

October 31, 2005
October 24, 2005
My weekend essentially involved reading the various profit models that Adrian Slywotzky had put forth in his best selling book. It clearly mentions that not more than one model needs to be digested in a week.
What is Local leadership profit ? This involves firms taking up strategies that clearly leverage the leadership position at the regional level and then scale up in a tactical way. A few examples to kick off the understanding are walmart, starbucks who started in a small location, built up the leadership at each of their respective locations and then used it as a weapon to expand to other locations. At the same time, there are umpteen examples of local leaders who find it difficult to scale. What could be the reason ? Is it purely a matter of luck, or are there are operational issues, strategic issues that entail the success of a small local leader firm to take on the world ? Let’s explore
What’s necessary to build a Local business in the first place?
What’s necessary to hold on to the Local business leadership position and scale it (more importantly) ? To answer this question , one must read closely 2 books atleast, Made in America by Sam Walton & Pour your heart in to it by Howard Schultz.
The other profit models which I have not blogged about, but are equally important to understand are
Entrepreneur Profit Model : Extraordinary expense management
Specialist Profit : Lower cost through better knowledge, Better price through reputation, shorter selling cycle, More rapid and universal penetration, Windfall profits because of the replication of high-valu, high margin answers
Installed Base Profit: Install a set of hardware components and generate margins on the software/services part
DeFacto Standard Profit: Be the standard in the market and soon a lot of ancillary players will start supporting the standard which inturn brings an increase in the sales of standard product
Brand Profit: Higher margins through good brand image
October 23, 2005
October 23, 2005
My weekend essentially involved reading the various profit models that Adrian Slywotzky had put forth in his best selling book. It clearly mentions that not more than one model needs to be digested in a week.
What is Local leadership profit ? This involves firms taking up strategies that clearly leverage the leadership position at the regional level and then scale up in a tactical way. A few examples to kick off the understanding are walmart, starbucks who started in a small location, built up the leadership at each of their respective locations and then used it as a weapon to expand to other locations. At the same time, there are umpteen examples of local leaders who find it difficult to scale. What could be the reason ? Is it purely a matter of luck, or are there are operational issues, strategic issues that entail the success of a small local leader firm to take on the world ? Let’s explore
What’s necessary to build a Local business in the first place?
What’s necessary to hold on to the Local business leadership position and scale it (more importantly) ? To answer this question , one must read closely 2 books atleast, Made in America by Sam Walton & Pour your heart in to it by Howard Schultz.
The other profit models which I have not blogged about, but are equally important to understand are
Entrepreneur Profit Model : Extraordinary expense management
Specialist Profit : Lower cost through better knowledge, Better price through reputation, shorter selling cycle, More rapid and universal penetration, Windfall profits because of the replication of high-valu, high margin answers
Installed Base Profit: Install a set of hardware components and generate margins on the software/services part
DeFacto Standard Profit: Be the standard in the market and soon a lot of ancillary players will start supporting the standard which inturn brings an increase in the sales of standard product
Brand Profit: Higher margins through good brand image
October 23, 2005
October 16, 2005
Innumeracy , a book that was referred by Zhao, the fictional teacher in " The art of profitability ". It deals with the lack of a specific set of skills among a lot of people, the lack of a sense of numerical proportion and an appreciation for the irreducible probabilistic nature of the world.
In a sense, the book makes readers aware of a lot of common fallacies that pervade our world view and consequently, our thinking . Innumeracy , in authors words, is the inability to deal comfortable with the fundamental notion of number and chance.
John Allen Paulos urges the readers to develop the skills of estimation by posing few interesting questions like :
In all these questions, it is not important to know the answers to the precise decimal point. However the answers to any of these questions involves getting some basic estimates about various things right ? Now one might be wondering the reason for thinking about these questions.The reason is that it gives one a healthy sense of handling big numbers. Now why should one get a healthy sense of big numbers ? Because , getting a sense of large numbers is a must to get a sense of context and its chance of occurring.
Be it while conducting a business transaction, or reading a newspaper clipping, having a healthy sense of big numbers helps one to take better decisions and be in a better position to analyze opinions and random facts which are publicized in the media.
Apart of focusing on a number of simple mathematical concepts, here are a few learnings from the book :
Overall , a brilliant account of examples and principles which help us view the word in a numerical sense . I was so excited and kicked about the way the principles were presented, that I just rushed to the book store to gulp the sequel to this book , a review on the same will be posted soon…Right now, I am off to dive deep in to the sequel " Beyond Numeracy"
Links : Innumeracy