The OctopOSS is waiting for new business models itself, but also facilitates new business models for CSPs and their customers
“48% of sales people never follow up with a prospect 25% of sales people make a second contact and stop 12% of sales people only make three contacts and stop ONLY 10% of sales people make more than three contacts 2% of sales are made on the first contact 3% of sales are made on […]
“Companies can get too big. There is such a thing as diseconomies of scale, which occurs when companies get less efficient after reaching a certain size.” Chris Mayer In the agrarian age, a vendor typically had a small, local, loyal tribe. In the industrial age, “factories” dominated creating vastly more product more efficiently and was […]
“We’re just going to have more and more traffic, and more and more congestion. Regardless of whether we decide to go forward with these projects or not, one way or the other, we will pay.” Jacob Snow Okay, so your OSS/BSS can’t really protect you from getting the flu, but perhaps it can ease congestion […]
“Don’t try to tell the customer what he wants. If you want to be smart, be smart in the shower. Then get out, go to work and serve the customer!” Gene Buckley. As President of Sikorsky Aircraft, Gene Buckley knows a bit about servicing a specialised field with knowledgeable customers, just like the OSS industry. […]
“If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is.” Jan Carlzon As much as we may consider CSPs to be the customers of OSS, the real customers are actually the ones using the CSP’s services. There is massive change underway for almost all CSPs globally, perhaps with the exception of […]
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Bill Gates. I’d extend this one step further in the world of OSS and look to learn from your competitors’s most unhappy customers. Chances are that they’re making the same mistakes as discussed in this Toyota Five-Whys Analysis of OSS. It’s better to learn from the […]
“I can cite numerous sponsors at different places in my career that made a huge difference for me just in terms of pulling me aside and giving me a tip or some coaching.” Denise Morrison. In many organisations, a project sponsor is simply the person who has the budget to approve a new project. When […]
“Professional sports is a business.” Lynn Swann The above is true, but is there also a lot that business can learn from professional sports? With most professional sports, there is a clear goal for every team, the championship at the end of each season. This defines the vision that all players and coaches are working […]
“Eliminate the things that don’t matter, that you’re never going to get better at or that you’re already good at. What’s left are the places where you have the opportunity to change your position in the market.” Seth Godin In many ways, the quote above holds true for whether you’re a vendor, a CSP or […]
In the State of the Asian CXO Survey 2012 by T.C Seow, there has been a clearly identified increase in corporate culture being an inhibitor of innovation. Seow speculates “that there is now conflict between senior management and the younger, so-called Generation Y executives or millennials who do not see eye-to-eye with their bosses. Perhaps there […]
“Consultants do most of their best work live (asking questions, innovating answers) while novelists virtually never do their work live.” Seth Godin This quote was from an interesting blog entry about doing it live. As discussed in the blog post, Seth compares and contrasts between live music and pre-recorded music. Pre-recorded music sells 500 times more than […]
“The buck stops here!” Harry S. Truman A CSP starts with it’s evolving service catalog (ie the definition of the services that it offers) and ends with the ongoing reliability of the network and associated services. If these steps, or any of the other steps in between fall away, then the CSP’s brand power will […]
“I love inventing worlds and characters and settings and scenarios.” Jerry B. Jenkins Have you played the “What if?” game with your OSS lately? Following on from yesterday’s post about moonshots, have you done any “what if?” analysis on how various possible moonshots might effect your OSS? What if the current network technologies were superseded […]
“Here is the surprising truth: It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better… when you aim for a 10x gain, you lean instead on bravery and creativity — the kind that, literally and metaphorically, can put a man on the moon.” Astro Teller on wired.com […]
“Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.” Ralph Waldo Emerson As an OSS consultant, it sometimes* saddens me to see powerful OSS systems being abandoned by organisations who have invested so much, but are now unable or unwilling to make use of their systems. There are so many […]
“You need to feel frustration and discomfort before you can really learn.” Jamie on 37signals.com blog How did you feel when starting out on your first OSS project? Frustration and discomfort were definitely two of the many feelings that I felt. The learning curve was definitely steep. And the more I learnt, the more obvious […]
“When you’re building a new product, you’re often thinking about all the new things people are going to be able to do with it. Now they can do this, now they can do that. Exciting! But there’s a better question to ask: What are people going to stop doing once they start using your product?” […]
“A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.” Frank Morgan The same is true of OSS products. You may love your product and your customers. But do your customers love you and your products? There are many products in many CSPs around the world […]
“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity” Albert Einstein There are many things that spawn my passion for OSS, but the strongest reason is brilliantly encapsulated in Einstein’s quote above. There are a loooooong list of difficulties with OSS in their current form: They have many layers of complexity They are time consuming to implement They […]
“There is so much anger, distrust, greed, and pettiness that we are losing our capacity to work well together.” Margaret J. Wheatley An entrepreneur can have a level of greed – the desire to bring a new product to market and see it used by as many customers as possible, without being exploitative. There is […]
