STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS
Designing, building, configuring, fine-tuning, and managing a business ecosystem and platform through a 9 step approach
Today, all businesses depend on building the right ecosystems of partnerships to succeed, and that is why whether you are a startup or a multi-billion-dollar company, you need to understand how to build them because your business depends on it.
Business ecosystem: the definition
A business ecosystem is a set of companies with complementary and synergistic relationships that build strategic partnerships to deliver value for end-users or customers. These strategic partners can complement each other in different ways whether it be by directly supplying products to one another, or to combine products or services to provide a larger value-add, or finding better channels to reach a target or larger market. …
LEADERSHIP IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP
There are six main winning traits that have defined Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s success over the last 25 years
Jeff Bezos is probably the most successful business leader alive, as over the past 25 years he has transformed an online bookstore startup into a diversified company currently valued at $1.6 trillion. Today Amazon is a digital retailing juggernaut, a web services provider, media producer, manufacturer of personal technology devices such as Kindle and Echo, and its founder owns the Washington Post and Blue Origin, a space exploration company. Jeff Bezos currently is deemed the richest person in the world.
His winning characteristics
I. Experimentation: an inventive mindset combined with a desire to test new things
Bezos is full of experiments; Amazon and his personal DNA are embedded with a continuous desire for experimentation, and he is believed to have…
Change management
Kurt Lewin, Kotter, Ackerman and Anderson, and Kubler-Ross’s change management models aim to describe how change should be managed in practice, in a collective and individualistic level. Combining theoretical models with organizational realities, we can level up a comprehensive framework for managing change.
We live in a world of rapid, relentless, continuous, and ever-faster rates of change. Change becomes the norm and change within change is ever-growing. Therefore, the ability to successfully navigate through change is becoming more and more important.
As individuals, each of us reacts to change in completely different ways, whether at the workplace or in personal lives. Hence, it is important to have a good awareness of how those around us, such as colleagues and family members, react to change. Some love an environment of change and others don’t. …
Change management
By being a catalyst and change agent, we can reduce roadblocks, by understanding why people change and when they don’t. There are 5 major barriers to change implementation: Intuitive Reactions, Endowment Effects, Gaps and Divides, Uncertainty, and Lack of Evidence
The challenge of change
Everyone has something they need to change. Whether it be a senior manager or client’s mind, transforming an organization, consumer behavior, industries, or even the world. But change is hard and often nothing happens despite the greatest of efforts at the highest of costs.
In the smartphone industry, new phones are often faster, have more memory, and better services, and therefore, people should very simply switch, but they don’t. This is because even though new things are technically better, people still cling to the old where they follow the same processes and maintain the same courses of action. …
Change management
The overall success of a change initiative depends upon the ability to proactively identify and manage cultural and organizational problems
Senior managers tend to find project deliverables not appropriately incorporated into routine business practices. Change management aims to address such issues and helps managers and employees deal with the stress of changing environments and responsibilities. The acceptance and adoption of change are different for every person and understanding how to have a positive influence on team members and key stakeholders will help decision-makers relate to them on a one-to-one basis and lead organizations to successful change initiatives. …
Internal communication strategy
Ineffective town halls meeting are a massive missed opportunity for corporations and their senior leaders
Employees value the opportunity to connect with senior leaders and that’s why town hall meetings can be very important. Town halls give leaders a forum to share results, reviewing critical issues, celebrate achievements, and discussing what employees can do to help the organization succeed.
A town hall meeting is a goal-oriented, mingling event, not a series of presentations — it’s about joint participation
The intention of town halls is to create an open space for employees to engage in conversations and when the meeting becomes a repetitive one-way presentation, then the employees will start to dread town hall meetings rather than look forward to them. …
BLOCKCHAIN STRATEGY
With a look into how Satoshi Nakamoto used computer science, mathematics, cryptography, and behavioral economics to design the Bitcoin Blockchain
The value propositions offered by Blockchain, build the foundations of a system of values that could build the blueprint for the next era of the digital economy and Internet 2.0. The seven areas that Blockchain have proven to create value include:
- A network built on integrity
- Distributed power
- Aligned, value-driven, motives
- Digital security
- Privacy
- Preservation of rights
- Economic inclusion
When one initially hears about Blockchain, they tend to think of Bitcoin and its implicit benefits of privacy and security. But the underlying technology of Bitcoin (i.e. Blockchain) can protect much more than just money. …
NEW PRODUCT AND STARTUP STRATEGY
A five-step framework to planning for product-market fit
Product leaders — or commonly referred to as Product Managers — have great amounts of responsibilities, and one of the more challenging tasks that they are responsible for is, ‘finding or achieving product-market fit’.
The framework for achieving product-market fit has five steps:
- Identifying the innovators and early adopters
- Uncovering the target customers’ underserved needs
- Building the value proposition strategy
- Building the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
- Testing, gathering, and incorporating customer feedback
While finding product-market fit is a challenging task that will make or break a product’s success in the market, it isn’t everything to a startup or product’s success or failure. The ability to build a world-class team, find a sustainable monetizable business model, and scaling operations for growth will come into play if a startup is to succeed. However, finding product-market fit is the initial, most challenging, and time-consuming hurdle any new offering will experience in the marketplace. …
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Product innovation requires the management of the product mix, talent, processes, organizational alignment, and structure
An innovation ecosystem is very similar to a biological one — the employees, customers, company processes, and strategies are all part of the complex set of interactive relationships among the resources within the marketplace, create a living, breathing ecosystem in which one tries to innovate. It is core to an innovation strategy that product leaders fully grasp and understand the portfolio of products a company offers and their ecosystems. The five pillars to product innovation are:
- Measuring the performance of the product portfolio
- Building an internal innovation talent network
- The need for innovative processes
- Aligning corporate objectives and resources
- The organizational…
LEADERSHIP IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP
A framework for a startup CEO’s roles and responsibilities
After four years of running my startups and advising various new ventures, I have learned the hard way — mainly from mistakes and failures — that there is a direct link between the founders’ leadership skills and the success of their startups. A capable and strong startup CEO and its founding will need two different skills sets to deliver success:
- Being a great manager — fostering a loop of various managerial tasks
- Being a great leader — fostering a loop of soft skills
