Innovate Where You Differentiate
In Best Practices are Stupid, I discuss the need to “innovate where you differentiate.” That is, discover what you do better than everyone else and rally all of your innovation efforts around that. In the book I discuss one company that does this well – USAA. They provide financial services to families of the military. For […]
Line Thinking at 3M
From my experience, 80% of innovations within most companies are “dot solutions.” That is, innovations are typically developed by individuals from a single domain of expertise. Deep expertise is valued. Dig deep wells. (for more on my perspectives on dot vs line thinking, please read my article from a while back – this is a […]
Do Less, Make More
In the September issue of “Speaker Magazine” (published by the National Speakers Association), I have a 3-page article. It is called: Do Less, Make More: Work Only One Hour a Day by Mastering Leverage. Here’s the beginning… I’ve been trying an experiment. For the last six months, I’ve been working, on average, only one hour each day on […]
How To Work One Hour A Day And Have A Thriving Business
Do you run a small business? Or does your small business run you? As entrepreneurs, there are countless things we could do to grow or improve our businesses. It’s easy to keep busy 100 hours a week. I know—I’ve done so countless times throughout my career. Unfortunately, I’m not the only one who has convinced himself […]
Do You Really Think for Yourself?
The question, “Do you really think for yourself?” isn’t as easy to answer as you might think. When a challenge or problem arises at work and you’re unsure of an answer, you probably rely on the judgment of others. But what if you know the answer to the problem? How likely are you to be […]
Launching a Business? Don’t Leap Before You Leverage
I’ve had a recurring conversation with quite a few friends and colleagues lately. They’re unhappy in their current jobs and want to do something different. For many, this means becoming an entrepreneur and launching their own business. Conventional wisdom suggests they will follow one of two distinct paths: They’ll leave their current jobs and make […]
Book Review by Gartner
Jake Sorofman, a Research Director at Gartner, just reviewed “Best Practices Are Stupid.” His review started… Don’t let its compact size—or snarky title—fool you. It’s a worthwhile read. Unlike so many other books in this particular genre, it doesn’t disguise otherwise straightforward concepts with overwrought explanation. Shapiro gets straight to the point with 40 often […]
Avoid Technology for the Sake of Technology
It seems that all too often, innovation has become synonymous with technology. I was recently working with a company that had a number of challenges they wanted to solve. Most of them looked something like this… “How can we use big data in order to better understand customer needs?” Of course, this is a common […]
Work One Hour a Day
Do you feel overworked? Do you feel as though you never have time to relax? What if you needed to work only one hour a day? I was recently interviewed by Dorie Clark for Forbes.com and discussed how I do this with my business. To be clear, I do not work one hour a day. […]
Everyone Reacts Differently
Back in 1996, I was conducting an important three-day “train the trainer” session for a program we were launching at Accenture. I was personally training 200 top client partners and managers. It was critical that we got everyone’s buy-in. At the end of day one, the partner in charge of program, Bob, asked me how […]