Profit is the primary signal of sustainable and scalable customer value. If you’re not profiting, you don’t know what value you’re providing.
Read MoreProfit is Good
Putting Out Into the Deep
Launching. Learning. Listening.
While you may not always act at this level, someone in your company had better be!
Read MoreSports and Business: a few of my favorite things
This week I was a guest on a podcast for the first time.
I’ve loved podcasts since … forever? But this was the first time I was on one.
Read MoreSome Notes On Digital Transformation
Application modernization, cloud migration, digital transformation. Going from where you are to where you “ought to be” is a journey down a non-linear path you can’t predict; and, until you need them, you won’t even know all the tools and skills you’ll need to make it.
Read MoreWhat is “Digital Transformation” and do I need one?
As an entrepreneur in our modern digital economy your business needs to leverage technology for success, and “digital transformation” has been the buzzword de jour for years to describe what companies need to do to become competitive in the 21st Century. Even so, business owners rightly respond, “But what is it and do I really need to it?”
Read MoreEmpathic Entrepreneurs are Expert Entrepreneurs
Your mind is a powerful computer. Expert entrepreneurs, as well as the best leaders and managers, use it to simulate the experience of customers and employees.
Read MoreWhy Expert Entrepreneurs Are Good Listeners
It is so important to listen. To all your stakeholders, but especially to your customers. Being a good listener is another trait that expert entrepreneurs share, but even that is not enough to build a beautiful business.
Read MoreWhy Expert Entrepreneurs Know Humility Is Key
“I started my own business because I wanted to be my own boss!” Great! But if you want to grow that business and have it thrive, you had better have a healthy dose of humility to navigate the situations where data and feedback show that you’ve been wrong.
Read MoreWhy Expert Entrepreneurs Care Most About Helping Others
Expert entrepreneurs build and manage the biggest, most profitable, most well-known, most innovative and impactful, most admired companies; what do you mean they care more about helping others than helping themselves?
Read MoreWhat’s more valuable, electricity or the equipment it powers?
Earlier this week I enjoyed a webinar from the TSIA, From Traditional to XaaS Hardware: Navigating your Digital Transformation, and got many good notes from it. (“X” is for “anything.”) I thought I would share this point because it also illustrates the “mindshift” necessary on the part of vendors and customers to imagine the value of XaaS hardware.
Read MoreGrowing Your Business and Making It Last
Every entrepreneur dreams of growing their business to serve all the people they envision need their offering. At some point, most entrepreneurs get stuck in the execution and operation of what they’ve built, while their dreams recede with regret in their rear-view mirror. Simbiotrek (sim-bÄ“-ˈä-ˈtrek) was founded to get entrepreneurs unstuck—or better yet, so they avoid getting stuck all together.
Read MoreYour Business: The Innovation Engine Society Needs
If you run a small- or medium-sized business, you likely have a very intimate knowledge about your customers’ needs and goals that many of your larger competitors do not. This is why we, at Simbiotrek (sim-bÄ“-ˈä-ˈtrek), believe there is huge opportunity for smaller firms with established offerings to grow and have oversized impact by focusing on customer value.
Read MoreImagining Your Business using the NABC Framework
The NABC business model framework was developed at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and is credited as a major component of its successful turnaround through the development of impactful innovations.
Read MoreHope and A New Way Forward
About two months ago I shared my final decision with my supportive leaders and teammates at Globant: I’d be leaving the great situation and fantastic opportunities we’d created together, and starting my own business, Simbiotrek (sim-bÄ“-‘ä-‘trek). Now, what I’d left to go create is starting to emerge…
Read MoreCreating Customers and Having Purpose
I recently posted on LinkedIn some thoughts on Peter Drucker’s famous statement, “There is only one valid purpose of a corporation: to create a customer.” My beliefs in customer sovereignty (meaning that customers have the freedom to take their business wherever they want) and in customers experiencing value from your offerings as the ultimate indicator of future success, led me leave an excellent job, company, and colleagues to start my own business. But it takes constant effort to keep focused on adhering to those beliefs, just as it takes constant effort to keep a company focused on its customers.
Read MoreJourneys in Journey Mapping
I have had a journey with journey mapping. Through it, I have noticed different types of customer journey maps requiring different inputs and resulting in different outputs/impact over time. I think that there is a time and place for each type of journey map and that it is worth categorizing the kind you’re using or creating in light of what you intend to achieve. I also believe that customer journey maps (and personas and scenarios) if kept as “living assets”, can help give all your teams “line of sight” to your customers, and that they are a powerful catalyst for organizations looking to reinvent themselves as truly customer-centered and empathetic.
Read MoreOvercoming the “Achilles Heel” of Agile
I recently noticed a former colleague gain a Disciplined Agile certification. In my congratulatory message I also indicated my interest in learning more. In addition to that conversation, he also pointed me towards a series of meetups and LinkedIn articles led by Ivar Jacobson around “Essence for Agility”. I won’t go into all the aspects of that, but I do want to share some of the thinking that it inspired me to do about how I’ve been been working and why that has been a solution to the Achilles’ Heel of Agile Adoption.
Read MoreWho is a Customer?
The definition of a customer seems so obvious in B2C relationships that we often don’t bother to define it. Amidst the complexity of B2B relationships, however, this lack of precision can lead to all kinds of confusion and lack of clarity.
Read More3 Necessities for Becoming a Repeatedly Innovative Organization
The article below was originally published in June 2018 and was based on a previous article from November 2017. Over the course of 2020 I had the opportunity to return to these ideas, refine them, apply them in new situations, and learn a bunch more from my experiences and also the study of others’. I intend to revisit and provide updates and expansions to some of the ideas in this post over the course of 2021 – and beyond: learning is a lifelong activity and learning is at the heart of innovation.
Read More