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Showing posts from December, 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