Helping businesses look before they leap. - TM
I was just interviewed on Ask the Expert about how monitoring your competition and marketplace can give your company an edge. Listen in during your drive home or lunch break to learn more about what can happen when you make the effort to better understand your marketplace and business space. And what can happen if you don’t. I’ll be a guest on the show every other month, so let me know what you’d like to hear about next time.
My recent post Would Maslow Shop at Whole Foods? focused on the company culture established by the C-Suite and how it might be classified using Maslow’s Hierarchy as an inspiration. Readers contributed a number of supportive comments worth considering as I continue refining this idea and building my own pyramid. First, the duration of a company’s strategy is an interesting method for grouping as it is both a symptom and the cure for moving to higher levels on the pyramid. After more thought, it is more appropriate to move this to the cure and I’ll be elaborating on all of the cures in an upcoming post. Second, a number of people pointed out that employee retention rate is a very good business health metric and I totally agree…as long as this metric is not taken in isolation from other information.
I’m looking forward to one of my favorite conferences, MiniTrends 2014. As always, it’s a great opportunity to learn more about MiniTrends (those emerging trends that are not yet widely recognized) and how understanding them can position businesses for the future. This year’s conference focuses on how to thrive in today’s business environment by combining MiniTrends tactics with innovative strategies.
The Pearson Strategy Group, LLC offers a free online assessment tool that provides an anonymous 5-minute method for assessing your company’s risk for falling behind in the marketplace. The assessment has been available for almost a year and it’s time to reveal the key findings. Every user completing the survey receives a summary listing the questions and individual answers. They also get a map of innovation-strategy results.
This past week I’ve been hearing a lot about Tesla’s announcement that it would adopt an “open source” philosophy and release its electric vehicle patents to the world. In his announcement by blog, Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, says “Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal.”
Professional patent research and analysis requires expertise and tools most business people are not aware of. And high quality results can help inventors and entrepreneurs understand their competition and their opportunities, the founder of the Pearson Strategy Group explained to a recent gathering of Austin’s IEEE Central Texas Consultants Network.
The first word of caution for patent applicants is that, unfortunately, some patent practitioners do produce garbage. I see these “bad” applications frequently. Worse still, some Patent Examiners are asleep at the switch and allow these bad applications to issue. The fatality rate might therefore reflect defendants taking a relatively inexpensive route to invalidate patents that desperately deserve euthanasia. This strategy should be compared to paying “go away” money to appease the owners. Moreover, invalidating bad patents would be a good thing for all (but the owners). No statistics, though, are yet available yet to validate/disprove this theory.
First published in 1943, Maslow’s hierarchy still provides us with a pattern of human motivation [1] and is so eloquent in communicating its purpose. It recently occurred to me that there is no similar pyramid for companies. I tried to find one, even asking several experts, without luck. I challenged myself to adapt this pyramid to the needs of companies. Explaining the hierarchal needs of companies helps us understand that companies operating in different spaces have different beliefs, needs and expectations.
Working with CEOs and management teams to create growth strategies, I watch for existing practices and attitudes that may hinder growth. It’s challenging enough to launch a new venture or a restart a faltering business without creating internal obstacles that weigh it down. An unrealistic view of competition can severely limit or slow the company’s rate of growth. A famous CEO mentor was fond of telling me, “If you don’t have a competitor, you don’t have a business.” Competition is a great motivator. If you have a company in a market with no competitors, either the market you’re pursuing isn’t really viable, or you lack the constant competitive motivation needed to keep you at the top of your game, or both.
Okay, maybe I am a bit ahead of myself… but not for long. I was reading an article in Gizmag about the status of driverless vehicles and thought how close we’ve come to this milestone. Autonomous vehicles had been under research for some years when DARPA, the U.S. military’s research organization, initiated the Urban Challenge in 2007. The goal was to reward the team that could build an autonomous vehicle that would successfully navigate a simulated city environment. Self-driving vehicles are a great example of a disruptive technology unfolding in front of us that will affect many people (and maybe, dogs).
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