A subtle but powerful shift has been moving through the realm of startups in the past few years. With the number of businesses entering the market every year exploding and with very few barriers to entry, new ventures have to dream bigger than stealing market share from established corporations — they must also defend their market share from startups with similar offerings who are entering the market at a similar time. With a constant influx of new ideas, it is no longer enough to simply offer a number of features and an incredible user experience. Those have become commonplace. According to Emily Heyward of TechCrunch.com the difference between success and failure for a startup often hinges upon branding. How exactly can you brand your company to position yourself above the competition? Read more>>
Monthly Archives: April 2019
The Eureka Moment Myth
Every hardworking innovator dreams of the day that they might by happenstance stumble across the next big idea. This popularized picture of success — in which smart people have a world-changing idea dropped into their laps — is rampant within the entrepreneurial community, perpetuating the idea that simply being in the right place at the right time is enough to create an innovation that becomes a household name. Greg Satell of Inc.com sets the narrative straight by breaking down the popular story about the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928. While it is enticing to believe that he was able to walk into his lab and miraculously turn the antibiotics that he found there into a commercially successful, life-saving drug, the truth of the story is something quite different. Why should you discard the idea of success hinging upon a “eureka moment”, and what is the actual process of developing a great idea into a successful one? Read more>>
Why The Semi-Nomadic Himba Are So Good At Thinking Outside The Box
Stepping out of your comfort zone is something that people are encouraged to do since they are young. However, people are reluctant to trying new methods of doing things especially when the method they are using seems to be working perfectly fine. Psychologists call this way of thinking, cognitive set. Sarah Pope a neurologist from the University of Texas at Austin wanted to explore this way of thinking and see if it was natural human instinct, or was developed from Western way of living. Pope found exciting results when running tests on both Western and non-Western humans that may help psychologists to answer many other questions about humans flexibility when thinking. Read More>>
To Improve Customer Experience, Embrace the Outliers in Your Data
Many successful companies are starting to veer towards the idea of using customer analytics in order to get a better grasp of how their customers interact with their products or services. Using information from customer analytics has come to help many companies, in a 2018 survey SAS Intel found that over half of company revenue growth came from the use of customer analytics. However, many business leaders are missing crucial information when studying this data. When studying the data many businesses ignore the outliers, when in fact this might be the top information that companies need to be looking at. These outliers can highlight a products biggest strengths or weaknesses which can help companies really understand what their target customers really want. Read More>>
How Leaders Shape Company Culture
What separates successful companies from iconic companies? The answer, according to William Craig of Forbes.com, is the critical element of culture. The question that so many different companies struggle with is how they can capture a culture of ethical behavior and fairness, and ultimately harness it to success. The answer to this seemly complicated question boils down to leadership. Leaders set the tone in their companies and exemplify for their employees what their company stands for and what the most important milestones for success are. Their leadership determines the success of a company in much more than just the classical sense of management based accomplishment. How engaged are employees and how encouraging of fluidity and new ideas is the company? All these questions and more are answered by the company’s leaders. Read more>>
Richard Branson Says This Emotion Helped Him Start Virgin Atlantic, and It Will Work for You Too
What is going through the minds of some of the most successful business moguls when they land their breakthrough business idea? In an interview with wildly prosperous entrepreneur Richard Branson of Virgin America Inc., reporter Minda Zetlin of Inc.com gets an insight into what the key to the billionaire’s success in his ventures is. Branson isn’t done yet either. He continues to harness the feeling that led him to found Virgin Atlantic in the first place to further diversify his corporation’s portfolio of activities. Read more>>
4 Key Steps to Preparing for a Business Presentation
Entrepreneurs are good at generating ideas however; a skill that may not be their strength is public speaking. Giving a proper business presentation is what can help entrepreneurs advance their ideas into businesses and create ultimately long-term business success. Tim Calkins who spent years as brand manager for Kraft Foods offers four different strategies that help take a business presentation from average to compelling and convincing. Firstly, preparation is key. Not necessarily preparing the delivery of the speech but instead focusing on which audience you may be presenting to and adjusting your presentation accordingly. The content that you tell your audience also must be simple concise and tell a smooth flowing story. Having a good idea in a business presentation is not enough; you also must be able to tell it. Read More>>
How (Not) to Change Someone’s Mind
Changing someone else’s opinion on a touchy subject like politics or religion is not an easy task to come by. However, there are two tactics that have shown to do so: encouraging people to engage in perspective-taking—putting themselves in someone else’s shoes—as well as asking people to come up with reasons to support something they oppose, or vice versa. Kellogg researchers wanted to put these tactics to the test and combine them, asking people to generate arguments from someone else’s point of view. The researches went to work and conducted an experiment with users from Reddit- a popular forum to swap memes and analyze pop culture. The experiment had these users offer an argument from a political view from an opposing view from their own. Although, the researchers combined these two tactics it was clearly shown in the results that in this case two plus two does not actually equal four. Read More>>
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