OSS are all about helping the customer in some way
“It’s one thing to be a ahead of your time. It’s another to change the future.” Lexus. Do telcos need differentiated prestige brands, in much the same way as Lexus is to Toyota? Do they need to differentiate their bit and byte businesses from solution integration and again from apps/content, etc? Telcos tend to be […]
“A smart manager will establish a culture of gratitude. Expand the appreciative attitude to suppliers, vendors, delivery people, and of course, customers.” Harvey Mackay. Over the years, I’ve noticed an approach that is used by some OSS solution integrators / vendors but interestingly, not by others. It’s what’s known as “land and expand.” It’s when […]
“Executive consultant at specialist software development consultancy ThoughtWorks Leslie Barry says the skunk works division becomes a safe place for experimentation. “You do that to attract a different culture that wants to try new things, get stuff done and get it out there faster,” Barry says. “It is about attracting smart, engaged people and giving […]
“Shift No. 6: From Mass-Market Supply to Tailored Offerings. OLD QUESTION: How should we organise our company’s operations to serve the mass market efficiently while offering customised products? NEW QUESTION: How should we organise the supply chain to serve each customer or segment uniquely and provide a tailored customer experience?” Laura Ross Kopczak and M. […]
“Shift No. 5: From Cost Reduction to Breakthrough Business Models. OLD QUESTION: How can we reduce our company’s production and distribution costs? NEW QUESTION: What new supply-chain and marketing approach would lead to a breakthrough in customer value?” Laura Ross Kopczak and M. Eric Johnson in the “MIT Sloan Management Review.” The old and new […]
“Shift No. 2: From Physical Efficiency to Market Mediation. OLD QUESTION: How do we minimise the costs our company incurs in production and distribution of our products? NEW QUESTION: How do we minimise the costs of matching supply with demand while continuing to reduce the costs of production and distribution?” Laura Ross Kopczak and M. […]
“Shift No. 1: From Cross-Functional Integration to Cross-Enterprise too. OLD QUESTION: How do we get the various functional areas of our company to work together to supply product to our immediate customers? NEW QUESTION: How do we coordinate activities across companies as well as across internal functions to supply product to the market?” Laura Ross […]
“Is your company focused on creating value — or on siphoning it off from others? Capturing value from other stakeholders by manipulating the competitive market process to the company’s advantage exposes a company to reputational or legal risks. It also can undermine corporate values. Value extraction is typically easier than developing a competitive advantage through […]
“Social TV app Zeebox (recently rebranded as Beamly) thought it was doing the right thing by moving from a tabbed interface to a navigation drawer, but the results were catastrophic — customer engagement dropped by half! Zeebox scrambled to issue an update that restored the tabbed UI. A second attempt proved equally disastrous. What started […]
“We were trying to empower the networking people and the CIO in an organisation to add some value to bring to marketing, but we found that getting the digital marketing team or the CMO involved early on makes the sales cycle move a lot faster. And we found that, for a lot of our customers, […]
“The best way to systematize your business is to first do each job yourself. Find the best or preferred way to do each task, and create a system for doing it that way that is easy to follow. Repeat this process for every function of your business until every part is systematized..” Michael Gerber. The […]
“…with big data techniques we can start to find out where the clusters of [revenue generating businesses] and where the clusters of bad coverage are so you can be far more selective of where you rollout to.” Kevin Noonan. In yesterday’s blog, we discussed the likelihood of more OSS vendor suites containing large-scale network design […]
“An empty house is better than a bad tenant.” Irish Proverb. As described in an earlier post (High-Rise OSS), multi-tenancy is becoming an important feature for OSS applications, particularly in highly virtualised environments. Aside from the shared infrastructure itself, there are two* key components of multi-tenancy models for OSS implementers to consider. Applications – Naturally, […]
“Spend 70 percent of your time on the core business, 20 percent on related projects, and 10 percent on unrelated new businesses.” Attributed to Eric Schmidt here on CNN.com. Yesterday we spoke of the 70/20/10 Learning Model. Today we apply the same ratio, but this time it relates the the principle used by Eric Schmidt […]
“Turns out that most of us don’t like losing. In fact, it’s what the academics call loss aversion. We feel the pain of loss more acutely than we feel the pleasure of gain. In other words, we may like to win, but we hate to lose.” Carl Richards here on NYTimes. If you’ve ever worked […]
“One of my partners reminds us that, to be a success, a company must not only sell successfully to its immediate customers (“sell-to”), but also enable the customer to sell successfully to his/her end customers (“sell-through”), not just once, but repeatedly. Too often we (as venture investors) see businesses that have revenue traction selling to […]
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Steve Jobs. The quote above is highly relevant for Steve Jobs’ target audience, which was a mass-market retail model where it’s simply not viable to design custom solutions for ever […]
“It started with ‘What incredible benefits can we give to the customer…Where can we take the customer?’ Not starting with ‘Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and how we’re going to market that.’” Steve Jobs. Do you exactly know who uses your OSS (not which customers, but […]
“The traditional business model of utility companies is under threat, with a new approach needed to ensure future success.” EY‘s “Business Pulse: Exploring the dual perspectives of the top 10 risks and opportunities in 2013 and beyond.” Whilst the OSS technologies remain more or less the same, the business imperatives for an OSS are quite […]
“I first met him… at a dinner my mother had put together. On my way there, I thought, ‘Why would I want to meet this guy who picks stocks?’ I thought he just used various market-related things—like volume, or how the price had changed over time—to make his decisions. But when we started talking that […]
