With only hours to go before 2010, your planning is probably finished. Your strategizing is tucked away. Your dreams are sitting on your desk, waiting for you to show up on Monday morning. You’ve done everything you can do this year and now it’s coming to close.
And the champagne is flowing generously. 
Innovation comes in many forms. Sometimes it is developing something brand new and bringing it to market. Sometimes it is putting your unique twist on an existing product to make it more suitable for your target market. And sometimes innovation is simply trying something new in your business that you haven’t done before… even if it’s not an entirely new concept.
There are lots of innovation opportunities that we face everyday, but acting on them can scare people off. Entrepreneurs might wonder “What if I fail?” The answer to that question is: “Great!”
Running a small business is all about problems!
This blog post was on my list of “things to write about” for two weeks now, but I’ve been busy with other things. That’s okay, though, because it’s a perennial topic.
I was recently reading a blog in the New York Times (published October 15th) by a CEO of a NY-based company. She referenced that, in a previous blog (published October 7th), she had written about ways to bypass high-priced agencies and run your own PR. And in that blog, someone had shared with her a brilliant piece of wisdom which sounds like something I tell people every day: In essence, the commenter said “you’re already busy as a CEO; why do the PR yourself as well? Focus on your core competencies to build your business and leave PR to someone else.” Read her original October 7th blog, entitled “Which PR Firm Do You Use?” .
Click here to read more »
Great discussion today on #businesslunchclub (on Twitter; but see BusinessLunchClub.com for more details).
The conversation today centered around delegation, and specifically around something that @IAC_Heather calls “the 3 Strikes, You’re Out” rule. The conversation was primarily between @IAC_Heather, @askleo, and myself (@AaronHoos), with @Hazewalker chiming in towards the end.
You can read our entire conversation on BusinessLunchClub (If you’re not reading this on the day it’s posted, go to BusinessLunchClub.com/users/archive and select July 13 from the calendar).
“Take my wife, please” is probably one of the most famous one liners there are. I’m not a big fan of one liners; it’s just not my brand of comedy. And when it comes to project management, I’m not a big fan of one liners, either.
In project management we bring together numerous smaller pieces so that, by the end, we have a completed project – whether that’s a book or a product or an invention or a new business. There are many different kinds of project management tools and techniques out there and the one that is used most often is the “one liner”. Click here to read more »
In my last two blogs, I’ve talked about the conundrum of committedness. The first part of the conundrum is the need to continue generating new commitments, even if there are a lot of them currently. And the second part is that new commitments aren’t always predictable.
Here are some ways to manage that situation for your business: Click here to read more »
One of the constant themes I see in the consulting I do is business-growth. Whether I’m working on helping a business get off the ground, or whether I’m implementing a new product into a company’s sales cycle, or whether I’m helping turn an idea into a product, it’s all about strengthening and improving the business.
But one of the challenges that businesses of all sizes face is something I call ‘committedness’. And as a business works to strengthen itself, the ‘conundrum of committedness’ increases and can cause all kinds of problems. Click here to read more »
