Tag: digital-transformation

What Are the Steps to Building a Beautiful Business?

No, you can’t just follow someone’s template: at best that will waste your time and energy. No, there’s no simple formula to follow. But you can do better than emulating successful entrepreneurs, you can have a framework for action and an intentional approach to build the beautiful business you’ve always imagined.

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What 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?”

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Entrepreneurial Lessons from Youth Hockey

The last two years I’ve coached my son’s team in hockey and it has been one of the most enjoying and fulfilling things I’ve ever done. My most recent coaching experience inspired me to standup and articulate the connections I see between and the lessons I think we can glean from youth hockey.

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Learning from Failing

Concert Audience and Stage

I have been listening to the Cautionary Tales podcast all year long as I drive with my 10 year old son to and from his Saturday Art of Problem Solving program. The delivery and style of the stories create both and emotional and intellectual response of joy and satisfaction; frequently mingled with discomfort, sadness, longing, and pathos. This Saturday we listened to another episode and it was no different. Except it was.

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What’s more valuable, electricity or the equipment it powers?

Mineral Point Cell Tower panoramic view

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.

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Growing 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.

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Some Notes On Reinventing Your Business

antique-style letters

Here are some “old” notes that come a cross a bit like a buzzword soup, but I’m pretty sure there are some germs of good ideas in here. If you can avoid going cross-eyed and dizzy reading the notes (or just scroll right past them), I follow them up with some bullet points that extract what might be those ideas to extract and expand on.

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Journeys 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.

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Overcoming 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.

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APIs for Fun and Profit

This is a republishing of an article that I’ve had around in few places, from the old company blog, to medium, and probably somewhere else. It is good for me to review from time to time the importance and impact of APIs in creating a true customer-centered business. We can probably never say it enough because the “techie” nature of APIs makes them an unusual topic for customer experience and business leaders. But the ultimate users of APIs are humans and the ultimate purpose for them is to facilitate value creation.

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