The business world is much more volatile than other sectors of society. In Belgium, one year after start-up, 80% of new companies are still in existence. After three years, the figure is just 65%. The life of an entrepreneur is full of uncertainty. Taking risks – calculated risks – is inherent to doing business. It’s not always easy to accept this, however. Frequently, those outside of the business world also have a very hard time facing up to this reality. Read more
Posts Tagged ‘business strategy’
Management insides
Thursday September 16th, 2010Business strategy : connect with your customers through social networks.
People are online. All the time. From any location. With any device. And they use them. To dialog, to chat, to express themselves. They use different tools to do this. Mostly social networks : Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, photo repositories (Picasa), video sites (YouTube), … These are not marketplace where you can sell, these are the social places where you can network with them, to learn about them, what they like or not, what they do, what they think, etc.
Social networks are the place to be. As I said, not to sell directly (people do not go to a café to sell their products, you do this in a shop or on a market place). But it is the place to talk, listen and convince. Netlog is a competitor of Facebook in Belgium. ING is their banker. ING provides virtual money on there. It is the company playing a part in their social game with a high visibility. The step to their real life bank services is small. They got the message.
Management insides
Tuesday September 14th, 2010Business Strategy : watch out for disruptive entrants
Competition is a given. Once you do something, others will start doing it also. It is as old as trade exists. To survive, competition tries to be cheaper, faster, better etc. And competitors watch carefully what the others are doing. Everytime one moves, the others move as well. It is a game that forces everybody to improve gradually. Todays danger comes from the increasing pace of change, shorter product lifecycles and new entrants.
Markets are sliced up in verticals : pharmaceutical, petrochemical, finance, … Competition happens within a vertical : banks are no competition to pharmaceutical and vice versa. This is normal, since the business models are different, as are the organisations, the profile of the people, the systems, the processes etc.
Management insides
Thursday September 9th, 2010Business strategy : integrate your IT with your customers’ or suppliers’ IT.
As I already stated in a previous article in this series : the automotive industry has integrated their logistics with manufacturing to create a just-in-time delivery mechanism. They created their own industry-standards to interconnect systems of suppliers with theirs. EDI became an even broader standard.
But what we see today, is that many systems are not really interconnected. Just as a theoretical example : your personal address. This is replicated in different databases : utility suppliers (electricity company for example), telecom suppliers (telephone company, cable TV), bank(s), insurance companies, employer(s), government, doctors, lawyers, … When you move, the information has to be changed manually in every database. If you now link the database of your employer with the group insurance company and the government, you would only need to change your address in one database, and all others being in sync, are updated automatically.
Management insides
Tuesday September 7th, 2010Business Strategy : create a two sided business model
A very classic business model is for example the one of the baker. The baker gets the required supplies (yeast, flour, dairy products), makes the bread, gets paid for the bread. With this income, the baker pays for the supplies. The income is coming from one side : the customer. Today, the business model is being changed towards a two-sided model.
Two-sided business model means that the money in-flow is coming from two sides : customers and suppliers/partners who want to be part of your ecosystem. Here some examples. Read more
Management insides
Thursday September 2nd, 2010Business strategy : include mobility
Anything is becoming mobile : people, things, ideas, applications, processes. Whether this is based on a smartphone/netbook or whatever technology, mobile is at the heart of innovation.
Technology has made mobility possible : transportation systems, broadband connectivity, devices, batteries, mentality shift (the world is a big village), digital information. There are some limits : law of physics (my house is not mobile ;-)), smell and taste cannot be transported, etc. Maybe one day in the future, but not in the near term anyway. Belgium has installed a scientific lab on the South Pole. People need to be transported, digital communication needs to be activated, goods need to be transported. From the South Pole to the North Pole, we can transport people and goods in a day or so, but whatever is digital can travel in a matter of seconds.
Management insides
Tuesday August 31st, 2010Business Strategy : be online
In this first article of 6 about business strategy, we’ll talk about the concept of being online. This isn’t just about an online presence as we are used to, but it is about doing online business, and that isn’t just about e-commerce. It is much more.
Online business means that you have to change your business model. Most of the business models that most companies use are “asynchronous”. The best example is printed media. Newspapers and magazines send a reporter to some event. This reporter will record what is happening, write an article about it, that will be published the day/week/month after it all happened. Another example is the production of a product. Somebody makes a forecast, the production makes it, the product is shipped in advance to the places where it can be sold.
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