Friday, March 06, 2015

Facts behind Successful Business

"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please." - Mark Twain



  • Data is a strategy – and we need to start thinking about it as one. It should adhere to the same competitive standards as other business strategies. Data monopolists’ like Google ability to block competitors from entering the market is not markedly different from that of the oil monopolist Standard Oil or the technollogist monopolist Intel.

  • Bezos periodically leaves one seat open at a conference table and informs all attendees that they should consider that seat occupied by their customer, 'the most important person in the room.'" In his efforts to build such a customer-centric company, you might not be surprised to find that Bezos expects all employees to be able to interact with customers.

  • Your bio as a marketing tool for your business and for your career. If you speak, link to your booking page. If you offer an online course, link to that too. It would be a waste to have someone read your bio and not become a potential customer. Not more than two calls to action on your bio or it would be a hard sell. You also want to save the calls for the most important clicks.

  • Change the structure of the meeting from individuals reporting their own performance and successes to collaborative problem solving, where the leader or a member of the team brings a topic for group discussion. The importance of this exercise is that team members begin to see their peers as a rich source of advice — one that they might not have gone to before. This type of collaborative problem solving usually yields better decisions

  • What can a network do for you? It can keep you informed. Teach you new things. Make you more innovative. Give you a sounding board to flesh out your ideas. When it comes to stepping up to leadership, your network is a tool for identifying new strategic opportunities and attracting the best people to them. It protects you from being clueless about the political dynamics and offers you the best way to change your environment. Your network is also what puts you on the radar screen of people who control your next assignment. In a nutshell your network is your Net Worth.

      • Your exit strategy; while Coke stock price has only appreciated 2% annually since 1998, Buffett could care less. He continues to "hold" on to his 400 million shares of Coke for one reason...It generates $122 million dollars in dividend income for his firm each quarter. This was his "exit strategy" for this investment all along: Perpetual dividend income. His cost basis for those shares (bought between 1988 – 1994) is $1.29 billion dollars. which means he currently earns a 37.5% cash flow return on this investment, year after year.


      With these FACTs I hope to see YOU at the TOP