Donald Mitchell's Articles

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Stick Your Neck Out to Do an "Impossible Task," and You'll Do What It Takes to Succeed Many efforts fail because there isn't enough commitment. Make a large public commitment, and you will feel very motivated to take actions that are needed. Speakers: Think Through What Might Happen to Prepare Your Audience It's easy to get carried away with an exciting message. But that message can have more impact if you plan for what effects you want to achieve. Speakers: Ask People to Step Out in Faith to Achieve Something New If you don't know exactly what you need to do, tell everyone and ask for their help. How Do You Explain Something No One Has Ever Thought About Before? A new idea can be better explained through putting the information into a familiar, interesting context. One of the best ways to do this is with a demonstration. Watch Your Listeners to See If the Message Is Sinking In No matter how well prepared your speech or presentation is, unless the listeners understand and are interested you are in trouble. Be ready to respond by switching gears until you get the right response. Expect the Unexpected When You Learn to Meditate In this article, I describe how learning to meditate led me into unexpected learning. How Do You Focus on Excellence? This article explores a method for helping an audience appreciate the potential of developing more excellence. Learn to Build an Ideal, Secure Lifestyle Many people get caught up in business careers that make them unhappy. How can you live a great life and be successful in your business career? This article explains how you can learn to do both and includes questions to help you do so. Be Prepared to Succeed: Do Your Homework before Starting New Businesses and Jobs A little homework can make all the difference in starting new businesses or new jobs. This article describes the benefits of the right homework, and tells you what to do to prepare for success. Smoke Out and Eliminate Pesky Long-Term Problems Every organization is hobbled by problems that everyone knows about, but no one has solved. This article describes methods for finding and accomplishing lasting solutions. Peter Drucker Points Out a Task This article shows how having an expert coach can make tremendous differences in developing an entrepreneurial business. If You Think You Know How to Apply the Business Theory, Check with an Expert Anyway Graduates leave school filled with powerful-sounding theories; theories that are often difficult to apply. When first working on applying those theories, check with an expert before finalizing your decision. To Start a Successful Consulting Firm, Learn from Your Clients Clients will teach you what you need to know about what services they need and how they want those services provided. But you have to be a sincere student of your current and potential clients to gain the right learning. Stretch Beyond What You Can Hope to Succed at to Learn the Most Mentors are in a better position to advise you on what challenges to take than you are. Listen and act! Check Out the Top First to See How to Get There A first job is critical to completing your education. Try to get one where you can meet the top people in your field. You'll see what they are missing and can plan a better career path as a result. You Never Know What You Can Do Until You Improvise If you are willing to improvise, you'll find paths to success that are invisible to all. Learn and Love Your Work Do you love your work? If you don't, you should consider how gaining more skill and exploring other interests can help you to get a job that you would love. Lose the Blindfold that Keeps You from Seeing Your Full Potential Even when no way out seems to be available, you can find a way. If you can't see it, feel your way to a solution. Be Challenged by the Best to Be the Best: Peter Drucker Asks a Question and Makes an Observation Do you want to surpass your wildest dreams? Take your biggest dream to the best thinker you can find and see what happens. Boldly Take Your Business Where No One Has Gone Before Aim to go beyond copying what others do to gain global breakthroughs for your business. But the right kind of copying can help get you where you want to go. A Stitch in Time Saves Eighty-One This article explores the perspective necessary to create social, personal, and business breakthroughs. Speed Up: Going from Concept to Widespread Application Often Takes Four Centuries This article looks at the reasons for slow adoption of breakthrough concepts. Apply Lessons from the Past to Build a Brighter Future for All How can we use history to teach us to avoid mistakes and seize opportunities for our lives today? Online Education Provides a Career Gangplank for a Retiring Naval Officer Do you plan to stay aboard ship for your whole career? If you want to change into a civilian career, you can study while at sea to prepare for new leadership challenges. Learn from the School of Hard Knocks to Gain Business Career Success The article looks at the hard-won lessons of the school of hard knocks for building a successful business career. Design, Propose, and Describe Potential Business Models for Stakeholder Evaluation and Improvement Take stakeholders into account in creating superior business models and you'll make more improvements that will work better. Business Model Innovation--Share Benefits Widely to Provide More for Each Stakeholder Benefits are expandable, depending on who benefits and how much they can gain. Business model innovation needs to take this into account. Instill a Spirit of Teamwork and Cooperation for Mutual Advantage Stakeholders of an organization can accomplish more by cooperating than by standing at arms-length. This article explores the advantages of such cooperation. Insist on the Best for Your Career Carefully plan your career, set high goals, and then pick the education to give you a huge head start. Master Taking the Affordable Risks to Reduce or Eliminate the Big Risks Business model innovation requires careful examination and selection risks. This article explains more about how to do this. Implement a Valuable Business Model This article looks at how to go from having ideas for a new business model into implementing one successfully. Improve Your Business Model Concepts While Testing Specific Changes Long delays can be avoided when business model innovation implementation is investigated while changes are being tested. Four Questions You Should Always Ask Before Putting in Cost Reductions Most cost reductions cause more harm than good. Check your cost reductions with these questions before putting the cost cuts in place and you'll have much more success. How to Select Among Promising Cost-Reduction Tests If you are lucky and imaginative, you should have more cost-reduction tests to run than you have time and resources to do so. This article looks at how to pick just the most promising tests. Find Problems with Cost Reductions and Then Make Improvements Most cost reduction proposals are flawed. But those flaws can help you locate appropriate cost reductions to test. This article shows you how to spot more flaws and make better use of what you learn. When One Career Door Closes, Another Career Door Opens This career-building article looks at how more learning expands personal development, allows people with little business background to gain senior positions, and permits entrepreneurial choices at almost any age. Set and Achieve High Goals: Launch Your Career onto a Higher Trajectory by Going Beyond an MBA This article describes the importance of setting the right career goals. Choose Cost-Reduction Tests That Fit Your Business Model Opportunities A 300-pound person cannot wear clothes designed for 120-pound person. Cost reduction tests also need to be tailored to fit the circumstances. Assume the New Cost-Cutting Ideas Will Hurt Customers and Raise Costs Business leaders need to be more skeptical of cost-reduction ideas . . . before testing them out. Keep the Flies Out of the New Business Model's Soup This article contains detailed directions for avoiding harmful cost cuts. If You Need to Get Something Done on Time, Ask a Busy Person to Help You This article explains the six keys to success for accomplishing a great deal more than others do. Acquisitions: Consider the Potential of Other Operations When Included in Your Company's Business Acquisitions can be very successful when your organization can make the other operation much more effective. Employ Alternative Technologies That Offer Cost Advantages for the Entire Business System To profit the most go beyond reducing your costs through technology . . . to lowering costs from suppliers through to customers' customers. Rather Than Get It Wholesale, Access What You Need for Close to Free Don't pay anything if you don't have to. Reduce Costs for All Stakeholders and Yourself Reducing stakeholder costs creates faster and more profitable growth. Look to Reduce Customers' Costs as Well as Your Own Many cost reductions simply burden customers with more costs and drive customers away. This article looks at using cost reductions to attract more customers. Look for Total Company Cost Reductions Related to a Customer A focus on total company cost reductions helps avoid cutting costs that are offset by cost increases in unexpected places. How Would Testing Delays Help or Hurt Your Ability to Check Different Price Structures? Pick the wrong time to test a new price, and you'll get back bad information. Here are some ways to avoid making that mistake. How Do Your Price Tests Potentially Impact Your Customers' Relationships with Their Customers? Price tests can be a mistake when they create friction between customers and their customers. Here are some things to consider to avoid doing that. What If You Knew You Could Only Succeed? You can accomplish more than you think you can by working on gaining more confidence, knowledge, and experience. Evaluate How Well Competitors Can Negate the Advantages of Your Proposed Pricing Structures Many price tests are ruined by unanticipated competitive reaction. Assume the worst before you approve such a test. Analyze Your Price Structure Proposals Think through what could go wrong and you'll avoid many pricing mistakes. Price Proposals: Select the Best Ideas to Pursue Everyone has an idea for how to improve pricing, but most of those ideas aren't even worth testing. How can you avoid the worst of the wrong ones? Take a Close Look: Then Work to Change Wrong Views and Actions You can change the world. A good place to begin is by questioning the "official" views and getting your hands dirty to determine what the real causes of problems are. Tough Love Helps a Financial Executive Meet His Career Goals Many organizations don't offer mentoring bosses. When that's the case, you may want to rely on taking courses from professors who have been senior executives in major companies to get the mentoring you need for a fast-track career. Encourage Price Test Proposals Get more good price-improving ideas by involving people who aren't normally expected to think about pricing. Use Price to Attract More Attention for New Business Models Low prices get attention better than claims of better offerings. How Not to Write a Business Book A lot of "experts" tell you easy ways to write books. Here are reasons why some of that advice doesn't work. Keep People Up-to-Date to Gain the Most Help from Stakeholders A lot of people feel discouraged by the work involved in sharing what they are working on. What if you have nothing to report? Make Progress by Learning from the Most Succcessful Both by studying the most successful and partnering with experts, you can make a lot more performance improvements whether you are writing about management practices or applying them. Add More Communication Arrows to Your Quiver by Writing Books Everyone learns differently. To gain the most attention and understanding you need to provide a variety of story-telling-based ways to explain what you are doing through books. This article explains how to get started. Thinking about Marketing Stickiness How do you make people be interested in and focused in on a new concept that isn't yet proven? This article uses a case history to describe how this can be accomplished. Turning a Breakthrough Concept into a Web Site How can you take something that doesn't exist yet, a way to make improvements 20 times faster, and deliver an interesting, helpful Web site? This article uses a case history to describe one possible path. A Bullied Child, Abandoned at Birth, Becomes a Global Leader in Dental Innovation and Education This article explains a four-step process that can be used to go from where you are to much more business success. Lessons for Starting a Breakthrough Project Even if you have no idea what to do first when you start a breakthrough project, get busy. As you try things, you'll learn lessons that can make your breakthroughs come sooner. Be More Successful in Testing Value-Enhancing Business Model Innovations You can improve the odds of developing good value-oriented business model innovations by carefully thinking through the questions in this article. How to Handle Having Too Many Successful Business Model Innovations to Implement After experience with defining business model innovations and adding lots more tests, you'll reach a point where you have more successes than you can handle. What do you do? Add Profitable Business Model Innovation When You Don't Have Many Successes with Innovation Tests Most organizations don't have many proven ideas for business model innovation to implement. This article presents answers for that situation. Find Simple, Cheap, and Easy Tests That Excite Your Organization to Locate Better Business Models Many good sounding business model concepts flop in market tests. Make these tests easy-to-do, and lots of innovation mistakes will be avoided. Diagnose What's Missing from Your Business Model to Triple Profits Ask new questions about your business model, and you'll find opportunities for new ways to improve. Select the Best Opportunities for Establishing a Vastly More Profitable Business Model Most organizations have far more opportunities to create improved business models than they can implement. How should you choose a new model? Six Degrees of Opportunity: Connecting Knowledge in All Directions This article describes how re-forming your business model can allow your take knowledge and provide and receive more value from it. Looking Backward Illuminates How to Make Improvements in the Present and Future Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This article explains how social improvements can be made much more rapidly. For the Most Profitable Business Model, Repeat What You Have Done, But Differently Take another look at your thinking about business model innovation, and you'll find new opportunities you missed the last time. Before Establishing Your Business Model, Anticipate the Potential Effects of What You Can't Control Don't forecast, but do think about the future so that you will have a business model that will do well . . . regardless of what comes next. Boost Your Business Model by Borrowing New Expertise You Have Not Thought of Using Before This article looks at how adding new competence from the outside can speed and strengthen your business model innovation to add profitable growth. Jack, Be Nimble! -- What Have You Learned Today? Who Have You Helped Today? For the best career, you need to look past the rules that others suggest you follow or impose on you . . . and be nimble in your thinking. This article explores a case history of someone who has designed a unique career path in the hospitality industry. Building a Foundation for an Enhanced Artistic Vision from a Distance This article explains how artists can use online learning to inexpensively build a new perspective for their artistic visions and increase their professional choices. Make the Rules! -- Don't Just Do What Everyone Else Does Success requires studying what works for the most extraordinary performers. How can you learn from and improve on what the best do? Fulfill Your Potential To Fly Higher in Your Career This article explores how to take ambitious career dreams and turn those dreams into reality. Open Your Horizons to the Many Forms of Value Look for value-enhancing opportunities that most competitors ignore. Value: Locate Ideas to Create More Sales from Improved Value at the Current Price If you want to improve the profitability of your business model the most, you need to add value without increasing price. If Your Glasses Are the Wrong Prescription, You Won't See Opportunities in Front of You CEOs are focusing on the wrong things now. They need to shift to continuing business model innovation. Lack of Focus Among Large Company CEOs Will Drive Accelerating Business Model Innovation Few are focused on business model innovation. This means an unusually good opportunity for those who do. Turn Business Model Leadership into Industry Leadership Can a small industry player use a new business model to become the industry leader? You bet. This article discusses how this might be done in gold mining. Create a Gold Mine of Improved Business Models What's better than owning a gold mine? Having a better business model for extracting gold. This article explores how business model innovation has revolutionized the gold mining industry. Respond to Rapid Increases in Business Model Innovation This article contains a forecast of future trends in business models that you need to be prepared to implement. Live Like 2408 In 2008 II This article examines your perceptions of how your life will be in the future. What are you afraid of? Live like 2408 in 2008 IV This article looks forward to see what the opportunity is to improve your life with normal progress. Get Ready for Rough Competition from New Business Models The competitive landscape is shifting to emphasize business model innovation. The pace of this shift is accelerating. Are you ready? Upgrade to a New Business Model Rather Than Try to Get More Out of Your Existing Business Model This article asks what you as a leader and entrepreneur should focus on: better business models or increasing the performance of your existing business models. How Should You Evaluate Your Current Business Model? Most people would like a better business model, but are unaware of how to see where the current business model can be strengthened. This article addresses that need. High-Payoff Business Model Innovations: A Lemonade Stand Example Simply copying what everyone else does won't deliver an improved business model. This article shows how focusing on high-payoff innovation choices can help provide more profit and growth. Understand the Seven Dimensions of a Business Model Through an Example A child's lemonade stand provides an example of what a business model is. The Seven Dimensions of a a Business Model "Experts" are fond of telling entrepreneurs to have an advantaged business model, but seldom define what a business model is. This article provides a clear definition that can be used to start thinking about how to create an advantaged business model Strive for an Ideal Business Model An ideal business model brings exponentially greater rewards than a good business model does. This article describes the ideal approach. Live like 2408 in 2008 V This article looks at how concentrating faster improvements could increase the quality of your life. Live like 2408 in 2008 III What are your hopes for the future? This article looks at their feasibility in light of risks that concern many people. What Is a Good Business Model? Leaders can use this article to test the quality of their business model. A Hands-On Approach to Solving Problems Helps a Distance Learner Spring into Engineering Management Many people who do technical work would like to become managers of such technical work. This article looks at how one person made the shift.
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