Business thinker must have a million 2×2 grids for classifying things. While chatting with my B-school advisor some years ago, I theorized that most business thinking has to get reduced to a 2×2 grid, because people can’t get their minds around anything bigger than what they can draw on a 2-dimensional piece of paper with
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Gather enough data and do enough analysis to make a good decision. Then decide. Then act. There are many famed quotes on the theme of “how much is enough”: Lore has it that someone once asked Abraham Lincoln, “How long should a man’s legs be?” and that he answered “Long enough to reach the ground.”
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“See what you can do with real data?” One of my clients’ other advisors said that to my client right after I’d presented some analysis of his marketspace. In the previous year, another marketing consultant had spent a lot of my client’s time (and money) on branding analysis. But he hadn’t taken the time to
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[Donald Trump] understood a famous axiom: If you owe the bank $1 million and can’t pay, you’re in trouble, but if you owe the bank $1 billion and can’t pay, the bank’s in trouble. The moment that captured his strategy perfectly came when Trump’s CFO received an $800,000 quarterly insurance bill for Trump’s yacht, Trump
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Hired to replace Robert Dynes in the aftermath of a management meltdown in which UC administrators flouted, circumvented and violated university policies governing pay and perks, the 63-year-old [Mark] Yudof knows his mission when he officially takes over next month.”I’ve really got to get the trains running on time (at UC). There are a lot
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The first purpose of a small business is to serve the entrepreneur who created it and who owns it. The business may have other purposes: to serve customers and even to serve the community. But before these, the business must serve the entrepreneur. How does a business serve its owner? Certainly, the business should make
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Once you have a picture of how you want your life to be, and you come to the realization that it’s more than just things to have and things to do, once you realize that what you and I really want is to have the room, the openness, to expand, to grow, to be more
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[what we first learned in the 80s is that...] Firms that earned superior levels of customer loyalty and retention also earned consistently higher profits–and they grew faster as well….[W]e learned that customer loyalty is inextricably linked to employee and investor loyalty and that major improvements in the one often require improvements in the other two.
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A common piece advice in retail: “Differentiate yourself. Then let the market know how you’re different.” That’s good advice, but here’s more: It’s easy to be different. It’s much harder to be distinctive. “Distinctive” means you’re different in a way that gets positive attention. Remember: it’s useless for a retailer to be different in a
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Back in March, my friend Barry Campbell and his wife started investing in their own White Trash and Minor Vices Portfolio. As Barry explained: Everyone says “invest in what you know.” I’m about to put my money where my big mouth is. Carrie and I invest, mostly in index funds and ETFs, every month through
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