Since then, Warren Buffett, Berkshire’s founder, has
successfully navigated the changing tides of business and
financial markets over the years to built one of the most
successful companies ever.  Unlike Microsoft, and Intel
which had relatively few important shifts in irresistible
forces, Berkshire Hathaway has weathered many by
redirecting its resources and energies into new, more
promising directions.

After having been primarily a portfolio manager of a
handful of common stocks for many years, the company has
recently shifted again to emphasize purchasing and
operating companies.  You too can learn to catch the full
benefit of today’s volatile and rapidly changing forces and
spur your enterprise on to greater and more rapid growth
than ever before.

Be Prepared:  Being in the Right Position to Optimize
Opportunity

Many business people are fond of saying, “I’d rather be
lucky than smart.”  Everyone has experienced the
exhilaration of an unexpected boost from favorable
circumstances and wishes it would happen more often.
Choosing a strategy that puts you in the right position is
a way for you to create your own good fortune.

You will achieve more favorable results by thinking
differently so you work smart, not hard.  When asked why he
scored so many goals in hockey, NHL scoring champion Wayne
Gretzky replied that he always skated to where he thought
the puck would be going. That gave him an important edge
because most other skaters go toward where the puck is
already.

But it isn’t enough to just be in the right place at the
right time.  The tightrope walker working outdoors in the
wind prefers that the wind be at her back, because a side
wind could more easily knock her off balance.  Setting up
the tight rope to make the breeze’s direction favorable can
provide the necessary advantage for her.  She can further
improve her security by using a balance pole.

To move your enterprise from its current position to a
better one takes careful thinking  It’s like the tightrope
walker finding the wind coming from the wrong direction,
and demanding a move in the tight rope’s location before
she performs.  The equipment handlers have a lot of hard
work to undo and redo.  That’s the bad news about getting
into the right position.

The good news is that once your company has reached its
ideal position, your subsequent need to change will be
less.  In the long run, this means less change, less work,
as well as better results.  Like the Olympic wrestler who
fights his way to a position securely on top of his
opponent, you will be able to seize superior positions that
will allow you the advantage no matter how your competitors
react and your business environment changes.

Most organizations today are unfortunately like the
wrestler’s opponent, operating subject to the whims of
powerful competitors and vagaries of circumstances as their
noses grind into the smelly, dirty mat.  Is yours one of
them?

If your enterprise is like most, it operates according to a
plan.  Your business now pays attention to executing that
plan.  When things go wrong, most people in your
organization will try to protect their self-interest and
their chances for achieving the plan’s goals.  If things
get really bad, they’ll be stunned into inaction.

These behaviors reflect some of the many faulty thinking
patterns you should abolish and replace in order to achieve
a winning position in an increasingly volatile and
unpredictable organizational environment.  You need to
focus on getting the most benefit from your enterprise’s
irresistible forces rather than trying to fend off the
forces.

Every change in irresistible forces provides new
opportunities to those who think that way.  For very
cyclical businesses, when demand is strong, you can sell
high-cost facilities and obtain long-term relationships
with attractive customers.  When demand is weak, you can
buy low-cost facilities, repurchase your own stock,
negotiate lower prices from suppliers and get complementary
competitors interested in merging with you.  There is
always some optimal opportunity being presented, if you
learn how to look at the circumstances with an eye prepared
to gaining important advantages from your business’s
environment.

Once an opportunity is recognized, you need to be properly
prepared to take the right actions at the right time.  You
have to have the flexibility to take advantage of rapid and
extreme changes in irresistible forces.  Such flexibility
can be developed through the use of planning extreme
scenarios that greatly exaggerate the future impact of
these forces to clarify opportunities.

This thinking requires using an improved kind of scenario
planning for possible future circumstances, most of which
will never occur.  By studying these scenarios uour
enterprise will then locate and be ready to implement its
“Always-Win, No-Lose” opportunities, that minimize the down
side, while leaving the up side open-ended, regardless of
the irresistible forces.

This new form of strategy replaces the costs and delays for
your organization learning primarily through broad scale
trial and error.  Irresistible force management is the
missing element that makes this possible.

Copyright 2008 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved

—————————————————-
Donald Mitchell is chairman of Mitchell and Company, a
strategy and financial consulting firm in Weston, MA. He is
coauthor of seven books including Adventures of an
Optimist, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, and The
Ultimate Competitive Advantage. You can find free tips for
accomplishing 20 times more by registering at:
====> http://www.2000percentsolution.com .

I used to write down my goals each year, but it never
really worked for me. I just didn’t feel really excited
about my new goals. They didn’t seem to propel me in motion
and so I kind of viewed them as being useless. I never
really looked at them, probably because they seemed like
“shoulds” rather than “really-meaningful-wants.”

Then I came across the concept of creating 3-year visions
instead of just a list of goals for the upcoming year. This
visioning wasn’t just about business goals, but also
family, financial, spiritual, and relationship goals. It
became a “holistic” way of looking at what you wanted in
your life. All the pieces looked like they would work
together, but only because you were compelled to make it
all work together, which was the first time I’d done that
in such depth.

The coolest thing about visioning 3 years out came to me
after I started doing this regularly. I noticed that ONE
year goals were never too much of a stretch. They seemed
like timid goals, goals that didn’t really get me excited.
But having to create a vision of what 3 years down the line
would look like allowed me to REALLY think BIG.

Inhibitions dropped. My creative side started going and I
really took time to see, “Hey, what WOULD I want my life to
look like in 3 years, if I could have time to create it?”
SHAZAM! I felt like I’d hit the jackpot.

The 3-year vision was a way for me to create something to
strive for that REALLY spoke to me. Something that made my
heart beat a little faster after I read it, excited to get
going, and just a little bit scared of the thought of me
reaching it. Now THAT would propel me into motion the way a
yearly list of goals wouldn’t be able to do. (By the way,
my deep down secret is that I strive to reach these in 1 or
2 years, not 3, and that’s usually what happens.)

So, each year, around this time, I create a 3-year vision
of what I want my practice to look like. I write it in the
present tense, as if it were 3 years later, that same day.
For example, this past year I wrote mine on January 4, 2007
as if it was January 4, 2010, and I talked about all the
things that had happened since 2007. All the things I’d
accomplished in my business, with my finances, my
investments, my family, and myself over the “last 3 years,”
which obviously hadn’t actually happened yet.

Such a cool exercise and it really gets the blood flowing
when you read it back to yourself, now and over the year.

“When you can clearly see yourself being there, you can see
much more clearly how to get there. You can imagine the
path to your dreams, and then start to actually walk it.
Play an active role in your own future. Imagine with
passion and detail how you’d most like it to be.”
—Ralph Marston, http://greatday.com

You see, I’ve figured out that it’s not just about goals.
Yes, goals are important, but the way I look at it, it’s
about focusing on what you REALLY want for your life, not
the “shoulds.” It’s also about putting into effect the Law
of Attraction in a big way. When you know what you want for
your life, when you can imagine it with passion and feel
what it feels like to have it, it’s almost guaranteed to
come to you.

So, this weekend, I’ll be taking a couple of hours to work
on my own 3-year vision. I wouldn’t dream of not doing it.
My success depends on it and it does for you too.

YOUR CLIENT ATTRACTION ASSIGNMENT:

Your turn. Sometime this week, create a 3-year vision dated
January 4, 2011. Your 3-year vision must be one that will
literally PULL you into your future, will scare you just a
little bit, and make your heart beat a little faster than
normal whenever you read this.

Make your 3-year vision very specific, realistic, and a big
STRETCH (that’s what’s going to move you forward quicker
than you would if you didn’t have it). If you’re right
brained, use bullet points for categories such as business,
finances, personal, family, spiritual, fun, health, etc. If
you’re left-brained, then write freely, and remember to
keep it all grounded in the specific, with lots of
MEASURABLES and TANGIBLES thrown in there so you can keep
track of your progress over the next 3 years (that’s what I
do).

Be sure to write in the present tense as if it were 3 years
from now… If it doesn’t scare you just a little bit or
get your mind racing, then it’s probably not enough of a
stretch. By the way, I just looked back to last year’s
3-year vision and I was SHOCKED to see how many of the
goals in my 3-year vision I’d already achieved in just a
little over a year. This stuff really works!!

—————————————————-
Once you’ve done your 3-year vision and are ready to get
marketing in a big way for 2008, invest in your success by
getting yourself the Client Attraction Home Study
System™. It’s all step-by-step, not a big mishmash of
things. So, you do step one of the system, and when you’re
done with that, you move on to step two, and so on.   You
can get it at http://www.TheClientAttractionSystem.com .

Small business owners often fall prey to the marketing whim
of the week, chasing every new way to do direct mail or
draw web site visitors they encounter, because they have no
real marketing strategy to help them drive marketing
decisions. If I could change anything about the way small
business owners view marketing – that would be it.

Without a strategy firmly in place to use as a filter for
where the business is headed, it’s far to difficult to
really analyze whether any particular tactic or marketing
initiative makes sense for a business or not.

By strategy I mean your marketing reason for being, the
position you want to hold in the mind of your customer and,
no, “I want to exchange money for something with anyone we
can,” is not a strategy, it’s a disaster plan. Far too many
people think “we want to sell lots of stuff to lots of
people” is a strategy.

The world doesn’t really need another accountant,
electrician, real estate agent, or small business of most
any kind, so if that’s what you are, then you better get a
way to stand out that’s based on a sound strategy. The
world, or at least a market segment, will always need the
accountant, electrician or real estate agent that does
business in new and different ways, ways that matter to a
specific market.

To develop an effective marketing strategy you must spend
some energy determining two crucial factors: who makes an
ideal client for your firm and how your firm is indeed
different than everyone else that claims to be in your same
business.

If is, in fact, quite possible that there are entire
subsets of what you might call a target market that are not
at all a fit for your business. You’ve got to get very
clear, and often narrow, about the characteristics of a
client your firm is best suited to serve. If you have
clients already, the best place to look to identify your
ideal clients is the subset of clients that is most
profitable and has a tendency to refer business to you.
These folks likely love what you do, are emotionally
attached enough to tell friends, and value the relationship
they have to your company. If you can come up with a
crystal clear image of what these folks look like, part of
your marketing strategy should focus on finding more of
these and saying no to the rest

The second half of your marketing strategy involves
discovering your firm’s best chance to stand out and
differentiate. You may already do something that truly is
unique and need only communicate it as your strategy. Or,
you may need to find one something that you can do
famously, such as dominating a narrow niche market or
packaging your services like no one else in your industry
dreamed of doing.

Once you create a powerful strategy for your business all
of focus can turn to creating and implementing tactics that
can bring your strategy to life.

—————————————————-
John Jantsch is a veteran marketing coach, award winning
blogger and author of Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most
Practical Small Business Marketing Guide. You can find more
information by visiting http://www.ducttapemarketing.com .

― Anonymous

A 2,000 percent solution is any method of accomplishing
what your organization does now with zero-to-four percent
of the current time and resources, or accomplishing an
increase of 20 times in results while employing the same or
fewer resources. A combination of those results can also be
a 2,000 percent solution.

When first creating a 2,000 percent solution, many people
report discovering that their solution could have been
implemented at any time during the prior 50 years. But no
one had. Why is that?

Here’s a story that helps explain such delays. An executive
works in a business where 95 percent of the ingredients
were once discarded at the end of the production process.
That’s like taking a piece or two of a large wedding cake
and then throwing the rest of the cake away. The
organization first called the unused ingredients “waste”
and dumped that material into the ocean. A new treaty in
the 1970s prohibited this kind of dumping, and the “waste”
went into landfills. Environmental laws were later enacted
that made it more attractive to do something else with the
“waste,” and the leftover ingredients were turned into
“by-products” that didn’t have much value. The executive
redefined those used ingredients as “products” and
discovered that with a little upgrading they became
valuable forms of organic fertilizer that many were anxious
to buy. Soon the executive had developed a large fertilizer
business and was successfully making similar upgrades of
waste into valuable products for other manufacturers.

From this experience, the executive learned that people
only pay a lot of attention to “products,” seldom focus on
“by-products,” and hardly ever examine their “waste.”
Similarly, people pay a lot more attention to 2,000 percent
solutions than to efforts to meet the annual budget
increase of 10 percent. Why? It’s more exciting and
rewarding to develop 2,000 percent solutions. When you
accomplish that first 2,000 percent solution, your
self-esteem reaches a higher level than you ever thought
possible. You’ve done it once and you know you can do it
again.

A parallel observation to Pareto’s Law (referred to by many
as Pareto’s Principle, or the 80/20 principle, meaning that
80 percent of the results can be observed to come from 20
percent of the people doing an activity) states that 80
percent of the results of any economic activity come from
20 percent or less of the efforts. Let’s look at an example.

Imagine that a business has 100 salespeople selling 100,000
units a year. Consistent with the parallel observation to
Pareto’s Law, 20 of those salespeople produce total sales
of 80,000 units per year (an average of 4,000 units per
year) while the remaining 80 salespeople produce total
sales of only 20,000 units per year (an average of 250
units per year. The 20 most productive salespeople create
on average 16 times (4,000/250) more than the average of
the 80 remaining sales people. Matching the performance of
the remaining 80 sales people to what the most productive
20 salespeople accomplish is a 1,500 percent solution.

Within the group of 20, some are more productive than the
others. Let’s assume that the most productive salesperson
produces annual sales of 7,000 units. That amount is 28
times what the 80 less productive salespeople average. If
the less productive people can move up to the productivity
of the most productive salesperson, that’s a 2,700 percent
solution.

Within the group of 80, some are less productive than
others. Let’s assume that the least productive salesperson
who won’t be fired sells merely 100 units per year. If that
person could match the most productive salesperson, that
would be a 6,900 percent solution.

The nature of which customers are served may have something
to do with why these two salespeople vary so much in
productivity. But if the least productive salesperson can
increase performance to even half the average of the most
productive group, that’s still more than a 2,000 percent
solution

Let’s also assume that the company has a more effective
competitor where the most productive salespeople sell on
average 10,000 units per year. Within that group, let’s
also assume that the most productive person sells 18,000
units per year. If some of this success is based on selling
methods that the least productive salesperson in the first
company can emulate but doesn’t use now, that relatively
low performing salesperson would only have to capture
one-eighth of the results of this most productive
competitor‘s salesperson to achieve a 2,000 percent
solution.

In addition, there are probably better performing
salespeople in other industries who could also show the
lowest producing salesperson in the original company how to
improve. By drawing on those examples, the least productive
salespeople can expand their productivity further.

From the first company’s management perspective, notice
that the challenge is different. Only if the salespeople in
total improve their productivity by 20 times does the
company enjoy a 2,000 percent solution. Even if the methods
and personal qualities of the best salesperson can be
duplicated in the rest of the sales force, such a 2,000
percent solution cannot be achieved. That’s because the
company would still need eight salespeople to equal the 100
current salespeople in performance. Only by dropping the
sales force to four people and keeping the same sales level
could the company achieve a 2,000 percent solution.
Reaching that level of performance would mean exceeding the
productivity of the competitors’ best performer. What’s the
solution?

The odds for creating a 2,000 percent solution for the
whole sales force are improved by another factor we haven’t
discussed. Few of the top performing salespeople will be
using identical methods. As a result, you can combine
highly productive techniques to exceed the performance of
even the most effective salesperson.

Likewise, 20 percent of the customers will produce 80
percent of the earnings. So it’s as important whom you sell
to as it is how efficiently you perform. Some organizations
will find that their highest volume salespeople are mostly
bringing in business from relatively unprofitable
customers. As a result the most profitable best practice
may be found among a so-called average performer who only
produces high margin sales. Cross-fertilize the methods of
the high volume salesperson with the high-margin one, and
you should increase the profit-productivity of sales
efforts by much more than 2,000 percent.

For a given organization, simply determining who are most
productive and what they do differently that may account
for their success is a very powerful starting point for
expanding effectiveness. That’s why the few organizations
that do such benchmarking within their company are quick to
find ways to make enormous improvements.

Here’s an important lesson: Pick the highest payoff
opportunities first! We all know that each activity varies
in its significance. For instance, developing new medicines
at a pharmaceutical company is much more valuable than most
other activities. If your company is below average in such
an important activity, the company-wide benefits of either
improving to become above average or outsourcing to an
organization that is above average can result in a 2,000
percent solution for the entire company’s profits. As a
result, those who are wise in selecting the activities to
improve first can make much faster progress than those who
focus in less significant activities.

You should consider an even more important lesson: Some
companies are making tremendous strides by developing skill
throughout their organizations in designing and
implementing 2,000 percent solutions. Such organizations
will have vast advantages over those who simply look at the
internal best practice or the industry best practice, or
outsource to a highly effective outside organization. Such
2,000 percent solution expert companies will be able,
instead, to advance to 5,000 and 10,000 percent solutions.

From that perspective, you can see that achieving a 2,000
percent solution is often a modest target … even though at
first blush a 2,000 percent solution would seem to be the
opposite, a stretch goal.

How much time and effort is involved?  People who have
worked on creating 2,000 percent solutions were often able
to reach 20 times higher performance levels within six
months of implementing this solution development process.
Rarely does it take longer than two years. Individuals who
have developed 2,000 percent solutions usually report being
able to create the plan for one solution with less than 60
hours of effort over a few weeks. Hardly anyone ever
requires more than 120 hours of personal effort.

What are you waiting for?

Copyright 2007 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved

—————————————————-
Donald Mitchell is chairman of Mitchell and Company, a
strategy and financial consulting firm in Weston, MA. He is
coauthor of six books including The 2,000 Percent Squared
Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, The Portable 2,000
Percent Solution, and The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook.
You can read about his work on improving effectiveness at:
http://www.2000percentsolution.com .

― John F. Kennedy

An emergency room (ER) nurse kept hearing complaints from
patients who had been waiting for hours to see a doctor.
After reading The 2,000 Percent Solution, she began to keep
track of how long it took various kinds of patients to get
the attention they needed. She was shocked to find that
those who were too sick or injured to explain their
problems but who appeared to be okay sometimes waited for
more than 10 hours ― even if they needed immediate
treatment. This nurse shared her concerns with the other ER
nurses and physicians. They discussed possible solutions
and decided to train the guards at the door to spot people
who couldn’t explain about themselves and bring a triage
nurse immediately to check the patient. Waiting time for
these vulnerable, hard-to-diagnose patients dropped to less
than 10 minutes. Although her colleagues didn’t know it,
they had just put in place a 2,000 percent solution.

A 2,000 percent solution is any method of accomplishing
what your organization does now with zero-to-four percent
of the current time and resources, or accomplishing an
increase of 20 times in results while employing the same or
fewer resources. A combination of those results can also be
a 2,000 percent solution.

That much improvement probably sounds pretty extreme to
you. It shouldn’t. We’ve all seen 2,000 percent solutions,
but we don’t usually label them as such. For instance, a
slow reader takes a course in better reading methods.
Reading speed increases from 100 words to 1,100 words a
minute while comprehension of what is read doubles. The
reading speed increase is a 10-fold improvement, [(1,100 –
100)/100 = 10], and the doubling of comprehension allows
twice as much to be comprehended in whatever reading time
is involved. When you multiply reading 10 times faster by
double the comprehension, you have a 2,000 percent solution
― a 2,000 percent increase in reading comprehension
per minute from the same time and effort.

What brought 2,000 percent solutions to my attention? I was
attracted to this subject of creating 2,000 percent
solutions because my family depended on a small business
when I was growing up, and 2,000 percent solutions made an
enormous difference in this operation and in my life. I
hope this concept will do the same for you, your family,
and your business or nonprofit organization, whether you
lead it or simply work there.

Let’s look at some more examples to help you grasp what a
2,000 percent solution is. Technology often helps us speed
results without increasing resources. For example, you can
send material halfway around the world now in an e-mail for
a tiny fraction of the cost and time of sending an air
courier package. E-mail is also a 2,000 percent solution
compared to the best method commonly available 20 years
ago: sending a facsimile.

Thinking more clearly about the implications of what needs
to be done can have a similar effect without waiting for
technology to advance. For instance, many electronic
products are now designed to have many fewer parts than the
products they replace. Consequently, repairing products
with fewer parts takes much less time and reduces costs.
For more expensive products, the parts are often monitored
electronically to note when they are about to fail. The
message that failure is imminent is sent to the repair
person before the failure. The part is replaced, and the
customer never experiences a problem. Repeat sales and
profits improve as a result. For less expensive products,
online resources allow customers to diagnose their
problems, implement the proper solutions, and receive
faster results at much less cost than providing hands-on
repairs.

Sharing information throughout organizations has had
similar effects. Many organizations now use business
intelligence software that allows everyone to know what
performance is in the activities each person influences. As
a result, fewer problems occur and the solutions come
faster and less expensively.

More recently, organizations have learned to access better
ideas inexpensively by involving large numbers of experts
through online contests. Goldcorp was a pioneer in this
effort when it sponsored the Goldcorp Challenge in March
2000. Hundreds of the world’s best geologists looked at
Goldcorp’s exploratory drilling results online and produced
a number of excellent suggestions. By spending a few
hundred thousand dollars for a Web site and prizes,
Goldcorp located new gold reserves worth hundreds of
millions.

Topping that success, Larry Huston, vice president of R&D,
Innovation, and Knowledge for Procter & Gamble (P&G),
reported in October 2005 that P&G had run more than 200
versions of the Goldcorp Challenge since 2000. These
contests had yielded innovations with a success rate of
over 80 percent, increased the company’s R&D productivity
by 45 percent, and provided 35 percent of all of P&G’s
successful innovations in recent years.

From these examples, you can see that breakthroughs are
possible for providing 2,000 percent solutions to the most
important organizational tasks. By considering these
examples, I hope you’ll be able to see possible variations
on their themes to establish 2,000 percent solutions for
important tasks where no one yet dreams of such
improvements.

Copyright 2007 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved

—————————————————-
Donald Mitchell is chairman of Mitchell and Company, a
strategy and financial consulting firm in Weston, MA.  He
is coauthor of six books including The 2,000 Percent
Squared Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, The Portable
2,000 Percent Solution, and The 2,000 Percent Solution
Workbook.  You can read about his work on improving
effectiveness at http://www.2000percentsolution.com .

1. New products or services

Blogging allows you to communicate quickly to your client base.  Marketing new products or services can costs thousands of dollars from inception, to printing, to mailing or exectution.  This method has a vital role in any marketing campaign, but what if you could let all of your clients, and potential clients, know the day that begin selling a new product or service.

Having a blog set up on your website would allow you to notify everyone of your new product or service.  You would list your product name, the features, and the benefits it offers.  You can receive instant feedback from people who review your offer from the comments section.  From there, you are able to evaluate, update, or change your offer.

Businesses are using this strategy to move quickly in front of competitors.

2. Attract new clients

Blogging for your business allows you to reach new customers and clients.  In today’s world, potential customers are reviewing products and services online to gather their own research.

They want to make sure they have a comfortable understanding of what your product or services offers.  Blogging is a way for you to highlight your product and differentiate yourself from your competitors.  The more “value” that you are able to demonstrate in your blog, the more likely customers will call you first.

3. Share knowledge and expertise

A business blog allows you to share your own personal and business knowledge and expertise.  This allows potential clients to trust you, and feel confident that you know what you are doing and will be able to solve their problems.

Who doesn’t like to talk about themselves or their business?  Blogging allows you to talk about anything you want to about yourself or your business.  It’s a time where you can share your personal insights and experiences in the industry.  Doing so puts you in the highlight and further exemplifies your expertise and leadership in your business field.

As competition for retaining clients and attracting new ones grow, blogging for you business is a 21st century tool to allow you to keep one step ahead of your competitors.

If you would like help or need more information on setting up your own business blog, please email me at damon@ceoconsultant.com

The who, what, where, when, why, and how

Knowing your competition allows you to identify a niche and
develop your own unique selling proposition (USP). Clearly
defining and understanding the core value you offer your
clients can depend on your having a firm grasp of your
competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

Where do you start?

1) Make a list of your competitors. Think big in this step.
Don’t just think about your direct competition; think about
indirect competition in other industries as well. For
example, as a copywriter I could list my competitors as
fellow copywriters that do freelance work. But I don’t want
to stop there. Other potential competitors may include
large ad agencies, small ad agencies (each may play a
different role with clients), technical writers, a
company’s in-house writers, journalists, and even
fill-in-the-blank templates you can purchase on the
Internet.

2) From this broad-based competitive list, list specific
companies you compete with. For example, in the “other
copywriters” category, I may list Sally Field, Shelby Foot,
and Joe Blow. Under the large agency category, I may have
only one or two large agencies I run up against when
bidding on projects. Follow this procedure until you’ve
gone through all the competing industries. Some may have no
direct competitor and that’s OK; acknowledging the
potential is there–and getting the “big picture” of where
competing business may lie–is what’s important.

3) From this long list of competitors, pick your top three
and do a detailed competitive analysis. These are the three
you should also use for your marketing plan.

Gathering information

The next step in a competitive analysis is gathering
information through competitive intelligence (CI). CI is
the practice of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating
information on what the marketplace requires (the demand),
about how and you and your competitors meet these
requirements (the supply), and how each strives to meet
market needs better than others (the competition).

Gather marketing materials, visit stores, call and ask
questions. These are common ways to collect competitive
data. I go straight to Web sites and find almost everything
I need there.

Here are a few things to look for while gathering
competitive information:

What products/services competitors produce Who their target
audience is Guarantees, pricing, hours of operation, and
delivery options Overall, how do they position themselves
(cheapest, best value, fastest, unique, patented, etc.)?
What is their USP? After collecting this data, do a little
analysis. What is your competition really good at and what
is it not so great at? Are there any holes in their product
offerings? A niche they’re missing? How does your business
fill in the gaps?

—————————————————-
Author of Healthcare Copywriting Secrets Revealed, Kelly
Robbins is an award winning copywriter and marketing
coach/consultant. She also publishes The Healthcare
Marketing Connection
(http://www.healthcaremarketingconnection.com), a free
e-zine on healthcare marketing tips. Contact Kelly to
receive her free report, “5 critical things you must know
when writing for the healthcare industry” -
info@KellyRobbinsLLC.com or 303-460-0285.

First, we had the agrarian economy – all about corn. People
related to their families or village. Their lives were
pretty much regulated by Mother Nature. Get up with the
sun, milk the cows, work the soil, go to bed with the sun.
Life and work weren’t “balanced” –they were integrated –
parts of a whole that were shared through stories and
handed-down wisdom. You didn’t need a “take your daughter
to work” day — she worked with you every day.

Then along came cars. OK, lots of other things came along
about that same time — and the industrial economy overtook
the agrarian economy. Relationships broadened to include
folks at the factory, and sometimes throughout a whole
city. You had contact and connections with way more people
across a much larger geography. Mother Nature as regulator
was displaced by machinery — Get up with the alarm clock
so you can be at the factory before the whistle. Work and
life became separate; labor unions were born to protect our
lifestyles from our work. Child labor laws kept you from
taking your daughter to work.

Today it comes down to concepts. Some call it the
“information economy” or the “imagination economy.” History
will have to decide what this era really is. But what is
clear for now is that just as corn was displaced by cars,
concepts now rule. Not computers or information, but
concepts. That’s where all the new juice is. We can have
relationships with anyone in the world and at the same time
many of us are somewhat isolated — telecommuting or free
agents, working as well as living alone. Mother Nature and
machines have been replaced by the mass media as the main
regulator of day-to-day reality. Our work and lives are
once again more connected as more of us work at home and
telecommute. Now, we need a “take your daughter to work”
day because they’re gone, while we labor at home on work
that is more abstract, more conceptual. Our kids aren’t in
touch with our work lives. They ask “what do you do, Mom?”
And we have a hard time explaining.

Concepts are hard to explain, but they are the fuel for the
current economy. Want a place in the current economy? Be
adept at working with concepts — inventing, adapting,
managing, cataloging, implementing concepts. The more
sophisticated or novel the concept, the more unique your
role will be. As Daniel Pink points out in “A Whole New
Mind,” with concepts we use mostly our right brain , but in
the early stage of the information age we used our left
brain skills. So, there is a shift we need to make.

The shift to concepts as the “main ingredient” of the
economy also necessitates a shift in organizational
culture. “Data driven” can be a good thing, but it’s not
the only thing. In an economy where concepts rule, we need
to return to our “corn” roots and rediscover and
communicate the stories, intuition, feelings and wisdom
that now hold the “concept” economy together. This shift
isn’t just about individual skills, it’s how our
organizations work. And our organizational culture will
need to adapt just as our individual skills and behavior do.

—————————————————-
Take charge of your organization – free resources at
http://fordbusinessconsulting.com/gorillagoods.html .  Dr.
Linda Ford helps leaders create organizations that achieve
superior performance. She has consulted to companies
ranging from small start-ups to Fortune 100 companies as
well as non-profit organizations To learn more about Dr.
Ford, visit http://www.FordBusinessConsulting.com .

We’ve all seen examples of software programs — even from
well-known, respectable software companies — that arrive
on our desktops barely breathing. They seem to be full of
bugs, and thereby cause us more grief than they help us
carry out work. Or we try to use a Web site that looks
great, but we can’t get from the shopping cart to the order
page. Or we buy a new widget, yet even using the
instruction booklet, we can’t jump from the main menu to
the critical functions the way we’re supposed to.

Are you anxious to catapult your business into the ranks of
companies that frustrate their customers this way?

Of course not! Therefore, I’m confident that you will do
things differently.

That’s why testing involves such a systematic, tedious, yet
indispensable sequence of activities. Without a method to
the madness, you’re not doing anything more than randomly
banging on the system to see if by chance you can find a
way to break it. So, what do you need to know to properly
estimate the effort, carry out the process, and keep the
testers happy? Here are 10 strategies for achieving testing
success.

1. Design test scenarios.

What’s a “test scenario”? Each test scenario should be
mirror image of a “use scenario” that’s been guiding a team
to design and develop the system. A use scenario describes
one typical interaction a customer has with the system. For
instance, for an automated teller machine, one scenario
involves a customer inserting a card in order to withdraw
some cash. In another scenario, a customer makes a deposit.
In another, he or she checks the balance.

Scenarios must represent any plausible ways in which users
could interact with the system, including unusual and
unintended actions. So both use scenarios and test
scenarios should account for possible error conditions such
as jammed cards, cancelled transactions, or overdrawn
accounts.

2. Write a test procedure.

A test procedure specifies how testers will exercise the
test scenarios, including the order to follow. In the ATM
example, it might say, “Test withdrawing cash denominations
in this order: $20, $30, $50, $100. Run another test in
reverse order: $100, $50, $30, $20. Then run several tests
in random order.” It should also explain what results to
expect in each case.

You’ll want the procedure to test all new system features
or changes. You’ll also want the procedure to test features
in various combinations. For example, you might specify 1)
withdrawing cash, then 2) checking balance information, and
then 3) making a deposit. Be sure to vary the order, and
test error conditions.

3. Determine what data you need.

If your system stores values in a database, you’ll need to
load some typical data to test the scenarios. In the ATM
example, values would include account balances — for
testing withdrawal limits and giving balance information.
Create the sample data sets and pre-load the systems to be
tested. Don’t forget to include extremely high and low
values!

4. Plan specific roles for testers.

Schedule each tester to focus on specific test scenarios
and related data sets. If there are enough testers, assign
more than one to cover each test scenario. Each person will
approach it differently.

5. Create a bug reporting system.

It could be designed as a form, a database, an e-mail
message, or a combination. Have testers submit bug reports
as they find errors in each round of testing.

6. Establish a test schedule.

The schedule should allow for several iterations of beta
testing. Be sure to clear the schedules of testers for each
round in which they will be participating.

7. Get all materials ready for testing.

The following items should be ready for the kickoff
meeting: A new or updated system, lists or descriptions of
any bugs fixed,  new or updated documentation, test
scenarios and procedures, and so on.

8. Set a start date.

On the start date, hold a kickoff meeting! Also schedule
progress checks. If testers find numerous bugs — or
especially critical ones — before reaching a given
checkpoint, stop testing, fix the bugs and/or
documentation, and return to Step 1. Ask before restarting:
Are new test scenarios or data sets needed?

9. Perform a new round of testing for each new test
baseline.

This means starting the complete test from scratch after
each round of fixes. You can’t sidestep this requirement,
because each time something is fixed, it can “break”
something else. Stop the cycles of testing only when no new
bugs are evident.

10. Plan a reward for a job well done.

Testing is very tedious — so testers need a special
incentive to keep them focused on the goal. Although
they’re helping to produce a high-quality system, a
post-testing party never hurts morale!

Thorough beta testing is essential for producing quality
systems. If you discover errors you can’t fix in time, you
could decide to release a system with known defects
(documented in your “Read-me” notes). The stakes can be
high, so weigh this option carefully before proceeding.

—————————————————-
Adele Sommers, Ph.D. is the creator of the “Straight Talk
on Boosting Business Performance” success formula. To learn
more about her tools and resources and sign up for other
free tips like these, visit her site at
http://LearnShareProsper.com