$14 beer and $7 hot dogs at sports stadiums. Why is that the right price? Or strategy? This podcast from the folks at Planet Money could be an excellent case analysis for price/volume trade-offs and other considerations in pricing....
Do your advertisements provide clear positioning to your target customers? Here are two commercials from Ford and GM that are great examples to consider. Watch the two commercials side-by-side and decide for yourself....
Do I believe in the importance of knowing how to calculate the profit maximizing price, understanding the elasticity of demand, and appreciating price/volume trade-offs? Absolutely! Every business person / entrepreneur should have a good grasp of these fundamentals. But that doesn't mean we have to set the price at the profit maximizing price, because that's what came out of Excel. What's your objective?...
Interesting article this morning in the NYTimes that highlights the challenges of keeping business education relevant in today's rapidly changing environment. Here's an excerpt, with a link to the full article that uses some examples from Cornell Tech's innovative program that brings M.B.A. candidates and graduate students in computer science together. Greg Pass, the former chief technology officer of Twitter, put the matter succinctly. The M.B.A., he observed, is “a challenged brand.” That’s because the degree suggests a person steeped in finance and corporate strategy rather than in the digital-age arts of speed and constant experimentation — and in skills like...
Stanford's How to Start a Start-up course by Sam Altman is built around guest lectures / discussions by the folks who have done it themselves. Recently, the course focused on how build great culture - perhaps the most important ingredient of successful businesses - and brought in Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann. Here are seven of their points distilled by Gregory Ferenstein (with link to full article at the bottom). 1. "Don’t f*ck up the culture.” 2. “Companies around for a really long time had a clear mission. A clear sense of values, and they had a shared...
If you are managing social media, you no doubt have wondered about things such as: Are short posts more effective than long ones? What time of day is most effective to post? Here's an article that summarizes some research that sheds some light on those issues. Remember, however, that you have to keep in mind your target market! These are very broad results and may not be representative of your customers. http://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-stats-studies...
I've always been a fan of Guy Kawasaki. Lots of great advice in this presentation for would-be entrepreneurs. Top 10 Mistakes of Entrepreneurs (with recommended solutions)...
This looks like an interesting conference that is being hosted at Brown University in Providence, RI in just a few weeks. The conference is completely student-run and features a number of fabulous speakers. So, if you happen to be in the Northeast, it could be a great way to spend a weekend! Here's the blurb from one of the organizers: You're invited to the A Better World by Design conference! This will be our seventh year hosting our student-run conference on environmentally and socially conscious design, and we would love for you to be a part of...
While disruptive technologies get most of the headlines these days, incremental improvements can lead to significant competitive advantage over the long run, especially if those improvements are done continuously. Here's an article about how Britain's cycling coach did just that to achieve a win in the Tour de France. When you think about it, that is precisely what metrics analysis sets out to do - helping us measure improvement (even small improvement) in key areas that over time can have a big impact on the performance of a business. This Coach Improved Every Tiny Thing by 1 Percent and...
Remember being graded on the curve? Maybe you still are. Should managers "grade" their employees' performance on the curve? What impact does this have on employee morale and company culture? What is the role of employee development under this system? These are some of the questions pondered by Josh Bersin in his LinkedIn post, The Myth of the Bell Curve....