My days as a practitioner and student of Lean Production at AutoEuropa (VW) and MIT taught me a simple, but valuable lesson – “It’s the System, Stupid” All the different components of ‘how to do more with less’ were available (production efficiency and reliability, quality, supplier integration, employee involvement, etc.) – Toyota was the first to put them all under one
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This three part blog series introduces a novel classification of innate user needs, aka ‘the basic ways we fight for happiness and progress (through consumption)’. Part I of the blog recapped the well known concept that market segmentation is not about demographics, but about seizing an unoccupied space in the mind and heart of the consumer. Part II of the
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In Part I of this blog, I introduced the age-old secret of entrepreneurship – understanding the essence of what you’re really selling, i.e. defining the intrinsic quality of your product or service that compels your customers to want it. This is also referred to as the ‘value proposition’ or ‘deep meaning’ of any particular offering, elucidating the reason ‘why’ someone
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My first ever (ad)venture was selling books door-to-door. Back during my college years at LSU, I badly needed to make money during the summer breaks to pay for the mounting costs of a higher education (and too much partying). Little did I know that my summer job was to be the real education – my door-to-door sales experience is where
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Back in 1999, minty-fresh from my Sloan MBA and stint at the Boston Consulting Group, I thought I knew all there was to know about ‘survival’ business jargon. This namely consisted of what I called the ‘big eight’ buzzwords: The first four related to top-line growth, namely: Strategy, Competitive Advantage, M&A (when you have no competitive advantage but you have
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In his book “Design-Driven Innovation. Changing the rules of competition by radically innovating what things mean” author Roberto Verganti argues that truly ground-breaking innovation happens when leaders propose a new vision to the market that is made possible by a new technology, but most importantly, how it changes the underlying meaning (or the ‘why?’) of a certain activity. He
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Necrophone 