Archive for Inspirational
Providing peak experiences and the power of premium
Posted by: | CommentsIf you read my last blog post you would know that David and I recently had a four night getaway at Hayman Island in the Whitsundays, a venue which is also hosting a major Australian leaders forum this week, that you can read all about at Business Spectator.
Our trip though was for R & R and not business thankfully though while we were there I couldn’t help but notice how many things done by the Hayman team and in delivering the Hayman experience, provided some unique insights into concepts that could be deployed in other places and other businesses.
One of these was the notion of offering a ‘peak experience’ to the customer base, not something that everyone will want to do, and the cost of it can be one of the factors that makes it exclusive, but something that can be nevertheless considered a pinnacle experience, a really neat thing to do. Read More→
Building on fantastic, Hayman a lesson in constant improvement
Posted by: | CommentsWhen David and I sat down at the offices of our mentor Dr Terry Cutler in the warm summer days of January 2009, our goal was to draw up a mud map of our experiences starting up, growing and then selling Arts Hub.
However, we didn’t just want to map out and then tell the Arts Hub story, we wanted to condense the journey into some key lessons for those who wanted to venture into niche publishing. It was our belief then and it still is that one of the great frontiers online that has only partly been exploited is that of niche content.
What we mean by that is that if you can provide content of a high quality in a specialist or niche field for a bunch of people who are interested in or work in that area, then you can create a product that those people will pay for. Many of us understand that it’s important to keep abreast of the trends and challenges in our industry or even in an area that is a hobby for us, and pulling this sort of information together for people has a value. Read More→
A holiday in your mind
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the things that happens when life starts to speed up again and all systems are starting to crank up is that as an entrepreneur it’s really easy to get stressed and feel the strain of a zillion balls all being juggled at once.
I mean you’re the one at the top of the company leading the charge, everyone looks to you for a decision, and if there’s just you rolling out a big vision, well then, when do you get time to sleep? Read More→
Innovation versus recycling old concepts
Posted by: | CommentsThere are some days when pursuing what appears to be a safe business practice or concept is really little more than recycling something that is known, has worked before but there are no guarantees that it will continue to work going forward.
More interesting for me are those businesses that build on what’s been done in the past, but do it in such a way that they create something quite new. Indeed if you’re breaking new ground you have permission to do things a little more out-of-the-box, the sides of the box have not yet been defined in fact you’re doing the defining as you’re going about things.
While it’s important not to reinvent the wheel, it’s also important to not be too derivative. Technologies and business that build on what’s known but take the opportunity off into a new, hitherto unnoticed direction are those who have the true potential to clean up big in my view.
Dr Terry Cutler in his time as Chairman of Arts Hub, often used to say to me – don’t follow the pack, be the market organiser. Do what you do differently enough that you can enforce a whole new way of looking at things in your market place. Even better, create that marketplace.
Just a little food for thought today. The word innovation is bandied around so often that I fear it sometimes loses its meaning. In my experience, you innovate when you build something new, interesting and useful beyond what is known and expected and accepted as being true.
Innovation can be jiggling old stuff around, but it's more than recycling worn-out concepts
And one more point on innovation. Some friends of the Into the Mountain crew have recently started a new business aggregating the resources and opportunities in the customer service space and they’ve invented a whole new term for what they’re doing. The business is www.clienteerhub.com and hats off to Ray Brown and Matt and Tim McDougall for creating a whole new language and canon around the area of customer service. Redefining something in an existing area in such a way that you unlock it’s real importance and give it the sort of value it should have had in the first place is really, really clever innovation. We wish the clienteerhub team all the best and we’re sure we’ll be talking more about their content and what they’re doing in the near future. For now check out their first clienteerTV interview with Ben Watson, Principal of Enterprise User Experience at Adobe.
Photo: flickr miguelpdl
The Matt Smith Effect
Posted by: | CommentsDavid and I have worked in online businesses and projects for the best part of 15 years now and coming from arts and media backgrounds we’ve both had somewhat of a bias towards running projects in an egalitarian, collaborative way. For us, this approach hasn’t always been successful and it is indeed cumbersome, takes time and you need to be supremely patient. In the meantime the competition can have the jump on you while you’re still fiddling around trying to get group consensus. Read More→
What we get up to when we’ve fallen off the radar
Posted by: | CommentsI’d like to apologise to our regular Into the Mountain readers as you will have noticed that our blog posts have been a bit random over the past few weeks.
This does not signify a lack of interest or desire to write about what we understand or come to know in the entrepreneurial business space, but does indicate that David and Fiona have been up to our own ventures again.
In between consulting David and I have been putting our efforts towards a couple of new businesses we’re launching. Read More→
What I learned waiting for a train on platform 13 after the footie
Posted by: | CommentsMy theme for Into the Mountain for the last little while has been the notion of returning to childhood and kindergarten and examining what it takes to get on with other kids and to play well in the sandpit. The sandpit of course is an analogy to the whole of life and business, and lessons learned in the sandpit are hopefully ones that are enduring and universal and we can take with us wherever we go and whatever we do. Read More→
The sandpit bully
Posted by: | CommentsAfter writing yesterday’s post on playing nice in the sandpit, and making sure that when you’re in business, you try choose colleagues and associates who you have confidence are going to play nice when the chips are down, all isn’t as it should be, or there are some conflicts of interest or conflicts over resources. If you and the other party, continue to play business nice when things aren’t smoothe then chances are you’re going to have a long business relationship and plenty of mutual successes (and probably some dips too – but you’ll all live to tell the tale) along the way.
One of the biggest frustrations I experienced in my time tethered to the corporate world was the fact that you don’t get to choose who you work with. One of the big expectations in organizations and companies is that we all need to do double, triple bendbacks to adjust ourselves to all the different personalities we have to deal with in the modern workplace. As someone who is focused around outcomes and who avoids personality politics as if they were the plague, I find this expectation really unworkable. For me, there are some people I wouldn’t trust with a barge pole between the two of us, and one of the starting points of any meaningful project or business challenge is that all those involved in it, have a level of trust in what the other parties are doing (and in themselves also). Read More→
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