The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 10 Jun 2011 06:51 PM PDT Return on Customer: Creating maximum value from your scarcest resource Authors: Don Peppers and Martha Rogers Publisher: Marshall Cavendish SHOULD you invest in customer acquisition, in product development, opening new stores, plant efficiency or cost reduction? The list seems endless. While you may believe that a particular decision creates shareholder value, there is no financial metric currently available to tell you how much shareholder value you have actually created, or even whether you created any at all. This book focuses on how firms create value, not just by driving current profits, but by preserving and increasing customer lifetime value. The authors take readers beyond marketing, sales and service. Dice Have No Memory: Big bets and bad economics from Paris to the Pampas Author: Bill Bonner Publisher: John Wiley & Sons AUTHOR Bill Bonner writes that economies around the world are suffering from the biggest multi trillion dollar bets ever wagered on big governments and miraculous financial interventions in pretend "free markets." He writes on the true health and well-being of the US and offers tips for investors, elegies for economists. He also guides readers to what he calls "modern finance". At the same time, he says he does not have any magic formulas, just a little practical guide book that will help readers to think clearly and act wisely as you wade through this mess. The Globalization of Chinese Companies: Strategies for conquering international markets Authors: Arthur Yeung, Waldemar Pfoertsch, Katerine Xin and SengJun Liu Publisher: John Wiley & Sons LEADING professors from China-Europe International Business School (CEIBS) address the issue of organisational capabilities required to establish themselves. They use case studies from Chinese companies like TCL, BenQ, China International Marine Containers Group, Trend Micro and Galanz. They also draw on the experiences of Lenova, Huawei, Haier as well as international names like Sony, Samsung and Proctor & Gamble. A useful read for anyone interested to know more about global Chinese companies and how they compare with the more established international names. Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
| Posted: 10 Jun 2011 06:51 PM PDT Author, Luke Williams tells bussinesses what they need to do and how to do it to remain at the top of their game. Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business Author: Luke Williams Hardcover: 208 pages Publisher: FT Press 1st edition (December 18, 2010) You see things as they are and ask, "Why?" I dream things as they never were and ask, "Why not?" — George Bernard Shaw (Quoted by Robert F. Kennedy) MANY business books tell us that we need to "disrupt" our businesses to remain competitive. However, almost no books describe how you can do this in a clear, concise and methodical manner. Luke Williams' book Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business slides into this gap to provide the perfect prescription. In 200 odd succinct pages, Williams shows us how to create and transform disruptive ideas into breakthrough business strategies. This book reflects Williams' experience as creative director of Frog Design, one of the world's leading innovation firms. He argues that by steadfastly clinging on to the increasingly irrelevant "differentiate or die" mantra, businesses have made it extremely difficult for their customers to tell the difference between "deep, meaningful change and shallow, superficial novelty." We now have an excess of marketplace offerings all claiming to be "different" but are fairly similar i.e. that "look like the last one with a few bells and whistles added." Williams notes that many companies try to gain a competitive edge by making only incremental changes to their existing products and services. They fear that the new will cannibalise the old. Instead of stimulating innovation, they end up stifling it and will go down "a path that gets narrower and narrower" until the end point where their customers forsake them for a new offering nobody saw coming. They will only take disruptive risks when backed into a corner with no other choice. More than ever, businesses need to constantly be making bold moves, even at their performance peak. Williams recommends that the real mantra today should be "differentiate all you want, but figure out a way to be the only one who does what you do, or die". A bit of a mouthful, but we get the point. Finding a way to be "the only one that does what you do is a provocative goal" but involves significant changes to "the way you think…a way of thinking that surprises the market again and again with exciting, unexpected solutions… that turns consumer expectations upside down and takes an industry into its next generation." The disruptive thinking Williams promotes in his book is not about how to spot and react to disruptive changes in technology (the subject of many other books) but how to be the disruptive change. Williams asserts that disruptive thinking can be learned and applied not only by new start-ups and SMEs but just as effectively by large organisations and industry incumbents. The Internet and the colossal connectivity it provides have already reinvented many industries. However, we have "barely scratched the surface" as we are "still surrounded by countless products, services, and business models built on the logic of the past." The good news is that disruptive thinking is already being taught in schools. The bad news is that instead of being taught in MBA programmes, this new thinking is being taught in design schools. Both disciplines suffer as business schools teach analysis but not how to create convincing emotional connections, whilst design schools show how connections can be created but not how they can be commercially viable. In a simple five-stage process, Williams shows us how to fuse the fluid, intuitive and creative process of design with the analytical rigour that defines business. He teaches us how to craft a disruptive hypothesis (be wrong at the start, to be right at the end), discover our best disruptive opportunities by exploring the unexpected (defining opportunities and generating disruptive ideas), shape our disruptive solution (avoiding the resource-killer: "novelty for novelty's sake") and make a winning disruptive pitch (by underpreparing the obvious and overpreparing the unusual). It uses many great illustrations from different industries and discusses radical hypotheses that force people to challenge clichés. The book tells of how director Quentin Tarantino denies the cliché that "the-hero-is-not a-murderer" in his films and talks about how the magazine Monocle rejected the traditional subscription sale model; creating instead a subscription premium model where its annual subscription is 50% more than its newsstand price but allows exclusive access to premium content and events. Being insightful is a question of awareness; being mindful of cultural and social constructs that surround you and your customers. For example, the moment you decide you are going to buy a yellow MINI Cooper, you start seeing them all over town as your awareness has now been focused. Being truly insightful involves "immersing yourself into the world of your customers to try to see how things look from their viewpoint" Williams quotes a New Yorker article entitled "The Eureka Hunt" — a story of a firefighter named Wagner Dodge who survived an out-of-control fire in the Mann Gulch in Montana in 1949. Thirteen other smoke jumpers died in the fire, but Dodge was saved by a brilliant insight. Fleeing for his life, he suddenly stopped running and ignited the ground around him. He then lay down on the smoldering embers and inhaled the thin layer of oxygen clinging to the ground. The fire passed over him and, after several terrifying minutes, Dodge emerged from the ashes, virtually unscathed. Dodge had been a firefighter for many years and knew that fire needs three things to exist: fuel, air, and heat. By getting rid of the grass (i.e. fuel) around him, he took his chances with the fast moving fire and was able to save himself. This illustrates that insight and intuition is the "outcome of earlier intellectual experience." We should look beyond "pain points" i.e. problems that need fixing. More often than not, it is the "small, seemingly unbroken aspects of a situation that provide the richest opportunity areas for innovation." It can be in an area in which everyone suffers the same predicament and nothing has changed in a very long time or where profit performance is average and should be more successful than it currently is. We should address these subtle, small "tension points" i.e. things that are not big enough to be considered problems; little inconveniences that people have grown complacent about. Disrupt is the "business equivalent of a cookbook that provides you with the framework and motivation you need to discover and execute bold new (ideas) recipes." The book works wonderfully as a workbook that allows you to practise and sharpen your disruptive thinking skills. It provides the tools to help transform your disruptive ideas from compelling opportunities into truly commercial offerings. Buy this book. Shake up our status quo. Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
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