Digital Vitamin

06/07/2019

06/07/2019

Celebrating Pride Month

06/07/2019

In pursuit of magic

04/02/2019

Whether you’re gearing up for the upcoming conference circuit as a keynote speaker or a networker, marketing events represent one of the best ways to learn about the latest marketing trends and strategies. It’s also a great way to mingle and build meaningful connections with other marketers and industry leaders. They provide a platform for stepping up your marketing game in 2019 and beyond.

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It’s essential to invest in yourself as a marketing expert and keep up with the most recent changes. One of the ways to stay ahead of the curve is by attending marketing conferences. Here are some of the conferences I’ve spoken at or attended and had good experiences with.

09/19/2018

Quality is the best business plan.

09/11/2018

Morning breakfast! Thank you for the sweet treats... .

09/04/2018

Companies still run by their founders have a certain magic. That’s not just a hunch — among public companies since 1990, returns to shareholders were three times greater at firms where the founder is still part of the management team. In an upcoming book and in a recent article in Harvard Business Review, my coauthor Christopher Zook and I identify the qualities of “the founder’s mentality” and show how all organizations, even those whose founders have long retired, can harness its vitalizing effects. We believe that a company’s best hope to sustain profitable growth is to stay true to the characteristics that great founding management teams naturally possess.

The founder’s mentality has three components: It requires that companies view themselves as business insurgents, fighting on behalf of an underserved customer; that they have an obsession with the front line, where the business meets the customer; and that they foster an owner’s mindset, which keeps them fast, bold, and infused with a deep sense of responsibility for long-term results. As part of our research to understand these attributes, we interviewed scores of founders and ran dozens of workshops with leaders of the Founder’s Mentality 100 (a network of fast-growth, mostly founder-led companies). Almost all of the founders we interviewed provided useful lessons, but three CEOs in particular exemplified each of the qualities that make the founder’s mentality so powerful.

Robbie Brozin and the insurgent mission
In 1987, a Portuguese audio engineer named Fernando Duarte took a friend, South African entrepreneur Robbie Brozin, to a small takeout restaurant in a suburb of Johannesburg. Brozin found the chicken there so delicious that he made a radical move: He bought the restaurant, renamed it Nando’s, in honor of Fernando, and made plans to expand. In the years since, Nando’s has become one of the most successful chicken restaurant chains in the world, with more than 1,200 restaurants in 23 countries.

What’s the secret to Brozin’s success in a world with no shortage of chicken joints? He and his employees rally around an insurgent mission. Every day they make a conscious choice to be world-class at the few extraordinary capabilities that make it possible to deliver a better product or service to customers. Great founders focus ruthlessly on these capabilities — and they accept that they cannot be world-class at everything, only the things that truly matter.

This “spikiness” is the key to staying competitive, but it isn’t easy. To make everybody happy, to serve every need, to hedge every bet, many CEOs spread resources around democratically as their companies grow — and they lose the spikiness on the cost sheet that is the telltale sign not of profligacy but of focus. The result is a slide into mediocrity.

Read full article: https://bit.ly/1LmAfF7

08/14/2018

“As a ‘new’ customer value, can play a relevant role in differentiating a brand’s proposition from that of its main competitors.” – Giuseppe Leone, brand analyst for Giorgio Armani

The postmodern consumer's search for authenticity has become a challenge that companies of various industries are facing in the race for authenticity.

08/01/2018

Nothing good comes easy!

07/24/2018

Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. By WHY I mean your purpose, cause or belief - WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care?

People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.

We are drawn to leaders and organizations that are good at communicating what they believe. Their ability to make us feel like we belong, to make us feel special, safe and not alone is part of what gives them the ability to inspire us.

For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not “integrity,” it’s “always do the right thing.” It’s not “innovation,” it’s “look at the problem from a different angle.” Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea - we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation.

Happy employees ensure happy customers. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders—in that order.

Leading is not the same as being the leader. Being the leader means you hold the highest rank, either by earning it, good fortune or navigating internal politics. Leading, however, means that others willingly follow you—not because they have to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to.

You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.

Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them. People are either motivated or they are not. Unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work toward, they will motivate themselves to find a new job and you’ll be stuck with whoever’s left.

Trust is maintained when values and beliefs are actively managed. If companies do not actively work to keep clarity, discipline and consistency in balance, then trust starts to break down.

All organizations start with WHY, but only the great ones keep their WHY clear year after year.”
― Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action