Although the book is centred around product development advise, it can be very useful for non-product or service businesses too.  What I like is the completely irreverent way at looking at traditional ideas and values.  For example here are a few excerpts

 ’Lets retire the term Entrepreneur. It’s outdated and loaded with baggage. It smells like a members-only club’ 

‘Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.’

‘Unless you are a fortune teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too mayn factors that are out of your hands…’

And it goes on with a lot of such direct and no-nonsense advice.

This book struck a chord with me as a business person looking for simple direct advise for my everyday issues. I don’t have time for convulted theories and fancy acronyms and this book does not give any. Its simple its direct and it hates ‘asap’ i.e. jargon.

A must read in the same league as ‘Good to great’, ‘E-myth revisited’  and ’4 hour work week’.

Go get it!

Ron

Amazon launches ‘Pickup’ services in India, starting with Mumbai & Delhi

Why One Executive Quit Business Travel Cold Turkey by Dan McGinn – HBR.org

Jason Calacanis: Five rules I learned from 7 years of coaching Launch Festival & TechCrunch50 by Jason Calacanis – LinkedIn Influencers

One of the Best Business Model Innovation Stories We’ve Ever Seen by Ilan Mochari

Erik Qualman: 10 Lessons I learned from Steve Jobs on Life & Leadership

What Shake Shack Knows About Growth that McDonald’s Has Forgotten by Denise Lee Yohn

Happy reading!!

Ron

The basic premise of the question is incorrect. Its not a matter of choosing one over the other.

When someone tries to make a choice between print and digital their basic premise is incorrect. The incorrect premise is ‘Which is better?’. Of course there is no right answer. If you had to answer this question, gun to head, the answer would be – it depends.

Factors that affect choice between digital and print

• Age / Seniority of target audience – Youth, Working professionals, CEOs etc.
• Social profile of target audience – Students, working professionals, middle management, CEOs etc.
• Type of industry – IT smart industry or IT dumb industry; Corporations or small vendors.
• Your budget – Print can be cheaper on narrow targets but very expensive on broad campaigns and Digital vice versa.

And there are many other minor and major factors which your agency should brief you on.

Ad Hoc approach will not work. A planned campaign is always the best option.

Implicit in my friend’s question was the ad hoc nature of the campaign. He intended to do small initiatives here and there. An overarching strategy was missing. Segmentation was missing. Power of complimentary campaigns was missing i.e. print and digital working in tandem to give a whole is greater than the parts effect.

The idea is to identify components from both print and digital and combine them in such a way as to get the maximum impact.

 Why the debate continues.

Inspite of all the material out there, executives like my friend, tend to go for disjointed options. Perhaps the perception is that a planned strategy might be too costly or they might feel better control by choosing the marketing components themselves. But what they gain in better control they will lose in efficacy of the efforts. 

Another factor that affects these decisions is the generational gap. Younger executives are more inclined to digital and older executives towards print. Each one misses the benefits of the other simply due to their individual perspectives. When we sit with older clients we promote digital options aggressively but we never dismiss the print options. And we always emphasize print options to the younger executives as well.

In conclusion, this post came out of a phone call that retouched the debate of print v/s digital and got me thinking. I hope that I have been able to convince my friend to take a more balanced, planned approach and whatever the choices not dismiss one over the other.

Cheers,
Ron

Then I came across this interesting link on Engadget.
http://www.engadget.com/2014/02/11/square-uniqlo/

The central premise being to use the shoppers own location and travel plans and match them with the delivery. Here is how it could work.

1. E-commerce vendor sets up various pickup points across the city
2. Shopper buys a product and selects the nearest pickup point. E-commerce company dispatches the goods to that pickup point.
3. Customers visit the nearest pickup place, identify themselves and pickup their stuff.

PROs

• E-commerce companies save a huge amount on delivery and COD costs. Delivery network is shortened.
• Customers do not have to worry about anyone being home to receive the parcel. A common issue with many working people.
•  E-commerce companies can setup alternative modes of payment besides COD at the pickup point.

CONs

• An inconvenience for very busy consumers who don’t have time to spare.
• Direct gifting becomes an issue. Customers will have to deliver gifts personally or ask the giftee to pick it up.
• Risk of goods being unclaimed for many days due to customer’s inability to visit the pickup point.
• Risk of goods being pilfered while in storage waiting for the customer.

Sometimes its important to break out of the conventional mold and try something  radical. Especially when your profits are getting eaten in the name of convenience. Out of the box solutions are needed.

Cheers,
Ron

What will forever stick with me is this simple formula for success…

Show Up

Show Up with a positive attitude

Show Up with a positive attitude over a long period of time.

Simple but beautiful. This book takes a no-nonsense common sense approach to getting things done in your life. It advises against the big bang over night success theories and recommends a simple and straightforward approach.

Highly recommended for those still waiting for success!! Maybe you have been looking at it the wrong way.

Happy Reading,
Cheers,
Ron

Visit www.gliffy.com for this great tool.

Amazon testing delivery with drones, CEO Bezos says by Reuters

Steve Faktor: Why I Should Be Google’s Next CEO

Amazon Turned a Flaw into Gold with Advanced Problem-Solving by Michael Skok

India could replace the US as Facebook’s #1 market in a matter of months

Karl Heiselman: Big Ideas 2014: B2B Marketing Will Look More Like Lego

10 Charts from 2013 That Changed the Way We Think by Gretchen Gavett

Enjoy,
Ron

Suddenly all those links incoming to the client sites became the reason for poor SEO performance. Google introduced the ‘disavow’ tool which allowed SEO agents to unlink from certain websites deemed spammers. Its hacking and burning time as years of work is reversed. If the link even remotely appears spammy – disavow it!

What is funny are the mails that would go something like this, ‘ Dear Webmaster, my client has a great site in so and so industry. Please provide a link to our site from your esteemed site’, has now turned into, ‘Dear Webmaster, due to recent google updates we request you to please remove the link from your spammy site to ours.’

All this would be hilarious if it was not so tragic and affecting so many people’s livelihood. The net effect of all this is:

Good sites which have worked hard doing SEO by Google’s earlier standard are now stranded.

Years of SEO work is now thrown away.

Deserving sites are now not getting the traffic they deserve.

And after all Google’s claims the search results have really not improved. In fact for many keywords, they have worsened.

Google’s ‘Do no evil’ motto is just that, a motto.  Although Google never supported SEO directly, there was always a symbiotic relationship between it and the SEO community, which it has now thrown to the wolves with reckless abandon, all in the name of improving search results that are not really improving.

Not so cheerfully,
Ron

As an entrepreneur, personal growth is very very important. This book has a concept called, ‘familiars’, basically feeling places we all withdraw to when we encounter something we don’t like or when we get stuck. What I loved about the ‘familiars’ concept was the simplicity and how it could be applied immediately to your life. Its’ a wonderful tool to break unproductive patterns of behaviour or thought.

Overall the writing is clear, easy to understand with many examples. Although you do need a little patience to read through all the exercises and work that the author asks you to do but the results are worth it.

This book has helped me to go to a much stronger place mentally and hope it works for you as well.

Cheers,
Ron