Both Kodak and Fuji were similar – both enjoyed lucrative near-monopolies of their home markets. Kodak selling film in America and Fujifilm in Japan. Both firms saw their traditional business rendered obsolete. However, due to key strategic moves, Fuji transformed into a solid profitable business with a market cap of 12.6 B to Kodak 220 M. [...]
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I have not attended MITX (The Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange) events prior to Dec 2011, but it is a great organization to be involved with. Emily Green, Chairman of Yankee Group, reached out to me last year regarding MITX and I was recently invited as a judge to the 16th Annual MITX Annual Awards. [...]
Understanding customer needs is extremely critical to develop a successful product. During my first week at one of the companies I previously worked at, the Director of Development at that time asked me “Here is the product we developed, could you please let us know what the value of it is to our customers?” Yes, [...]
Couple of weeks ago, I attended an event where Pragmatic Marketing’s Steve Johnson was the speaker. It was a very interactive conversation and Steve asked the attendees a question while discussing win/loss analysis – “if you asked your sales people, what is the biggest reason for their losses, what would they answer?”, the attendees [...]
With 26 executives and managers from product management and marketing community from the Boston area, we launched the 2011 BPMA Executive council last week. Executives and managers come from 24 different companies ranging from corporate firms like CA, ADP, Cisco, Fidelity to start-ups like Netprospex, Centage and Ankota. The group comes from diverse backgrounds and [...]
One of the topics discussed at our recent Executive Council event is to understand what helps your career the most – is it who you know or what you know? Based on the collective wisdom, here are some key points: You need both: Most of the opinion was to have a combination of both [...]
How many of us can actually run a full page ad like this? Taco Bell’s confidence is admirable to do this in response to the recent law suit claim that their beef taco filling doesn’t actually contain all that much meat (whether they are really thankful or not is a whole different story..). Three things [...]
In the current economy, most companies expect GMs to accomplish results with fewer resources and more budget cuts than ever before. Nothing changes with your budget cuts though – you are expected to achieve the same top line growth and same NOI growth slated for you – just don’t ask us for more $s – [...]
A few years ago, one fine sunny Tuesday morning, as I was trying to get through my regular marketing meetings, our Executive Admin dropped by to deliver a surprise news (not positive though) – that my boss’s boss is visting us in a week and I need to present a full fledged business plan for a new [...]
Based on my experiences writing business plans for both start-ups and Fortune 500 corporations, I have developed a template that can be used as a business tool in any scenario. Given below are two versions - detailed and short. Use the short version first to see if your executives/investors have interest in the idea. If they do, [...]
