Home » Planning
Category Archives: Planning
How many times should you try?
How many times should you try?
The Business Plan
The Business Plan
Jim Ellis talks about the elements of a successful business plan as well as common mistakes related to its development and use.
Bill Gates: How to Fix Capitalism
TIME Magazine editor Richard Stengel discusses creative capitalism with Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates.
Jeff Bezos Biography – Biography.com
Jeff Bezos – Biography.com
Amazon’s business model is deceptively simple: Make online shopping so easy and convenient that customers won’t think twice. It can almost be summed up by the button on every page: “Buy now with one click.”
Why has Amazon been so successful? Much of it has to do with Jeff Bezos, the CEO and founder, whose unique combination of character traits and business strategy have driven Amazon to the top of the online retail world.
Richard Brandt charts Bezos’s rise from computer nerd to world- changing entrepreneur. His success can be credited to his forward-looking insights and ruthless business sense. Brandt explains:
- Why Bezos decided to allow negative product reviews, correctly guessing that the earned trust would outweigh possible lost sales.
- Why Amazon zealously guards some patents yet freely shares others.
- Why Bezos called becoming profitable the “dumbest” thing they could do in 1997.
- How Amazon.com became one of the only dotcoms to survive the bust of the early 2000s.
- Where the company is headed next.Through interviews with Amazon employees, competitors, and observers, Brandt has deciphered how Bezos makes decisions.
The story of Amazon’s ongoing evolution is a case study in how to reinvent an entire industry, and one that anyone in business today ignores at their peril.
Some Core Principles for Building a Legacy
To build a sustainable and positive family or business legacy, it is very important that the following key principles be incorporated into your dynastic planning process:
1) The entire family must be involved in planning and NOT just the wealth-holder or business owner. The goal for a successful multi-generational family/business legacy is to plan “with” your family and not “at” your family.
2) The agenda for each family or family business meeting must be open to include the needs and concerns of all family members who are affected by the financial, estate, business, or legacy plan.
3) Part of the common mission for each family and business plan should be the indisputable realization that family members are the real assets and NOT the money or business.
4) Communication expectations for everyone must be setup upfront. For example,
- Everyone has wisdom;
- We need everyone’s wisdom for the wisest results;
- All will hear and be heard;
- There are no wrong answers;
- The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
5) The best legacy solution is one that considers the needs of future generations. A legacy plan should focus on the perspective of family wealth and the family business for at least the next seven generations.
6) A Family Constitution should be created to help with the Governance of the Legacy plan. The goal here is not to dictate the future to family members but to establish guidelines for dealing with conflicts, new opportunities, in-laws, extended family member dreams, and the future complexity involved with the growth of family members into the third generation onward.
7) Structures, and committees, must be put in place for dealing with, and implementing, the financial, estate, business, and legacy plans.
Remember that a wealthy family or a profitable business cannot create a strong family but a united family with a common mission can build wealth and a sustainable and profitable family business.
Frontline: The Long Walk of Nelson Mandela PBS
Nelson Mandela is widely considered to be one of the most inspiring and iconic figures of our age. Now, after a lifetime of taking pen to paper to record thoughts and events, hardships and victories, he has bestowed his entire extant personal papers, which offer an unprecedented insight into his remarkable life.
A singular international publishing event, Conversations with Myself draws on Mandela’s personal archive of never-before-seen materials to offer unique access to the privateworld of an incomparable world leader. Journals kept on the run during the anti-apartheid struggle ofthe early 1960s; diaries and draft letters written in Robben Island and other South African prisons during histwenty-seven years of incarceration; notebooks from the postapartheid transition; private recorded conversations;speeches and correspondence written during his presidency—a historic collection of documentsarchived at the Nelson Mandela Foundation is brought together into a sweeping narrative of great immediacy and stunning power. An intimate journey from Mandela’s first stirrings of political consciousness to hisgalvanizing role on the world stage, Conversations with Myself illuminates a heroic life forged on the frontlines of the struggle for freedom and justice.
While other books have recounted Mandela’s life from the vantage of the present, Conversations with Myself allows, for the first time, unhindered insight into the human side of the icon.
Who Moved My Cheese
Inspired from a book with the same title written by Dr Spencer Johnson. Its about 2 mice and two little people whose live in a maze. This story is actually reflecting ourselves and our behaviour when it comes to change. Like everything else CHANGE is inevitable. Many people resist change and live their lives in fear of change. Some will change according to time while mmost won’t. Some will take it as an opportunity while others will look at it as a threat. Which one is you?
With Who Moved My Cheese? Dr. Spencer Johnson realizes the need for finding the language and tools to deal with change–an issue that makes all of us nervous and uncomfortable.
Most people are fearful of change because they don’t believe they have any control over how or when it happens to them. Since change happens either to the individual or by the individual, Spencer Johnson shows us that what matters most is the attitude we have about change.
When the Y2K panic gripped the corporate realm before the new millenium, most work environments finally recognized the urgent need to get their computers and other business systems up to speed and able to deal with unprecedented change. And businesses realized that this was not enough: they needed to help people get ready, too.
Spencer Johnson has created his new book to do just that. The coauthor of the multimillion bestseller The One Minute Manager has written a deceptively simple story with a dramatically important message that can radically alter the way we cope with change. Who Moved My Cheese? allows for common themes to become topics for discussion and individual interpretation.
Who Moved My Cheese? takes the fear and anxiety out of managing the future and shows people a simple way to successfully deal with the changing times, providing them with a method for moving ahead with their work and lives safely and effectively.
