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Showing posts from 2012

Do you like contact with prospects?

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Most companies have (on their site) a contact page. Usually it mentions a physical address and an email. A phone number is not mentioned very often – ‘don’t call us, we call you’. The email looks like this info@......... So far that looks rather logical. The main failure is that I have never received an answer from mails send to these info@ …. addresses. However,  most of my inquiries were related to where I could buy their products! Apparently they are not really interested in having new customers. I would suggest to seriously respond to these questions or to skip the contacts page. Are you responding to customer inquiries? Enthusiasm drives Excellence! www.theproperway.com

The co-……. hype

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You can’t read any article without finding the co-word.    New ones are defined every day. Here are some examples: -          co-authoring -          co-branding -          co-creation -          co-designing -          co-owning -          co-parenting -          co-producer -          co-……. etcetera In essence, this is what co means:                                                   co- |kəʊ| prefix 1 (forming nouns) joint; mutual; common: coeducation . 2 (forming adjectives) jointly; mutually: coequal . 3 (forming verbs) together with another or others: coproduce | co-own . While most challenges clearly do need a team approach, adding the co-word is not a magic recipe for success. Working together (from two to n- people) is in itself not easy. Especially when you bring a group of freelancers or entrepreneurs together. They are all their own bosses and have their own agendas. This is a bit easier when you build teams of empl

Be open to changing the rules (i.e. the system)

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Last week, I did attend the Open Innovation Festival in my city, Amersfoort. It was a nice event, but I really don’t understand why they called it “open”. There was nothing being discussed where ideas were sourced from the community. There were no initiatives to truly engage the local community. It was more about what innovation is. Well, the way it looks to the local government. The mayor and general council gave a presentation about what innovation is. That was really shocking as the content was really poor and missing the point. They did exclude disruptive innovation from the menu! They said that they were only interested in incremental innovations. At the same time cities are confronted with a lot of challenges and a more demanding population. A consulting agency did share that they are experiencing huge problems in aligning all stakeholders (citizens, public servants, management, council and board). If you stick to the old rules and are not open to

What happens if bookkeepers run your biz?

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This week I did get a mail from my car insurance. There was a letter that due to some market conditions, they had to increase the price. I can understand that. So, then I did check the price increase and I couldn’t believe it, as the increase was 56%!! My thought was that this had to be a mistake, so, I did call the insurance. The customer service lady was already glad that I didn’t shout at her, clearly I was not the only one picking up the phone! She had to check this with another department and said she would call me back. She did call me back and sais that indeed there was a mistake, the price increase should have been 50% as that was the maximum increase allowed according to their T&C’s. Again I was flabbergasted, because I have been driving without any damages for at least 22 years! I did tell her that now I was forced to check out other offers in the market and she said that she could understand this. End of call! I did check out several options

There are always opportunities for innovation

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These days, if you follow the news, it is a lot of doom and gloom. Hurricane Sandy, earthquakes, Syrian war, rising numbers of unemployment etc. It is easy to be influenced by this kind of news. Therefor I do recommend spending a minimal amount of time following this negative news. And then you can use the ‘extra’ time to discover inspiring news. There are many blogs, videos, and podcasts, articles that emphasize positive and innovative news. These circumstances provide a good breeding ground for new innovations. Please bear in mind that most innovations start at the edge and not at the center of most activities. It is hard to be innovative if you follow the pack. For example, I just listened to an interview with someone from Aurora pens and he said that the focus on standardization (in his case pc’s tablets, phones) gives him the opportunity to specialize in a niche area (nice writing instruments). He even mentioned a research that some schools in Italy are ha