Amy Wohl on the importance of Business Models:
In order for a business model to work, there must be a sense
of where the money is coming from, what it will be spent on,
and where and when revenues and profits will be achieved.
Setting priorities means getting these in the right order
and in the right relative magnitude.
Setting priorities means:
- deciding what to spend money or other resources on and in what order
- selecting a market segment and having the discipline to stay there from both a product perspective and a customer one
- choosing a marketing mechanism and appropriate partners and sticking with them (unless it’s not working)
- adding new things to the mix (product features, products, product lines, acquisitions, market segments, partners, etc.,only when earlier priorities have been satisfactorily accomplished or abandoned as no longer suitable
This is hard stuff. When things are going slowly it’s very
hard not to take on customers opportunistically even if they
don’t fit your focus and will take you away from your
plans — but you should. It’s even harder to have the
discipline to control spending to the plan when you see
competitors throwing money about madly and you have some in
the bank — but you’ll be happy you did when you make it to
the next milestone and they’re falling apart.
Peter Drucker on the impact of the Internet in Business 2.0:
The Internet has tremendous importance, but only marginal [economic] sizeThe Internet eliminates distance. That is its impact.Today, the Internet eliminates distance for communication. A client of mine, a major financial services company, moved 85 percent of its telephone customer service — calls from customers, such as “Where is my dividend check?” — from the Midwest to Bangalore. India has a large population of well-educated, English-speaking women. They go to school to get an American accent. You call from Milwaukee and don’t know whom you are talking to. If the question is not routine, she pushes a button and you are speaking to someone over here. As far as the customer is concerned, you have no idea where they are. The reason you go to India is not even the wage differential — you can’t get people in this country to do that terribly boring job.
The cultural impact of the Internet is far greater than the economic one. The important effect is on the middle classes in these half-developed countries. They don’t see themselves as part of their economy, but as part of the worldwide developed economy. This may be the next development: the emergence of psychologically global middle classes.
