‘Building for Everyone, with Everyone’ means producing inclusive products and services. The customer should feel that the product fits with who they are, and was built just for them. It boils down to these core components:
<ul>
<li>Listening</li>
<li>Caring</li>
<li>Being humble</li>
<li>Empathy</li>
</ul>

Inclusive Products and Services

The all-important first step here is to develop an understanding of your users/customers/clients – understanding who they are, where they come from, what’s important to them, and how their core needs are represented in your product or company mission. To become more inclusive, we need to build diverse teams and ask users what they need, and why. To become more inclusive, we need to build diverse teams and ask users what they need, and why. We need to build a thorough understanding of our users, revealing our biases and uncovering (potential) areas of exclusion.

Understanding Your Customer

Diversity in language can lead to misunderstandings, and how a shared language helps create clarity and alignment around diversity. At the core of product inclusion are four pillars: product inclusion, diversity, equity and intersectionality.

A Common Language

<ol><li>Product inclusion: The practice of applying an inclusive lens throughout the entire product design and development process to create better products.</li><li>Diversity: Location, language, available infrastructure, etc.</li><li>Equity: This is the quality of being fair and impartial in terms of access, opportunities, and success for all individuals. This is not to be confused with Equality.</li><li>Intersectionality: The interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class, and gender.</li></ol>

The Four Pillars

<ol><li>Has your team been exposed to product inclusion?</li><li>Have you identified a champion for your product inclusion efforts?</li><li>What’s the product challenge?</li><li>What’s the inclusion challenge?</li><li>How do the product and inclusion challenges align?</li><li>Whom do you need to influence to unlock resources to solve the problem?</li><li>What’s your action plan for a test/pilot?</li><li>What partners need to be involved to execute, document, measure, and communicate the results of your test/pilot?</li><li>How can you build the resources to continue this work?</li><li>What’s your public commitment to documenting and sharing the outcomes of your work?</li></ol>

10 Questions We All Need To Ask And Answer

What makes product inclusion difficult is that it requires product managers and leaders to be honest and clear about who they’re genuinely aiming to serve.Once you’ve worked through some of the above ten questions, you can start being much more intentional about how you design your products.

The Challenge Of Product Inclusion

<ul><li>Identify the market opportunity for key demographics.</li><li>Recognise what real users want.</li><li>Identify the market opportunity by examining the gap between what is currently being offered and the key demographic needs or desires.</li></ul>

Building a human case for product inclusion

<ul><li>Naming exclusion unlocks the potential of inclusion.</li><li>Team diversity is reflected in product diversity.</li><li>Everyone is different.</li><li>Needs and preferences change with context.</li><li>Everyone is biased!</li><li>Equal isn’t always equitable.</li><li>Designing for a minority also benefits the majority.</li><li>Diversity accelerates and amplifies learning and innovation.</li><li>Diversity and inclusion are good for business.</li></ul>

Basic Product Principles

<ul><li>When in doubt, subtract</li><li>Never say “No” without offering “Yes”</li><li>Be tough, not rough</li><li>Risk nothing, change nothing</li><li>Seek the invisible</li><li>Quality is a habit</li><li>Magic > Logic</li></ul>

Maxims About Product Inclusion

To make a business case for product inclusion, we start with evaluating our metrics needs, to identify whether any existing metrics need to be amended or augmented by new ones:<ul><li>What metrics do you currently use to assess the performance of your product or service?</li><li>Do your existing metrics provide insight into the needs and sentiments of non-majority users specifically?</li><li>What does “underrepresented user” mean for your organisation, team, process or product?</li><li>Where do you not have insight into the needs and sentiments of underrepresented users?</li></ul>

Measuring product inclusion performance

Metrics can be classified into two broad categories, or buckets: socialisation metrics and product inclusion metrics.<ul><li>Socialisation metrics – These are the metrics we can use to track progress in terms of diversity and inclusion awareness and participation.</li><li>Product inclusion metrics – These are the metrics we can use to track progress in terms of integrating product inclusion into what our product teams are doing and the outcomes of those efforts.</li></ul>

The Two Buckets

Another way to classify metrics is to distinguish between input and output metrics:<ul><li>Input metrics – These metrics are meant to track the resources used to produce the desired outcome with respect to product inclusion.</li><li>Output metrics – These metrics reflect the outcome resulting from a given input.</li></ul>

Input And Output Metrics

Diversity and Inclusion to build better products from the front lines at Google Establishing diverse and inclusive organizations is an economic imperative for every industry. Any business that isn’t reaching a diverse market is missing out on enormous revenue potential and the opportunity to build products that suit their users' core needs. The economic “why” has been firmly established, but what about the “how?” How can business leaders adapt to our ever-more-diverse world by capturing market share AND building more inclusive products for people of color, women and other underrepresented groups? The Product Inclusion Team at Google has developed strategies to do just that and Building For Everyone is the practical guide to following in their footsteps. This book makes publicly available for the first time the same inclusive design process used at Google to create user-centric award-winning and profitable products. Author and Head of Product Inclusion Annie Jean-Baptiste outlines what those practices look like in industries beyond tech with fascinating case studies. Readers will learn the key strategies and step-by-step processes for inclusive product design that limits risk and increases profitability. Discover the questions you should be asking about diversity and inclusion in your products for marketers, user researchers, product managers and more. Understand the research the Product Inclusion team drove to back up their practices Learn the “ABCs of Product Inclusion” to build inclusion into your organization’s culture Leverage the product inclusion suite of tools to get your organization building more inclusively and identifying new opportunities. Read case studies to see how product inclusion works across industries and learn what doesn't work. Building For Everyone will show you how to infuse your business processes with inclusive design. You’ll learn best practices for inclusion in product design, marketing, management, leadership and beyond, straight from the innovative Google Product Inclusion team.

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

business

Business

books

Books

product

Product & Design

Diversity and Inclusion to build better products from the front lines at Google Establishing diverse and inclusive organizations is an economic imperative for every industry. Any business that isn’t reaching a diverse market is missing out on enormous revenue potential and the opportunity to build products that suit their users' core needs. The economic “why” has been firmly established, but what about the “how?” How can business leaders adapt to our ever-more-diverse world by capturing market share AND building more inclusive products for people of color, women and other underrepresented groups? The Product Inclusion Team at Google has developed strategies to do just that and Building For Everyone is the practical guide to following in their footsteps. This book makes publicly available for the first time the same inclusive design process used at Google to create user-centric award-winning and profitable products. Author and Head of Product Inclusion Annie Jean-Baptiste outlines what those practices look like in industries beyond tech with fascinating case studies. Readers will learn the key strategies and step-by-step processes for inclusive product design that limits risk and increases profitability. <ul> <li>Discover the questions you should be asking about diversity and inclusion in your products for marketers, user researchers, product managers and more.</li> <li>Understand the research the Product Inclusion team drove to back up their practices</li> <li>Learn the “ABCs of Product Inclusion” to build inclusion into your organization’s culture</li> <li>Leverage the product inclusion suite of tools to get your organization building more inclusively and identifying new opportunities.</li> <li>Read case studies to see how product inclusion works across industries and learn what doesn't work.</li> </ul> Building For Everyone will show you how to infuse your business processes with inclusive design. You’ll learn best practices for inclusion in product design, marketing, management, leadership and beyond, straight from the innovative Google Product Inclusion team.

Annie Jean-Baptiste

Building For Everyone

Building For Everyone: Expand Your Market With Design Practices From Google's Product Inclusion Team

If your company is efficient, that means it is especially capable of producing desired results with little or no waste with very few resources. <ul><li>If you’re able to produce the same amount of work with less time and resources, you’re being more efficient. </li><li>If you use more time and resources but produce the same amount of work as before, your performance is less efficient.</li></ul>Therefore, efficiency is simply the quality and degree of effectiveness at which a company is being efficient.

What Is Efficiency?

The dictionary defines being productive as, “having the quality or power of producing especially in abundance.” Those who are concerned with productivity are trying to make the most output with the resources they have. <ul><li>For example, if they have a large budget, they’re trying to produce the largest amount of work possible. If they have a small budget, then they’re still trying to produce the largest amount of work possible.</li></ul>

What Is Productivity?

<ul><li>Efficiency refers to the amount of effort and resources people put into work, while productivity is all about the amount of work done over a certain period of time.</li><li>Productivity is proactive. Efficiency is reactive.</li><li>Productivity is about achieving the best output no matter the situation. A company becomes more productive when they’re focusing on doing more with their current resources. Efficiency is more about survival. </li></ul>

Efficiency vs. Productivity

Let’s say your company can process 40 documents per hour. A company focused on productivity would try to increase the number of documents they can produce in that hour.So, your people have worked hard and are now able to scan a total of 50 documents per hour. They have just become 25% more productive.Whether they have 6 hours or one hour, the productivity-focused company can still work at the same pace. They still produce as much as they can, even if their total numbers drop due to cuts.

Example Of Productivity

Let’s say your company, which can now process 50 documents per hour, gets its budget slashed. Now, the company is trying to do the same amount of work (50 documents processed per hour) with fewer resources to process them. This would be the time to focus on efficiency.

Example Of Efficiency 

In a perfect world, companies would try to be both efficient and productive. Companies should always be looking for ways to do more with what they have while doing the same amount of work with less waste.That being said, most successful companies put their primary focus on productivity, not efficiency.Productivity helps companies do more, while efficiency helps companies do the same with less.If a company is going to focus on making anything more efficient, it should be all of the tedious work that needs to get done but doesn’t really help the company grow.

It Is Best To Be Productive And Efficient, But If You Must Choose, Choose Productivity

<ul><li>Productivity Formula</li></ul>Total Output / Total Input = Labor Productivity<ul><li>Efficiency Formula</li></ul>(Standard Labor Hours / Amount of Time Worked) x 100 = Efficiency

Formula

Are efficiency and productivity different or the same? Is one better than the other?

productivity

Productivity

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

An American Life by Walter Isaacson is a definitive biography of Benjamin Franklin. The book discusses his life and career as a scientist and inventor, author, musician, politician, diplomat, etc. and traces his adventures through Boston, Philadelphia, London and back. The book also chronicles his achievements and pays particular attention to the beliefs of his character which defined the national perspective of the United States of America. Isaacson provides detailed and intimate aspects of Benjamin Franklin's life and the role he played in forging the American national identity.

What's it about?

Starting a business is never without risk. Starting a business with the wrong mindset, however, can sometimes lead to wasting hours and money attempting to grow a business you know isn't going anywhere

Introduction 

to learn when jumping from adventure to adventure is that it doesn’t pay to plan ahead. Planning is a waste of time. Plan nothing. Just jump into things, trusting that at some point they will benefit you. This works especially well if you have not built up any credit term at all.

The first lesson

"A financially healthy company is a result of a series of small daily financial wins, not one big moment."

the right speed is the single most important step in taking your business to the next level. You should not look for sympathy or pity. There are few things more disheartening than taking a risk and failing. Everyone makes mistakes, but if you allow yourself to be emotionally swayed by others

Choosing 

happen due to lack of focus, a lack of available resources, ruthless pursuit of short-term success, or the simple fact that the conditions are unsuitable for something new to emerge. Spend as much time and energy as you need getting your business off the ground and into the black.

Failures

is ambitious, risky, and requires an enormous amount of passion and tenacity. You are going to fail often. That doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to identify the things that could make your enterprise successful.

Starting A Company 

owners make is over-promising and under-delivering. You can never please everyone, so what you need to do is figure out what is really important to you and then deliver that. There are many mistakes that small business owners make when trying to expand or improve their business. One of the biggest is trying to please everyone inside and outside the company.

One of the biggest mistakes

owners make is over-promising and under-delivering. You can

to have a clear sense of what you do, what matters most to you, and what will give you the most pleasure. Do not start building your business solely on the basis of what others say - this is liable to lead to failure.

It is essential 

"Entrepreneurs don’t do most of the work. Entrepreneurs identify the problems, discover the opportunities and then build processes to allow other people and other things to do the work."

You have to learn how to talk to both sides of the fence, the customer and the business owner. In order to do this, you have to experience both ends of the spectrum and learn how both view you as a valuable resource. The ability to compromise, get along with people, explore new ideas and work with people without compromising your ideals is something that extremely few people naturally have.

Learning Ability 

else is doing something doesn’t mean that you shouldn't try to do the same. This goes for leaders and mentors who want their charges to consistently achieve more than they have in the past. You need to trust yourself first before anyone else can help you achieve your goals and desires.

Just because someone

This clarity only appears once you stop trying to figure everything out for yourself and start focusing on what really matters, namely, your top clients. Instead of chasing after every new lead (no matter how tempting), focus on identifying that handful of very special customers who are worth pursuing aggressively for two reasons: they have a specific insight, and they can be trusted to put their resources into something big—with you at the centre.

Clarity

This clarity only appears once you stop

Learn the most effective business way of growing your

Looks at the author's method for overcoming periods of stagnation in business growth, explaining how he found inspiration in the examples of giant pumpkin farmers, and sharing metaphorical strategies for driving sustained growth.

Each year Americans start one million new businesses, nearly 80 percent of which fail within the first five years. Under such pressure to stay alive—let alone grow—it’s easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up in a never-ending cycle of “sell it—do it, sell it—do it” that leaves them exhausted, frustrated, and unable to get ahead no matter how hard they try. This is the exact situation Mike Michalowicz found himself in when he was trying to grow his first company. Although it was making steady money, there was never very much left over and he was chasing customers left and right, putting in twenty-eight-hour days, eight days a week. The punishing grind never let up. His company was alive but stunted, and he was barely breathing. That’s when he discovered an unlikely source of inspiration—pumpkin farmers. After reading an article about a local farmer who had dedicated his life to growing giant pump­kins, Michalowicz realized the same process could apply to growing a business. He tested the Pumpkin Plan on his own company and transformed it into a remarkable, multimillion-dollar industry leader. First he did it for himself. Then for others. And now you. So what is the Pumpkin Plan?<ul> <li>Plant the right seeds: Don’t waste time doing a bunch of different things just to please your customers. Instead, identify the thing you do better than anyone else and focus all of your attention, money, and time on figuring out how to grow your company doing it.</li> <li>Weed out the losers: In a pumpkin patch small, rotten pumpkins stunt the growth of the robust, healthy ones. The same is true of customers. Figure out which customers add the most value and provide the best opportunities for sustained growth. Then ditch the worst of the worst.</li> <li>Nurture the winners: Once you figure out who your best customers are, blow their minds with care. Discover their unfulfilled needs, innovate to make their wishes come true, and overdeliver on every single promise.</li></ul>Full of stories of other successful entrepreneurs, The Pumpkin Plan guides you through unconven­tional strategies to help you build a truly profitable blue-ribbon company that is the best in its field.

Mike Michalowicz

The Pumpkin Plan

When you learn how to start a business, you’ll want to have a specific audience you want to reach, engage, and interact with. These users are going to be the same people who will read your content, buy your products, and help grow your business.Start by identifying:<ul><li>Their demographics (age, location, gender, etc.)</li><li>How they spend their time online and where do they reside (social media, blogs, sites etc.)</li><li>What problems or concerns are they currently trying to solve</li><li>What value to they expect from you</li><li>What are some points of objection your audience might have to working with you.</li></ul>

Build Your Target Audience

No matter how big or small your business is, there is virtually no company that has zero competition. The first step here is to find out who it is you are competing with exactly. Perform a Google search on your topic/niche and see who the main players in your industry are.Are there any emerging companies that might pose a threat now or in the future? How many notable competitors do you have, that are going after the same exact audience?

Run a Competitive Analysis

You already know what keywords your competition is using to rank on Google, and you already have your persona set. By combining these two elements you can start to brainstorm potential long tail keywords and phrases you will need to start adding to your website and blog posts to make them “findable.”A winnable keywords is defined as a word or phrase that has:<ul><li>Over 100 monthly searches</li><li>Has a difficulty score of below 55%</li><li>Is relevant in both context and intent with your audience’s pains, needs, or interests.</li></ul>

Find “Winnable” Keywords

<ul><li>Start off by thinking of a good domain name. Ideally, this should include a winnable keyword IF possible. If it’s not possible, don’t worry too much, just make sure you’re using something that represents your brand and is easy to remember,</li><li>Next it’s time to find a hosting platform. Without this your site has nowhere to sit, and thus won’t exist!</li><li>Now, at long last, it’s to build your website. You can go with WordPress. Its free, beginner-friendly, and has integrations with the most popular tools and hosting services.</li></ul>

Build Your Website

Among the plethora of tools that provide in depth, high value insight for free, Google Analytics (GA) reigns supreme.Despite its many benefits and advantages, GA does have one pretty big “flaw” especially for beginners; it can be overwhelming.

Set Up Google Analytics (GA)

<ul><li>Start by brainstorming a few topics around the keywords you found. </li><li>Once you’re done brainstorming, pick the titles/topics you like the most and start creating a content calendar. This will help you stay on track and guide you for the next months in terms of planning and creating.</li><li>Once your calendar is complete begin creating. Ideally, you want to have a few posts ready for your audience to read but we know time is a really valuable commodity.</li></ul>

Create Content

In order to fully optimize your pages you will need to place these keywords in:<ol><li>Your titles</li><li>Your URL</li><li>The headers throughout your page/post</li><li>Image alt tags (search engine crawlers cant see images, so you will need to add a title to each one of you images to help crawlers understand what the image is about)</li><li>The body of your page/post (make sure they fit in naturally throughout the text)</li><li>Anchor text in internal links to other relevant pages or posts on your site</li><li>Your meta tags — This is the abstract or summary, of the page and is often your first chance to catch your audience’s attention.</li></ol>

Optimize for On-page SEO

Contrary to on-page SEO, off-page SEO has to do with optimization elements that reside externally (not on your pages.) The most common element here is link building (or backlinking.) This is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own site, pages, or blog. The more links from high ranking websites, the better your site will look in the eyes of Google.The easiest way to begin is to just create high quality content. The more researched, valuable, and quality driven your posts are, the greater the chance of them being linked back to by other websites.

Optimize for Off-page SEO

Start by answering the following questions:<ul><li>On which social media platform does my target audience spend most of their time? (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.)</li><li>How many hours a day do they spend on social media?</li><li>What kind of posts to they like to see (plain images, links, videos etc.)</li><li>What would make them engage with my post (like, share, comment.)</li><li>What time of day do they frequent the platform?</li><li>How many times a day to they visit the platform?</li></ul>So now that you have the answers to these questions you are ready to start creating social profiles.

Social Media Marketing

Starting a business isn’t easy, and learning how to start a business is even harder. If it was easy, then everyone would be doing it! The first 30 days of your new business are like a new President’s…

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

startup

Startups

How to Start a Business in 30 Days: A Complete Guide

it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy

Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup, you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard. And the success of a startup is almost always a function of its founders.

Pick good cofounders

The reason to launch fast is not so much that it's critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven't really started working on it till you've launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. Till you know that you're wasting your time. So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users.

Launch fast.

This is the second half of launching fast. Launch fast and iterate. It's a big mistake to treat a startup as if it were merely a matter of implementing some brilliant initial idea. As in an essay, most of the ideas appear in the implementation.

Let your idea evolve.

You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives. The second dimension is the one you have the most control over. And indeed, the growth in the first will be driven by how well you do in the second. As in science, the hard part is not answering questions but asking them: the hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that.

Understand your users.

Ideally, you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can't expect to hit that right away. Initially, you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. If you think you're 85% of the way to a great product, how do you know it's not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it's easy to know how many users you have.

Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.

Customers are used to being maltreated. Most of the companies they deal with are quasi-monopolies that get away with atrocious customer service. Your own ideas about what's possible have been unconsciously lowered by such experiences. Try making your customer service not merely good, but <a href="http://www.diaryofawebsite.com/blog/2008/07/wufoo-and-the-art-of-customer-service/">surprisingly good</a>. Go out of your way to make people happy. They'll be overwhelmed; you'll see.

Offer surprisingly good customer service.

Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it.

If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and everyday plot the number of users. You'll be delighted when it goes up and disappointed when it goes down. Pretty soon you'll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you'll start to do more of that. Corollary: be careful what you measure.

You make what you measure.

I can't emphasize enough how important it is for a startup to be cheap. Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money. So being cheap is (almost) interchangeable with iterating rapidly. But it's more than that. A culture of cheapness keeps companies young in something like the way exercise keeps people young.

Spend little.

"Ramen profitable" means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. It's not rapid prototyping for business models (though it can be), but more a way of hacking the investment process. Once you cross over into ramen profitable, it completely changes your relationship with investors. It's also great for morale.

Get ramen profitable.

Nothing kills startups like distractions. The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, consulting, profitable side-projects. The startup may have more long-term potential, but you'll always interrupt working on it to answer calls from people paying you now. Paradoxically, <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html">fundraising</a> is this type of distraction, so try to minimize that too.

Avoid distractions.

Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus. Either the company is run by stupid people (which can't be fixed with advice) or the people are smart but got demoralized. Starting a startup is a huge moral weight. Understand this and make a conscious effort not to be ground down by it, just as you'd be careful to bend at the knees when picking up a heavy box.

Don't get demoralized.

Even if you get demoralized, <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html">don't give up</a>. You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up. This isn't true in all fields. There are a lot of people who couldn't become good mathematicians no matter how long they persisted. But startups aren't like that. Sheer effort is usually enough, so long as you keep morphing your idea.

Don't give up.

One of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. We probably had 20 deals of various types fall through. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated. It's very dangerous to morale to start to depend on deals closing, not just because they so often don't, but because it makes them less likely to.

Deals fall through.

Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself which I'd choose if I could only keep one.Understand your users. That's the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have the most control over is how much you improve users' lives; the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's a mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that. Understanding your users is part of half the principles in this list. That's the reason to launch early, to understand your users.

What if I have to choose one?


Startups in 13 Sentences

You’ve been running your business for a while and from your repeated activities, you can predict what to expect and what needs to be done based on the outcome at every stage. What you’re doing here is writing down every step you take to achieve results for the different business activities including the possible outcomes and the actions to take based on each outcome.

Take Your Experiences Into Account 

The best business processes are centered around creating unforgettable experiences for users (customer, supplier or employee). Looking at your business processes from the user’s perspective helps you understand the user journey in order to create a flow that easily influences their decision and steers them towards the desired goal.

Create an experience

When you lay down the processes, run a test. Have a few people go through the process and observe them. Have them give you their unbiased feedback and make the necessary adjustments. Their feedback will help you better understand your clients needs and provide for them during the process.

Beta Test For Feedback 

After running your the process for a few weeks, step back; critically look at the progress you’ve made. Consumer behaviour changes with time so you will need to keep instep with the trends. Don’t hesitate to make changes to include user trends. Example: You realise over a few months consistently that every time your clients place an order for a book, they order some stationery to go with it. In your sales process, you can include a request for clients to purchase stationery in addition to their book orders at a price they can’t resist. This gives value to the client and also boosts your sales.

Allow for innovation and iteration 

To further reduce the time spent on each process, invest in automation. Like Codewit(a code school), you can set up a system for responding to student applications in real time. Transitioning from manually sending emails to every new student who registers for their courses has reduced the amount of time spent during the onboarding process and increased their conversion rates. Build a process for your major business activities and automate them to give you more time to focus on running your business.

Automate the process 

Get your hands dirty. Put in the work to build the process with these tips

 Tips to help you build a realistic business process today

Investors don’t seem to care so much about a company’s assets or how much money it makes in the present, they're most interested in seeing growth. But after the core business matures, growth usually plateaus. This is the time to work on new growth opportunities, but trying new things is risky. Innovation doesn’t always make growth happen fast enough for investors, even when money is thrown at the effort.

The Growth Imperative

<ul><li>New-market disruption: this is where disruptive products compete with non-consumption. They create new markets and reach people who previously weren’t consumers. As their performance improves, they run into some existing markets to disrupt. </li><li>Low-end disruption: this doesn't create new markets, it just takes over the bottoms of established markets. Traditional competitors usually don't focus on defending the low end of the market (they have the eyes on higher market levels) and they don’t recognize the disrupters as a threat until it’s too late.</li></ul>

The Two Types of Disruptive Innovation

“Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you’re good at."__

Customers "hire" products to do specific "jobs". Customers - people and companies - have "jobs" that arise regularly and need to get done. When customers become aware of a job that they need to get done in their lives, they look around for a product or service that they can "hire" to get the job done.Effectively, conveniently, inexpensively as possible.

What Products Customers Want to Buy

Marketers put a lot of emphasis on market segments, dicing up the populace and finding the percentage that will need or want the product. But if you get the process wrong, you can end up without any actual customers. To accurately segment the market, don’t focus so much on the attributes of people and things. Instead, look at the circumstances people are in when they make a purchase decision. There are many tasks that people do routinely; people are always looking for things that will do those jobs or help them do those jobs.

Understanding Your Market

Instead of asking what their company does best today, managers should ask, "What do we need to master today, and what will we need to master in the future, in order to excel on the trajectory of improvement that customers will define as important?"

Getting the Scope of the Business Right

Three classes or sets of factors that define what an organization can and can not accomplish:<ul><li>Resources: they include tangible things like people, equipment, and real estate, but things like brands, information, and reputation are also valuable resources.</li><li>Processes: they turn resources into value and include patterns of interaction, coordination, and communication, as well as the way things are developed, manufactured, and marketed.</li><li>Values: employees at all levels, even those at the bottom of the hierarchy, make decisions. Under the framework, values are standards that determine how employees prioritize these decisions.</li></ul>

The “RPV” Framework

DELIBEDeliberate RATE planning (traditional / for existing-sustaining):
<ul>
<li>make assumptions about the future</li>
<li>make a strategy based on those assumptions & build financial projections based on that strategy</li>
<li>make decisions to invest based on those financial projections</li>
<li>implement the strategy in order to achieve projected financial results</li>
</ul>
Discovery-Driven Planning: (for disruptions):
<ul>
<li>make the targeted financial projections</li>
<li>what assumptions must prove true in order for these projections to materialize?</li>
<li>implement a plan to learn - to test whether the critical assumptions are reasonable</li>
<li>invest to implement the strategy.</li>
</ul>

Deliberate Planning vs Discovery-Driven Planning

An innovation classic. From Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos, Clay Christensen’s work continues to underpin today’s most innovative leaders and organizations. A seminal work on disruption—for everyone confronting the growth paradox. For readers of the bestselling The Innovator’s Dilemma—and beyond—this definitive work will help anyone trying to transform their business right now. In The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor expand on the idea of disruption, explaining how companies can and should become disruptors themselves. This classic work shows just how timely and relevant these ideas continue to be in today’s hyper-accelerated business environment. Christensen and Raynor give advice on the business decisions crucial to achieving truly disruptive growth and propose guidelines for developing your own disruptive growth engine. The authors identify the forces that cause managers to make bad decisions as they package and shape new ideas—and offer new frameworks to help create the right conditions, at the right time, for a disruption to succeed. This is a must-read for all senior managers and business leaders responsible for innovation and growth, as well as members of their teams. Based on in-depth research and theories tested in hundreds of companies across many industries, The Innovator’s Solution is a necessary addition to any innovation library—and an essential read for entrepreneurs and business builders worldwide.

creativity

Creativity

An innovation classic. From Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos, Clay Christensen’s work continues to underpin today’s most innovative leaders and organizations. A seminal work on disruption—for everyone confronting the growth paradox. For readers of the bestselling The Innovator’s Dilemma—and beyond—this definitive work will help anyone trying to transform their business right now. In The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor expand on the idea of disruption, explaining how companies can and should become disruptors themselves. This classic work shows just how timely and relevant these ideas continue to be in today’s hyper-accelerated business environment. Christensen and Raynor give advice on the business decisions crucial to achieving truly disruptive growth and propose guidelines for developing your own disruptive growth engine. The authors identify the forces that cause managers to make bad decisions as they package and shape new ideas—and offer new frameworks to help create the right conditions, at the right time, for a disruption to succeed. This is a must-read for all senior managers and business leaders responsible for innovation and growth, as well as members of their teams. Based on in-depth research and theories tested in hundreds of companies across many industries, The Innovator’s Solution is a necessary addition to any innovation library—and an essential read for entrepreneurs and business builders worldwide.

Clayton Christensen

Michael Raynor

The Innovator's Solution

In a world where customer experience has become a trending topic, a lot of brands are still behind in the excellence they ought to deliver through their services.And here is that reminder - it is no longer just about a great product anymore. One of the ways to deliver exceptional services is to delight a customer, by surprising them with an unexpected gesture.In my recent experience with Solopress, they sent me a replacement roll-up banner costing £50, due to a very minor and barely noticeable defect on my original order.

Customer Delight Makes A Huge Difference

Taking a step back to the moment I realised there was a minor dent on the banner, I deliberated ringing the company to complain.Finally I did, with a simple expectation of getting an apology or something. And to be honest, that would have been fine by me.One thing I really appreciated was the ease of contacting the company and reporting my complaint. I dialled the number on the website, someone picked up and they were ready to listen to address my complaint. Within 2 minutes, the friendly lady had ordered a replacement order on my behalf.How easy can your customers reach you? Think about it!

Prioritise Customer Complaints, Avoid Long Processes

From a sales numbers perspective, one could argue that sending a replacement order to me is a business loss. That may be true but not entirely.When the replacement order was communicated to me, I was informed it would be delivered next day. This is a premium the brand would have to bear and I could see they were doing all they could to deliver excellence.Also, I was told to keep the original order and keep it as a spare. Wow! 2 roll-up banners for the price of 1. Of course I was excited.Clearly the company valued their customer over the cost of the item. Is this the same in your business?

A Customer Is Worth More Than A Single Sale

No surprises, I am a valuable customer of the brand, and they are called Solopress. I have since placed an additional order, shared my experience with other potential customers and recommended their services to others too.All these have been possible because of the drive for excellence and customer satisfaction from the company, and I am thankful to have experienced this as a customer.

The Customer You Serve Excellently Has A Reason To Stay

I recently ordered a roll-up banner for an exhibition show and it arrived with a very slight dent on the fabric.  I rang the company and was very surprised what I learnt from the experience.  Something for all businesses to learn.

How to WOW customers with Excellence

“People are more productive working at home than people would have expected. Some people thought that everything was just going to fall apart, and it hasn’t. And a lot of people are actually saying that they’re more productive now.”

Many companies shy away from the idea of "remote work" because they thought it will cause unproductivity and worst DISHONESTY. But <a class="idea-content-link" href="https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2021/article/are-we-really-more-productive-working-home">recent data collected shows</a> that nearly six out of 10 workers reported being more productive than they expected throughout the pandemic. On average, respondents’ productivity at home was 7% higher than they expected, and 40% of workers reported they were more productive at home during the pandemic than they had been when in the office. So, we can conclude that Remote Work is Inevitable.

Remote Work is a Unicorn (Before the Pandemic)

Managers are having a hard time creating SOP's for the "new normal" especially with all the doubts and fears of employees not being "controlled" or "regulated". Moving from the traditional workforce to remote is a crucial step to break all the old ways and move on to something that will surely revolutionize the way we view work. From the hiring process, onboarding, and training, the companies management needs to implement systems that will help the transition more bearable for both parties.

The Transition Dilemma

If things aren't clear at the beginning of a relationship, it will not end well, don't you agree? Being clear on what is allowed and not in a remote work setup gives boundaries, it sets a roadmap on how to do "THE WORK".

Clear remote work policies

The new normal is knocking on your companies door, it is time to update policies that will not serve the remote work culture. Written Policies affixed with signatures (even if it's electronically) will seal the agreement for both the employee and employer, updating it is a must.

Update hiring policies

This is one of the hardest things to master, in a world full of opportunities to do bad things, an employee can't blame the company. But the latter must give let go of the ego and start trusting, coz trust begets trust.

Focus on building trust: Trust and let go

Technology is always available whenever humanity needs it. This pandemic revolutionized the way we work, communicate and interact. We need to use all the available resources to fully transition into a remote work setup.  Check this <a class="idea-content-link" href="https://trio.dev/blog/tools-remote-work">article</a> to learn more.

Prepare the right tools: establish a remote work infrastructure

Here are the 10 tips businesses need to embrace certain policies to ensure a smooth transition to becoming a fully remote work enabled team.

10 Tips for Transitioning to a Fully Remote Work Enabled Team - My Cloud Crew

Find 100+ Business Facts, Ideas & Insights - Curated from inspiring sources like Books, Podcasts & Articles - Genuine Insights from like-minded Users like You!

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Read like a Pro.

Building For Everyone: Expand Your Market With Design Practices From Google's Product Inclusion Team

Efficiency vs. Productivity

The Pumpkin Plan

How to Start a Business in 30 Days: A Complete Guide

Startups in 13 Sentences

Tips to help you build a realistic business process today

The Innovator's Solution

How to WOW customers with Excellence

10 Tips for Transitioning to a Fully Remote Work Enabled Team - My Cloud Crew

Clearly Defining Your Business Activities

It's time to Read like a Pro.

It's time to
Read like a Pro.