My Manager is AI
Have you ever wondered who instructs a Uber driver or a Postmate or Deliveroo worker what to do next, which route to take and how he is being rated. Right. It is algorithm. Self training AI.
The Buyer is changing
What is buyer enablement? A discussion hosted by Product Marketing Community featuring Michele Buckley (Research Director, Gartner) Tim Riesterer (Chief Strategy Officer, Corporate Visions) and Fred Studer (then CMO, FinancialForce, now CMO TIBCO) dived deep into the subject and here are the highlights :
Managing Distractions
We all are distracted at work. To push complex work at hand to a later time span – a digital age procrastination. Nir Eyal wrote a whole book to help manage distractions on and in this article he underlines 4 steps that could potentially reduce distractions and points to “Bricker’s work using acceptance and commitment therapy in smoking cessation programs “
Learning from Competitors
There has been a lot of advice to the contrary. While I understand that as a philosophy – to focus on your customer and not your competitor – on the ground it makes a lot of tactical sense to know what the competitors are up to and how the ecosystem is reacting to their moves.
The Contrarian
I sat through a session organised by TiE,Bangalore of Francisco Santolo the founder of Scalabl – Argentina based Academy of Entrepreneurship and innovation, during his recent trip to the city. He had some radical views and an endearing personality making him instantly likeable. His core message was – the current VC funded startup ecosystem is broken. And in this article in Medium he explains why. It is useful to look at alternate thought processes from time to time to ensure you are doing what is right for your dream and not what is expected in the current discourse of building a startup. If you follow my posts you will know I do agree with a lot of this line of thinking and have followed and written about Rand Fishkin and others who have contrarian views to the current discourse.
Learning from Failure
In technology, failures were the stepping stones for all success.The thousands of prototypes Edison built for the electric bulb to NASA building its lunar module where the engineering philosophy was “There are no random anomalies”. In this Fast Company article Charles Fishman writes about two such amongst 1400 documented failures during development – one related to the the iconic triangle windows shattering and the high pressure helium tank bursting. The second was one of the solved puzzles while the first with the window glass, remains part of 22 that were never solved.
Planning sales growth with data
Logan Strain collated 4 Sales Research Studies and their findings for the Inside Sales Blog. All of us who are trying to enhance sales effectivity will do well to take a look at the studies and deep dive into the data. It will help move away from gut to data driven sales planning.
Using willpower Vs designing your environment for success
Benjamin Hardy, PhD who I have referred to a few times through this year has written a whole book ‘Willpower Doesn’t work’ – about why over reliance on will power is bound to fail. To make his point he quotes the findings of historian Will Durant – the author of The Story of Civilization – a labour of love that took him over 4 decades to complete. This is what he concluded – ‘“history was not shaped by great men, but rather by demanding situations.”
Mark Leslie ’s Law: When Small Meets Large, Small (Almost) Always Wins
Mark Leslie was the founding Chairman and CEO of Veritas Software. During his tenure as CEO, the company went from 12 to 5,500 employees and from annual revenue of $95,000 to $1,500,000,000. Currently he is a Lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he teaches courses in Entrepreneurship, Ethics and Sales Organization.
Get paying users. Let someone else change the world.
I found this interesting article by David Mercer of smepals.com in AllBusiness. He shares 5 lessons he learnt in his entrepreneurial journey and they made a comprehensive list of learnings.
