a business, or build more meaningful relationships, Rebel Talent will show you how to succeed — by breaking all the rules.

Francesca Gino

Rebel Talent

“The way we are conditioned to see the world in our own culture seems so completely obvious and commonplace that it is difficult to image that another culture might do things differently. It is only when you start to identify what is typical in your culture but different from others, that you can begin to open a dialogue of sharing, learning, and ultimately understanding.”

The majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding of how culture is impacting their work. This is especially true as more and more of us communicate daily with people in other countries over virtual media.
When you live extensively in a foreign country, you pick up a lot of contextual cues that help you understand the culture of the people living there, and you decode communication and adapt accordingly. But when you exchange emails with an international counterpart in a country you haven’t spent time in, it is much easier to miss the cultural subtleties impacting the communication.

The invisible boundaries that divide our world

“Leaders have always needed to understand human nature and personality differences to be successful in business--that's nothing new. What's new is the requirement for twenty-first century leaders to be prepared to understand a wider, richer array of work styles than ever before and to be able to determine what aspects of an interaction are simply a result of personality and which are a result of differences in cultural perspective.”

Cultural patterns of behavior and belief frequently impact our perceptions (what we see), cognitions (what we think), and actions (what we do).
Many of the cultural differences—varying attitudes concerning when best to speak or stay quiet, the role of the leader in the room, and what kind of negative feedback is the most constructive—may seem small.
But if you are unaware of the differences and unarmed with strategies for managing them effectively, they can derail your team meetings, demotivate your employees, frustrate your foreign suppliers, and in dozens of other ways make it much more difficult to achieve your goals

How we understand each other

It is common, to work across cultures for decades and travel frequently for business while remaining unaware and uninformed about how culture impacts you. Millions of people work in global settings while viewing everything from their own cultural perspectives and assuming that all differences, controversy, and misunderstanding are rooted in personality.
This is not due to laziness. Many well-intentioned people don’t educate themselves about cultural differences because they believe that if they focus on individual differences, that will be enough.

When having an open mind is not enough

Each of the eight scales represents one key area that managers must be aware of, showing how cultures vary along a spectrum from one extreme to its opposite. The eight scales are:
<ul>
<li>Communicating: low-context vs. high-context</li>
<li>Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs. indirect negative feedback</li>
<li>Persuading: principles-first vs. applications-first</li>
<li>Leading: egalitarian vs. hierarchical</li>
<li>Deciding: consensual vs. top-down</li>
<li>Trusting: task-based vs. relationship-based</li>
<li>Disagreeing: confrontational vs. avoids confrontation</li>
<li>Scheduling: linear-time vs. flexible-time.</li>
</ul>

Eight scales that map the world's cultures

<ul>
<li>In cultures where low-context communication styles are prevalent, people assume a low level of shared context — few shared reference points and comparatively little implicit knowledge linking speaker and listener. In low-context countries like the United States and the Netherlands, effective communication must be simple, clear, and explicit in order to effectively pass the message.</li>
<li>In contrast, in high-context countries such as the United Kingdom and Japan, people tend to communicate in ways that are implicit and rely heavily on shared context. Someone from a high-context culture might accuse a low-context speaker of being too direct, whereas a low-context listener might often wonder if the high-context speaker will ever get to the point.</li>
</ul>

Communicating: low-context vs high-context

Erin Meyer’s Evaluating scale offers insights into how to give effective performance appraisals and negative feedback in different parts of the world. The spectrum goes from “direct negative feedback” to “indirect negative feedback”.
With direct negative feedback, the feedback is delivered to a colleague frankly, bluntly and honestly. Negative messages stand alone, not softened by positive ones. In contrast, when indirect negative feedback is provided it’s done in a soft, subtle and diplomatic manner.

Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs indirect negative feedback

<ul>
<li>When providing an evaluation, be explicit and low-context with both positive and negative feedback. Don't launch into the negative until you’ve also explicitly stated something that you appreciate about the person or the situation. The positive comments should be honest and stated in a detailed, explicit manner.</li>
<li>Try, over time, to be balanced in the amount of positive and negative feedback you give.</li>
<li>Frame your behavior in cultural terms. Don’t use your cultural background as an excuse to be disrespectful but talk openly about the cultural differences that explain your communication style.</li>
</ul>

How to provide feedback

There are two types of reasoning we can use to persuade:
<ul>
<li>Principles-first (or deductive) reasoning derives conclusions or facts from general principles or concepts. People from principles-first cultures generally want to understand the why behind their boss’s request before they move to action</li>
<li>With applications-first reasoning (or inductive) reasoning, general conclusions are based on a pattern of factual observations from the real world. Applications-first learners tend to focus less on the why and more on the how.</li>
</ul>

Persuading: principles-first vs applications-first

When interacting with someone from another culture, try to watch more, listen more, and speak less.

An international business expert helps you understand and navigate cultural differences in this insightful and practical guide, perfect for both your work and personal life. Americans precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans get straight to the point; Latin Americans and Asians are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians think the best boss is just one of the crowd. It's no surprise that when they try and talk to each other, chaos breaks out. In The Culture Map, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer is your guide through this subtle, sometimes treacherous terrain in which people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together. She provides a field-tested model for decoding how cultural differences impact international business, and combines a smart analytical framework with practical, actionable advice.

travel

Travel

An international business expert helps you understand and navigate cultural differences in this insightful and practical guide, perfect for both your work and personal life. Americans precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans get straight to the point; Latin Americans and Asians are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians think the best boss is just one of the crowd. It's no surprise that when they try and talk to each other, chaos breaks out. In The Culture Map, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer is your guide through this subtle, sometimes treacherous terrain in which people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together. She provides a field-tested model for decoding how cultural differences impact international business, and combines a smart analytical framework with practical, actionable advice.

Erin Meyer (born August 22, 1971) is an American author and professor based in Paris.[1] She is most known for writing the 2014 book, The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business a study that analyzes how national cultural differences impact business.Meyer is a professor at INSEAD, an international business school with campuses in France, Singapore and Abu Dhabi. She regularly speaks about cross cultural management and global teamwork.

Erin Meyer

The Culture Map

Silence is often underestimated. Interestingly it serves two purposes in a business discussion. It can allow the other person to talk, or even force them to speak.Regardless of the application of silence, when used with effective listening, you can drive a business conversation into a successful outcome.

Use Silence As A Tactical Tool

Anxiety and excitement can easily drive you down the rabbit hole of offering solutions without having a clear understanding of the business situation/problem. Unfortunately, a solution is only valid if it meets a known problem or business situation.Never be in a haste to speak, listen to understand the business context so you can gather your thoughts and drive the conversation towards a meaningful outcome.

Listen First To Understand The Context

There’s nothing worse than rambling for hours only to realise your audience was completely misunderstood or uninterested. What’s more frustrating is when you’re unable to tell what point the disconnection happened.Find opportunities to pause and ask for feedback. Ask if there are any questions so far, or if clarity is required. Pauses also allow you to get a reaction from your audience and use their feedback to determine your next move, or words.

Pause For Feedback Continuously

When speaking becomes over-speaking, you risk losing the opportunity you have already secured. This is particularly important in sales especially when the prospect has shown interest in buying or made a verbal decision.Don’t talk yourself out of a deal by sharing information that is relevant after a deal is won. Focus on what matters and if there’s nothing else to say, thank them, clarify next steps and call it a day.

Know When To Stop, Especially When A Deal Is Struck

There’s a thin line between speaking and overspeaking.  Sometimes it is best to be the listener. Recognising the importance of silence and how to use it as a tactical tool in business is an art a lot of successful salesman have mastered.  So here are some of the practical tips I have taken into my business that have also worked for me.

Mark McCormack, dubbed 'the most powerful man in sport', founded IMG (International Management Group) on a handshake. It was the first and is the most successful sports management company in the world, becoming a multi-million dollar, worldwide corporation whose activities in the business and marketing spheres are so diverse as to defy classification. Here, Mark McCormack reveals the secret of his success to key business issues such as analysing yourself and others, sales, negotiation, time management, decision-making and communication. What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School fills the gaps between a business school education and the street knowledge that comes from the day-to-day experience of running a business and managing people. It shares the business skills, techniques and wisdom gleaned from twenty-five years of experience.

Mark McCormack, dubbed 'the most powerful man in sport', founded IMG (International Management Group) on a handshake. It was the first and is the most successful sports management company in the world, becoming a multi-million dollar, worldwide corporation whose activities in the business and marketing spheres are so diverse as to defy classification. Here, Mark McCormack reveals the secret of his success to key business issues such as analysing yourself and others, sales, negotiation, time management, decision-making and communication. What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School fills the gaps between a business school education and the street knowledge that comes from the day-to-day experience of running a business and managing people. It shares the business skills, techniques and wisdom gleaned from twenty-five years of experience.

Mark H. McCormack

What They Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School

Every brand that is serious in securing equity in the market place must leverage every digital opportunity that exists.But it is not just about having a website, it is about having a clear business strategy that leverages online opportunities to maximise sales. Clearly, Toys’rus could have done more with their online game.The reason is simple - more consumers now opt for online shopping, but you need to attract them to your online store.The moment you don’t take the digital space as seriously, you’re already taking major leaps backwards into extinction.

Digital/Online Is The Present And The Future

The summation of all the interactions between your customer and your brand is the overall customer experience.Leave a gap and the customer is already making their way towards your competition.It is no longer about a good product only, there is more focus on how a customer feels through the experience shopping with you.Both in-store and online shopping experiences of the old toys’rus were not as seamless as new decade consumer experiences. This is a major issue that leads to customer attrition in any brand.

Customer Experience Is A Game Changer

Shopping is clearly now an omnichannel experience with customers buying in store, online or switching across both experiences simultaneously.Within these experiences is a huge customer need that must never be underestimated - Convenience.Every winning brand know that it is not enough to have limited options. Customers want the flexibility of shipping choices, quicker delivery, various payment options and much more. At the core of this is convenience.

Convenience Is A Core Customer Need

If data is not seen as gold by any brand, then they are already coasting towards extinction.But data is not just about seeing what is truly happening. It is also about making every attempt to anticipate where the market, customers and the business industry is heading.The key here is to stay ahead of the game by anticipating market changes that can impact your business so you can make data-driven decisions to keep your brand afloat and winning.

Data Reveals More Than You Can Think

The last point is all about being customer centric. If Toys’rus had put just a bit more focus on listening to what their customers were saying, and studying what their customers were doing and not doing, it may have revealed risks and opportunities within the brand.When you ignore the importance of the customer’s voice, you may just end up building a brand without the customers you’re looking to win in the first place.No customers, no business!

Listen To Your Customers

It took me a long time to believe that Toys’rus had truly disappeared from the streets of retail.  While I am glad the brand is making its way back, here are some key business lessons for any brand that wants to stay in the marketplace.

When familiarity is a strategy, you lose market share.

Lessons from Toys R us - How to Remain in Business and not Lose Brand Equity

Conventional wisdom might lead a company to focus on growth, looking for revenue wherever it seems most available. But the unconventional companies we have studied commit to an identity. They focus their efforts on developing a solid value proposition and building distinctive capabilities that will last for the long term.

Commit to an identity


Many business people assume that the best way to build capabilities is to adopt the best practices of an industry or develop functional excellence, but companies with a strategy that works believe otherwise. They translate the strategic into the everyday. They design and build their own bespoke capabilities that set them apart from other companies and allow them to live their identity.

Translate the strategic into the everyday

A business leader might seek to solve performance problems by making structural changes: reworking the org chart and rethinking incentives. The culture of the enterprise, if considered at all, is often seen as a hindrance. But companies that close the strategy-to-execution gap do it differently. They put their culture to work.

Put your culture to work

A more conventional company might try to reduce costs across the board by going lean everywhere and spreading investments across a wide range of promising opportunities. But the unconventional companies we studied cut costs to grow stronger. They marshal their resources in a more strategic way, doubling down on the few capabilities that matter most to their long-term success and pruning back to the minimum everything else.

Cut costs to grow stronger

Finally, companies that make their strategy work are not trying to become agile. They don’t respond to external change as rapidly as possible. Instead, they shape their future by creating the change they want to see. They use their distinctive edge to gain privileged access to customers and do mergers and acquisitions to recreate their business environment on their own terms.

Shape your future

Winning companies don’t follow conventional wisdom. They apply five acts of unconventional leadership that allow them to close the strategy-to-execution gap.

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

startup

Startups

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Strategy That Works

Offering employees the tools and motivation to create ideas is the key to an innovative organization.Most organizations recognize the importance of encouraging innovation. Good ideas can streamline production processes, help save money and open up potential new markets. Yet despite the compelling evidence, it’s not always obvious what steps are needed to integrate innovative practices and thinking across an organization.

The key to an innovative organization

There are three key processes necessary to build an Innovation Engine into any organization: Creation, Integration, and Reframing.Integration and reframing are about changing mindsets and implementing innovations across an organization. These will be dealt with more fully in subsequent articles. Creation is focused on the act of generating the ideas needed for innovation to take place. But it is also about making sure those ideas are being created throughout an organization, particularly by frontline workers.

A blueprint for innovation

Offering employees the tools and motivation to create ideas is the key to an innovative organisation.

creativity

Creativity

Innovation Is Everyone’s Business

Billionaire <a href="https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/warren-buffett-says-this-is-how-you-can-instantly-spot-a-great-leader.html">Warren Buffett </a>, chairman and CEO of <a href="https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/warren-buffett-recommends-these-33-books-to-berkshire-hathaway-shareholders.html">Berkshire Hathaway </a>, learned a long time ago that the greatest commodity of all is time. That's why he is religiously protective of his own time by setting strict boundaries for himself.This leads to a "<a href="https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/warren-buffet-says-this-career-advice-is-all-wrong-its-like-saving-up-sex-for-your-old-age-it-just-doesnt-make-a-lot-of-sense.html">Buffett-ism </a>" that has garnered a lot of debate over the years since he said it. It's a quote about the difference between successful people and really successful people.

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”

The “Buffett-ism”

That's a tall order. Most ambitious people are driven for results and doing more, not less. If you're an entrepreneur, for example, you are relentless in your pursuit of capitalizing on every opportunity presented to you if it means growing your business and income.That means saying a lot more "yesses" than "no's."But is it sustainable?

No To Almost Everything?

While it's true that many successful and high-profile entrepreneurs put in 60 to 80 hours per week, really successful people don't neglect their mental health and self-care or time with family, hobbies, or other interests. They recognize that if they can't take care of themselves, the business suffers.

As we near the end of the year, this is typically the time people start thinking about what goals to set for the new year. Here’s one suggestion to add to your list based on Buffett's advice:Learn to manage yourself .

Learn To Manage Yourself

Why manage ourselves and not time? Because we can't manage time. There's no such thing. We all wake up in the morning with the same exact number of hours, minutes, and seconds in a day. We can't control time. As it ticks away, it's gone -- in the past, never to be reclaimed again.

Manage Yourself, Not Time

But here's what we can do, and is very much within our control: choose how to use that time by managing ourselves wisely.

Focus In What You Can Control

<ol><li class="ql-align-justify">Say no to opportunities and things that don't speak to your values, or further your personal or organizational mission</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Say no to superficial networking. Really successful people don't network. They build relationships.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Say no to overworking by doing all the work yourself. Delegate instead and trust in others' abilities and skills to get the job done.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Say no to neglecting your deepest wishes and desires for what your want to accomplish in life. Stop accommodating and yielding to others' wishes and desires. It's your life, take control of it, and live your calling.</li></ol>

How To Manage Yourself 

productivity

Productivity

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

timemanagement

Time Management

Warren Buffett Says What Separates Successful People from Everyone Else Really Comes Down to a 2-Letter Word

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