To Love or To Be Loved

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Who You Love or Who Love You

          This is a classic question in finding a true love. Of course, we all want the one we love to love us. But, that’s not always possible. If you can’t have that, would you choose the one who love you or the one you love? In other words, would you choose the one who gives you happiness or the one you would have give him/her happiness?

          We can spend countless time arguing about this. But here is an interesting point when you choose to give (rather than take) happiness. Happiness is not cheap. You need to find the one who worths sacrificing. The one you are truly willing to devote yourself to. That’s the meaning of choose the one you would give happiness over the one who gives you happiness. 

Help Users Get Their Job Done

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Get the job done

          Why does a product succeed? The simple answer is that the designer think of what the users want, not what they want. For example, most furniture store would divide the market demographically, and try to find products that fit each segment. But no one buys a certain product because he is a male whose age between 30-40. They buy products because they need to get the job done, and the products help them get the job done. 
          In the previous post, I blogged about the job of milkshake isn't to be delicious, but to help users get through boring traffic or to help a dad seem like a good dad. The followings are few more examples:

What is Social Media?

     I came across a very good slide show on Social Media. It is very concise, informative, and inspiring, and it fits well to beginners who would like to start learning about Social Media. Have a look and let me know what you think.

What is Social Media? from Martafy

Why Social Media

1. Marketing channel
2. Public relation
3. Customer service
4. Loyalty-building
5. Collaboration
6. Networking
7. Thought leadership
8. Customer acquisition

Basic Rules

1. Listen
2. Engage
3. Measure

A Story of Milkshake

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          Once upon a time, a restaurant was trying improve the sale of milk shake. So, it hired a marketing team to find the demographic, and even made a questionnaire to ask the customers how to make better milkshake. Unfortunately, after all the effort, the sale didn’t improve.
          Another group of researchers used another approach. They asked themselves ‘what job does milkshake help people to get done’. They asked questions like what time did they come?, what clothes did they wear?, did they come alone?, did they buy other food with it?, and did they eat in? These questions lead them to interesting insights.

          Most morning buyers are commuters who have a long drive and need to get through mid-morning hunger. The main job of milkshake is not to taste good, but to help making the commuting less boring. 

Life is too short. Don't wait for perfection

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 The First Strategy Is Usually Wrong

A particular research shows that most companies do not success because they have a great initial strategy. They succeed because they do not use all their money for their first attempt. They first attempt usually fails. However, they learn from mistakes and pivot quickly.
On the other hand, a lot of ventures fails because they are so sure about the opportunity. They spend all their money in the opportunity only to realize after the failure that some of their assumptions was wrong.

Good and Bad Capital

          A good capital is the one that seeks profit before growth. This concept helps ensure that the company would grow slowly but surely. 

But, it is often hard to resist the temptation to use the capital for growth, because the satisfaction of seeing growth is much larger than seeing profit. After all, most people would ask ‘how much does your company worth?’ not ‘how much profit does your company make?’

             

Life and Focus

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 “In my experience, high-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the persons they want to be at work, and far too little on the persons they wanna be at home.”

 Apart from Work, There's Life

Work is just one dimension in life. We also have our family, our friends, and our health to consider. So, having strategy for career would not be enough for us.

We Are Just Too Impatient

Humans naturally tends to focus on what yields high immediate return. We tend to give more priority to work than to our family, simply because we can see our career flourish in a few months or a few years. But, we have to invest so many years in order to raise a great kid.

Allocate Your Resource to Fulfill Your Strategy

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“In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intention unless it’s effectively implemented.”

Problem of resource allocation 

The problem of implementing a strategy is the limited resource. So, we need to carefully select the resource for the right strategy.

Innovator Dilemma

Unfortunately, resource allocation is not an easy task. Often, we face the conflicting goals. For example, short-term goals usually conflict with long-term goal. The goals of entrepreneurs usually conflicts with that of big companies.   

How Should I Plan My Future

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Anticipated and Unanticipated

          Choices come from two sources: Anticipated and unanticipated strategies. You can plan ahead of time for ‘deliberate opportunity’. However, you should never be too stubbornly blind to see new ‘unanticipated opportunities’. 

          Nicely planned strategies give you confidence and corroborate the chance of success. But, no strategy is perfect. You may spend a lot of time trying to perfect your plan. But, things often do not go according to the plan, just because no one can predict future perfectly. 

          A better strategy is to plan out up to a certain extent, and be flexible in execution. During execution, you may see a new opportunity you did not anticipate at the planning phase. A new strategy--called an ‘emergent strategy’--may come out of unanticipated opportunities.