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Innovation a Top 3 Priority-What about metrics?

According to yearly McKinsey surveys, innovation is one of the Top 3 Blog - Metricspriorities for around two-thirds of companies. It is a critical enabler of differentiation and growth. To create a sense of urgency, align individual performance contracts, and convincingly communicate with investors about innovation, companies need to assess the effectiveness of and return on their innovation investment.

A question I am often asked is:

“Sure, but what metrics can we actually use?”

Looking at it from the investor’s perspective, outcome-oriented metrics focus on what innovation delivers to today’s and tomorrow’s bottom-line and, from there, to shareholder value:

  • Revenue growth from new products/services
  • Customer satisfaction with new products/services
  • Return on investment (ROI) in new products/services
  • Percentage of sales from new products/services
  • Number of new products/services launched

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Il primo lavoro? Meglio se fisso e vicino a casa

Blog - Primo LavoroCercasi candidato per posizione prestigiosa. Ottimo stipendio. Sede di lavoro vicino a casa. Non è richiesta particolare flessibilità né lavorativa, né contrattuale. Posto sicuro naturalmente. L’annuncio dei sogni di tutti i jobseekers italiani si riassume così secondo una ricerca che Monster e Anthea consulting hanno fatto tra 13.320 persone appartenenti a tre diverse generazioni: neolaureati senza un’esperienza significativa, lavoratori con almeno tre anni di esperienza e professionisti con oltre tre anni di esperienza. La crisi e i ripetuti inviti alla mobilità internazionale provenienti da più parti non sembrano essere bastati per rinnovare il nostro mercato del lavoro e per cambiare l’approccio di chi cerca un’occupazione. Le 13.320 risposte disegnano un mondo dove i candidati prediligono settori anticiclici e sicuri, come l’alimentare. Ed ecco che allora in testa alla classifica dei top employers arriva Barilla, seguita da Ferrero e Ferrari.

E come se non bastasse i jobseekers italiani non ricorrono ai canali istituzionali «quasi nel 50% dei casi – dice il country manager di Monster per l’Italia, Nicola Rossi –. In Francia, i miei colleghi fatturano quattro volte quanto la sede italiana, nonostante le dimensioni di mercato simili e la presenza di quattro competitor». In Francia, però, «il principale portale è quello pubblico – aggiunge Rossi –, mentre nel nostro paese ancora non è avvenuta quella infrastrutturazione del mercato del lavoro che fa sì che ci sia un pubblico in grado di fare da collettore generale e di offrire una piattaforma. E di consentire ai privati di offrire dei servizi. I privati non possono sostituirsi al pubblico, soprattutto in un mercato così polverizzato come quello italiano, dove una parte importante dell’offerta arriva dalle Pmi». Questo sottolinea un fenomeno grave per il paese, come spiega Maurizio del Conte, professore di diritto del Lavoro all’università Bocconi: «Non c’è quel servizio all’impiego efficiente di cui avremmo bisogno. Così il network personale diventa un canale importante quando si cerca lavoro e anche dai soggetti istituzionalmente dedicati a favorire il match tra domanda e offerta come le agenzie del lavoro o gli head hunters in Italia passa una percentuale bassa di candidati». View the rest of this posting »

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Putting Your Employees First

Union Square Hospitality Group CEO Danny Meyer focuses on the importance of how you treat your employees and customers.

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10 Characteristics of Superior Leaders

Thousands of articles and books have been published describing what it takes Blog - Leadershipto be a superior organizational leader. Some researchers and authors claim a superior leader possesses certain traits or abilities; others say it’s all personality. Still others maintain it’s the behaviors–not necessarily the intentions or thoughts–that are crucial.

Whatever your viewpoint, it boils down to this: successful leaders share the following characteristics or views:

  1. Mission: Leaders know what their mission is. They know why the organization exists. A superior leader has a well thought out (often written) mission describing the purpose of the organization. That purpose need not be esoteric or abstract, but rather descriptive, clear and understandable. Every employee should be able to identify with the mission and strive to achieve it.
  2. Vision: Where do you want your organization to go? A vision needs to be abstract enough to encourage people to imagine it but concrete enough for followers to see it, understand it and be willing to climb onboard to fulfill it.
  3. Goal: How is the organization going to achieve its mission and vision and how will you measure your progress? Like a vision, goals need to be operational; that is specific and measurable. If your output and results can’t be readily measured, then it will be difficult to know if you have achieved your purpose. You may have wasted important resources (time, money, people, and equipment) pursuing a strategy or plan without knowing if it truly succeeded.
  4. Competency: You must be seen by your advisors, stakeholders, employees, and the public as being an expert in your field or an expert in leadership. Unless your constituents see you as highly credentialed–either by academic degree or with specialized experience–and capable of leading your company to success, it will be more difficult for you to be as respected, admired, or followed.
    Practically speaking, not all executives immediately possess all of the characteristics that spell success. Many leaders learn along the way with hard work. As crises and challenges arise, those at the top of the hierarchy have key opportunities to demonstrate to others that they are in fact, qualified to be leaders. In actuality, greater competency can be achieved as a leader gains more on-the-job experiences.
  5. A strong team: Realistically, few executives possess all of the skills and abilities necessary to demonstrate total mastery of every requisite area within the organization. To complement the areas of weakness, a wise leader assembles effective teams of experienced, credentialed, and capable individuals who can supplement any voids in the leader’s skill set. This ability is what sets leaders apart from others. However, the leader needs to be willing to admit he lacks certain abilities and go about finding trusted colleagues to complement those deficiencies. After building the team, the entrepreneur needs to trust that team to understand issues, create solutions, and to act on them. View the rest of this posting »
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Do Your Prospects Understand You?

Closeup of woman giving weird smile holding piggybankLast week I met a brilliant and driven solopreneur at a networking event. When I asked her to tell me about her business I could feel my eyes glazing over and my mind wandering to the buffet table without my body in tow. Now, I’m a great listener and I have a strong passion for business. Even so, my new acquaintance couldn’t keep my attention.

As I pulled myself back to the present, I worked hard at taking in this business owner’s concept. It was then that I realized the problem – she was making me work to “get it.” She had a unique, and potentially profitable, twist on her area of expertise and proceeded to explain it to me in lengthy, highly technical mumbo jumbo. It was only the passion and excitement in her voice that kept me focused and piqued my curiosity.

I often have the same experience when I visit my prospects’ websites. What do they do? And who do they do it for? Now, they think they’re doing a great job of explaining their product or service because every industry-specific word they can think of is scattered throughout their pages. But you know what? If I’m going to hire you it’s because YOU are the industry expert and I shouldn’t have to learn your language to truly understand how you can help me.

Try these simple tips to begin with: Record your 60-second pitch so you can hear it yourself. Listen to it as a newbie to your industry. Also, create a 10 second pitch.
Read your marketing content from a fresh perspective. Take a look at your homepage. Count the words over 2-3 syllables and the ones that the average “Joe” wouldn’t use in their everyday vocabulary. Is your content written above the 8th grade level? Did you know that the average reading level in the US is between 8th and 9th grade?

The genius behind great content is the ability to write in a way that the marketplace can understand it without having to work too hard. Information is being pushed to us all day long, it can be exhausting! Identify with your prospect. Let them know that you understand their problem and that you can help them fix it. People buy from an emotional place, connect to their emotion.

Try starting your verbal pitch with a question or a statement that will get the person’s attention. The other day I asked a solopreneur if she ever felt like she owned a hobby, rather than a business. Did she ever wonder if she’d bring home a bigger paycheck by working at the coffee shop? She laughed and asked me how I knew? Then I simply told her that I knew because I have helped hundreds of people just like her to turn their businesses into money-making machines. Simple and short; that’s all it took. I had just found a new client.

Whether you’re writing or speaking, ask yourself a simple question. “Am I making them work too hard?” Catch the industry-specific words and use metaphors and analogies instead. Remember that the mind thinks in pictures. The better the picture you paint, the easier it is for your prospect to grasp what you can do for them. Today you are an artist; tomorrow you are more profitable.

Source: Inc.com

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February’s Top 10 Innovation and Marketing Articles

Blog - Top 10

This year I thought I would experiment with a Top Ten list at the beginning of each month, profiling the ten posts from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Blogging Innovation. So, without further ado, here are February’s ten most popular innovation or marketing posts:

  1. Two Biggest Mistakes in Social Media – by Mike Brown
  2. Radical Innovation of Meaning – Apple iPad – by Hutch Carpenter
  3. Four Models for Competitive Crowdsourcing – by Hutch Carpenter
  4. Aligning Social Media, Marketing and PR – by Matt Heinz
  5. 56 Reasons Why Innovation Initiatives Fail – by Mitch Ditkoff
  6. Bill Gates Coming out of Retirement? – by Anonymous Microsoftie
  7. Reverse Innovation a Popular Trend – by Yann Cramer
  8. Innovation Metric of Leading Companies – by Stefan Lindegaard
  9. Are MBAs becoming irrelevant? – by Idris Mootee
  10. Ideas Are Core to Enterprise 2.0 – by Hutch Carpenter

Source: Blogging Innovation

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5 Ways to Prepare for a Social Media Disaster

I watched the @ThatKevinSmith and @SouthwestAir brouhaha erupt live on Blog - Social Media DisastersTwitter but didn’t write about it last week. Bunches of tweeters and bloggers hashing out who was right and wrong based on second, third, or five hundredth-hand information simply wasn’t interesting enough to warrant adding to the noise.

Getting ready for a social media presentation this week though, I’ve been thinking about service defects and service recovery in the world of social networking.

I sought an analogy to help think strategically about how a company prepares for an angry customer who wants to be heard and starts tweeting incessantly: handling a hostage situation is very comparable. Rather than a person though, it’s a brand’s reputation being taken hostage by a customer threatening irreparable harm unless demands are met. With the one-to-many communication capabilities of social media, this type of threat has never been more credible.

Here are five hostage negotiation principles and related implications for preparing to handle when your brand’s good name is being held hostage:

  1. Have a negotiating team ready – This means more than a single person monitoring Twitter and handling responses. In hostage negotiations, the primary negotiator, who is ideally the sole contact with the hostage taker, is joined by a coach/commander in charge of the situation and personnel along with a secondary negotiator to help monitor, listen, and offer input.
    • Strategic Questions – Does your company have a pre-identified team and protocols for how it will work together in a social media-based service recovery effort? And how would you incorporate front-line employees when you’re trying to recover from a service failure playing out both at one of your company’s locations and online?
  2. Gather as much solid information as possible right away – Beyond having standard questions to run through, there’s added complexity in a social media-based service recovery effort. Suppose the customer issue IS taking place in-person. With social media monitoring removed from the scene, it may not even be possible from a customer’s messages to determine where the issue is occurring. This creates an interesting implication for enacting rapid service recovery.
    • Strategic Questions – If it’s clear the issue is taking place in the presence of front line employees, what steps will you take to identify the location and establish communication with them immediately? Since multi-person communication with the angry customer is almost a given, how will you ensure your multiple contacts are speaking with one message? View the rest of this posting »
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How to Present Your Business to a Crowd

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L’Italia non deve autoflagellarsi

Ho trovato questo di essere piuttosto interessante.  Che ne pensi?

Di Luca Montezemolo

Blog - MontezemoloÈ la qualità delle classi dirigenti che può fare la differenza tra un paese civile e un paese che non lo è. Una classe dirigente i cui esponenti siano forti nelle loro specifiche competenze ma anche consapevoli di avere una comune e vincolante responsabilità verso la società civile facendosi carico degli interessi del paese.

Sappiamo bene che la qualità delle classi dirigenti si misura anche sui valori etici e morali, oltre che sul senso delle istituzioni: istituzioni da rispettare ma anche da modernizzare, con tutti i necessari passaggi di riforma, affinché siano sempre più in grado di rispondere alle esigenze della modernità.

È anche qui, nella riforma dello Stato e delle istituzioni, che possiamo vedere una soluzione strutturale al gigantesco problema della corruzione. Perché fintanto che l’azione dello Stato non sarà resa più efficiente e trasparente, fintanto che gli spazi di intermediazione tra la società civile e la cosa pubblica saranno molteplici e confusi, fintanto che il cittadino non avrà la possibilità di poter contare su una pubblica amministrazione pienamente funzionale e responsabile le occasioni per il malaffare si sprecheranno.

Proprio in questi giorni torniamo a interrogarci sulla diffusione del malaffare, dello sperpero del denaro pubblico e sul loro impatto per la credibilità delle classi dirigenti. Ma proprio in questi stessi giorni occorre tornare a guardare con fiducia all’Italia, alle sue risorse morali e alla grande maggioranza di italiani che si dedicano con impegno e onestà al proprio lavoro e alla costruzione del futuro comune. Dobbiamo fare in modo che questa maggioranza di italiani si affermi e si renda sempre più visibile nel paese. Perché siamo una nazione che troppo spesso tende ad autoflagellarsi, a cedere alla leggenda consolatoria secondo cui “tutti sono uguali e tutti rubano alla stessa maniera”. Non è così e lo sappiamo bene.

Dobbiamo anche evitare di pensare che le colpe della corruzione siano tutte nella politica, perché anche in altri settori esistono fenomeni di malaffare che affliggono la nostra vita pubblica. Eppure la politica ha certamente una precisa responsabilità: quella di non avere introdotto riforme adeguate per far funzionare bene la macchina dello Stato. E dove lo Stato non funziona si afferma inevitabilmente quella “società fai da te” dove ognuno si sente autorizzato ad arrangiarsi come meglio può, e dunque anche attraverso il ricorso alla corruttela.

Talvolta la politica sembra profittare di questo vuoto dello Stato, occupando ogni spazio di mediazione tra i cittadini senza dare in cambio istituzioni efficienti. Il compito di una politica alta e responsabile non può che tornare ad essere quello delle riforme, del profondo senso dello stato e del suo buon funzionamento, della ricostruzione di un tessuto civile dove il malaffare sia l’eccezione e non la regola della mediazione.

Voglio dirlo con chiarezza: la lotta alla corruzione è un’impresa titanica che occuperà quanto meno lo spazio di una generazione, che richiederà sforzi enormi e grande lungimiranza. Eppure tutti noi vogliamo e possiamo contribuirvi.

Source: Italiafutura

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Study: Women Rock As Small Business Owners

Women are proving themselves to be a powerful small-business force to be reckoned with.Blog - Successful Women

Not only are women-owned firms contributing $3 million annually to the U.S. economy and accounting for 16% of all jobs, but new research shows women entrepreneurs will create 5 to 5.5 million new jobs across the U.S. by 2018 – more than half of the total new small-business jobs expected to be created during that time, and about one-third of the total new jobs anticipated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That research, recently released by The Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute, also shows that characteristics such as being more customer-focused, more likely to incorporate community into their business plans, and more adept at creating opportunities for others are helping women excel in 1) running a business 2) keeping employees driven and productive and 3) building a loyal customer base.

“As owners and managers, [women] are much more diligently engaged in the strategic and tactical facets in their business. They are more proactively customer-focused,” said Mark D. Wolf, director of the institute. Also, “they’re more intensive about saying things like, ‘I turn my customers into friends.’ Can you imagine the CEO of a major automotive business saying, ‘I turn my customers into friends?’”

In fact, the only things that ranked higher for women than importance of their customers were family and religion. Women also were found, on average, to feel more strongly than men about creating a positive work environment, being able to pay employees better and making employees feel as if they are part of a team. The data also suggests women are more focused on making meaningful differences between themselves and their competitors, and are intent on finding ways to take advantage of their current economic situations. Experts say women also typically reach further into social networks and support systems for help in their business, and more often than men can finesse the art of multitasking, via their roles as caregivers at home and as bosses.

Experts say hopeful male entrepreneurs should take notes on what has been giving women business leaders an edge.

“If women are doing things that unleash peoples’ potential … and if someone has a choice between the two [a male- or female-owned firm] and starts to get wise …” Wolf said. “Men should probably look to owning and running their business more collaboratively and more as a team.

“While there certainly needs to be someone who makes the final decision … I think it’s the collaborative, all-inclusive approach where women have a much greater level of intensity about that they could learn from.”

Many women business owners said they chose to start their own business – primarily in industries such as services, health care, communications and similar areas – because they were dissatisfied with the corporate track and sick of worrying about office politics. And another reason noted: the glass ceiling.

“There’s not a lot of opportunity for women to reach the executive level of boardrooms,” said Helen Han, president of the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO). View the rest of this posting »

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