Podcasts about Yves Pigneur

SummaryThe conversation explores three main topics: business model resilience, AI, and environmental sustainability. The accessibility and democratisation of AI tools have made a significant impact on innovation and value creation. AI has the potential to propose better value propositions and even replace human managers. The integration of AI tools in consulting processes has resulted in faster results and improved efficiency. However, the development of better value propositions through the integration of different data sources is still a work in progress. In this conversation, Alex and Dominic discuss the potential of AI in innovation and business processes. They explore the idea of using AI to automate customer interviews and the impact it can have on the speed and efficiency of innovation. They also touch on the importance of environmental sustainability and the need for new business models that harmonize profit and impact. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the challenges and opportunities of AI and the importance of regulation.Keywordsbusiness model resilience, AI, environmental sustainability, accessibility, democratisation, innovation, value creation, value propositions, AI tools, consulting processes, data sources, AI, innovation, business processes, customer interviews, speed, efficiency, environmental sustainability, business models, profit, impact, regulationTakeawaysThe accessibility and democratization of AI tools have revolutionized innovation and value creation.AI has the potential to propose better value propositions and even replace human managers.The integration of AI tools in consulting processes has resulted in faster results and improved efficiency.The development of better value propositions through the integration of different data sources is still a work in progress. AI can greatly speed up the innovation process by automating tasks like customer interviews.Businesses need to embrace environmental sustainability and find new business models that harmonise profit and impact.Financial sustainability and resilient revenue models are crucial for the success of a business.Experimentation with pricing and revenue streams is essential for business growth.The rapid pace of change in AI presents both challenges and opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators.Regulation is necessary to ensure the responsible and ethical use of AI.About Alex OsterwalderAlex Osterwalder is ranked in the top 10 on the Thinkers50 list of management thinkers worldwide. He is passionate about simplifying the complex challenges that today's leaders face. Along with Yves Pigneur, he invented the Business Model Canvas and other practical tools, which are now used by millions of practitioners around the globe.Strategyzer, the company Alex co-founded, provides technology-enabled innovation services to leading organisations, including Colgate-Palmolive, MasterCard and Merck. Alex spends most of his time advising leaders on how to scale their innovation efforts and get results. They already have the assets but lack the organisational design and innovation culture.His books include Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, The Invincible Company, and High-Impact Tools for Teams. Together with his children he created Biz4Kids, a comic book to promote entrepreneurship.Chapters02:22 The Impact of AI on Innovation and Value Creation05:10 The Potential of AI in Proposing Value Propositions10:42 Challenges in Developing Better Value Propositions with AI30:30 Harmonising Profit and Impact: The Future of Business...

Come join Share PLM for another podcast episode with Andrea Järvrén, the Transformation Manager, Methods and Practices in Tetra Pak. Andrea has a strong background in business transformation and global process driver roles with focus on problem solving with an iterative approach. She specialises in facilitation with Design Thinking mindset, Design Sprints and tailored workshops in an enterprise setting, doing everything from facilitating, distributing competence, transforming and scaling to accelerating transformation. In this episode, we are talking about:⚉ Introduction to Design Thinking at Tetra Pak⚉ Practical Applications of Design Thinking⚉ Design Sprint Methodology⚉ Facilitation and Preparation⚉ Measuring Effectiveness⚉ Adapting to Remote Work⚉ Scaling Design Thinking PracticesMENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:⚉ [Book] Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp - https://amzn.to/4c3ih84 ⚉ [Book] Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience by Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf - https://amzn.to/3KAMmzX ⚉ [Book] Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (The Strategyzer series) by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur - https://amzn.to/4c9QHWR ⚉ Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin⚉ AJ&Smart - https://www.ajsmart.com/ ⚉ Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ) - https://www.workshopper.com/lightning-decision-jam CONNECT WITH ANDREA:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-j%C3%A4rvr%C3%A9n-56a1433/ CONNECT WITH SHARE PLM:Website: https://shareplm.com/ Join us every month to listen to fascinating interviews, where we cover a wide array of topics, from actionable tips, to personal experiences, to strategies that you can implement into your PLM strategy.If you have an interesting story to share and want to join the conversation, contact us and let's chat. We can't wait to hear from you!

Bio   David is known for his ability to deliver inspiring and thought-provoking presentations that challenge audiences to think differently about innovation and product development. His keynotes and workshops are engaging and interactive, with a focus on real-world examples and case studies. David's message is relevant for entrepreneurs, executives, and organizations of all sizes and industries, and he illustrates concepts live on stage to leave attendees with concrete tools and techniques they can use to drive innovation and growth in their own business.   Interview Highlights 02:00 Early Startups 02:45 Dealing with uncertainty 04:25 Testing Business Ideas 07:35 Shifting mindsets 11:00 Transformational leadership 13:00 Desirable, viable, feasible 14:50 Sustainability 17:00 AI 22:50 Jobs, pains and gains 26:30 Extracting your assumptions 27:30 Mapping and prioritisation 28:10 Running experiments   Social Media   LinkedIn:  David Bland on LinkedIn Website:  davidjbland.com Company Website: Precoil YouTube: David Bland on YouTube     Books & Resources   ·         Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation (The Strategyzer Series): David J. Bland, Alex Osterwalder ·         Assumptions Mapping Fundamentals Course: https://precoil.teachable.com/p/assumptions-mapping-fundamentals/ ·         The Invincible Company: How to Constantly Reinvent Your Organization with Inspiration From the World's Best Business Models (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, Frederic Etiemble ·         Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith, Trish Papadakos ·         The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses: Eric Ries ·         Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights- 2nd Edition, Steve Portigal ·         The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You, Rob Fitzpatrick ·         Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur ·         The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win: Steve Blank   Episode Transcript Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku   Hello everyone. I'm really honoured and pleased to introduce David Bland as my guest for this episode. He is the best-selling author of the book, Testing Business Ideas, and he's also the Founder of Precoil, an organisation that's focused on helping companies to find product market fits using Lean Start-up, Design Thinking and Business Model Innovation. He's not a newcomer to the world of Agile as well. So, David, it's an honour to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. Thank you so much for making the time. David Bland   Yeah, thanks for inviting me on, I'm excited to be here. Ula Ojiaku   Right. So, where I usually start with all my guests, because personally, I am interested in the story behind the person - are there any happenings or experiences that have shaped you into who you are today? David Bland   Yeah, I think through childhood, dealing with a lot of uncertainty and then ended up going to school for design. I thought I was going to go a different career path and then at the last moment I was like, I want to really dig into design and I think people were sort of shocked by that, with the people around me, and so I really dove into that and then I came out of school thinking, oh, I might join a startup and retire in my mid 20s, because this is a .com craze, everyone was making all this money. Obviously, that didn't happen, but I learned a lot at the startups and I was introduced to Agile really early on in my career at startups because we had to go really fast and we were in a heavily regulated industry so we couldn't break stuff and we had to have kind of processes and everything. I did that for a while and then I realised, wow, there were some people that could learn from my mistakes, and so we kind of switched coasts. So we were near Washington DC for a while, and then we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and I started working with companies there, and I was like, well, let me see if I can just really dig in, help people learn how to apply stuff and coach them through it, and that was around 2010 or 2011 or so, and I've been doing it ever since, and I think why I love it so much is that it kind of helps people deal with uncertainty, gives them a process to deal with uncertainty, and at the same time, I have a hard time with uncertainty. So maybe it's kind of a little bit therapeutic for me to help others deal with uncertainty as well. So yeah, I just love what I do. Ula Ojiaku   And so you mentioned you don't like uncertainty, but helping other people deal with uncertainty helps you, that's interesting. Do you want to expand on that? David Bland   I mean, I very much like my routines and everything, and I feel like I come at it from a process point of view. So when I'm dealing with uncertainties, like, oh, what kind of process can I apply to that? So I feel a little better about things, even though there's a lot of stuff outside my control, at least I can have kind of a process. So I feel as if, when I'm dealing with people, I feel all of this anxiety, they're working on a new idea, they're not sure if it's going to be any good or not, giving them a process to work through it together, I don't really tell them if their idea is going to be good or not because who am I to judge their ideas most of the time? It's more about, well, here's a process you can apply to all that stuff you're working through and maybe you can come up to some sort of investment decision on whether or not you should go forward with that idea. So I feel as if my demeanour and everything comes off as someone that you're like, oh, I can talk to this guy and he's actually going to respect me, and so I feel like my style plus the uncertainty bit fits together really well. So I have a style where I come into orgs and say, you have a lot of uncertainty, here's a process, you're going to be fine, we're going to work through it together and it tends to work out pretty well. Ula Ojiaku   What comes across to me is that you give them tools or a process to help them hopefully come to an evidence-based conclusion without you having to share your opinion, or hopefully they don't have to have personal opinions imposing on whatever conclusion that is.   David Bland   Yeah, it's just a process.   Ula Ojiaku   And so what put you on the path to writing the book Testing Business Ideas, I was one of your students at the masterclass you and Alex Osterwalder ran during the covid lockdown, and you mentioned during that session, I don't know if you remember, that you probably went for a retreat somewhere, or you went on a hike as part of the writing process and that Alex gave you a hard time or something, so can you share your version of the story? David Bland   Oh yeah, I mean it was a joy writing with him. I think one of the difficult times for me writing that book…So first Alex approached me writing it and eventually, I mean initially it was just going to be me and then I mean he needed to be involved and so he played a big role strategically in helping me kind of think about the book writing process because I've never written a book like this and then also had it published and also did the whole four colour landscape style, very visual book. It's not that you just write an outline and then you start putting in words, it's a very different process. So yeah, he pushed me a little bit during that process, I would say, he would challenge some of my ideas and say like, are you explaining this in a way that where people can understand, you know? And so I feel as if it was a very productive process writing the book with him. It took about a year I would say. I think the way it came about was it was pretty much from my coaching, born out of my coaching, because I was helping companies with a lot of uncertainty, early stage ideas and they would say well we're now going to have interviews and we're going to do surveys and we're to build the whole thing. And it's like, well, there's other things you could do that are beyond interviews and surveys. And so he and I were continuously talking about this, and it's like, well, if people are only comfortable doing interviews and surveys they're not going to address all their risk, they're going to address a part of their risk, but not, you know, there's so much more they can do. And so, we started thinking about, well, is there a book that we could put that together and give people a resource guide? So, it's more like a textbook or almost something you would read in a university. My editor, I just spoke to him a couple weeks ago, he's like, this is required reading at Stanford now, and some other places in the university programs. And so it's very much like a textbook, you know, but the reason we wrote it was, you know, to help people find a path forward, to find a way to go and de-risk what they're working on. And so I felt it was very ambitious to put that all into a book, and of course, it has some flaws, but I think for the most part, it does the job, and that's why it's been really successful.   Ula Ojiaku   It is, in my experience, very well laid out. It takes a lot of work to distill these ideas into something that seems simple and easy to follow. So I do concur, it's been very helpful to me as well and the ideas. In your book, in the flap, it says, okay, the number one job as an innovator, entrepreneur, a corporation, is to test your business ideas to reduce the risk of failure. And I think you've alluded it, you've kind of touched on that in explaining how your career has gotten you where you are today. But what, in your experience, do you find leaders and organisations missing the most when it comes to testing ideas? David Bland   I think it's hard to unwind it all, because it goes back to how do you become a leader. And so, at least in Western, in the United States anyway, where I do some of my work, I feel as if it's very egocentric, it's very about what I can do and what I know. So there's a progression of becoming a leader where you grow up in an organisation because you have the answers, or at least you're able to convince people you know the answers, and then you're promoted and keep being promoted. And so when I'm coming in and saying, well, we might not know the answers, or we might need to test our way through and find the answers, it almost goes against that whole kind of almost like worldview you've built up or someone has built up over the years where it's about me. It has to be more than just about you as a person. It's like how do you enable leaders around you and how do you create more leaders around you and all that. And so I think where there's contradiction is this idea of, okay, I'm promoted to where I am because I have the answers, but now I want to enable people to test their way through things and find answers, and you almost need a feedback loop there of somebody that's willing to say, look, do you understand how you've unravelled some of this or how you've undermined things by saying, well, I know this is a good idea, so build it anyway. Or, that's not the test I would have ran, I would have done this other thing. You give people almost the benefit of your opinion, but they take it as marching orders, whether you realise it or not, and then it becomes this core of, why am I running tests at all because my leader is essentially going to tell me what to build. And so I think there's just some unpacking a bit of, well, I searched for the right answer in school and I was rewarded for that, and I went into business and I was rewarded for the right answer, and now we're telling you, there might not be a right answer, there are multiple right answers, and different paths and choices. And I think sometimes leaders have a hard time with that because it almost contradicts everything they've done in the past to be successful. Ula Ojiaku   So, what I'm hearing you say David is that in terms of, even before we get testing the ideas, please correct me if I'm wrong, it's that there needs to be a mindset shift, a paradigm shift of, you know, what leadership is all about, it's no longer going to be about the person who knows the way, who knows all the answers and tells people what to do, but moving from that to saying, hey, I recognise I have limits and I may not have all the answers and I empower you all for us to work together to test our way to find what the right path or direction would be. David Bland   Yeah, it's more about your leadership style and accountability. I think you severely limit what an organisation could do if everyone's relying on you for the answers. It's going to be really tough to scale that because if all answers have to come through you, then how do you scale? But also, it goes from transactional to transformational in a way. So transactional is, it's very much like, well, I want you to do something by this date on time, on budget, and on scope, and then basically hold you accountable to doing that, and then there's a very transactional level of leadership there. It's like, I asked you to do this thing, or told you to do this thing, you did this thing, so therefore I trust you. Where I'm trying get a bit deeper is, you know, well can you say, well, how do I empower a team to go find out what needs to be built, or if there's a real problem there, and then have them give me an account of, oh, we're making progress towards that, or you know what, we shouldn't go forward with this because this isn't worth pursuing, nobody has this problem, et cetera, and respecting their wishes or at least having a conversation about that. And so I think it does require a little bit of leadership. Looking at your style, looking at the words you use, looking at how you lead teams through uncertainty, which could be a little different than ‘I need this thing by this date and keep it under this cost and this scope' It's more about, well, we have an idea, we're not sure there's a market for it, can we go test that and see if there is and if it's viable for us and if we can actually do it? And it's a little different leadership style, and I think if you apply a transactional leadership style to trying to lead people through uncertainty, it just backfires, because it's very much like, run these experiments by this date, it doesn't empower the teams to be able to give an account of how they're addressing the risks. It's sort of a learning moment for leaders to say, oh, this leadership style that's worked really well for me in the past may not actually work really well for me here, it may work against me here in trying to drive out the uncertainty of this thing that we're trying to do. Ula Ojiaku   So if I may just build on your response to the question. What, in your experience, has helped, or could help, a leader who's used to, and has been in the past up until now rewarded for that transactional leadership, to make the switch to a transformational leadership? David Bland   I think asking them what they're worried about. I know people try to project confidence like they have the answers, but they don't, and so being able to be open, even if it's just a one-on-one, to say hey we have this thing where we think it might be a new business line or something that we're working on that's relatively new that we haven't done before, which is a lot of my clients, they're trying to do something that they haven't quite done before. It may not be too far away from what they're good at, but far enough away that they're worried, they're worried that it's not going to work. And so I try to get them and talk about what's keeping you up at night, what is worrying you about this, and then usually in the back of my head I'm saying, okay, what can I map that to? So I love the desirable, viable, feasible framing. I use it a lot from design thinking, user centre design. So if they're worried about the customer or there's not enough, you know, there's not really a job to be done there, I map that back to, okay, he's worried about desirability or she's worried about desirability. And if they're talking about, oh, we don't know if people will pay enough for this, or if we can keep costs low enough, you know, that's like I map it back to viability, right? And then if it's more about, I actually don't know if we're organised well enough as a company to do this and really execute on it and I map it back to feasibility. And then from there, it's more like, well how will we go test that since you're worried about it, rather than just build the whole thing and launch and see what happens. And so I try to kind of, I'd be really careful of the words I'm using and I'm trying to coach them into a moment where it's okay, just let's be open and transparent that it's not just about executing a bunch of things and then we're okay. It's more about, you know, what are we worried about and then how do we go address those worries sooner versus later. And so I try not to come at them with a bunch of canvases and a bunch of mapping tools and a bunch of stuff that would make them feel defensive because one, they probably have not had experience with those, and two, it's like, oh, this consultant's more interested in the tools than helping me, you know. So I try to use words that really kind of get at, what are you worried about and then how can we go test that and then kind of back away into the process from there? Ula Ojiaku   Well, it does seem like you apply quite some psychology to the whole approach, because it's really about meeting people where they're at. And I am, just back to your point about viability, desirability and feasibility. There is a school of knowledge, I mean, you are the expert here, so I'm deferring, but there's a school of knowledge that would add also like the sustainability parts to it. Or do you think it's separate from those attributes when you're looking at ideas? David Bland   Yeah. Well, I work on a lot of sustainable projects at the moment. Well, even over the last several years I've been working on companies trying to be more sustainable. So companies are manufacturing phones, they want their phones to be all recyclable materials, they want fully recyclable phones let's say. So I'm working on very cutting edge sustainability projects, but I still don't introduce it as another circle because I'm trying to keep it very simple. And so I know there are different flavours of it. I know some people add sustainability, some people add adaptability, some people add ethics, usability. Before I know it, it's just, you end up with seven circles and different themes, so I really try to keep it very simple. Even Alex and I talk about adaptability, because that was a theme that didn't quite make it into the book, but he talks about it in The Invincible Company, which is the book he wrote immediately after the one we wrote together. So I have ways of addressing those things, but I don't necessarily want to add a bunch of extra themes, because I feel like it's already challenging people with a bunch of ‘ility' words. I noticed they get confused even with the three. No matter how well I explain it, I'll see things like, things that are about building it, and reframed as desirability, and I'm like no, no, that isn't about the customer. I mean yes, of course we have to build what they need, but building it is more about feasibility. So even with the three I see people get confused so I just try to stick to the three as best I can, but basically we go into sustainability projects, still using those three, with sustainability top of mind. So I don't really call it out as a separate theme but I certainly take it into consideration when we're working on those projects.   Ula Ojiaku   Okay, just keeping it simple. Okay, thanks for that, David. So there are some instances where the people will consider probably are outliers to the known proven principles of design thinking, of product development, customer discovery. And I can't remember, I mean, I would have attributed it to the person, but I was just reading a tweet from someone who is known in the product development world and he was saying that if, he wouldn't have guessed that with the advent of or the popularity of Generative AI, that ChatGPT, according to his books, you know, broke all the rules of products, discovery products, development in the sense that there, and I wasn't aware that they were, Open AI was doing lots of market research to say, hey, what do you want from an AI assistant or Generative AI? But within months of releasing it to the public, they gained millions of users. So what's your thought on this? Would you say it was an outlier or is it that there were some principles working in the background that we are not aware of? David Bland   I imagine there's a lot going on we're not aware of. It reminds me of the older conversations about the iPhone. There was this air of, Steve Jobs had this single brilliant idea about the iPhone and then willed it into being and then everyone, it was wildly successful, right? But I look at, even like the first iPhone as, in a way it was kind of a minimum viable product. I mean, the hardware was pretty solid, but the software, the OS was not. I mean, it didn't have really basic stuff that we would expect that we had on other things like Blackberries at the time. You couldn't copy and paste, there were some things that were missing and people viewed it as a toy and they kind of laughed at it, you know, and then they iterated on it. I would say it was about iPhone three or four, by the time they really started to get market fit with it, and then you see, you know, people you wouldn't expect with iPhones with their iPhone. You're like, wait a second, that person has an iPhone. But that took a while, you know. And I think with Open AI, it's kind of a, we're still in the early stages of a lot of this, I feel, and I'm not really sure how it's going to shake out, but I imagine, you know, they seem to be very iterative about how they're going about it, you know. So I don't know how they went about the creation of it at first, but I feel as if at least now they're taking feedback. They're not just building stuff people are asking for, but they're looking at, well these people are asking for this, but why are they asking for it and what are they trying to achieve and how might we achieve that by releasing something that solves for that. And that's kind of your job, right? It's not just to build what people ask for. It's more about getting to the need behind what they're asking for, and there might be a more elegant way to solve for what they're asking for. But there's also some backlash with AI. So I see some things happening where a lot of my corporate clients have just banned it at the firewall, they don't want their employees even accessing it. They want to keep it within the company walls, so to speak, which is going to be kind of challenging to do, although there are some solutions they're employing to do that. I also see people taking it and, you know, interviewing fake users and saying, I can validate my idea because they asked OpenAI and it said it was a good idea, so I don't have to talk to customers. And it's like, okay, so they're taking some kind of persona from people and kind of building up a thing where you interact with it, and it seems very confident in it. It seems very confident in its statements. Like, that's the thing that I've noticed with OpenAI and a lot of this ChatGPT stuff is that it can be like really confidently wrong, but you find security in that confidence, right? And so I do see people saying, well I don't have to talk to customers, I just typed in ChatGPT and asked them. And I said, this is the kind of customer, what would that customer want? And it can literally generate personas that can generate canvases. It can do a lot that makes you seem like they are good answers. You could also just click regenerate and then it'll come up with really confident, completely different answers. So I think there's still a way where we can use it to augment what we do, I'm still a big believer in that, because I think it's really hard to scale research sometimes, especially if they have a small team, you're in a Startup. I think we can use AI to help scale it in some ways, but I think we just have to be careful about using it as the single source of truth for things because in the end it's still people and we're still, find all the tech problems, still people problems. And so I think we have to be careful of how we use AI in Agile and research and product development in general. Ula Ojiaku   Completely agree, and the thing about being careful, because the AI or the model is still trained at the end of the day by humans who have their blind spots and conscious or unconscious biases. So the output you're going to get is going to be as good as whatever information or data the person or persons who trained the model would have. So what I'm still hearing from you if I may use Steve Blank's words would be still get out of the building and speak to real customers. I mean, that could be a starting point or that could be something you augment with, but the real validation is in the conversation with the people who use or consume your products. David Bland   I think the conversations are still important. I think where it gets misconstrued a bit is that, well people don't know what they want, so we shouldn't talk to them. I think that's an excuse, you should still talk to them. The teams that I work with talk to customers every week quite often, and so we want that constant contact with customers and we want to understand their world, we want to find new insights, we want to find out what they're trying to do and trying to achieve, because sometimes that can unlock completely new ideas and new ways to make money and new ways to help them. I think this idea of, well, we can't talk to customers because we don't have a solution ready or we can't talk to customers because they don't know what they want, I feel as if those aren't really the reasons you should be talking to customers. With discovery, you're trying to figure out the jobs, pains and gains, test value prop with them, continue to understand them better. And if you pay attention to your customers, there's this great Bezos quote, right. If you pay attention to your customers and your competitors are paying attention to you, you're going to be fine because you are, they're getting lagging information, right? You're really deeply connected to your customers, and so I just think we've somehow built this culture over time where we can't bother customers, we can't confuse them, we can't come to them unless we have a polished solution and I think that's becoming less and less relevant as we go to co-creation. We go more to really deeply understanding them. I think we have to be careful of this culture of we can't bother them unless we have a polished solution to put in front of them, I don't think that's where we're headed with modern product management. Ula Ojiaku   And someone might be saying, listening to, whilst I've gone through your masterclass, I've read your book, but someone might say, well, do you mean by jobs, pains and gains with respect to customers? Could you just expand on those, please? David Bland   Yeah, if you look at the, so my co-author Alex Osterwalder, if you go back to the book before Testing Business Ideas, there's a Value Proposition Design book where we have the value prop canvas. If you look at the circle in that book, so the tool kind of has a square and a circle, and we usually start with a circle side, which is a customer profile. And with the profile, you're really trying to think of a role or even a person, you're not trying to do it at the org level, you're trying to think of an actual human being. And in that, we kind of break it down into three sections. One is customer jobs to be done. So you can think about, you know, one of the functional, usually functional jobs that tasks are trying to do, you could also weave in, you know, social jobs, emotional supporting, it can get really complicated, but I try to keep it simple. But one way to find out those jobs is by talking to customers, right? Then next are the pain points. So what are the pain points that customers are experiencing, usually related to the jobs they're trying to do. So if they're trying to do a task, here's all the stuff that's making it really hard to do that task. Some of it's directly related, some of it's tangential, it's there, it's like these impediments that are really, you know, these pains that they're experiencing. And then the third one is gains. So we're looking for what are the gains that can be created if they're able to either do this task really well, or we're able to remove these pains, like what are some things that they would get out of it. And it's not always a one to one to one kind of relationship. Sometimes it's, oh, I want peer recognition, or I want a promotion, or, you know, there are some things that are tangential that are related to gains, so I love that model because when we go and we start doing discovery with customers, we can start to understand, even in Agile right. If we're doing discovery on our stories, you know, we're trying to figure out what are they trying to achieve? And then is this thing we're about to build going to help them achieve that? You know, what are the pains we're experiencing? Can we have characteristics or features that address these big pain points they're experiencing? And then let's just not solely focus on the pains, let's also think about delighters and gains and things we could do that like kind of make them smile and make them have a good day, right? And so what are some things that we could do to help them with that? And so I love that framing because it kind of checks a lot of the boxes of can they do the task, but also, can we move the pains that they're experiencing trying to do it and then can we can we help create these aha moments, these gains for them? Ula Ojiaku   Thank you, and thanks for going into that and the definitions of those terms. Now, let's just look at designing experiments and of course for the listeners or people if you're watching on YouTube, please get the book, Testing Business Ideas, there's a wealth of information there. But at a high level, David, can you share with us what's the process you would advise for one to go through in designing, OK yes, we have an idea, it's going to change the world, but what's the process you would recommend at a high level for testing this out? David Bland   At a high level, it's really three steps. The first is extracting your assumptions. So that's why I like the desirable, viable, feasible framing. If you have other things you want to use, that's fine, but I use desirable, viable, feasible and I extract. So, what's your risk around the market, the customer, their jobs to be done, the value prop, all that. Viability is what's your risk around revenue, cost, can you keep cost low enough, can you make money with this in some way, make it sustained? And then feasibility is much more, can you do it, can you execute it, are there things that prevent you from just executing on it and delivering it? So that step one is just extracting those, because this stuff is usually inside your head, you're worried about it, some of them might be written down, some of them might not be. If you're in a team, it's good to have perspectives, get people that can talk to each theme together and compromise and come together. The second part of the process is mapping and prioritisation. So we want to map and focus on the assumptions that we've extracted that are the most important, where we have the least amount of evidence. So if we're going to focus experimentation, I want to focus on things that make a big difference and not necessarily play in a space that's kind of fun to play in and we can do a bunch of experiments, but it doesn't really pay down our risk. And so I like focusing on what would be called like a leap of faith assumption, which I know Eric Ries uses in Lean Startup, it also goes back to probably like Kierkegaard or something, and then Riskiest Assumption is another way you can frame it, like what are the Riskiest Assumptions, but basically you're trying to say what are the things that are most important, where we have least amount of evidence. So that's step two, prioritisation with mapping. And then step three is running experiments. And so we choose the top right, because we've extracted using the themes, we have desirable, viable, feasible. We can use that to help match experiments that will help us pay down the risk, and so I always look for mismatch things. Like you're not going to pay down your feasibility risk by running customer interviews, that doesn't help you whether or not you can deliver it. So making sure that you're matching your risk, and that's kind of where the book plays in mostly because we have 44 experiments that are all organised by desirable, viable, feasible, and then we have like cost, setup time, runtime, evidence, strength, capabilities. There's like a bunch of kind of information radiators on there to help you choose, and so we basically run experiments to then go and find out, you know, are these things that have to be true, that we don't have a lot of evidence to prove them out, are they true or not? And so we start then using this process to find out and then we come back and update our maps and update our artefacts, but that's kind of the three step process would be extract, map and then test.   Ula Ojiaku   Thank you. Would you say that there is a time when the testing stops? David Bland   I would say it never completely stops, or at least hopefully it doesn't completely stop. Even if you're using discovery and delivery, I find that usually in the beginning there's a lot of discovery and maybe a little bit of delivery or almost no delivery, and then as you de-risk you have kind of like more delivery and then a little bit less discovery. And then maybe if you're in a kind of repeatable mode where you're trying to scale something there's a lot of delivery and a little bit of discovery, but where I get really nervous are teams that kind of have a phase or a switch and they say, okay, we've done all the discovery now we're just going to build and deliver. I feel as if that constant contact with customers, being able to constantly understand them, their needs are going to change over time as you scale, it's going to change things, and so I get really nervous when teams want to just kind of act like it's a phase and we're done with our testing, right, we're done with our discovery. And I feel great organisations are always discovering to an extent. So it's just really finding the balance with your teams and with your orgs, like how much delivery do you have to do? How much discovery do you need to kind of inform that delivery? So ideally it doesn't stop, but the percentage of discovery you're doing in testing will most likely change over time. Ula Ojiaku   So in the world of Agile, Agile with a capital A in terms of the frameworks that originated from software development, the role of the Product Owner/Product Manager is typically associated with ensuring that this sort of continuous exploration and discovery is carried out throughout the product's lifecycle. Do you have any thoughts on this notion or idea? David Bland   I think there's always some level of risk and uncertainty in your backlog and in your roadmaps. So people in charge of product should be helping reduce that uncertainty. Now, it's usually not on their own, they'll pair with a researcher, maybe a designer. They might even be pairing with software developers to take notes during interviews and things like that to socialise how they're paying down the risk. But I think if you look at your backlog, you're kind of looking at middle to bottom and saying, oh, there's a lot of uncertainty here, I'm not really sure if you should even be working on these. So part of that process should be running discovery on it, and so I try to socialise it. So if you're in your Standups, talk about some of the discovery work you're doing, if you're in planning, plan out some of the discovery work you're doing, it's just going to help you build this overall cohesive idea of, well, I'm seeing something come in that I have to work on, but it's not the first time I've seen it, and I kind of understand the why, I understand that we did discovery on it to better understand and inform this thing and shape what I'm about to work on, and so I think it helps create those like touch points with your team. Ula Ojiaku   Thank you for that, David. So let's go on. There is, of course, your really, really helpful book,  personally I have used it and I've taken, I've not done all the experiments there, but definitely some of the experiments I have coached teams or leaders and organisations on how to use that. But apart from Testing Business Ideas, are there other books that you have found yourself recommending to people on this topic? David Bland   Yeah, I think there's some that go deeper, right, on a specific subject. So for example, interviews, that can be a tool book itself, right, and so there's some great books out there. Steve Portigal has some great books on understanding how to conduct interviews. I also like The Mom Test, well I don't like the title of the book, the content is pretty good, which is basically how to really do a customer interview well and not ask like, closed-ended leading bias questions that just get the answers you want so you can just jump to build, you know. So there are some books I keep coming back to as well. And then there's still some older books that, you know, we built on, foundationally as part of Testing Business Ideas, right? So if you look at Business Model Generation from Alex Osterwalder, Value Prop Design, the Testing Business Ideas book fits really well in that framework. And while I reference Business Model Canvas and Value Prop Canvas in Testing Business Ideas, I don't deep dive on it because there's literally two books that dive into that. A lot of the work we've built upon is Steve Blank's work from Four Steps to the Epiphany and I think people think that that book's dated for some reason now, but it's very applicable, especially B2B discovery. And so I constantly with my B2B startups and B2B corporations, I'm constantly referring them back to that book as a model for looking at how you go about this process from customer discovery to customer validation. So yeah, there are some ones I keep coming back to. Some of the newer ones, there are some books on scaling because I don't, I'm usually working up until product market fit, you know, and I don't have a lot of growth experiments in there. So there are some books now starting to come out about scaling, but I think if you're looking at Testing Business Ideas and saying, oh, there's something here and it kind of covers it, but I want to go a lot deeper, then it's finding complimentary books that help you go deeper on a specific thing, because Testing Business Ideas are more like a library and a reference guide and a process of how to go through it. It would have been like two or three times in length if we'd gone really, really deep on everything, so I think 200 pages of experiments was a pretty good quantity there. And so I'm often, I'm referring books that go deeper on a specific thing where people want to learn more.   Ula Ojiaku   Thank you for that. So if the audience, they've listened to what you have to say and they're like, I think I need to speak with David, how can they reach you? David Bland   Yeah, I mean, davidjbland.com is a great place to go, that's me, you can read about me, you can watch videos on me presenting. I have, you know, videos of me presenting at conferences, but also, there's a YouTube channel you can go to where I have some of my webinars that are free to watch as well, and just little coaching videos I make where I'm like, hey, I have a team that's really struggling with this concept and I just kind of make a quick YouTube video helping people out to say this is how I'm addressing this with, you know, with a team. Also Precoil, P-R-E-C-O-I-L, that's my company, and so there's a lot of great content there as well. And then just in general social media, although I have to say I'm pulling back on social media a little bit. So, I would say for the most part LinkedIn is a great place to find me, I'm usually posting memes about customer discovery and videos and things just trying to help people, like make you laugh and educate you, and so LinkedIn, surprisingly, I don't think I'd ever say like, oh, come check me out on LinkedIn, you know, five or ten years ago, but now that's where I spend a lot of my time, and I feel like that's where my customers are and that's where I can help them, so yeah, I end up spending a lot of time on LinkedIn too.   Ula Ojiaku   Yeah, some of your memes there like, I mean, how do I put it, just gets me up in stitches. Yeah, I don't know how you find them or do you commission actors to do some of them, but yeah, it's good. So yeah, so LinkedIn, social media is the main place, and your websites, those would be in the show notes. I also heard you do have a course, an online course. Can you tell us about that? David Bland   Yeah, this summer, I finally found some space to put together my thoughts into an Assumptions Mapping Course. So that is on Teachable. I'm going to be building it out with more courses, but I've just had enough people look at that two by two and read the book and say, I think I know how to facilitate this, but I'm not sure, and so I literally just went like step by step with a with a case study and it has some exercises as well where you can see how to set up the agenda, how to do the pre work for it, who you need in the room for it, how to facilitate it, what traps to look out for because sometimes, you know, you're trying to facilitate this priority sort of exercise and then things go wry. So I talked about some of the things I've learned over the years facilitating it and then what to do a little bit after. So yeah, it's a pretty just like bite-sized hands-on oh, I want to learn this and I want to go try with the team or do it myself. So yeah, I do have a new course that I launched that just walks people step by step like I would be coaching them. Ula Ojiaku OK, and do you mind mentioning out loud the website, is it precoil.teachable.com and they can find your Assumptions Mapping Fundamentals Course there?   David Bland   Correct. It's on precoil.teachable.com   Ula Ojiaku   OK, and search for Assumptions Mapping Fundamentals by David Bland. Right, so are there any final words of wisdom that you have for the audience, David. David Bland   Try to keen an open mind when you're going through a lot of this work. I feel as if the mindset is so important, you know. So if you're taking this checkbox mentality, you're not going to get the results out of following any of these processes, right. So, I think being able this idea of, oh, I'm opening myself to the idea that there's some assumptions here that may not be true, that I should probably test. It shouldn't be an exercise where you're just checking the box saying, yep, I wrote down my assumption and then, yeah, I ran an experiment that validated that and then move on, you know. It's more about the process of trying to, because your uncertainty and risk kind of move around. So, this idea of mindset, I can't stress enough that try and keep an open mind and then be willing to learn things that maybe you weren't expected to learn, and I think all these great businesses we look at over the years, they started off as something else, or some form of something else, and then they happened upon something that was an aha moment during the process, and I think that's, we have to be careful of rewriting history and saying it was somebody, it was a genius and he had a single brilliant idea, and then just built the thing and made millions. Very rarely does that ever occur. And so I think when you start really unwinding and it's about having an open mind, being willing to learn things that maybe you didn't anticipate, and I think just that mindset is so important. Ula Ojiaku   Thanks. I don't mean to detract from what you've said, but what I'm hearing from you as well is that it's not a linear process. So whilst you might have, in the book and the ideas you've shared, you know, kind of simplifying it, there are steps, but sometimes there might be loops to it too, so having an open mind to know that's something that worked today or something you got a positive result from, might not necessarily work tomorrow, it's, there's always more and it's an iterative journey.   David Bland   It's quite iterative.   Ula Ojiaku   Yeah. Well thank you so much David for this, making the time for this conversation. I really learned a lot and I enjoyed the conversation. Many thanks.   David Bland   Thanks for having me. Ula Ojiaku   My pleasure. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!   

Bio Luke Hohmann is Chief Innovation Officer of Applied Frameworks. Applied Frameworks helps companies create more profitable software-enabled solutions. A serial entrepreneur, Luke founded, bootstrapped, and sold the SaaS B2B collaboration software company Conteneo to Scaled Agile, Inc. Conteneo's Weave platform is now part of SAFe Studio. A SAFe® Fellow, prolific author, and trailblazing innovator, Luke's contributions to the global agile community include contributing to SAFe, five books, Profit Streams™, Innovation Games®, Participatory Budgeting at enterprise scale, and a pattern language for market-driven roadmapping. Luke is also co-founder of Every Voice Engaged Foundation, where he partnered with The Kettering Foundation to create Common Ground for Action, the world's first scalable platform for deliberative decision-making. Luke is a former National Junior Pairs Figure Skating Champion and has an M.S.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan. Luke loves his wife and four kids, his wife's cooking, and long runs in the California sunshine and Santa Cruz mountains.    Interview Highlights 01:30 Organisational Behaviour & Cognitive Psychology 06:10 Serendipity 09:30 Entrepreneurship 16:15 Applied Frameworks 20:00 Sustainability 20:45 Software Profit Streams 23:00 Business Model Canvas 24:00 Value Proposition Canvas 24:45 Setting the Price 28:45 Customer Benefit Analysis 34:00 Participatory Budgeting 36:00 Value Stream Funding 37:30 The Color of Money 42:00 Private v Public Sector 49:00 ROI Analysis 51:00 Innovation Accounting    Connecting   LinkedIn: Luke Hohmann on LinkedIn Company Website: Applied Frameworks    Books & Resources   ·         Software Profit Streams(TM): A Guide to Designing a Sustainably Profitable Business: Jason Tanner, Luke Hohmann, Federico González ·         Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (The Strategyzer series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur ·         Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith, Trish Papadakos ·         Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play: Luke Hohmann ·         The ‘Color of Money' Problem: Additional Guidance on Participatory Budgeting - Scaled Agile Framework ·         The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, Eric Ries ·         Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change 2, Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres ·         The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering: Brooks, Frederick Phillips ·         Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud ·         Ponyboy: A Novel, Eliot Duncan ·         Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel, Bonnie Garmus, Miranda Raison, Bonnie Garmus, Pandora Sykes ·         What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, Oprah Winfrey, Bruce D. Perry ·         Training | Applied Frameworks   Episode Transcript Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.  Ula Ojiaku   So I have with me Luke Hohmann, who is a four time author, three time founder, serial entrepreneur if I say, a SAFe fellow, so that's a Skilled Agile Framework fellow, keynote speaker and an internationally recognised expert in Agile software development. He is also a proud husband and a father of four. So, Luke, I am very honoured to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. Thank you for making the time. Luke Hohmann Thank you so much for having me, I'm very happy to be here, and hi everyone who's listening. Ula Ojiaku Yes, I'm sure they're waving back at you as well. I always start my conversations with my guests to find out about them as individuals, you know, so who is Luke? You have a BSc in Computer Science and an MSc in Computer Science and Engineering, but you also studied Cognitive Psychology and Organisational Behaviour in addition to Data Structures and Artificial Intelligence. AI is now making waves and is kind of at the forefront, which is interesting, you had the foresight to also look into these. So my question is, what took you down this path? Luke Hohmann Sure. I had a humble beginning in the world of technology. I worked for a large company, Electronic Data Systems, and it was founded in the mid 60s by a gentleman named Ross Perot, and it became a very, very large company. So my first job at Electronic Data Systems was working in a data centre, and we know what data centres are, but back then, data centres were different because they were predominantly mainframe-based data centres, and I would crawl underneath the floor, cabling the computers and cabling networking equipment. Now, when we think networking, we're really thinking one of two kinds of networking. We think of wireless networking or we think of some form of internet networking, but back in those days, there were varieties of network protocols, literally the standards that we use now weren't invented yet. So it was mainframe networking protocols and dial ups and other forms of networking protocols. From there, I worked my way from beneath the ground up. I had some great managers who saw someone who was worthy of opportunity and they gave me opportunity and it was great. And then eventually I started working in electronic data systems and there was, the first wave of AI came in the mid 80s and that's when we were doing things like building expert systems, and I managed to create with a colleague of mine, who's emerged as my best friend, a very successful implementation of an expert system, an AI-based expert system at EDS, and that motivated me to finish off my college degree, I didn't have my college degree at the time. So EDS supported me in going to the University of Michigan, where as you said, I picked up my Bachelor's and Master's degree, and my advisor at the time was Elliot Soloway, and he was doing research in how programmers program, what are the knowledge structures, what are the ways in which we think when we're programming, and I picked up that research and built programming environments, along with educational material, trying to understand how programmers program and trying to build educational material to teach programming more effectively. That's important because it ignited a lifelong passion for developing education materials, etc. Now the cognitive psychology part was handled through that vein of work, the organisational behaviour work came as I was a student at Michigan. As many of us are when we're in college, we don't make a lot of money, or at university we're not wealthy and I needed a job and so the School of Organisational Behaviour had published some job postings and they needed programmers to program software for their organisational behaviour research, and I answered those ads and I became friends and did the research for many ground-breaking aspects of organisational behaviour and I programmed, and in the process of programming for the professors who were in the School of Organisational Behaviour they would teach me about organisational behaviour and I learned many things that at the time were not entirely clear to me, but then when I graduated from university and I became a manager and I also became more involved in the Agile movement, I had a very deep foundation that has served me very well in terms of what do we mean when we say culture, or what do we mean when we talk about organisational structures, both in the small and in the large, how do we organise effectively, when should we scale, when should we not scale, etc. So that's a bit about my history that I think in terms of the early days helped inform who I am today. Ula Ojiaku Wow, who would have thought, it just reminds me of the word serendipity, you know, I guess a happy coincidence, quote unquote, and would there be examples of where the cognitive psychology part of it also helped you work-wise? Luke Hohmann Yeah, a way to think about cognitive psychology and the branch that, I mean there's, psychology is a huge branch of study, right? So cognitive psychology tends to relate to how do we solve problems, and it tends to focus on problem solving where n = 1 and what I mean by n is the number of participants, and where n is just me as an individual, how do I solve the problems that I'm facing? How do I engage in de-compositional activities or refinement or sense making? Organisational behaviour deals with n > 1. So it can deal with a team of, a para-bond, two people solving problems. It can deal with a small team, and we know through many, many, many decades of research that optimal team structures are eight people or less. I mean, we've known this for, when I say decades I mean millennia. When you look at military structure and military strategy, we know that people need to be organised into much smaller groups to be effective in problem solving and to move quickly. And then in any organisational structure, there's some notion of a team of teams or team engagement. So cognitive psychology, I think, helps leaders understand individuals and their place within the team. And now we talk about, you know, in the Agile community, we talk about things like, I want T-shaped people, I want people with common skills and their area of expertise and by organising enough of the T's, I can create a whole and complete team. I often say I don't want my database designer designing my user interface and I don't want my user interface designer optimising my back end database queries, they're different skills. They're very educated people, they're very sophisticated, but there's also the natural feeling that you and I have about how do I gain a sense of self, how do I gain a sense of accomplishment, a sense of mastery? Part of gaining a sense of mastery is understanding who you are as a person, what you're good at. In Japanese, they would call that Ikigai, right, what are the intersections of, you know, what do I love, what am I good at, what can I make a living at and what do people need, right? All of these intersections occur on an individual level, and then by understanding that we can create more effective teams. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. I've really learned something key here, the relationship between cognitive psychology and organisational behaviour, so thanks for breaking it down. Now, can we go quickly to your entrepreneurship? So there must be three times you started three times a company and you've been successful in that area. What exactly drives you when it comes to establishing businesses and then knowing when to move on? Luke Hohmann Sure. I think it's a combination of reflecting on my childhood and then looking at how that informs someone when they're older, and then opportunities, like you said, serendipity, I think that's a really powerful word that you introduced and it's a really powerful concept because sometimes the serendipity is associated with just allowing yourself to pursue something that presents itself. But when I was young, my father died and my mum had to raise six kids on her own, so my dad died when I was four, my mum raised six kids on her own. We were not a wealthy family, and she was a school teacher and one of the things that happened was, even though she was a very skilled school teacher, there were budget cuts and it was a unionised structure, and even though she was ranked very highly, she lost her job because she was low on the hiring totem pole in terms of how the union worked. It was very hard and of course, it's always hard to make budget cuts and firing but I remember when I was very young making one of those choices saying, I want to work in a field where we are more oriented towards someone's performance and not oriented on when they were hired, or the colour of their skin, or their gender or other things that to me didn't make sense that people were making decisions against. And while it's not a perfect field for sure, and we've got lots of improvement, engineering in general, and of course software engineering and software development spoke to me because I could meet people who were diverse or more diverse than in other fields and I thought that was really good. In terms of being an entrepreneur, that happened serendipitously. I was at the time, before I became an entrepreneur in my last job, was working for an Israeli security firm, and years and years ago, I used to do software anti-piracy and software security through physical dongles. This was made by a company called Aladdin Knowledge Systems in Israel, and I was the head of Engineering and Product Management for the dongle group and then I moved into a role of Business Development for the company. I had a couple of great bosses, but I also learned how to do international management because I had development teams in Israel, I had development teams in Munich, I had development teams in Portland, Oregon, and in the Bay Area, and this was in the 2000s. This is kind of pre-Agile, pre-Salt Lake City, pre-Agile Manifesto, but we were figuring things out and blending and working together. I thought things were going pretty well and I enjoyed working for the Israelis and what we were doing, but then we had the first Gulf War and my wife and I felt that maybe traveling as I was, we weren't sure what was going to happen in the war, I should choose something different. Unfortunately, by that time, we had been through the dot-bomb crisis in Silicon Valley. So it's about 2002 at the time that this was going on, and there really weren't jobs, it was a very weird time in Silicon Valley. So in late 2002, I sent an email to a bunch of friends and I said, hey, I'm going to be a consultant, who wants to hire me, that was my marketing plan, not very clever, and someone called me and said, hey, I've got a problem and this is the kind of thing that you can fix, come consult with us. And I said, great. So I did that, and that started the cleverly named Luke Hohmann Consulting, but then one thing led to another and consulting led to opportunities and growth and I've never looked back. So I think that there is a myth about people who start companies where sometimes you have a plan and you go execute your plan. Sometimes you find the problem and you're solving a problem. Sometimes the problem is your own problem, as in my case I had two small kids and a mortgage and I needed to provide for my family, and so the best way to do that at the time was to become a consultant. Since then I have engaged in building companies, sometimes some with more planning, some with more business tools and of course as you grow as an entrepreneur you learn skills that they didn't teach you in school, like marketing and pricing and business planning etc. And so that's kind of how I got started, and now I have kind of come full circle. The last company, the second last company I started was Conteneo and we ended up selling that to Scaled Agile, and that's how I joined the Scaled Agile team and that was lovely, moving from a position of being a CEO and being responsible for certain things, to being able to be part of a team again, joining the framework team, working with Dean Leffingwell and other members of the framework team to evolve the SAFe framework, that was really lovely. And then of course you get this entrepreneurial itch and you want to do something else, and so I think it comes and goes and you kind of allow yourself those opportunities. Ula Ojiaku Wow, yours is an inspiring story. And so what are you now, so you've talked about your first two Startups which you sold, what are you doing now? Luke Hohmann Yeah, so where I'm at right now is I am the Chief Innovation Officer for a company, Applied Frameworks. Applied Frameworks is a boutique consulting firm that's in a transition to a product company. So if this arm represents our product revenue and this arm represents our services revenue, we're expanding our product and eventually we'll become a product company. And so then the question is, well, what is the product that we're working on? Well, if you look at the Agile community, we've spent a lot of time creating and delivering value, and that's really great. We have had, if you look at the Agile community, we've had amazing support from our business counterparts. They've shovelled literally millions and millions of dollars into Agile training and Agile tooling and Agile transformations, and we've seen a lot of benefit from the Agile community. And when I say Agile, I don't mean SAFe or Scrum or some particular flavour of Agile, I just mean Agile in general. There's been hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars shoved into Agile and we've created a lot of value for that investment. We've got fewer bugs in our software because we've got so many teams doing XP driven practices like Test Driven Development, we've got faster response times because we've learned that we can create smaller releases and we've created infrastructure that lets us do deployments automatically, even if you're doing embedded systems, we figured out how to do over the air updates, we've figured out how to create infrastructure where the cars we're driving are now getting software updates. So we've created for our business leaders lots of value, but there's a problem in that value. Our business leaders now need us to create a profit, and creating value and creating a profit are two different things. And so in the pursuit of value, we have allowed our Agile community to avoid and or atrophy on skills that are vital to product management, and I'm a classically trained Product Manager, so I've done market segmentation and market valuation and market sizing, I've done pricing, I've done licensing, I've done acquisitions, I've done compliance. But when you look at the traditional definition of a Product Owner, it's a very small subset of that, especially in certain Agile methods where Product Owners are team centric, they're internal centric. That's okay, I'm not criticising that structure, but what's happened is we've got people who no longer know how to price, how to package, how to license products, and we're seeing companies fail, investor money wasted, too much time trying to figure things out when if we had simply approached the problem with an analysis of not just what am I providing to you in terms of value, but what is that value worth, and how do I structure an exchange where I give you value and you give me money? And that's how businesses survive, and I think what's really interesting about this in terms of Agile is Agile is very intimately tied to sustainability. One of the drivers of the Agile Movement was way back in the 2000s, we were having very unsustainable practices. People would be working 60, 80, death march weeks of grinding out programmers and grinding out people, and part of the Agile Movement was saying, wait a minute, this isn't sustainable, and even the notion of what is a sustainable pace is really vital, but a company cannot sustain itself without a profit, and if we don't actually evolve the Agile community from value streams into profit streams, we can't help our businesses survive. I sometimes ask developers, I say, raise your hand if you're really embracing the idea that your job is to make more money for your company than they pay you, that's called a profit, and if that's not happening, your company's going to fail. Ula Ojiaku They'll be out of a job. Luke Hohmann You'll be out of a job. So if you want to be self-interested about your future, help your company be successful, help them make a profit, and so where I'm at right now is Applied Frameworks has, with my co-author, Jason Tanner, we have published a bold and breakthrough new book called Software Profit Streams, and it's a book that describes how to do pricing and packaging for software enabled solutions. When we say software enabled solution, we mean a solution that has software in it somehow, could be embedded software in your microwave oven, it could be a hosted solution, it could be an API for a payment processor, it could be the software in your car that I talked about earlier. So software enabled solutions are the foundation, the fabric of our modern lives. As Mark Andreessen says software is eating the world, software is going to be in everything, and we need to know how to take the value that we are creating as engineers, as developers, and convert that into pricing and licensing choices that create sustainable profits. Ula Ojiaku Wow. It's as if you read my mind because I was going to ask you about your book, Software Profit Streams, A Guide to Designing a Sustainably Profitable Business. I also noticed that, you know, there is the Profit Stream Canvas that you and your co-author created. So let's assume I am a Product Manager and I've used this, let's assume I went down the path of using the Business Model Canvas and there is the Customer Value Proposition. So how do they complement? Luke Hohmann How do they all work together? I'm glad you asked that, I think that's a very insightful question and the reason it's so helpful is because, well partly because I'm also friends with Alex Osterwalder, I think he's a dear, he's a wonderful human, he's a dear friend. So let's look at the different elements of the different canvases, if you will, and why we think that this is needed. The Business Model Canvas is kind of how am I structuring my business itself, like what are my partners, my suppliers, my relationships, my channel strategy, my brand strategy with respect to my customer segments, and it includes elements of cost, which we're pretty good at. We're pretty good at knowing our costs and elements of revenue, but the key assumption of revenue, of course, is the selling price and the number of units sold. So, but if you look at the book, Business Model Generation, where the Business Model Canvas comes from, it doesn't actually talk about how to set the price. Is the video game going to be $49? Is it going to be $59, or £49 or £59? Well, there's a lot of thought that goes into that. Then we have the Value Proposition Canvas, which highlights what are the pains the customer is facing? What are the gains that the customer is facing? What are the jobs to be done of the customer? How does my solution relate to the jobs? How does it help solve the pain the customer is feeling? How does it create gain for the customer? But if you read those books, and both of those books are on my shelf because they're fantastic books, it doesn't talk about pricing. So let's say I create a gain for you. Well, how much can I charge you for the gain that I've created? How do I structure that relationship? And how do I know, going back to my Business Model Canvas, that I've got the right market segment, I've got the right investment strategy, I might need to make an investment in the first one or two releases of my software or my product before I start to make a per unit profit because I'm evolving, it's called the J curve and the J curve is how much money am I investing before I well, I have to be able to forecast that, I have to be able to model that, but the key input to that is what is the price, what is the mechanism of packaging that you're using, is it, for example, is it per user in a SAS environment or is it per company in a SAS environment? Is it a meter? Is it like an API transaction using Stripe or a payment processor, Adyen or Stripe or Paypal or any of the others that are out there? Or is it an API call where I'm charging a fraction of a penny for any API call? All of those elements have to be put into an economic model and a forecast has to be created. Now, what's missing about this is that the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas don't give you the insight on how to set the price, they just say there is a price and we're going to use it in our equations. So what we've done is we've said, look, setting the price is itself a complex system, and what I mean by a complex system is that, let's say that I wanted to do an annual license for a new SAS offering, but I offer that in Europe and now my solution is influenced or governed by GDPR compliance, where I have data retention and data privacy laws. So my technical architecture that has to enforce the license, also has to comply with something in terms of the market in which I'm selling. This complex system needs to be organised, and so what canvases do is in all of these cases, they let us take a complex system and put some structure behind the choices that we're making in that complex system so that we can make better choices in terms of system design. I know how I want this to work, I know how I want this to be structured, and therefore I can make system choices so the system is working in a way that benefits the stakeholders. Not just me, right, I'm not the only stakeholder, my customers are in this system, my suppliers are in this system, society itself might be in the system, depending on the system I'm building or the solution I'm building. So the canvases enable us to make system level choices that are hopefully more effective in achieving our goals. And like I said, the Business Model Canvas, the Value Proposition Canvas are fantastic, highly recommended, but they don't cover pricing. So we needed something to cover the actual pricing and packaging and licensing. Ula Ojiaku Well, that's awesome. So it's really more about going, taking a deeper dive into thoughtfully and structurally, if I may use that word, assessing the pricing. Luke Hohmann Yeah, absolutely. Ula Ojiaku Would you say that in doing this there would be some elements of, you know, testing and getting feedback from actual customers to know what price point makes sense? Luke Hohmann Absolutely. There's a number of ways in which customer engagement or customer testing is involved. The very first step that we advocate is a Customer Benefit Analysis, which is what are the actual benefits you're creating and how are your customers experiencing those benefits. Those experiences are both tangible and intangible and that's another one of the challenges that we face in the Agile community. In general, the Agile community spends a little bit more time on tangible or functional value than intangible value. So we, in terms of if I were to look at it in terms of a computer, we used to say speeds and feeds. How fast is the processor? How fast is the network? How much storage is on my disk space? Those are all functional elements. Over time as our computers have become plenty fast or plenty storage wise for most of our personal computing needs, we see elements of design come into play, elements of usability, elements of brand, and we see this in other areas. Cars have improved in quality so much that many of us, the durability of the car is no longer a significant attribute because all cars are pretty durable, they're pretty good, they're pretty well made. So now we look at brand, we look at style, we look at aesthetics, we look at even paying more for a car that aligns with our values in terms of the environment. I want to get an EV, why, because I want to be more environmentally conscious. That's a value driven, that's an intangible factor. And so our first step starts with Customer Benefit Analysis looking at both functional or tangible value and intangible value, and you can't do that, as you can imagine, you can't do that without having customer interaction and awareness with your stakeholders and your customers, and that also feeds throughout the whole pricing process. Eventually, you're going to put your product in a market, and that's a form itself of market research. Did customers buy, and if they didn't buy, why did they not buy? Is it poorly packaged or is it poorly priced? These are all elements that involve customers throughout the process. Ula Ojiaku If I may, I know we've been on the topic of your latest book Software Profit Streams. I'm just wondering, because I can't help but try to connect the dots and I'm wondering if there might be a connection to one of your books, Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play, something like buy a feature in your book, that kind of came to mind, could there be a way of using that as part of the engagement with customers in setting a pricing strategy? I may be wrong, I'm just asking a question. Luke Hohmann I think you're making a great connection. There's two forms of relationship that Innovation Games and the Innovation Games book have with Software Profit Streams. One is, as you correctly noted, just the basics of market research, where do key people have pains or gains and what it might be worth. That work is also included in Alex Osterwalder's books, Value Proposition Design for example, when I've been doing Value Proposition Design and I'm trying to figure out the customer pains, you can use the Innovation Games Speed Boat. And when I want to figure out the gains, I can use the Innovation Game Product Box. Similarly, when I'm figuring out pricing and licensing, a way, and it's a very astute idea, a way to understand price points of individual features is to do certain kinds of market research. One form of market research you can do is Buy-a-Feature, which gives a gauge of what people are willing or might be willing to pay for a feature. It can be a little tricky because the normal construction of Buy-a-Feature is based on cost. However, your insight is correct, you can extend Buy-a-Feature such that you're testing value as opposed to cost, and seeing what, if you take a feature that costs X, but inflate that cost by Y and a Buy-a-Feature game, if people still buy it, it's a strong signal strength that first they want it, and second it may be a feature that you can, when delivered, would motivate you to raise the price of your offering and create a better profit for your company. Ula Ojiaku Okay, well, thank you. I wasn't sure if I was on the right lines. Luke Hohmann It's a great connection. Ula Ojiaku Thanks again. I mean, it's not original. I'm just piggybacking on your ideas. So with respect to, if we, if you don't mind, let's shift gears a bit because I know that, or I'm aware that whilst you were with Scaled Agile Incorporated, you know, you played a key part in developing some of their courses, like the Product POPM, and I think the Portfolio Management, and there was the concept about Participatory Budgeting. Can we talk about that, please? Luke Hohmann I'd love to talk about that, I mean it's a huge passion of mine, absolutely. So in February of 2018, I started working with the framework team and in December of 2018, we talked about the possibility of what an acquisition might look like and the benefits it would create, which would be many. That closed in May of 2019, and in that timeframe, we were working on SAFe 5.0 and so there were a couple of areas in which I was able to make some contributions. One was in Agile product delivery competency, the other was in lean portfolio management. I had a significant hand in restructuring or adding the POPM, APM, and LPM courses, adding things like solutions by horizons to SAFe, taking the existing content on guardrails, expanding it a little bit, and of course, adding Participatory Budgeting, which is just a huge passion of mine. I've done Participatory Budgeting now for 20 years, I've helped organisations make more than five billions of dollars of investment spending choices at all levels of companies, myself and my colleagues at Applied Frameworks, and it just is a better way to make a shared decision. If you think about one of the examples they use about Participatory Budgeting, is my preferred form of fitness is I'm a runner and so, and my wife is also a fit person. So if she goes and buys a new pair of shoes or trainers and I go and buy a new pair of trainers, we don't care, because it's a small purchase. It's frequently made and it's within the pattern of our normal behaviour. However, if I were to go out and buy a new car without involving her, that feels different, right, it's a significant purchase, it requires budgeting and care, and is this car going to meet our needs? Our kids are older than your kids, so we have different needs and different requirements, and so I would be losing trust in my pair bond with my wife if I made a substantial purchase without her involvement. Well, corporations work the same way, because we're still people. So if I'm funding a value stream, I'm funding the consistent and reliable flow of valuable items, that's what value stream funding is supposed to do. However, if there is a significant investment to be made, even if the value stream can afford it, it should be introduced to the portfolio for no other reason than the social structure of healthy organisations says that we do better when we're talking about these things, that we don't go off on our own and make significant decisions without the input of others. That lowers transparency, that lowers trust. So I am a huge advocate of Participatory Budgeting, I'm very happy that it's included in SAFe as a recommended practice, both for market research and Buy-a-Feature in APM, but also more significantly, if you will, at the portfolio level for making investment decisions. And I'm really excited to share that we've just published an article a few weeks ago about Participatory Budgeting and what's called The Color of Money, and The Color of Money is sometimes when you have constraints on how you can spend money, and an example of a constraint is let's say that a government raised taxes to improve transportation infrastructure. Well, the money that they took in is constrained in a certain way. You can't spend it, for example, on education, and so we have to show how Participatory Budgeting can be adapted to have relationships between items like this item requires this item as a precedent or The Color of Money, constraints of funding items, but I'm a big believer, we just published that article and you can get that at the Scaled Agile website, I'm a big believer in the social power of making these financial decisions and the benefits that accrue to people and organisations when they collaborate in this manner. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for going into that, Luke. So, would there be, in your experience, any type of organisation that's participatory? It's not a leading question, it's just genuine, there are typically outliers and I'm wondering in your experience, and in your opinion, if there would be organisations that it might not work for? Luke Hohmann Surprisingly, no, but I want to add a few qualifications to the effective design of a Participatory Budgeting session. When people hear Participatory Budgeting, there's different ways that you would apply Participatory Budgeting in the public and private sector. So I've done citywide Participatory Budgeting in cities and if you're a citizen of a city and you meet the qualifications for voting within that jurisdiction, in the United States, it's typically that you're 18 years old, in some places you have to be a little older, in some places you might have other qualifications, but if you're qualified to participate as a citizen in democratic processes, then you should be able to participate in Participatory Budgeting sessions that are associated with things like how do we spend taxes or how do we make certain investments. In corporations it's not quite the same way. Just because you work at a company doesn't mean you should be included in portfolio management decisions that affect the entire company. You may not have the background, you may not have the training, you may be what my friends sometimes call a fresher. So I do a lot of work overseas, so freshers, they just may not have the experience to participate. So one thing that we look at in Participatory Budgeting and SAFe is who should be involved in the sessions, and that doesn't mean that every single employee should always be included, because their background, I mean, they may be a technical topic and maybe they don't have the right technical background. So we work a little bit harder in corporations to make sure the right people are there. Now, of course, if we're going to make a mistake, we tend to make the mistake of including more people than excluding, partly because in SAFe Participatory Budgeting, it's a group of people who are making a decision, not a one person, one vote, and that's really profoundly important because in a corporation, just like in a para-bond, your opinion matters to me, I want to know what you're thinking. If I'm looking in, I'll use SAFe terminology, if I'm looking at three epics that could advance our portfolio, and I'm a little unsure about two of those epics, like one of those epics, I'm like, yeah, this is a really good thing, I know a little bit about it, this matters, I'm going to fund this, but the other two I'm not so sure about, well, there's no way I can learn through reading alone what the opinions of other people are, because, again, there's these intangible factors. There's these elements that may not be included in an ROI analysis, it's kind of hard to talk about brand and an ROI analysis - we can, but it's hard, so I want to listen to how other people are talking about things, and through that, I can go, yeah, I can see the value, I didn't see it before, I'm going to join you in funding this. So that's among the ways in which Participatory Budgeting is a little different within the private sector and the public sector and within a company. The only other element that I would add is that Participatory Budgeting gives people the permission to stop funding items that are no longer likely to meet the investment or objectives of the company, or to change minds, and so one of the, again, this is a bit of an overhang in the Agile community, Agile teams are optimised for doing things that are small, things that can fit within a two or three week Sprint. That's great, no criticism there, but our customers and our stakeholders want big things that move the market needle, and the big things that move the market needle don't get done in two or three weeks, in general, and they rarely, like they require multiple teams working multiple weeks to create a really profoundly new important thing. And so what happens though, is that we need to make in a sense funding commitments for these big things, but we also have to have a way to change our mind, and so traditional funding processes, they let us make this big commitment, but they're not good at letting us change our mind, meaning they're not Agile. Participatory Budgeting gives us the best of both worlds. I can sit at the table with you and with our colleagues, we can commit to funding something that's big, but six months later, which is the recommended cadence from SAFe, I can come back to that table and reassess and we can all look at each other, because you know those moments, right, you've had that experience in visiting, because you're like looking around the table and you're like, yeah, this isn't working. And then in traditional funding, we keep funding what's not working because there's no built-in mechanism to easily change it, but in SAFe Participatory Budgeting, you and I can sit at the table and we can look at each other with our colleagues and say, yeah, you know, that initiative just, it's not working, well, let's change our mind, okay, what is the new thing that we can fund? What is the new epic? And that permission is so powerful within a corporation. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for sharing that, and whilst you were speaking, because again, me trying to connect the dots and thinking, for an organisation that has adopted SAFe or it's trying to scale Agility, because like you mentioned, Agile teams are optimised to iteratively develop or deliver, you know, small chunks over time, usually two to three weeks, but, like you said, there is a longer time horizon spanning months, even years into the future, sometimes for those worthwhile, meaty things to be delivered that moves the strategic needle if I may use that buzzword. So, let's say we at that lean portfolio level, we're looking at epics, right, and Participatory Budgeting, we are looking at initiatives on an epic to epic basis per se, where would the Lean Startup Cycle come in here? So is it that Participatory Budgeting could be a mechanism that is used for assessing, okay, this is the MVP features that have been developed and all that, the leading indicators we've gotten, that's presented to the group, and on that basis, we make that pivot or persevere or stop decision, would that fit in? Luke Hohmann Yeah, so let's, I mean, you're close, but let me make a few turns and then it'll click better. First, let's acknowledge that the SAFe approach to the Lean Startup Cycle is not the Eric Ries approach, there are some differences, but let's separate how I fund something from how I evaluate something. So if I'm going to engage in the SAFe Lean Startup Cycle, part of that engagement is to fund an MVP, which is going to prove or disprove a given hypothesis. So that's an expenditure of money. Now there's, if you think about the expenditure of money, there's minimally two steps in this process - there's spending enough money to conduct the experiments, and if those experiments are true, making another commitment to spend money again, that I want to spend it. The reason this is important is, let's say I had three experiments running in parallel and I'm going to use easy round numbers for a large corporation. Let's say I want to run three experiments in parallel, and each experiment costs me a million pounds. Okay. So now let's say that the commercialisation of each of those is an additional amount of money. So the portfolio team sits around the table and says, we have the money, we're going to fund all three. Okay, great. Well, it's an unlikely circumstance, but let's say all three are successful. Well, this is like a venture capitalist, and I have a talk that I give that relates the funding cycle of a venture capitalist to the funding cycle of an LPM team. While it's unlikely, you could have all three become successful, and this is what I call an oversubscribed portfolio. I've got three great initiatives, but I can still only fund one or two of them, I still have to make the choice. Now, of course, I'm going to look at my economics and let's say out of the three initiatives that were successfully proven through their hypothesis, let's say one of them is just clearly not as economically attractive, for whatever reason. Okay, we get rid of that one, now, I've got two, and if I can only fund one of them, and the ROI, the hard ROI is roughly the same, that's when Participatory Budgeting really shines, because we can have those leaders come back into the room, and they can say, which choice do we want to make now? So the evaluative aspect of the MVP is the leading indicators and the results of the proving or disproving of the hypotheses. We separate that from the funding choices, which is where Participatory Budgeting and LPM kick in. Ula Ojiaku Okay. So you've separated the proving or disproving the hypothesis of the feature, some of the features that will probably make up an epic. And you're saying the funding, the decision to fund the epic in the first place is a different conversation. And you've likened it to Venture Capital funding rounds. Where do they connect? Because if they're separate, what's the connecting thread between the two? Luke Hohmann The connected thread is the portfolio process, right? The actual process is the mechanism where we're connecting these things. Ula Ojiaku OK, no, thanks for the portfolio process. But there is something you mentioned, ROI - Return On Investment. And sometimes when you're developing new products, you don't know, you have assumptions. And any ROI, sorry to put it this way, but you're really plucking figures from the air, you know, you're modelling, but there is no certainty because you could hit the mark or you could go way off the mark. So where does that innovation accounting coming into place, especially if it's a product that's yet to make contact with, you know, real life users, the customers. Luke Hohmann Well, let's go back to something you said earlier, and what you talked earlier about was the relationship that you have in market researching customer interaction. In making a forecast, let's go ahead and look at the notion of building a new product within a company, and this is again where the Agile community sometimes doesn't want to look at numbers or quote, unquote get dirty, but we have to, because if I'm going to look at building a new idea, or taking a new idea into a product, I have to have a forecast of its viability. Is it economically viable? Is it a good choice? So innovation accounting is a way to look at certain data, but before, I'm going to steal a page, a quote, from one of my friends, Jeff Patton. The most expensive way to figure this out is to actually build the product. So what can I do that's less expensive than building the product itself? I can still do market research, but maybe I wouldn't do an innovation game, maybe I'd do a formal survey and I use a price point testing mechanism like Van Westendorp Price Point Analysis, which is a series of questions that you ask to triangulate on acceptable price ranges. I can do competitive benchmarking for similar products and services. What are people offering right now in the market? Now that again, if the product is completely novel, doing competitive benchmarking can be really hard. Right now, there's so many people doing streaming that we look at the competitive market, but when Netflix first offered streaming and it was the first one, their best approach was what we call reference pricing, which is, I have a reference price for how much I pay for my DVDs that I'm getting in the mail, I'm going to base my streaming service kind of on the reference pricing of entertainment, although that's not entirely clear that that was the best way to go, because you could also base the reference price on what you're paying for a movie ticket and how many, but then you look at consumption, right, because movie tickets are expensive, so I only go to a movie maybe once every other month, whereas streaming is cheap and so I can change my demand curve by lowering my price. But this is why it's such a hard science is because we have this notion of these swirling factors. Getting specifically back to your question about the price point, I do have to do some market research before I go into the market to get some forecasting and some confidence, and research gives me more confidence, and of course, once I'm in the market, I'll know how effective my research matched the market reality. Maybe my research was misleading, and of course, there's some skill in designing research, as you know, to get answers that have high quality signal strength. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for clarifying. That makes perfect sense to me. Luke Hohmann It's kind of like a forecast saying, like there's a group of Agile people who will say, like, you shouldn't make forecasts. Well, I don't understand that because that's like saying, and people will say, well, I can't predict the future. Well, okay, I can't predict when I'm going to retire, but I'm planning to retire. I don't know the date of my exact retirement, but my wife and I are planning our retirement, and we're saving, we're making certain investment choices for our future, because we expect to have a future together. Now our kids are older than yours. My kids are now in university, and so we're closer to retirement. So what I dislike about the Agile community is people will sometimes say, well, I don't know the certainty of the event, therefore, I can't plan for it. But that's really daft, because there are many places in like, you may not for the listeners, her daughter is a little younger than my kids, but they will be going to university one day, and depending on where they go, that's a financial choice. So you could say, well, I don't know when she's going to university, and I can't predict what university she's going to go to, therefore I'm not going to save any money. Really? That doesn't make no sense. So I really get very upset when you have people in the agile community will say things like road mapping or forecasting is not Agile. It's entirely Agile. How you treat it is Agile or not Agile. Like when my child comes up to me and says, hey, you know about that going to university thing, I was thinking of taking a gap year. Okay, wait a minute, that's a change. That doesn't mean no, it means you're laughing, right? But that's a change. And so we respond to change, but we still have a plan. Ula Ojiaku It makes sense. So the reason, and I completely resonate with everything you said, the reason I raised that ROI and it not being known is that in some situations, people might be tempted to use it to game the budget allocation decision making process. That's why I said you would pluck the ROI. Luke Hohmann Okay, let's talk about that. We actually address this in our recent paper, but I'll give you my personal experience. You are vastly more likely to get bad behaviour on ROI analysis when you do not do Participatory Budgeting, because there's no social construct to prevent bad behaviour. If I'm sitting down at a table and that's virtual or physical, it doesn't matter, but let's take a perfect optimum size for a Participatory Budgeting group. Six people, let's say I'm a Director or a Senior Director in a company, and I'm sitting at a table and there's another Senior Director who's a peer, maybe there's a VP, maybe there's a person from engineering, maybe there's a person from sales and we've got this mix of people and I'm sitting at that table. I am not incented to come in with an inflated ROI because those people are really intelligent and given enough time, they're not going to support my initiative because I'm fibbing, I'm lying. And I have a phrase for this, it's when ROI becomes RO-lie that it's dangerous. And so when I'm sitting at that table, what we find consistently, and one of the clients that we did a fair amount of Participatory Budgeting for years ago with Cisco, what we found was the leaders at Cisco were creating tighter, more believable, and more defensible economic projections, precisely because they knew that they were going to be sitting with their peers, and it didn't matter. It can go both ways. Sometimes people will overestimate the ROI or they underestimate the cost. Same outcome, right? I'm going to overestimate the benefit, and people would be like, yeah, I don't think you can build that product with three teams. You're going to need five or six teams and people go, oh, I can get it done with, you know, 20 people. Yeah, I don't think so, because two years ago, we built this product. It's very similar, and, you know, we thought we could get it done with 20 people and we couldn't. We really needed, you know, a bigger group. So you see the social construct creating a more believable set of results because people come to the Participatory Budgeting session knowing that their peers are in the room. And of course, we think we're smart, so our peers are as smart as we are, we're all smart people, and therefore, the social construct of Participatory Budgeting quite literally creates a better input, which creates a better output. Ula Ojiaku That makes sense, definitely. Thanks for sharing that. I've found that very, very insightful and something I can easily apply. The reasoning behind it, the social pressure, quote unquote, knowing that you're not just going to put the paper forward but you'd have to defend it in a credible, believable way make sense. So just to wrap up now, what books have you found yourself recommending to people the most, and why? Luke Hohmann It's so funny, I get yelled at by my wife for how many books I buy. She'll go like “It's Amazon again. Another book. You know, there's this thing called the library.” Ula Ojiaku You should do Participatory Budgeting for your books then sounds like, sorry. Luke Hohmann No, no, I don't, I'd lose. Gosh, I love so many books. So there's a few books that I consider to be my go-to references and my go-to classics, but I also recommend that people re-read books and sometimes I recommend re-reading books is because you're a different person, and as you age and as you grow and you see things differently and in fact, I'm right now re-reading and of course it goes faster, but I'm re-reading the original Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck, a fantastic book. I just finished reading a few new books, but let me let me give you a couple of classics that I think everyone in our field should read and why they should read them. I think everyone should read The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks because he really covers some very profound truths that haven't changed, things like Brooks Law, which is adding programmers to a late project, makes it later. He talks about the structure of teams and how to scale before scaling was big and important and cool. He talks about communication and conceptual integrity and the role of the architect. The other book that I'm going to give, which I hope is different than any book that anyone has ever given you, because it's one of my absolute favourite books and I give them away, is a book called Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Comics or graphic novels are an important medium for communication, and when we talk about storytelling and we talk about how to frame information and how to present information, understanding comics is profoundly insightful in terms of how to present, share, show information. A lot of times I think we make things harder than they should be. So when I'm working with executives and some of the clients that I work with personally, when we talk about our epics, we actually will tell stories about the hero's journey and we actually hire comic book artists to help the executives tell their story in a comic form or in a graphic novel form. So I absolutely love understanding comics. I think that that's really a profound book. Of course you mentioned Alex Osterwalder's books, Business Model Generation, Business Model Canvas. Those are fantastic books for Product Managers. I also, just looking at my own bookshelves, of course, Innovation Games for PMs, of course Software Profit Streams because we have to figure out how to create sustainability, but in reality there's so many books that we love and that we share and that we grow together when we're sharing books and I'll add one thing. Please don't only limit your books to technical books. We're humans too. I recently, this week and what I mean recent I mean literally this weekend I was visiting one of my kids in Vermont all the way across the country, and so on the plane ride I finished two books, one was a very profound and deeply written book called Ponyboy. And then another one was a very famous book on a woman protagonist who's successful in the 60s, Lessons in Chemistry, which is a new book that's out, and it was a super fun light read, some interesting lessons of course, because there's always lessons in books, and now if it's okay if I'm not overstepping my boundaries, what would be a book that you'd like me to read? I love to add books to my list. Ula Ojiaku Oh my gosh, I didn't know. You are the first guest ever who's twisted this on me, but I tend to read multiple books at a time. Luke Hohmann Only two. Ula Ojiaku Yeah, so, and I kind of switch, maybe put some on my bedside and you know there's some on my Kindle and in the car, just depending. So I'm reading multiple books at a time, but based on what you've said the one that comes to mind is the new book by Oprah Winfrey and it's titled What Happened to You? Understanding Trauma, because like you said, it's not just about reading technical books and we're human beings and we find out that people behave probably sometimes in ways that are different to us, and it's not about saying what's wrong with you, because there is a story that we might not have been privy to, you know, in terms of their childhood, how they grew up, which affected their worldview and how they are acting, so things don't just suddenly happen. And the question that we have been asked and we sometimes ask of people, and for me, I'm reading it from a parent's perspective because I understand that even more so that my actions, my choices, they play a huge, you know, part in shaping my children. So it's not saying what's wrong with you? You say, you know, what happened to you? And it traces back to, based on research, because she wrote it with a renowned psychologist, I don't know his field but a renowned psychologist, so neuroscience-based psychological research on human beings, attachment theory and all that, just showing how early childhood experiences, even as early as maybe a few months old, tend to affect people well into adulthood. So that would be my recommendation. Luke Hohmann Thank you so much. That's a gift. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. You're the first person to ask me. So, my pleasure. So, before we go to the final words, where can the audience find you, because you have a wealth of knowledge, a wealth of experience, and I am sure that people would want to get in touch with you, so how can they do this please? Luke Hohmann Yeah, well, they can get me on LinkedIn and they can find me at Applied Frameworks. I tell you, I teach classes that are known to be very profound because we always reserve, myself and the instructors at Applied Frameworks, we have very strong commitments to reserving class time for what we call the parking lot or the ask me anything question, which are many times after I've covered the core material in the class, having the opportunity to really frame how to apply something is really important. So I would definitely encourage people to take one of my classes because you'll not get the material, you'll get the reasons behind the material, which means you can apply it, but you'll also be able to ask us questions and our commitment as a company is you can ask us anything and if we don't know the answer, we'll help you find it. We'll help you find the expert or the person that you need talk to, to help you out and be successful. And then, and I think in terms of final words, I will simply ask people to remember that we get to work in the most amazing field building things for other people and it's joyful work, and we, one of my phrases is you're not doing Agile, if you're not having fun at work, there's something really wrong, there's something missing, yeah we need to retrospect and we need to improve and we need to reflect and all those important things, absolutely, but we should allow ourselves to experience the joy of serving others and being of service and building things that matter. Ula Ojiaku I love the concept of joyful Agile and getting joy in building things that matter, serving people and may I add also working together with amazing people, and for me it's been a joyful conversation with you, Luke, I really appreciate you making the time, I am definitely richer and more enlightened as a result of this conversation, so thank you so much once more. Luke Hohmann Thank you so much for having me here, thank you everyone for listening with us. Ula Ojiaku  My pleasure. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!   

What makes a company invincible? How do you know if a company takes innovation seriously? Alexander Osterwalder has the answers.  Alex is an entrepreneur, leading author, and in-demand speaker, and one of the world's most influential strategy and innovation experts. Ranked no. 4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide, his work has changed how established companies do business and how new ventures get started. His books include the international bestsellers «Business Model Generation», «Value Proposition Design», and «The Invincible Company.» Together with Yves Pigneur, he invented the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas – practical tools that are trusted by millions.  He explains what makes a company invincible, what companies get right and wrong about innovation, how you can create a value proposition for your business that customers love.  We also discuss how storytelling helps your businesses suspend disbelief in the unfamiliar.  Enjoy this episode with one of the world's foremost strategy and innovation thinkers! Would you like to receive weekly tips from me on how you can join the top 1% of business communicators? Try the Speak Like a CEO newsletter. It is highly actionable and provides a ton of insights that you can immediately apply to your own career or business.  https://www.eoipsocommunications.com/newsletter/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/likeaceo/message

Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder, founder & CEO of Strategyzer, is one of the world's most influential strategy and innovation experts. A leading author, entrepreneur, and in-demand speaker, his work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started. In this episode of Leadership NOW with Dan Pontefract, Alex lays out his nfluential ideas on modern business models, emphasizing the need for innovative strategies and a shift away from traditional business thinking. Continuously ranked in the top 50 management thinkers worldwide by Thinkers50 and a visiting professor at IMD, Osterwalder is known for simplifying the strategy development process and turning complex concepts into digestible visual models. Together with Yves Pigneur, he invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map – practical tools that are trusted by millions of business practitioners from leading global companies, including Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Mastercard, Sony, Fujitsu, 3M, Intel, Roche, Colgate-Palmolive, and many more. Strategyzer is an innovation powerhouse, providing online courses, applications, and technology-enabled services to help organizations effectively and systematically manage strategy, growth, and transformation. Osterwalder's books include the international bestseller «Business Model Generation», «Value Proposition Design», «Testing Business Ideas», «High-Impact Tools for Teams» and «The Invincible Company,» A frequent and popular keynote speaker, Osterwalder travels the world discussing his ideas and strategies at Fortune 500 companies, premiere innovation conferences, and leading universities. He holds a doctorate from HEC Lausanne/Switzerland and is a founding member of The Constellation, a global not-for-profit organization connecting local responses to global issues around the world.

Growing your people to grow your organization – it makes sense, right? But what about approaching the problem from the other direction – growing your organization, to grow your people? When's the last time you looked at the state of your org chart? And how willing are you to experiment with it? Today, I want to bring back an old episode. In 2020, we spoke with Alex Osterwalder about his idea of an invincible company – one that is constantly reinventing itself to stay on the bleeding edge of disruption. Alex, along with his mentor Yves Pigneur, is one of the top-ranked management thinkers in the world – as of Thinkers50 2023, which just wrapped up, the duo is number 8 on that list. I hope you enjoy.  

HR-Transformationen sind der Schlüssel zur Anpassung an die sich verändernde Arbeitswelt, sagt Xenia Meuser.Unser Podcast Host Johannes Füß spricht in dieser Woche mit Xenia Meuser, ehemalige CHRO bei RTL, über die Rolle von HR in Veränderungsprozessen.Das erwartet Dich:1. HR als strategischer Partner: Wie HR-Abteilungen den Veränderungsprozess aktiv mitgestalten können2. Die Grundlagen der HR-Abteilung: Optimierung von Abläufen und Prozessen für eine solide Grundlage3. Erfolgsmessung in HR: Die Bedeutung von KPIs bei der Bewertung von HR-Projekten4. Veränderung des Mindsets: Die Rolle von HR-Leitern bei der Förderung eines innovativen und agilen Mindsets5. Herausforderungen und Chancen: Widerstand und Unsicherheit bei der Veränderung des Mindsets, aber auch die Möglichkeit einer stärkeren Zusammenarbeit mit den Fachbereichen.__________Über Xenia:Xenia Meuser war zuletzt CHRO bei RTL Deutschland. Zuvor wirkte sie in verschiedensten Führungsfunktionen im Personalbereich der New Work SE, ehemals Xing SE, der Otto-Gruppe und bei Tchibo mit. Mit Blick auf ihre 25-jährige Erfahrung im HR Bereich, überzeugt Xenia mit hervorragenden Führungsqualitäten und einer ausgeprägten Expertise im Recruiting, Employer Branding und Change Management. Xenias Vision ist es, HR gesamtheitlich in Deutschland auch auf das nächste Level zu bringen. In ihrer Freizeit liest Xenia sehr viel und hält an täglichen Ritualen fest, wie morgendlichen Mobilitätsübungen und einem abendlichen Gebet.Xenia ist auf der Suche nach einem Tool für die HR Reifegradanalyse und freut sich über Inspirationen!Finde Xenia auf LinkedIn und schreibe ihr: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xenia-meuser-24146313b/Xenias Businessbuch Empfehlung für Menschen, die sich beruflich neu orientieren:Business Model You: Dein Leben - Deine Karriere - Dein Spiel - Tim Clark, Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur https://www.amazon.de/Business-Model-You-Leben-Karriere-dp-3593517698/dp/3593517698/ref=dp_ob_title_bkXenias Podcast-Empfehlung:OMR Podcast | https://open.spotify.com/show/4rION5Qm2nPvDbzIB1wUiH (Spotify) | https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/omr-podcast/id1056312052 (Apple)___________Über unseren Host Johannes:Johannes Füß ist Vice President von EGYM Wellpass, die mit ihrer Firmenfitness den perfekten Corporate Health-Benefit für ein produktives, gesundes und ausgeglichenes Team bietet. Der in München geborene Schokoladen-Liebhaber hat eine große Leidenschaft für die Alpen, das Wandern und Skifahren.Finde Johannes Füß auf LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johannes-füß/oder schreibe eine E-Mail an johannes.fuess@egym-wellpass.com __________Der Level Up HR Podcast wird von unseren Freunden von SAWOO produziert – http://www.sawoo.io 

Mike and Alex explore key questions around the innovation mindset and framework. What is required of leadership, how to properly test your ideas, and most importantly how to inject the "Dual Mindset" into your organization! Thank you for listening to the Leaders, Innovators and Big Ideas podcast, supported by Rainforest Alberta. The podcast that highlights those people who are contributing to and/or supporting the innovation ecosystem in Alberta. Host:  Mike Procee is an entrepreneur, facilitator, innovator and problem solver. Working in the Calgary Energy Sector, Mike strives to build the innovation ecosystem and community. From his volunteer position on the Strategic Capability Network, where he founded the Calgary Innovation Peer Forum, to pursuing his DBA in Winter 2024, focused on innovation, Mike is pushing the thinking on what it means to be a corporate innovation practitioner.  Guest: Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is the founder & CEO of Strategyzer and visiting professor at IMD Business School. He is ranked no. 4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide.  Dr. Osterwalder is best known for inventing the Business Model Canvas together with Yves Pigneur. He wrote 5 global bestsellers and 1 business comic for kids. Strategyzer, his company, helps leading organizations around the world innovate and transform.   Please be sure to share this episode with everyone you know. If you are interested in being either a host, a guest, or a sponsor of the show, please reach out. We are published in Google Podcasts and the iTunes store for Apple Podcasts We would be grateful if you could give us a rating as it helps spread the word about the show. Show Links: Strategyzer AG  Show Quotes: "Do not call yourself rebels or pirates if you are innovating!" "Innovation is creating value for the business, customers, employees, and stakeholders" "A great R&D program does not mean you are a great innovator!" Credits... This Episode Sponsored By: New Idea Machine Episode Music: Tony Del Degan Creator & Producer: Al Del Degan  

Folge 39 beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, wie Startups die größten Hürden auf dem Weg zum Erfolg überwinden können. Zu Gast ist Stephan Schulze, CTO und Managing Director bei Project A Ventures, einer operativen Venture Capital Gesellschaft, die nicht nur investiert, sondern mit über 100 Mitarbeitern die Portfolio-Unternehmen dabei unterstützt, besser zu werden. Stephan arbeitet bei Project A Ventures hauptsächlich im Bereich Operational Services. Das bedeutet, dass er eine starke operative Perspektive und viel Erfahrung aus der Startup-Praxis mitbringt. Uli, Markus und Stephan diskutieren über die zentrale Bedeutung eines gesicherten Produkt-Markt-Fits für Startups und die Rolle permanenter Optimierungen am Markt. Darüber hinaus betont Stephan die Notwendigkeit einer ausgewogenen personellen Zusammensetzung über die verschiedenen Phasen eines Startups hinweg. Nicht nur die Größe, sondern auch die Zusammensetzung des Teams sollte im Auge behalten werden. Das praxisorientierte Gespräch macht aber auch deutlich, wie wichtig eine am aktuellen Bedarf orientierte technische Umsetzung ist. Sowohl Über- als auch Unterdimensionierung hat Stephan bereits in der Praxis erlebt. Wer mehr erfahren möchte, findet hier weitere Informationen:: - Project A Ventures Angebot und das Profil von Stephan Schulze https://www.project-a.com und https://www.project-a.com/team/stephan-schulze/ - Literaturhinweis „The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses“ von Eric Ries https://amzn.eu/d/4bOlPh8 - Literaturhinweis „Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future“ von Peter Thiel https://amzn.eu/d/9cWdodq - Literaturhinweis „The $100 Startup: Fire Your Boss, Do What You Love and Work Better To Live More“ von Chris Guillebeau https://amzn.eu/d/3Fl8qyy - Literaturhinweis „Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers“ von Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur https://amzn.eu/d/gPryJtS - Literaturhinweis „The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers“ von Ben Horowitz https://amzn.eu/d/5WtKvwb Euer Feedback zur Folge und Vorschläge für Themen und Gäst:innen sind sehr willkommen! Vernetzt euch und diskutiert mit: - Stephan Schulze: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephan-schulze/ - Ulrich Irnich: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ulrichirnich/ - Markus Kuckertz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markuskuckertz/ Mitwirkende - Hosts: Ulrich Irnich & Markus Kuckertz // Produktion: Daniel Sprügel, Maniac Studios (https://maniacstudios.com/) // Redaktion: Marcus Pawlik © Digital Pacemaker Podcast 2023

Yasser Tamer discusses ways of being intentionally inclusive on episode 477 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. Quotes from the episode Students are not actually advised to memorize or even to learn a theory by heart, but they are advised to reflect. -Yasser Tamer Do whatever you are interested in. -Yasser Tamer Let students choose their own pathway. -Yasser Tamer It is equitable, but let's make it more accessible. -Yasser Tamer Resources Cultivating Compassionate Community to Foster Academic Integrity? (with @YasserTammer), by Maha Bali Video: MYFest22 Syllabus Accessibility Jam with Alexandra Gazis and Yasser Tamer Video: The Experience of a Visually Impaired Student Yasser Tamer, The American University in Cairo, Egypt Business Model You: The One-Page Way to Reinvent Your Work at Any Stage, by Bruce Hazen, Timothy Clark, Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, + Alan Smith* The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey* Soliya Intentionally Equitable Hospitality series through Equity Unbound Write Good ALT text Syllabus as Manifesto: A Critical Approach to Classroom Culture, by Adam Heidebrink-Bruno

CANVAS 1-10 El modelo de negocios Este episodio 224 es introductorio de un total de 10 episodios que estaré desarrollando, para cada uno de los bloques de gestión del modelo CANVAS Este Business Canvas Model o Modelo Canvas  es una metodología desarrollada por Alexander Osterwalder y Yves Pigneur, que "permite desarrollar, visualizar, evaluar y alterar modelos de negocios nuevos o existentes"  Sirve para ir a la práctica y plasmar un modelo empresarial. Este es una “especie de anteproyecto de una estrategia que se aplicará en las estructuras, procesos y sistemas de una empresa”.  Es muy sencillo y profundo a la vez, fue desarrollado a partir de un power point que luego graficó y publicó en su blog, en el año 2004, el suizo Alexander Osterwalder, posteriormente recibió la colaboración de muchos consultores y escribió el libro Modelo de Negocios CANVAS. Permite mirar el modelo de negocios , dividido en nueve bloques: Segmento de Mercado Propuesta de Valor Canales Relaciones con clientes Fuentes de ingresos Recursos clave Actividades clave Asociaciones clave Estructura de costos En los siguientes episodios revisaremos con mayor profundidad cada uno de estos bloques, con ejemplos, para que vendedores, emprendedores y ejecutivos puedan implementar esta útil herramienta estratégica en sus empresas.

En tant que professeur à la HEC Lausanne, Yves Pigneur aidait régulièrement les étudiant·es à relire leur business plan. Il a alors élaboré 9 questions fondamentales pour appréhender un projet et visualiser son plan d'affaires. C'était les débuts du Business Model Canva, aujourd'hui téléchargé par plusieurs dizaines de millions de personnes à travers le monde. Dans ce nouvel épisode de notre podcast, on parle proposition de valeur, désirabilité, test et impact avec notre invité. *** Animé par nos coachs en création d'entreprise, le podcast de GENILEM est un rendez-vous pour les personnes passionnées et curieuses d'entrepreneuriat. Avec le soutien de notre parrain Berney Associés.

¿Te gustaría tener éxito con tu proyecto creativo, aunque no sabes por dónde empezar o cómo llevarlo al siguiente nivel?Ese es el tema principal del programa de esta semana, donde compartiremos nuestros aprendizajes más impactantes aprendidos después de haber publicado nada menos que 250 episodios del podcast.Notas de programaLas notas del programa están disponibles en https://kenso.es/episodio/250-aprendizajes-podcastÍndice del programa(02:19) 1 | Preguntarte el «para qué»(06:24) 2 | Conocerte a ti mismo(08:46) 3 | Hacer el ejercicio de «Persona»(12:16) Recomendación: recurso(13:47) 4 | Buscar referentes(16:28) 5 | Definir una estructura(20:48) 6 | Investiga y prueba(23:12) 7 | Producto mínimo viable(25:23) Recomendación: Herramienta(27:02) 8 | Preguntar y mejora continua(30:35) 9 | Disfrutar(32:15) 10 | Romper creencias y déjate sorprender(33:53) Tu plan de acción(34:46) ¡Nos escuchamos muy pronto!Recursos mencionadosEpisodio 0: KENSO, el origen de una nueva efectividadArchivo del podcastEpisodio 133: Vence al síndrome del impostorArtículo: El mapa de empatía (entendiendo al cliente) de Javier MegiasLibro: Tu modelo de negocio de Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur y Timothy ClarkPersona: David CantollaEpisodio 5: El artesano de la innovación con Humberto MatasEpisodio 102: La gestión de personas y proyectos con José Carlos Palencia «Bowie»Plataforma de grabación: Zencastr (30% descuento para lo oyentes de KENSO)Kit: Todo lo que necesitas para grabar tu podcastÚnete a KENSO CírculoKENSO Círculo es el club para personas centradas en mejorar su efectividad y vivir más felices.Un club a tu alcance porque a partir de 1€ al mes tendrás acceso prioritario a los episodios del podcast, podrás descargar un plan de acción para cada episodio, recibirás cada mes un episodio especial donde haremos una reseña sobre un libro de efectividad, disfrutarás de descuentos en los servicios de KENSO y de nuestra eterna gratitud por ayudarnos a mejorar.Más información & InscripciónComparte tus sugerencias¿Qué te gustaría escuchar en futuros episodios del podcast? Déjanos tus sugerencias de personas a entrevistar o temas a tratar en los comentarios de las notas del programa. Únete a KENSO Círculo en https://plus.acast.com/s/kenso. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

#57 with Iris: 我正在創造一份很棒的新工作 ! ｜ I'm in the process of building something great! 這集是用國語聊。This episode is in Chinese. Iris said hi after a talk I gave (in Chinese!) back in October about my journey with podcasting. We finally met up earlier this month. After a two-hour long lunch, Iris and I recorded this conversation about her personal growth journey over the past few years, and the remarkable changes she's seen in herself before and after arriving to Boston (pre-pandemic). We had so much fun, as you'll be able to tell with all the laughs.Her mantra of telling herself: "我正在創造一份很棒的新工作 !" (I'm in the process of building something great!). I'm adopting it for my morning routine. Enjoy! Topics: 從認識自己 ｜ getting to know oneself again 從新建裡自我價值觀 ｜ re-establishing personal values 從建立自己跟自己的信念 ｜rebuilding oneself and one's belief system 我想要當什麼樣的人？我的動機是什麼？我為什麼要對這件事情抓的真麼緊？｜ Who do I want to be? What is my motivation? What's behind the motivation that's causing me to hang on so tightly? 當平靜喜悅的人 ｜to become a calm and joyful person 對待自己的方式讓自己進步｜ how you treat yourself to improve and grow (shame / self-criticism vs encouragement / self-confidence / self-compassion) 用好的精神做每天要做的五件事情｜know when you have your best energy so you can apply it to the five things you set out to do each day 用冥想來消化情緒｜ daily meditation practice to process emotions 用於加來認識身體 ｜ daily yoga to connect with one's body, to see how its feeling and what it's telling you 從讀書裡面找到答案 ｜ read daily -- can learn so much from what other people have gone through 寫感恩日記 ｜ write daily gratitude journal 付出分享 ｜ output Follow Iris on FB at 日常。瑜珈 Recommended Books: 1) 原子習慣 ｜ Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear 2) 子彈思考整理術 ｜ The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll 3) 創造生命的奇蹟 ｜ You Can Heal Your Life by Louise L. Hay 4) ｜ Trust Life: Love Yourself Every Day with Wisdom by Louise Hay 5) 自我疼惜的五十一個練習 ｜ The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook: A Proven Way to Accept Yourself, Build Inner Strength, and Thrive Letting Go by Christopher Germer and Kristin Neff 6) 一個人的獲利模式：用這張圖，探索你未來要走的路 ｜ Business Model You: The One-Page Way to Reinvent Your Work at Any Life Stage by Bruce Hazen, Timothy Clark, Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith The book links above contain affiliate links to bookshop.org, an online bookshop that supports neighborhood and indie booksellers (support local businesses!). If you choose to make a purchase after clicking a link, I may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your support! Recommended Meditation App: Insight Timer - featuring Kristen Neff | Kristen's Self-Compassion Meditation *** Say hi! 來打招呼！ Newsletter (new!): ⁠twdiaspora.substack.com⁠ Social media 社群: @twdiaspora on ⁠Twitter⁠, ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠Facebook⁠. Show notes 主網頁: ⁠www.taiwanesediaspora.com⁠. Email 電子信箱: ⁠hello@taiwanesediaspora.com⁠. Support 贊助: ⁠https://ko-fi.com/twdiaspora⁠ and ⁠https://bookshop.org/shop/twdiaspora --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/twdiaspora/support

Le monde du travail connaît une véritable révolution - la plus importante depuis l'instauration des congés payés - drivée par les collaborateurs. Pour notre invité, on peut avoir une approche globale autour de l'amélioration des conditions de travail des équipes, mais il faut apporter des solutions personnalisées.   C'est de ce constat que l'événement The Next Work Place est né. Grâce aux prises de parole de Kévin Bouchareb, Perrine  Labesse ou encore Pamela Corbin-Audoux, les quelque 300 invités sont ressortis de l'event avec une roadmap du Future of Work pour les aider à construire l'écosystème de travail. L'invité : Martin Sauer est le co-fondateur de Slean, l'entreprise qui réinvente le bureau de demain, mais aussi l'un des organisateurs de l'événement The Next Work Place qui a eu lieu le 6 décembre 2022 dans le garage Amelot. Restez connectés, une summer édition devrait voir le jour prochainement.  Les time codes : 3''00 : Les incontournables du podcast 8''00 : The Next Work Place : la genèse   20''00 : Des améliorations pour la prochain édition ? 31''30 : Le télétravail en France  38''30 : Quel impact pour The Next Work Place ? 41''10 : Un fail ?  43''10 : Le bureau de demain  51''00 : L'offre de lancement de Slean  53''10 : Début de Slean en période de Covid-19  54''10 : Le bureau circulaire  1''01''10 : Les recos de l'invité  1''04''45 : L'anecdote de l'invité Les références citées dans l'épisode : Lectures  # La Méthode Value Proposition Design d'Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Greg Bernarda et Alan Smith # Les employés d'abord, les clients ensuite - Comment renverser les règles du management de Vineet Nayar et Étienne Appert Série # WeCrashed de Lee Eisenberg et Drew Crevello  Abonnez-vous ici, à la newsletter Lundi au Soleil, qui sortira tous les dimanches à partir de 2023.  Pour découvrir tout ça, c'est par ici si vous préférez Apple Podcasts, par là si vous préférez Deezer, ici si vous préférez Google Podcasts, ou encore là si vous préférez Spotify. Et n'oubliez pas de laisser 5 étoiles et un commentaire sympa sur Apple Podcasts si l'épisode vous a plu. Lundi au soleil est un podcast du label Orso Media produit par Orlane Tonani Guéguen.

Full episode video available here: https://youtu.be/gWWkD9hQVtA  Ula's Bio: Uloaku (Ula) Ojiaku is a Business Agility Strategist, coach, mentor and trainer with a focus on helping leaders and their teams in large organisations embrace a Lean-Agile mindset and adopt its associated ways of working to improve how they operate, effectively respond to changes in the marketplace and ultimately deliver value to their customers. With nearly 20 years of professional experience, she has worked in multiple countries, in a variety of technical, business and leadership roles across industries including Oil & Gas, Telecommunications, Financial Services, Government, Higher Education and Consulting. A certified Technology Business Management (TBM) Council Executive, SAFe 5.0 Program Consultant (SPC 5.0) and ICAgile Coach, Ula has a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University College London (UCL) and a Bachelors degree in Electronics Engineering from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN). She is the Founder/ Principal Consultant of Mezahab Group Ltd (a UK-based Lean Agile Innovation training and consulting company). She also currently serves a multi-national retail organisation as a Senior Agile Coach and is a guest lecturer at Coventry University.  Social Media/ Websites: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/uloakuojiaku/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/uloakuojiaku Website: www.agileinnovationleaders.com  Episode Transcript Ula Ojiaku Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more, with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. I had the privilege on the 30th of March 2022 to speak at the Agile Coach Conference organised by Gladwell Academy. My talk was focused on the SLoMoSH Canvas, which is the tool that I had developed to help with facilitating conversations amongst teams, to clarify roles and responsibilities. The SLoMoSH Canvas has other use cases, however my talk was just focused on the clarification of roles and responsibilities and how it could be used in that situation. Without further ado, my talk at the 2022 Agile Coach Conference in Amsterdam. Thank you, it's a great privilege to be here, live and in person. The last time I attended and participated in a face to face conference was back in 2019, December 2019, San Francisco, so you can't imagine how refreshing it is to be out here. So I'm here, all the way from the United Kingdom, I'm here to speak to you about the topic ‘Set up for Success: Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities using the SLoMoSH Canvas.' I know, ‘what's that word SLoMoSH'? I made it up, as you're going to come to realise. But without further ado, let me tell you about myself. I have about 20 years of professional experience. I started off in engineering, hands-on engineering roles in telecommunications, oil and gas industry, and then kind of moved on to that more business-facing, interfacing type of role with teams where you're kind of translating the conversations, and my first foray into agile ways of working was about 16 years ago as a field engineer, with Schlumberger as a field engineer. We had standups, we had kanbans and all that, but we didn't use the term agile, it wasn't a buzzword then. So as coaches, and I'm sure as we're predominantly agile coaches in the audience here, I've noticed. And we do have those… part of our satisfaction that comes from our jobs is when the teams, the leaders, the people we're coaching, have those ‘aha' moments, and I love what Lyssa (Adkins) said in the morning, it's really about taking a holistic view, building those relationships, meeting people where they are, so that's what I love about being an agile coach. I host a podcast, Agile Innovation Leaders, and I've been privileged to have people like Jeff Sutherland, Steve Blank, Alex Osterwalder, but that's not why we're here. So, we're going to do an ice breaker. I have two children, I have a son who's 11 and a daughter, Kiki, who's 9. So one day Kiki comes back from school and says, and I'm busy working and in the zone, and she says ‘mum, I have something for you, I have a game I have to play'. And I'm like, in my mind, I don't need this right now, but I have to be a loving parent with my children isn't it, so I say ‘all right Kiki, what do you have for me?' All right, so I'm going to teach you that. I don't need to tell you the story, but the key thing is now, I'm going to mention three words in succession, and after each word, you know, you use A, shout out A and raise your left hand if it's an A, if that word matches with an A, so if it's an animal, you raise your left hand, if it's a food, the word that I call, raise your right hand, you can also shout it out if you feel like that, and if it's a place, C, then raise both hands and say C. Does that sound clear enough? OK, let's do a trial run. So, A, well, you did it. So I was going to say ‘poodle', A, awesome. Burger! B. You guys are rocking it. And a castle. C. OK, awesome, you guys have gotten it. Now let's do the real thing. OK, so, I'm going to mention it in a random way. I know you're watching and wondering what I'm doing. Yoghurt. B. OK, B, good, good. Lion. A. Are you sure? Yes, it's an animal, lion is an animal. All right, third and the last, Turkey. (Laughter) That was exactly what my daughter did to me, you know she said, Turkey and I was like OK, where does it go, because mine was more like, A is stand here, B is stand here and C is stand here. But I will take the blame, as a responsible agile coach I will say, if I had wanted you to understand, I would have explained it better. That is the words of the famous Johan Cruyff. And I should have explained it better because, you know, I kind of, hands up if you know, you didn't quite go into the outliers, because you didn't, because the impression based on the instruction was the, you know, the words would fit into one box. Either it's going to be A, or B, or C. Hands up if that was your impression? OK, the rest of you could see that two, three steps ahead, awesome, please call me, because maybe we have a business to start because you can see into the future. But that's the case with transformation initiatives. There are lots of moving wheels, it's about change on a massive scale, and the fact is, with all the changes happening, and people are complex beings, and as Lyssa mentioned again, in her talk earlier on today. I was taking copious notes for all the speakers, when you all were speaking. It's really about moving from that mindset of an organisation and people as machines to an organisation as a complex eco system. And I don't know about you, but for most transformation, and no matter where you are on your transformation journey, whether you are very mature or whether you are just at the beginning of the journey or somewhere in between, the fact is there are always going to be moving parts, and we change, and we need to change and adapt as we go on. So, again, Lyssa, by now you all know I'm a massive Lyssa fan, but the key thing is how work has really impacted a lot of the things we do as agile coaches and the agile coaching competencies that she and Michael Spayd developed, you know has kind of helped with clarifying, what are those multiple hats, those balls that we need to juggle as agile coaches as we support and lead and help the teams as they move under transformation, the journey towards ways of agile working, and developing an agile mindset. Now, usually it would start with some sort of training, you know, to train people into the roles, to understand, because people need to be trained. And I think it was, you know, and I think it was during the session with Marcel, there was something about needing to combine education with coaching. So, in terms of like the initial starting point of training people, let's say classroom-based training, there would be, if you, as an agile coach, are the one running that training, you need to have your teacher's hat on. Lyssa, am I correct, or am I bungling it up? Lyssa Adkins You've been beautiful, I'm overwhelmed. Ula Ojiaku Ok, well please correct me, because you are the expert, and that's your work there. Anyway, so you have to have that teaching hat on, but the main message today that I want to bring to you here, the key point it this, more often than not, just classroom-based training or training of any sort isn't quite enough for the teams to start adapting or applying their learnings to their context. Even within the same organisation, you'll find out that no two teams are alike, and you might have a product owner in team A and a product owner in team B. They are on paper, they have the same role, the title, however, the nuances of what they do with it, it might mean that there are other things that they would need to take on as a result of the nature of their work and the team that they belong to. And so, in what I'm going to be sharing with you in terms of the case study, I've also had to become a neutral process holder, you know, to facilitate conversations with the teams. And this is with the purpose of helping them to connect the dots. OK, just to help them to connect the dots, because they need to get to a shared understanding of whatever topic it is that they are having. So I picked this graphic from the internet. Unfortunately, I don't know who the author, the original originator is, but credit to them, it kind of beautifully illustrates the concept. You might have the same people in the room, listening to this talk right now like we are, you know, if you look at this picture here, there are three people looking at a picture of a truck, but what you can see is something, different elements of the picture is coming out, jumping out at them. But you need to make sure that they also have a joined up view, you know, to have the bigger picture in mind. So how does that apply to us as agile coaches? It's not about having lots of different frameworks, and we don't want to go into that rut of being like the proverbial person with their hangman seeing everything as a nail, it's about taking the time to understand the context. And as Sharon and Yasmina said in their talk, you know, you need to have tools in the toolbox, but you also need to know that it's not about the tools in the toolbox, it's, according to my colleague Scott Henault, who says the power of the tool is in the conversation it creates. It goes back to the people, it's about helping them to have a conversation so that they have a shared understanding to work together more effectively. And so, a bit of the case study in my case. So I am currently a senior agile coach with a multi national retail organisation, if you read into my LinkedIn profile, you'll know which organisation that is. So there is this, there were these teams and when the organisation started its agile transformation about four years ago or something like thereabouts, for that team they were pivoted into agile, single agile team like team level team teams, OK. And then over time some further analysis was done and the leadership decided, that's a story for another day, but go with me here. So they decided they wanted it to be a SAFe ART and so the team was now being pivoted into the combined SAFe ART. Now I had joined the organisation after the initial, the first, you know, pivot to agile teams, and what I noticed interacting with those teams was that they, the teams, already struggled, because they were moving from a traditional projects management waterfall based approach to delivery into agile, and as agile teams, you know, scrum teams, Kanban teams, they were already struggling. I mean, they were delivering, it's almost like, have you ever had a toothache where you're able to eat, but how you ate and enjoyed your food when you had a toothache versus when your, when everything is OK, is much different. So they were delivering all right, but it's almost like you're chewing with a toothache, or hobbling with a bad foot, you're moving, but you're not moving in the most effective way you could. So I realised they had this problem, and just waving, if I could be a fairy godmother and wave the SAFe wand over them with all due respect, it wasn't going to make the problem go away. There was something we needed to get to the root cause. So, sometimes, yes, it's all about trying to make a light touch and as simple as possible reduce the cognitive load as Mariëlle said in the workshop earlier, but there are times that, you know, the hard things have to be done. There are times you have to strip down, get into the weeds, get into the detail, and based on the conversation with the RTE, I designed a session for the key roles, because those were the key points, if you know the theory of constraints, it's about looking at where the bottom leg is and then addressing the bottom leg to improve the flow, and of course you know as the system, because, you know, there would definitely be something else to improve, but right now the key bottom leg was with the Epic Owner roles, the product management roles, the product and scrum master roles, so those were the areas we decided to focus on, because you can't boil the ocean. So, the SLoMoSH Canvas. Now I wouldn't say that it all was original, but it's more of a synthesis of ideas , concepts, mental models that I've been exposed to over the past 20 years, but the main influence for this SLoMoSH Canvas was the work of Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, the business model canvas, and of course when I last spoke with Alex Osterwalder, you know, I had him as a guest on my podcast , he said it's really about making things visual, it's important, it makes it easier for conversations, it helps people to get on the same page. And another influence in developing this was from the work of an executive coach known as Tony Jeary, Jeary with a J, and he wrote this book ‘Strategic Acceleration' and he had the MOLO matrix, which is like 'more of, less of'. So based on that I kind of developed this, which I was using as well for personal reasons, you know, in terms of thinking where do I want to be in the future, how do I get there, what do I need to do more of, less of, what do I need to stop entirely, hand over. And I kind of, as I was thinking about this in the middle of the night, I thought, this might work for the teams we're talking about. So let me explain the SLoMoSH Canvas. Has anyone figured out why it's named SLoMoSH? OK, here you go. Audience member It's the first letters OK, yes, so the first letters, Start, Less of, More of, then Stop and Handover. So that's where the SLoMoSH came from, and I'm still thinking of, is there anything better to call this, so if you have any ideas, please let me know. But that's what it's called. Now, the key thing, how does it work? It's more in the centre you have the core responsibilities, that would be, let's say, common to all the roles, it's better when you do it role by role, so if it's about a particular role, it's something you're facing, you have those responsibilities and tasks in the centre, and there's no change, no action needs to be done, and usually that would be a starting point, OK, for the conversation. Now, the actions that will come out in the conversation will be when you're now looking at those key things, you kind of have a conversation about it, as we'll look at it later, and then you  find out, are there things that you need to, that you should be doing that you're not doing that you should start, you put it there, and the other thing is that you should be doing as part of your role that you're not doing as often as you should, maybe put them in the ‘More of'. You know, ‘Less of' would be the reverse of ‘More of' and then other things ‘Stop'. This part is really important, because as human beings we are adverse to, you know, kind of losing things and taking things out, kind of losing things, we'd rather pile up things without taking off some other things consequently and that is a mindset that we, you know, because there should be the art of maximising the work, the amount of work not done. So it's also important to challenge your teams, are there things that you should stop doing, and stop means stop. Don't hand it over to anyone because it's not adding value now, it wasn't adding value then, it's not going to add value in the future. And then, just as important, is the Handover part. Are there things that you're doing in your current role or in the current context, which in the new role, in the new structure, which don't necessarily apply to you, what your role as you understand it now, but someone needs to do it or else things will fall through the cracks and it's going to impact on delivery, and that would be in the Handover space. OK. So, this if for you now, two minutes, can we all take the time to pause and reflect, and I acknowledge it might not be applicable to you, we all have different situations and contexts, problems that we're solving right now. So if it doesn't apply to you, that's fine. Can you pause and reflect individually on what you've heard so far. Think about scenarios in your current context, your current work, where you could use the Canvas, or where you have, you're needing to have the conversations that this Canvas could help you with. What are those scenarios? So it's an individual pause and think. Can anyone share the result of your conversations? Audience member We were just discussing challenges that we have in multiple teams and the conclusion of the challenge was the team motivation and the relationship with the team members started deteriorating due to the moving to remote working, right. So, there were misunderstandings about what the team lead needs to do, what the product owner needs to do, what the scrum master needs to do, or even every single member of the team. So, what we did, we did different kinds of workshops, but now, when I see this, it perfectly fits into the, what I think we could use, or what we could benefit a lot from this. It was not structured like you did, but this is more clear and straightforward, yeah. Ula Ojiaku Wow, thank you for that, and yes, I'll be sharing my context, so thank you for sharing that. We have just enough time for you. Audience member I think we can use this in our organisation. I'm working for the government, for the POVmark we call that, the Product Owner Vakgroep Manager and agile coach, it's like, we talk about the teams, but not about the individuals, but not about the teams, but what are we talking about? Because we say the product owner is there for the product, and the manager is there for the people, and the agile coach is there for the team. But sometimes it feels like no one has the responsibility so we can use this very wise to, hey, what can we stop talking about? Ula Ojiaku Awesome! Well thank you for sharing. Right, thank you. So, what did I do? Let's move on. So, a case study with the very team that I was talking about, a team of teams in this case. Now, something else I didn't share about the challenges they were facing was this, you know. Having gone to the training, because, let's say for example some of them were previously project managers and as part of the transformation pivot, you know, they were now set, OK, the way it was done is another conversation. And it was more of a combination of OK, where do you think we fit in now that, you know, this is what this role does, and that's what that role does. So it was a combination of that and, you know, my management kind of making joint decisions to give people new roles. And so as a traditional project manager, you'd expect that you're making sure things are on time, you budget and schedule, you liaise with third parties, maybe vendors as required to make sure everyone is cooperating. That's the traditional project management role. You're also, you'd also be monitoring the spend, how much are we spending on this project? You know, the financial reporting, the compliance, to make sure you're being compliant, and being a publicly traded organisation, you also have to make sure that, you know, on the straight and narrow, it's not directly giving value to the end customer, but it needs to be done if you want to operate as an organisation, if you want to be legally trading. So, these things still need to be done. But in the new roles, you know, the new product owner role generally, it doesn't have anything about managing compliance issues, it doesn't have anything about financial reporting, and so when we're operating as that agile team, these things were falling through the cracks. You could have said, yes, I used to be a project manager but now I'm a scrum master, there's nothing that says, you know, as a scrum master, that I need to do that same thing with the product. So, who does it, because it needs to be done. OK. So in this simplified example, let's assume we're doing this session with product owners. Now, I populated the core area, or the continuum area with the generic responsibilities that a product owner would do. Of course, this is not exhaustive, this is only for illustration. And then at the start of the session I'll be like, OK, now these are the things, you know, generic things that the product owner would need to do. But are there other things that you currently do that's not in the box? Feel free to create a sticky(note) and put it there, because we need to have a conversation, we need to make it visible. Because most people have what they do in their heads, and other people, remember the picture with the, you the bus and all that, and three people are looking at, one is seeing the driver, the other one is seeing the cargo, the other one is seeing the vehicle. So, let's all visualise it and talk through it. I told you sometimes you need to get into the weed of things so that everyone has a shared understanding. So, imagine that the ones or the items in the bold italics are the ones that I can't add in, oh, I also manage compliance issues, oh I also participate in release value, oh and I also produce reports for the senior management. Let's put it there. Now, after having the conversation, sticky by sticky, let's assume in this hypothetical session, this is what we came up with. So, remember in the core part it's more of whatever it is that you're doing and you're happy with it, you think you're doing OK, there's nothing that needs to change, that's fine, you leave it there. So, for, let's assume, that the product owner group you know, you already create to start the stories. We prioritise our backlog and we also participate in release planning  and we think it's relevant to where we're going so we have to keep stay there. But there might be other things that they have, you know, had a conversation about, and they say OK, you know what, we haven't really been conducting backlog refinement sessions and we need to do that a bit more, thoughtfully and, you know, we need to just start doing it basically. That goes in the start place. And maybe they say something about contributing to the product vision and roadmap, and say it's been someone else that's been doing that, the product manager has been doing that, but we feel like, you know, the, it trickles down to us and it comes as a surprise, we need to contribute earlier so that we can also give the team perspective into things, so we can put that in the ‘More of' etc etc. But the key thing is, it's about facilitating those conversations. And it doesn't stop here. Once we've done this part, it's now about focusing on the elements in the outer rectangle to identify what's the action that's required for this. So, if you said you don't facilitate or you don't do backlog refinement sessions, what action needs to be done and who's going to own it after this session? And they, as a group, you know, there's this saying, if they write it, they won't fight it. As a coach, as an agile coach, it's not about being the sage on the stage, it's about being their guide by their side. So you ask them, OK, so you have, and of your own free will, I didn't tell you to start doing it, but you said you do need to start doing it, so what are you going to do about it? Because, you know, if you tell them, then the ownership for following up with that action is going to be on me if I told them, but if they said, this is what we think we need to do, and this is who, I mean, I think I'll own it, then they're more likely to follow through with the actual action, so they will, you know, identify who owns it, what they're going to do, and the writing of the same happens with the rest of the items on the board. So for this case study, some of the outcomes were, there was an improved visibility and shared understanding of what people were doing. And of course, during the session, the fact that it was visual, it wasn't like a spreadsheet or a long Word document, not that there's anything wrong with it, but most people process, you know we all process information differently and having it visually on stickys helped with, you know, bringing or bridging that gap in communication and giving us a point of reference that we all could zone into. So, it helped with relevant conversations, both as a group and after the session they were also able to show this to their line management, and have necessary conversations with them. And for some of them, the product management group, they were able to demonstrate, because they would say, I had a lot on my plate, and the line management would be like, she's complaining again, but by the time we did this, and they showed an electronic copy of it to the line management, they said, oh, you actually do a whole lot, right, and that meant a case for an additional set of business analysts to be added to the team to help them with those sorts of things, to invent the responsibility on their plate. It enabled them to identify actions to move from their current state to the desired future state and, you know, they have also role descriptions that takes into account the context of the work they do, that they can share with their stakeholders, because there was a confusion about who does what. So, some facilitation tips as I round off this. It's more effective if you do it role by role. You know, don't try to boil the ocean, there are instances you can do it as a whole team, but my focus right now, on this case study, is more about, you know, on a role, so if it's for scum masters, within a team of teams, then bring them together so they have a joint understanding. If it's a product management, or product owner etc etc, but do it role by role, because that helps with focusing the session. And don't start with a blank slate. Prepopulate the centre of the board with generic responsibilities and then have them add things or remove things as they see fit. Now it's really about being a neutral facilitator in this process, because it's now them having conversations. Now, encourage conversation and debate whilst keeping focused on desirable outcomes and then remind them that, you know, this is not a once and done activity. Things will change, and as they do, you don't have to do it often, but as things change, and you feel they're significantly changed that you need to have another of these conversations, you do so, and inspect and adapt as required. So, before we summarise, what would be your key takeaway from this talk? Anyone? OK, I'll walk to you, I'm not throwing. Audience member  Thank you. Maybe we all recognise, because I also saw it in your model, that stopping and handover are mainly the most difficult topics to discuss. How did you handle those things? Because if you look at the model now, it doesn't seem a lot went off their plate.  More or less it shifted or put on their plate. Ula Ojiaku OK, I was asking for key takeaways, but you know, you've given me a question so I will answer that. No problem. So you said stopping and handover are the most important aspects, and how did I get them, keep them focused on that conversation? It's all about asking questions but I can't tell them you have to stop it, you need to have them come to a realisation and sometimes it's a conversation that you might have with them a few times before they come to the realisation themselves, but it's not about telling them what to do, so I, when I facilitate these sessions, I don't tell them what they need to do, I just ask questions to clarify, OK, what you are doing, do you think you still need to keep it? Yes, OK. Is it adding value to your stakeholders, your customers, does it make it more efficient, no? So why do you think we should keep it, because it's the way we've always done it. OK, so I leave it there and it might not be the right time to pursue it, but I try to encourage them to, you know, consider things that they can stop and handover. So it's a interfaced question and it's also like there's no one-size-fits-all-approach. But thank you very much sir for that question. So, I'll just round up. Classroom based training is almost never enough. We need to support them to kind of, make sense of whatever they've learnt, and teams, because they as teams and individuals sometimes, I personally sometimes struggle to apply what I've learnt in the classroom, on a course, into my real life context. So sometimes that additional support is needed, sometimes we have to roll up our sleeves and help them to have those conversations. And my humble submission is, would you consider using maybe the SLoMoSH Canvas for these sort of conversations, would that help you? For me, for the team that I've used it with, it's made things clearer for them. I wouldn't say it's a Fairy Godmother. You know, I wave the wand and they lived happily ever after, but that hobble has definitely gone. I'm now going to find a dentist to go help me on with the toothache, because there are always going to be problems to be solved. So, with that, that's all I have. Thank you so much for listening and for not falling asleep on me. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!

Värdeerbjudande är ett centralt begrepp för att skapa framgångsrik marknadsföring och kommunikation. Och starka sådana kan vara helt avgörande. Jag bjöd därför in marknadsföraren och entreprenören Daniel Nilsson från Up Strategy Lab som har lång erfarenhet av att ta fram värdeerbjudanden. Och det är lika viktigt för både B2B och B2C. Värdeerbjudandet lägger grunden till vad vi ska kommunicera kring våra produkter eller tjänster till olika personer och målgrupper. Det spelar ingen roll om det är en landningssida, presentation eller ett säljsamtal. Det är också ett begrepp som har nämnts otaliga gånger här i podden. Så i det här avsnittet går vi igenom det ordentligt. För att göra den research och det arbete som krävs för att hitta och formulera riktigt starka värdeerbjudanden är svårt. Om gästen Daniel Nilsson är en entreprenör och marknadsförare som driver bolaget Up Strategy Lab där man bland annat hjälper B2B-företag att effektivisera sälj och marknadsföring. Och att skapa värdeerbjudanden. Inom Up Strategy Lab har han även startat ett flertal framgångsrika startups som MuchSkills, HardSkills och kryptoprojektet Nulink. Daniel har dessutom många års erfarenhet från den andra sidan i ledande marknadsroller på bolag som Mentice och Appland. Han har dessutom en populär blogg där han bland annat skriver om värdeerbjudande, skapa kundprofiler och bygga partnerprogram med fokus på B2B-marknadsföring. Om avsnittet Daniel och jag pratar i avsnittet om värdeerbjudande och vad det här. Samt hur man utvecklar starka sådana för sin marknadsföring och kommunikation. Han går bland annat genom sitt arbetssätt, hur han tar fram värdeerbjudanden och hur han använder value proposition canvas i sin process. Du får dessutom höra om: Vad som utmärker ett bra värdeerbjudande Varför det är så viktigt att definiera det Vad många marknadsförare missförstår Hur han använder jobs-to-be-done Hur man vet att man har hittat rätt Validering och testning av värdeerbjudande Och hur det kan och bör utvecklas över tid Plus en massa mer. Daniel går även igenom en rad olika både verkliga och fiktiva exempel för att illustrera hur man både hittar, skapar och formulerar starka värdeerbjudanden. Och otaliga bra tips och insikter. Du hittar som vanligt länkar till allt vi nämnde här i poddinlägget. Däribland Strategyzer, value proposition canvas och de exempel som togs upp. Daniel har dessutom samlat ihop massa bra länkar till både egna resurser och andra artiklar och videos för dig som vill lära dig mer om värdeerbjudanden. Och efter länkarna hittar du tidsstämplar till olika sektioner i avsnittet. Länkar Daniel Nilsson på LinkedIn Up Strategy Lab webbsida Up Strategy Lab på LinkedIn Up Strategy Lab på Instagram Up Strategy Lab på Twitter Value Proposition Design av Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith, Trish Papadakos (bok) Adlibris / Bokus Strategyzers Value Proposition Canvas. Ladda ner och lär dig mer (resurs) How to Create a Strong Value Proposition for B2B - Daniel Nilsson (artikel) Know Your Customers' “Jobs to Be Done” - Harvard Business Review (artikel) Clayton M. Christensen var HBS Professor & Disruptive Innovation Expert om milkshakens job-to-be-done och disprutiva innovatörer (YouTube) Matt Hodges, CMO på Intercom förklarar hur han använde job-to-be-done för att göra Intercom framgångsrikt (YouTube) The Elements of value - Harvard Business Review (artikel) How to create customer profiles / buyer personas for B2B Sales - Daniel Nilsson (artikel) How to create an effective Sales Presentation - Up Strategy Lab (artikel) How to write copy for high-converting website pages in B2B - Up Strategy Lab (artikel) Hacking Sales

Ayoub Harij est CEO et cofondateur de Sle3ti.ma, plateforme digitale qui connecte les détaillants traditionnels avec les distributeurs de produits de grande consommation en offrant des services à forte valeur ajoutée autour de la gestion des commandes jusqu'à l'optimisation des ventes et des livraisons. Sle3ti.ma a réalisé une levée de fonds seed en octobre 2021 de 12 millions de DHs qui va accélérer le développement et la croissance de la startup, dans un potentiel marché estimé à 120 milliards de Dhs annuels dépensés dans environ 200.000 points de vente Ayoub s'est construit très jeune dans l'effort, la détermination, la remise en question permanente et la rébellion face aux règles. En matière d'apprentissage, il s'applique à décortiquer les concepts pour mieux les assimiler et les retenir. Jusqu'à aujourd'hui, il a nourri cette habitude d'être en veille par rapport aux nouveaux concepts et possibilités de disruptions technologiques grâce au digital  « J'ai réalisé que j'étais condamné à réussir par mes propres moyens ! »  Cette course vers les défis l'emmène vers le parcours sélectif des classes préparatoires qui renforce considérablement sa résistance et sa capacité mentale à ne pas avoir de problème à se tromper “ Tu peux recevoir tous les coups du monde sans mourir ! “ L'expérience de l'organisation du forum en école d'ingénieur lui donne le goût du business development et il rejoint la direction commerciale de Procter & Gamble avec un premier passage obligé sur le terrain auprès des épiceries, pour assurer un objectif quotidien de vente. Il poursuit son parcours quelques années plus tard, en tant que Directeur de la zone Afrique chez Lavazza où Il est chargé de parcourir plusieurs pays pour développer avec des entrepreneurs leur activité et l'écosystème local autour du produit. Fort de cet apprentissage, il décide de quitter le salariat en 2015 ayant pris le soin d'avertir les plus proches des difficultés à venir et s'aidant dans cette démarche avec des livres de développement personnel   Son projet passion s'appelle Footigo une application mobile de type réseau social pour les fans de football autour d'un univers ludique et riche (quizzs, monnaie virtuelle,...). La startup réalise une traction rapide avec 70.000 users actifs en 6 mois et une première levée de fonds de 250.000 dollars en Italie auprès de business angels  L'aventure Footigo devra néanmoins s'arrêter au bout de quelques années faute de financement suffisant, la traction initiale ne réussissant pas à intéresser des investisseurs VC pour une sérieA internationale, frileux à prendre le risque sans un POC réussi en dehors du Maroc  “Il faut savoir couper le cordon ! Soit c'est Footigo qui meurt, soit je meurs avec Footigo ! ” “ Footigo n'est pas égal à Ayoub, Footigo est un projet de Ayoub ! ” L'aventure lui  a pourtant permis de constituer une équipe et un socle technologique digital performants. Cet actif, permettra de développer rapidement une solution de covoiturage pour les Entreprises, RiderIn qu'il  va déployer en septembre 2019, avec un modèle économique basé sur les économies réalisées, qui a le mérite d'aligner les intérêts de l'entreprise avec ses salariés. Un modèle qui est contraint à freiner brutalement avec l'avènement du COVID en mars 2020 L'idée de Sle3ti va germer lorsqu' Ayoub croise Abderrahim Zizi, un ancien collègue qui s'est lancé dans la distribution qui lui relate les difficultés de la vente auprès des épiceries traditionnelles en plein confinement. Ayoub connaît bien les drivers de la distribution qui sont la couverture géographique et la fréquence de visite. L'idée est de fournir une application multiservices chez les épiciers recrutés, moyennant commissions sur les ventes réalisées, ce qui va dispenser de la présentation physique et libérer le potentiel rendu possible par le digital en facilitant et fluidifiant l'accès et la relation du distributeur avec le point de vente   Ayoub mobilise à nouveau l'équipe digitale pour déployer en quelques mois l'écosystème applicatif Sle3ti, recruter les premiers épiciers dès juin et réaliser un POC avec Abderrahim, son nouvel associé qui a souhaité rejoindre l'aventure, en apportant sa connaissance du marché et son réseau relationnel. Cette performance va attirer l'attention de plusieurs investisseurs jusqu'à la réalisation de la levée auprès de Richbond, un fit qui repose sur trois piliers : confiance, mindset et complémentarité des forces " L'idée ne vaut rien du tout : ce n'est pas l'idée qui  compte, c'est l'exécution de l'idée qui compte ! "  " La vraie barrière à l'entrée c'est le business que tu construis, ce n'est pas l'outil !" Ayoub nous livre son précieux retour d'expérience sur le mindset entrepreneur : Apprendre à ne pas mourir : même quand la situation semble sans issue, être décidé à ne pas mourir “ Je suis convaincu que je ne vais pas mourir, la question devient comment je vais survivre ? ”   Changer sa perception des choses : accepter qu'il y'aura des problèmes “ Ce qui fera la différence, c'est ta réaction par rapport au problèmes ! “ Essayer de se détacher et ne pas être amoureux de son produit, coûte que coûte : "  Il ne faut pas se définir par le produit, le produit c'est juste ta création ! " Ayoub nous décrit aussi l'importance de la conscience de soi et que le plus grand challenge, c'est de se connaître soi même ! Il nous recommande les lectures suivantes :  The Power of Now Eckhart Tolle Hooked par Nir Eyal La bonne idée existe par Luc de Brabandère Business Model - Nouvelle Génération  par Yves Pigneur Centered leadership   par Joanna Barsh Le Moine qui vendit sa Ferrari par Robin Sharma  Manuel d'Epictète   Value Proposition Design par Yves Pigneur  The Power of Habit  par Charles Duhigg

How well do you serve your clients? Do you understand them well? Can you measure the impact you have on them? Join me and Alex as we discuss his famous tool, the Value Proposition Canvas. This is one of the most powerful tools you can use to map out the jobs, pains and gains your clients are looking for. We share examples and talk more about how you can use this tools even before creating your first product. Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is one of the world's most influential strategy and innovation experts, a leading author, entrepreneur, and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started. Together with Yves Pigneur, he invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map - practical tools that are trusted by millions of business practitioners from leading global companies including Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, MasterCard, Sony, Fujitsu, 3M, Intel, Roche, Colgate-Palmolive, and many more. Listen out for: What is the value proposition canvas and why this tool was needed How most companies who skip this step end up wasting time and money How you can find more information about your clients (or potential clients) How it all fits together to give you the best tool to design effective sales and marketing. Bonus: Get a copy of Value Proposition Design See the value proposition explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReM1uqmVfP0 Go to Sellingwithlove.com for video access to the show or directly to youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5VaR6Z3wfElWFZn64ugOBw New to Selling with Love Podcast? I'd love to connect with you. You can find me, your host, Jason Marc Campbell on the following Channels: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jasonmarccampbell LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmarccampbell/ *Selling with Love Podcast was previously known as Superhumans at Work by Mindvalley.

Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is one of the world's most influential innovation experts, a leading author, entrepreneur, and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started. Ranked No. 4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide, Alex is known for simplifying the strategy development process and turning complex concepts into digestible visual tools. Together with Yves Pigneur, he invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map—practical tools that are trusted by millions of business practitioners from leading global companies. And they really introduced into the strategy dialogue the idea that business models can be intentionally—and creatively—designed. Strategyzer, Alex's company, is on a mission to evolve large established companies so that they inspire and activate and liberate their employees to be innovators. They do this using online courses, applications, and technology-enabled platforms. His books include the international bestseller Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, The Invincible Company, and the recently launched High-Impact Tools for Teams.In this podcast he shares: Why innovation MUST begin with your culture Why if there were only ONE metric you should be tracking to unleash innovation, it should be your “innovation kill rate” Real-world examples of large enterprises who have been able to transform into agile, innovate organizations, proving it CAN be done __________________________________________________________________________________________"So there are now those outliers who have done exactly that. They invested in innovation, but it's not just the money, they gave innovation power and they created this ecosystem for exploration, with tons of failures. They hold up their failures—same thing as Amazon. They hold up their failures and say, "You can't succeed without failures, and the bigger you get, the bigger your failures. But you know that's the system you need to create for the winners to emerge. So, failure's never the goal, but it's an inevitable side consequence of exploration."-Alex Osterwalder__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Alex Osterwalder + The topic of today's episode2:05—What is your definition of strategy?3:01—What got you interested in strategy?4:01—Could you explain a "dual culture"?5:50—What are the drivers of culture?8:09—What are you most well-known for?11:16—What should a CEO be encouraging to engage innovative behavior?14:30—What is the key lesson people should take away from the case studies you've described?16:20—What do most companies get wrong?18:07—What's a belief that you've changed your mind about?19:54—What are you working on now, and how can people engage with you?__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:Personal website: https://www.alexosterwalder.com/Strategyzer Website: https://www.strategyzer.com/

Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is one of the world's most influential innovation experts, a leading author, entrepreneur, and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started. Ranked No. 4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide, Alex is known for simplifying the strategy development process and turning complex concepts into digestible visual tools. Together with Yves Pigneur, he invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map—practical tools that are trusted by millions of business practitioners from leading global companies. And they really introduced into the strategy dialogue the idea that business models can be intentionally—and creatively—designed. Strategyzer, Alex's company, is on a mission to evolve large established companies so that they inspire and activate and liberate their employees to be innovators. They do this using online courses, applications, and technology-enabled platforms. His books include the international bestseller Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, The Invincible Company, and the recently launched High-Impact Tools for Teams.In this podcast he shares: Why innovation MUST begin with your culture Why if there were only ONE metric you should be tracking to unleash innovation, it should be your “innovation kill rate” Real-world examples of large enterprises who have been able to transform into agile, innovate organizations, proving it CAN be done __________________________________________________________________________________________"So there are now those outliers who have done exactly that. They invested in innovation, but it's not just the money, they gave innovation power and they created this ecosystem for exploration, with tons of failures. They hold up their failures—same thing as Amazon. They hold up their failures and say, "You can't succeed without failures, and the bigger you get, the bigger your failures. But you know that's the system you need to create for the winners to emerge. So, failure's never the goal, but it's an inevitable side consequence of exploration."-Alex Osterwalder__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Alex Osterwalder + The topic of today's episode2:05—What is your definition of strategy?3:01—What got you interested in strategy?4:01—Could you explain a "dual culture"?5:50—What are the drivers of culture?8:09—What are you most well-known for?11:16—What should a CEO be encouraging to engage innovative behavior?14:30—What is the key lesson people should take away from the case studies you've described?16:20—What do most companies get wrong?18:07—What's a belief that you've changed your mind about?19:54—What are you working on now, and how can people engage with you?__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:Personal website: https://www.alexosterwalder.com/Strategyzer Website: https://www.strategyzer.com/

Visit www.agileinnovationleaders.com for the full episode shownotes (including interview transcript and bonus resources - free chapter of Where to Play and Navigator worksheets). Guest Bio: Dr. Marc Gruber is full professor at the College of Management of Technology at EPFL where he holds the Chair of Entrepreneurship and Technology Commercialization (ENTC) and was Vice President for Innovation at EPFL in the 2017-2021 presidency period. Marc also acted as Associate (2013-2016) and as Deputy Editor (2017-2020) at the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), the highest ranked empirical research journal in the management domain. Furthermore, Marc is co-author of the book “Where to Play: 3 Steps for Discovering Your Most Valuable Market Opportunities”, which introduces the Market Opportunity Navigator – a practical business tool that was recently added to the ‘Lean Startup' toolset by Steve Blank and is used by tens of thousands of startups and established firms to improve their capabilities in opportunity identification and new wealth creation. Marc Gruber joined EPFL in the fall of 2005 coming from the Munich School of Management, University of Munich (LMU), where he held the position as vice-director of the Institute of Innovation Research, Technology Management and Entrepreneurship (INNOtec) and established the LMU's Center for Entrepreneurship. He has held several visiting scholar posts at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he conducts research on technology commercialization and entrepreneurship. He is also a visiting professor at the Business School of Imperial College, London. Marc has published his research on innovation, strategy and entrepreneurship in several leading journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, and the Journal of Business Venturing. In an independent research study on the most impactful entrepreneurship scholars (Gupta et al., 2016), Marc was ranked as the worldwide #1 researcher in entrepreneurship for the 2005-2015 period (shared #1 spot), and among the worldwide top 5 for the 2000-2015 period. Beyond his research work, he is currently authoring a textbook on technology commercialization and was the co-editor of a textbook on entrepreneurship as well as a regular contributor to a weekly column on entrepreneurship in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”. Marc Gruber received a doctorate from the University of St. Gallen (UNISG) in 2000. In spring 2005, he received a venia legendi from the Munich School of Management (LMU) for his habilitation thesis on marketing in new ventures.     Websites/ Resource URLs Where to Play website: https://wheretoplay.co/ Download WhereToPlay_Part1_Sample Chapter pdf here Download Navigator and Worksheets here Steve Blank's Blog on Flyability https://steveblank.com/2019/05/07/how-to-stop-playing-target-market-roulette-a-new-addition-to-the-lean-toolset/ Steve Blank's Blog on the Market Opportunity Navigator https://steveblank.com/2020/06/23/winners-rising-out-of-the-crisis-where-to-find-new-markets-and-customers/ Scott Shane's article on Prior Knowledge and the Discovery of Entrepreneurial Opportunities https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.11.4.448.14602 MIT articles on commercializing 3D printing: http://meche.mit.edu/news-media/new-era-3d-printing https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/innovation-lessons-from-3-d-printing/   Marc Gruber contact/ social media: Email: mark.gruber@epfl.ch LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbgruber/ Twitter: @MarcBGruber   Books/ Resources: Where to Play: 3 Steps to Discovering Your Most Valuable Market Opportunities by Marc Gruber and Sharon Tal Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win by Steve Blank The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step by Step Guide for Building a Great Company by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses  by Eric Ries Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business by Rita Gunther McGrath The Theory of the Growth of the Firm by Edith Penrose The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty by Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan   Related podcast episodes Steve Blank (Episode 1): http://podcast.agileinnovationleaders.com/website/1-steve-blank-on-the-need-for-innovation-showing-up-and-learning-from-failure Alex Osterwalder (Episode 3): http://podcast.agileinnovationleaders.com/website/s1e003-alex-osterwalder-on-the-3-characteristics-of-invincible-companies-and-how-he-stays-grounded-as-a-leader Sharon Tal (Episode 6): http://podcast.agileinnovationleaders.com/website/s1e005-sharon-tal-on-how-to-identify-the-best-market-opportunities-for-your-ideas-or-innovations-in-a-structured-way   Interview Transcript Ula:  00:26 Hi everyone. My guest today is Dr Marc Gruber. He is a full professor at the College of Management of Technology at EPFL (a Science & Technology Higher Education Institution located in Switzerland). Marc is also the Chair of Entrepreneurship and Technology Commercialisation at EPFL and amongst his numerous other achievements, he co-authored the book Where to Play: 3 Steps for Discovering Your Most Valuable Market Opportunities with Dr Sharon Tal. This episode complements the conversation I'd had with Sharon in Episode 6. This time around, Marc shares his side of the story behind the book. He also explains how the Market Opportunity Navigator fits in with other Lean Start Up tools like the Business Model Canvas, Customer Discovery & Development, etc. With no further ado, ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Marc Gruber. Enjoy! Ula:  01:35 Dr Marc Gruber, thank you so much for joining me on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. Marc Gruber:  01:41 Thank you very much for inviting me Ula. It is a pleasure to be here. Ula:  01:45 So, let's get started. Marc, I understand that you love art, can you tell me more about that? Marc Gruber:  01:52 I'm a very visual person. That's why I think early on, I developed this love for art. You know, I like to go to museums, galleries, etc. and I think it inspired my research work, how I write, but also the tools that I develop for managers, for entrepreneurs… Because it should be visual.  It should be appealing. This is an interesting combination, because it combined somehow your love for the artistic, but also your research, you are typically very scientific, you are very rigorous and structured. And I think combining both worlds, it's actually quite an exciting journey. Ula:  02:26 Hmmm… Now, that's interesting. So, can you give me an example where your love for art has inspired your research work? Marc Gruber:  02:35 Well, I … it's less that it would inspire my research work in the sense that I have a concrete research question based on it. But it's more like, whenever I write, you know, write a paper or article, I think I have this… it can be a nice paragraph. But I know that I could always improve on that. It's more like a feeling that I have, that I think that there's an artistic quality towards writing research papers, that's where I see a lot of parallels. Because it's, in some sense, I when I write and there's a mistake, or there's something not so nice in the paragraph, I somehow view it, I see it, that's the link where art comes in… it can be improved. And same with music, you can hear if there's something that can be improved. Ula:  03:16 Now, that's an interesting analogy. I've also heard Steve Blank, say entrepreneurs are artists, and a good artist knows that the first instance of their work can never be the last one, there's always iterations. Marc Gruber:  03:31 Exactly. And I think that's when you write a nice research paper, or write any book or develop a tool, it should be the same type of instinct. You want to improve on it. You want to … not only do your best, but it has some intrinsic quality that you're trying to achieve that satisfies you. Ula:  03:49 Interesting, so do you paint also? Marc Gruber:  03:52 Yeah, I should make more time for it. There's no time now. I'm more of a passive art lover nowadays. When I go to conferences to give speeches, I like to go to the museums and galleries and check out the new artists, the established ones. You know, so it's, this is kind of nice because once in a while you see a nice piece, and then you acquire it and then, it travels with you for life, because you have it. Being one of these people, I like to collect these things, I would never sell them. Ula:  04:22 Who's your favorite artist? Marc Gruber:  04:24 My favorite one is Gerhard Richter from Germany. He's now 86 or so, he's a very accomplished person. He's one of the few who have truly shaped three, four different styles in art - coming up with them, you know. So you had Picasso with his different periods, but Richter has his very abstract art, and some photorealistic art, and so on. So, you really shape three, four different types of art movements in that sense. And that's quite impressive, because most artists are happy and satisfied if they can do one thing, you know, one type of trademark art, and he has done multiple. That's quite unique. Then you try to, as someone who likes art, try to understand what's the intrinsic quality that cuts across all of them. Ula:  05:05 So, the feeling of knowing when something is finished, is it like a satisfaction or a sense of pride… is something you can describe with words? Marc Gruber:  05:14 It's difficult to describe with words, but definitely, it's satisfaction - you like it. It matches your own aspirations. And you know it deep down and then you become immune to what reviewers would say.   So you think, ‘Ok, I've done the work that I enjoy'. It doesn't mean that I'm neglecting what the reviewers would say, that's an intellectual stimulus that you get then from the outside.  Ula:  05:37 Now moving on to your book, Where to Play: Three Steps for Discovering Your Most Valuable Market Opportunities. So, you co-authored this book with Sharon Tal. Can you tell us a bit about the inspiration behind this book? Marc Gruber:  05:53 This book goes back… my research work… to about 2001 or 2002, when I started teaching that was back then at the University of Munich, about this early stage in entrepreneurship. And I had entrepreneurs in front of me who always struggled to figure out, not doing the prototypes, etc. They struggled to figure out for whom to do the prototypes, what is a good market to play in. And drive it in multiple ways number one to understand which market domains are out there for them, and which they could address in seconds and which one is might or may not be such a good one. And this is a very interesting process that relies a lot on creativity etc. And we'll probably talk about this later on. But there was a paper by a very famous entrepreneurship researcher called Scott Shane. He studied 3D printing from MIT, how it was commercialized - as shown very nicely in his paper - that this technology, this innovation was commercialized by a couple of different people. But all of them basically applied it to the industrial domain, they knew best. Which basically meant, well, there were some people who applied it, maybe to print architectural models, others applied it to dentistry, etc. What was quite interesting for me was, the question while all of these people identified at least one opportunity, but there were some that were extremely valuable opportunities, some that were not valuable at all. So, in that sense, what I asked (in) my research was, you know, could an entrepreneur who sees more opportunities actually benefit from this choice that that he or she would generate? And this is a question that when you look at it, it's a very fundamental nature to entrepreneurship, because the market you choose shapes, not only the profit potential, the value creation potential, but it chooses, it also shapes the identity, in a way, of the company. So in that sense, I got intrigued by this question. I collected some data, then had the pleasure of having a research day at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, when I met Ian MacMillan, one of the very famous entrepreneurship scholars. It turned out that he grappled with the similar ideas that I had grappled with and I had data to investigate to analyze about these early stages in the entrepreneurial process. And we sat together, discussed it, and we have been working on this topic, as scholars ever since the first few papers came out, then end of 2008. This was a very rewarding journey that took a couple of years, then Sharon, my co-author joined the team, where she did her PhD on the topic, collecting data mainly in Israel. And after she was finished, you know, there were now more than a handful of papers. There were other authors who had started studying this topic, knowing this from the research side, but on the other hand, also seeing that there's a lot of interest by startups, but also then from large companies and understanding this early stage process better. And then Sharon and I said, ‘Okay, let's write a book.' ‘Let's solidify this; let's make sure that others can understand it and get it get access to the information because we cannot answer so many phone calls or write so many emails, always explaining the same thing.' So, in that sense, a book is a convenient tool to multiply yourself. And that's how it (the book) came about. But it happened over 15 years of research that then culminated in an effort to write a book. We initially thought it was three months' effort to write a book, it took us two years. Ula:  09:09 Oh, wow! So, 15 years of effort, of research and it took you about two years to now put together the outcome from the research. Marc Gruber:  09:19 Yeah, we thought you know, we've done the research so we should be able to write it down easily… develop a tool, a business framework around it. But that was the hard part, to write something where know the depth, where know it from the research side, you have seen thousands of cases, and then being true to yourself as a researcher and say, hey, it should be simple but not simplistic. And this is a fine line to walk for any author. Because the tool will be applied when it's simple (and) easy to use, but it also will only be applied if it delivers real value. Everyone can dumb down any question as much as one wants but then it's not useful anymore. Finding that fine line between having a simple tool but that is still useful, valuable. So, it took some time to iterate, develop different visuals, develop different explanations. After all, it I think it turned out nicely. It was just a journey that is common to anyone developing a prototype. So, in that sense, what we did there with the tool is nothing less, nothing more than developing another prototype. If you want to do it, well, it's not like a simple task. Ula:  10:22 I have read the book, it's so easy to read, very simple to understand, but not simplistic, as you've said. Why… it's quite easy to miss the amount of work it takes to make things easy and accessible. Marc Gruber:  10:36 After the fact it always looks (like) it's simple. That's exactly the reaction we want to have; that's what a framework needs to do. It needs to boil down… guide you to the main issues, help you ask the right questions and give you good answers. Great admiration for everything Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur did with the Business Model Canvas book, because that's a fantastic book to really enjoy. Ula:  10:58 I have read that, yes. Could you tell us a bit more about the Market Opportunity Navigator? Because that seems to be the centerpiece of the book Where to Play. Marc Gruber:  11:09 So, the book is called Where to Play as you say. It addresses this very fundamental question, ‘Which market domain should I enter?' This is a question, if you break it down analytically, you can say, ‘Hey I first want to understand (the) playground, you know, my opportunity landscape. It's not straightforward to figure this out. Some people might think oh, I can only play in one domain but I am yet to meet an entrepreneur who actually is trapped in one domain only. Normally entrepreneurs can play in multiple domains using their competencies. Let me give you a simple example. It's a drone company out of Lausanne (Switzerland), Flyability - that Steve Blank also featured in his blog post about the book. This drone company that has created a drone in a cage, of course for such a company, they were inspired by market needs in the nuclear energy domain, but then realized there might be better market domains out there. And they did it early enough to avoid any costly pivots. Oftentimes, companies realize that only after a couple of months, maybe even years that the market domain that they had originally identified is not as performant as it could or should be. Then they need to pivot. We wondered - with our practical work with startups, with innovators and established firms - how to make this process a bit more philosophical. This doesn't mean you have a crystal ball and exactly know what the future will bring; this is not at all the idea. Quite to the contrary, in innovation, we all know that you cannot predict the future. But what is particular is that you can also already in advance, try to understand some basic features of your markets. You know, some are highly congested, some are not, some are growth markets, some are shrinking markets, etc., etc. So, there are parameters where you can say, ‘I can make an informed choice.' Second, what you can do by having this from a bird's eye view is to bake agility into the DNA of your staff. Just think about the brand name you're gonna choose. If you have a company that is doing drones, you know, this company in Lausanne that I was talking about called itself Flyability.  With this name, you basically can enter any type of domain. They could also have called themselves Drones for the Inspection of Nuclear Energy Plants. This would lock them in even more into this domain and would make a pivot even harder if it should become necessary. So, in short, what we want to do with the method is to provide you with a tool to figure out what are your potential domains out there, your opportunities. And second, provide a tool that allows you to become a more agile star. And both together I think, are a winning combination that allows you to navigate this difficult and uncertain process of startup creation, of early stage innovation. Ula:  13:47 Thanks a lot Marc for that. In your book, you summarized the Market Opportunity Navigator framework as consisting of three steps. Could you let the audience know what these three steps are please? Marc Gruber:  14:02 With pleasure! The Market Opportunity Navigator has a main dashboard which depicts the three steps. The first step is the opportunity bag, you know, it's a little bag where you collect all the opportunities that you identified. The second step consists of a matrix that allows you to evaluate the attractiveness matrix. And the third step is to enter a focus, could we say, hey, that's where I focus and these could be good plan B's, in case my plan A doesn't work out or a good growth option in case my plan A works out. These three steps are depicted on the main navigator board, but behind each step is a worksheet that helps you to walk through these questions and address the main question. So, the first worksheet is dedicated towards helping you understand the different playgrounds you have, you know, the different opportunities that exist for you. It creates, therefore, the opportunity landscape. The underlying idea is that you delink your existing competencies from a concrete application. You know, also in the case of this drone company, they should think about the drones, the capabilities, the competencies they have in their own right without really linking it to any domain. And then have a creative brainstorming session internally and externally with external people to understand what is really the scope of my activities. And this is the first worksheet that helps you to figure out the opportunity landscape. The second worksheet is a worksheet that helps you to evaluate these options that you identified. This is a worksheet that builds on 50 years of venture capital research. Most of your listeners will probably be familiar with the venture capital domain and know that one of the core tasks of a venture capitalist is to understand the prospect of an early stage venture. Venture capitalists have developed a rich set of tools basically to analyze the attractiveness of potential ventures that are presented to them. And we drew on 50 years of research in this domain, and this was really hard work to bring them together into factors that shape the attractiveness, and factors that shape the challenge level in ranking an opportunity, which will combine to provide you with an assessment of how good or not so good these opportunities are. Again, under uncertainty which means while you'll need to maybe adjust your information over time etc. (because these are six factors in total), it had to give entrepreneurs and innovators a more complete view of the factors that matter. Because you might have realized that yourself when you talk to the entrepreneurs, they always excited about the opportunities they're pursuing. Usually they focus on one dimension, you know, think about market size, ‘Wow, that's a big market - that's great!' … or competitive advantage, ‘Hey, we are ahead of the competition. That's great!' But normally what they don't have (is) a pluralistic view of all the key challenges that could hinder the development - time to first revenue, which is a key metric, as entrepreneurship has shown and how long it takes to make these sales, how difficult it is to make the sales, how big (the sales are), and so on. So, you have a couple of metrics that in combination are giving you a more rounded picture of how good or not so good the opportunity is. And if you do this, not only for one opportunity, but for multiple ones, you will quickly realize that not all opportunities are alike. You know, some are high growth, some are low growth, some are highly congested, some are not so congested. With some you have a high margin, with some you have a low margin. And in combination, you have the matrix, which is then the second step in the (Market Opportunity) Navigator that allows you to assess each opportunity, but also the portfolio that you have. The third step is then building on this one, where you can say, ‘Now that I've seen multiple opportunities, (I) have a portfolio in my hands, what should I actually do?'  And there, the tool is non-prescriptive, you choose what you want to do, you know, we have in the matrix, the gold mines - low challenge level, high potential; we have moonshots which have a high potential, high challenge, we have the questionables - which have high challenge but low potential; and the quick wins - which have low potential, but also have low challenge level. So, you might want to say, ‘I'll start with the gold mine' or you might want to say, ‘I feel I am the next Elon Musk, I want to change stuff with a moonshot.' Others might say, ‘You know, I'll start with a quick win and use this to develop another opportunity; I'll earn money quickly but then I'll use the proceeds to do something bigger.' And still others might say, ‘Hey, I love this other domain so much. It's a questionable (domain) but, there's another dimension of pleasure that I get out of this.' So we're not prescriptive, but what we say is, ‘Look, you pick your favorite opportunity', but what we advise you to do is to say, ‘Hey, there might be a second opportunity, a third one that is closely related, so that you have growth options that you can efficiently exploit over time.' Or you have - if the first opportunity doesn't work out - you have a good plan B. That's actually quite an interesting concept. It's not something where you invest a lot of time, but in case things go sour, don't materialize, with your first choice… you know, you want to have a pivot that is not as painful as it could be. If you have to pivot, you want to have one that doesn't consume all your energy, your resources, your time or financial resources. Pivoting could be easier, if you have good foresight. Ula:  19:08 I like the illustration in your book, that's around having a backup plan that would help with a seamless pivot where required when you showed two mountains, and there was a bridge. It's kind of you know, depicted that when you have all these details, and you know what your backup plan is, you also would be working consciously to make sure the infrastructure is there, and you are not starting from ground zero again, if you need to pivot. Marc Gruber:  19:35 You can make it more flexible. Look at this drone example I gave you two minutes ago. This is something where you can say, ‘I know that the drone can be applied to inspecting bridges as much as it can be applied to inspecting silos, farm equipment, etc.' What you do is to build a drone that is going to be more flexibly adjusted. And this is like picking a great brand name that you can choose to use for these different domains. As much as that takes initially with a little bit of foresight, some agility into your venture that can make a big difference. When we talk to venture capitalists, they said, ‘Okay, this is a great tool, we wish every startup would come up with a Market Opportunity Navigator to (show) us, because it can clearly tell us that they have figured out what an attractive market is.' ‘They know what they do, they know what they don't want to do. They know what their plan B could be and they know that they are not a one trick pony that can only grow in this domain, but can grow in other domains.' This is creating an exciting value creation journey for the startup but also for the venture capitalists. Also, when you think about it, the little force that you can give to the entrepreneurial venture that is affordable under conditions of uncertainty, this little foresight that can get you a long way. Ula:  20:43 It could be the difference between success or massive failure really. Marc Gruber:  20:48 Absolutely, you know, I'm still yet to meet the first startup that really said, ‘I enjoyed pivoting.'   This is often a task that creates not only financial inefficiencies, but a lot of worry in the team. You know, one of the founders firmly believed in a domain and that turns out to be not so great and the need for (a) pivot arises. It's also loss of status maybe within the team; there are quarrels, there are fights, there are redirections. This is not a pleasant period and if you can make this at least smoother by baking this agility as I called it into the DNA of your venture, a lot is gained. And if you maybe can avoid, like on average, not every startup, but on average, a significant number of startup can avoid pivoting then I think the process is also one where that is more rewarding. Ula:  21:38 You have explained the first two steps: searching broadly assessing deeply. And this all leads to the Agile Focus Dartboard. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Marc Gruber:  21:52 Yeah. So, you can picture in your head a dartboard actually with three layers… You have the focal element - that's the opportunity to focus on. And we are big supporters of the idea that you should focus on an opportunity, especially in your startup. When you have three, four people, it's nonsense that you chase too many balloons; you focus on one, but you keep others open as a secondary. Say, ‘Hey, I passively observe, I read newspaper reports maybe once in a while. So, I have a passive knowledge about these markets and keep myself current, because I realise that these might be interesting, additional options for me.' And then we have the third (outer) ring, which we call the storage where you say, ‘Look, there are some opportunities we studied, and they don't work out for us. So, we put these ideas away.' And this is actually more helpful than one might initially think. Because when I talk to entrepreneurs about this third step, they say, ‘Hey, look, this putting away is as valuable for us as the focus, because it helps you to keep what you might want to call mental hygiene. You have so many things constantly to address, to worry about in your venture, (so) if you can put something away, that's actually a relief. And that's why this third ring is actually much helpful to entrepreneurs.  With the tools, you come from something unstructured, creative where you have a lot of opportunities, lots of options to something where you have evaluated them to a third step where you say, ‘Hey, that's where I should focus.' And that's then the focal point where, and I'm sure we talk about other tools later on, like a business model canvas, customer development, customer discovery, minimum viable product. We would say, ‘Hey let's learn with additional tools, whether this market domain that I selected is actually a good one.' So big picture of the tool is providing you with some kind of meta learning. You say, ‘Okay, that's what my company could potentially do.' I create (enable) agility. Now, let's learn about the ‘how to play' - the business model that works in your domain; the ideal prototype that you could develop for your target customers. So, the ‘where to play' and the ‘how to play' then form, the yin and the yang, if you want to call it that way. Ula:  23:57 You've nicely segued into the next question I have, which is about other business tools that the Market Opportunity Navigator can be used with? Can you go into more details on this, please? Marc Gruber:  24:10 So, when we designed the tool, we actually were careful in saying, ‘Hey, we know that there is a unique aspect to it that none of the other tools addresses. Let's design it in a way that's plug and play with the existing tools - so, it's non redundant. And actually, when we discussed with Steve Blank, he loved the idea so much that he'd said, ‘Okay, I'm gonna write a blog post about it, and integrate your (Market Opportunity Navigator) tool into my Lean toolset because it's missing some additional valuable learning that is critical for entrepreneurs and innovators.' So, it's non redundant with the other tools, but it forms a more complete tool, and therefore delivers value for the question but delivers that additional value to the other tools and vice versa. There's a nice blog post by Steve Blank called Stop Playing Target Market Roulette; a New Addition to the Lean Toolset. Ula:  24:56 Yes, I've read that. Marc Gruber:  24:57 Wonderful blog post, and it teaches this Flyability drone example, if you want to look at it. Ula:  25:02 We'll put it in the show notes. Yeah. Marc Gruber:  25:04 And there he explained actually how the tools work together. If you think big picture, you can say, well, the market opportunity navigator helps you to understand where to play, what is a good starting position for your venture. And then you would say, ‘Hey, for this starting position, for this domain, I now try to develop a business model that is appealing. And in order to develop a good business model, I need to figure out product-market fit.' So, I do customer discovery, I do a minimum viable product - we all know Osterwalder/ Pigneur's Business Model Canvas, you know. Steve Blank's tools about minimum viable product, customer discovery... Ula: 25:37 The Lean Startup… Marc Gruber: 25:39 …Exactly! The Lean method that is then extended and say okay, there's another layer to the lean that method. That's how he features it in the blog. So, what you have is basically, a nice suite of business tools that work nicely in conjunction. Each one adds value to the other one. And that's why I like to use them in my own classroom and my work with startups or with large enterprises. I like to apply them as a suite of tools because then people understand the logic behind each of them, but also get much more utility out of them if they combine them. Ula:  26:12 Hmm. So, it sounds like you know, the Market Opportunity Navigator gives you a view at a higher level, a macro level. And then once you've gotten those details and you've narrowed down on where to play, you can now drill down into you know, developing the business model canvas and testing your hypothesis using the Lean Startup method. Marc Gruber:  26:34 If you look at the Lean Startup tools, Business Model Canvas, as well… they don't really tell you where to play, you know, they assume that you have a market. Also, if you look at design thinking, you know, it's an important method nowadays and (needed) in the toolbox of any innovation manager, but it assumes you have a target market that is useful to investigate, to spend time before doing design thinking. But the question is, might there be a better target market out there where it's even more valuable to apply design thinking that is not addressed. Also, the Market Opportunity Navigator helps to address the question therefore, makes the design thinking method for that business model canvas all the other tools we have talked about, more valuable because it's more promising to do (use) them. Ula:  27:18 Do you so far, the focus of the conversation has been on how this market opportunity navigator framework is useful for startups? Can large organizations get some use out of it as well, if so, how? Marc Gruber:  27:33 That's a very good question. The book is written mainly from the perspective of startups. If you apply it to established companies, you know, I've done that multiple times now in workshops, this can be applied extremely smoothly. Established companies typically use the other tools. For the established companies, the where to play question is extremely important nowadays, because you know, you have all the new technologies that provide new competencies. And with the tool… I'll give you a very concrete example. You know, an established watchmaker can understand that when by putting sensors into the competence set, they could actually become a medical device company. Because they say, oh, we now have a watch that can measure your blood pressure, that can measure maybe your sugar level for diabetes, whatever it is, you know, and that's a where to play question. And technology enables so many new uses; AI, put AI into your established products, and you can become a different animal as a company. When you look closely what the very successful Silicon Valley companies are doing, they are not bound by their initial turf. A prime example is Uber. Uber moves wherever it can grow. Uber moves, wherever it can grow based on competencies, you know, and acquires new ones on the way to make the opportunity space even larger. I think we are living in an exciting time because technology enables so much that you can become as a company, a very different animal, that doesn't mean that you have to lose your first initial market domain. But it means you play in additional markets. And Rita McGrath, my colleague from Columbia Business School, she's very nicely depicted this in her book, The End of Competitive Advantage, where she says, look, we used to live in a world dominated by industry, we're actually nowadays living in competing arenas. That means, you know, wherever firms move, wherever they can grow, their measure of success is the share of the potential opportunity space. But that's a fluffy concept. What is an opportunity space? What's the share, you can get out of this one? That's a very pertinent question. And the virtual playbook gives you basically, the tool that helps you to understand what's your opportunity space, this doesn't fall out of heaven for the companies. If Apple moves into car manufacturing, this is an entrepreneurial step where they say, ‘okay, that's an opportunity that we identified'. Among many opportunities that they identified that this is one that they've deemed worthwhile to get into. And then there's managerial questions about how to exploit this opportunity to hire away people from Daimler, partner up with Fiat… whatever, you know, those steps are to explore this opportunity. But initially, there's the where to play question for Apple, for Uber, for Google, for any type of company, out there, and you can close your eyes to that and say, hey, we are only in our home turf, but then others might have set their sights on your home turf. Now think about what happened to the cellphone manufacturers, you know, they were attacked, they didn't die, because the second one, Ericsson took over Motorola and became bigger than Nokia. Now, it was the computer manufacturers who said, hey, we can play in the cellphone domain. And see, and that's where this arena concept is extremely pertinent. And therefore, tools that help you to understand what your competitive arena is - where to play - become important. That's where the book becomes important. What usually larger or more resource rich firms can do is to not only exploit one opportunity, but they can do multiple ones. So, the third step is one where they can focus on a handful, maybe a dozen opportunities in parallel, create an interesting pipeline. But even then, when I talk to the large companies, they don't want to waste money. They want to understand where they could play and what could be a good plan B if my first option doesn't work out. Ula:  31:10 They also want to be lean and agile. Marc Gruber:  31:13 If you can achieve a higher innovation outcome … strong innovation outcome, with less effort, with less resource consumption, of course, that's a winning formula. Ula:  31:25 Hmm. That's true. Do you then have any other books in the pipeline, will there be a sequel to Where to Play? Marc Gruber:  31:34 At the moment is no sequel plan because the book has been out for two years. When you look at how long it takes until books are known to people, understand and apply them… It takes some time until a tool actually is diffusing into the market. And a good example is Steve Blank's books. They were extremely successful, but it also didn't come from Sunday to Monday. But it took some time until people heard about them, saw them, saw the usefulness, they create a following. And then the same happened with Osterwalder and Pigneur's initial book, which was the Business Model Generation book, which took several years until it hit mainstream. That's why the Where to Play is a book, which was launched, people adopted it, it got translated into multiple languages, Steve Blank featured it as a part of the Lean Startup toolset in May last year. So, I think the journey is still on the early side. And so, I prefer setting my sights on helping others to apply it, understand its value, because I firmly believe in the value and how it can help people become more successful entrepreneurs and innovators. Maybe, at some point I'd say it's time for a second one. But you know, not yet, not quite yet. Ula:  32:42 No problem at all! Right!! So, are you a reader? Would you say you like reading? Marc Gruber:  32:47 I love reading. I like reading and I actually can read quite quickly - that's the benefit. But some of the stuff you don't want to read quickly and that's the annoying part, because then you don't have the time to read it slowly. Ula:  32:57 What would you say, are your two favorite books and why? Marc Gruber:  33:02 There is a book from 1959 from Edith Penrose. She's one of the eminent academic scholars. She has written a book called The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. This is an extremely insightful book in the sense that many of the things we're discussing nowadays are actually foreshadowed by her, half a century earlier. And it's a very nicely written book, it basically says, ‘Look, if you want to understand the growth of firms, you just have to look at the imaginative power of its C-suite and that is a function of their education and experience in print.' And it's just one element of the book, which makes it exciting because it foreshadows a lot of the diversification literature we see; the growth literature that we see nowadays. And it has very powerful patterns of explanation that help you to understand why some firms are growing very strongly, while other firms might be very constrained in how they think about what they could do. Ultimately brings it down to a very intriguing level of understanding because it connects the cognitive element to the resource base of a company. So, I recommend that definitely to everyone. Another one that I like a lot is The Entrepreneurial Mindset by Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan. This came out in 2000. And it's one of those books that combines a lot of entrepreneur insights. It's based on a couple of HBR (Harvard Business Review) papers that MacMillan and McGrath had authored in the late 80s and throughout the 90s. They put them all together in this book with a lot of added new content, and a lot of new theorization, examples, etc. So it's one of those books, you read it and say that was a milestone, too, when you read the book by Steve Blank and by Alex Osterwalder, from Eric Ries, the more recent one, but you begin to understand the intellectual roots that each and every book has the heritage of the thoughts, how the fields developed, how we nowadays think about stuff, but also where it has its roots maybe 20, 30 years ago, or in Penrose's case, more than half a century ago. Ula:  35:04 It is interesting, because you find out that there are connections and no field kind of suddenly springs up on its own, there are connections. Marc Gruber:  35:13 Yeah, that's it. If someone has a bit of reading time over the next few weeks, months, over the summer on the beach - this is definitely a set of books that you can take with you and you understand management and entrepreneurship, innovation management, in their very fundamental and intriguing manner. Ula:  35:31 I already have some of the books in my library, I now have some recommendations for new ones. So that's much appreciated. So, given how much you've accomplished over the years, what would be your advice for someone who is starting up and who might aspire to walk the path that you're on currently? Marc Gruber:  35:53 For me, it was important for my own career as a professor to understand where to play. In the sense that I always had more paper opportunities - articles or research opportunities than I could possibly do. So, I basically had my own portfolio of opportunities, and I had to discriminate where I thought this might be a better research question. This might be a more intriguing question than another one. So, I think I applied basically what I early on, you know, in my research what I later on said in the playbook. That's number one. Number two, you can always push harder. If you think your paper is nice, you can make it even nicer. That's like 110% level; you push yourself and try to understand what your limits are. I think that's an interesting aspect to discover within yourself and not to be too satisfied too early. Which makes you grow, basically a recipe for growth, because you say, ‘I push harder, I tried to learn more, I tried to write it even better' and then you push yourself over your own limits. And that's the satisfying part that leads to what I've just said earlier, when you know, I was talking about art and the implications for art. A good artist doesn't give up early, a good artist pushes himself to understand the new frontier. And I think as scientists, we are pushing the frontiers and, you know, in that sense, giving up too early is not a good recipe. You always can do better, because that's the way you learn. And that brings me to my third advice as to being a professor, being an academic. You get paid for pushing the frontier, and then you get even paid for talking about how you push the frontier.  So, it's never boring, you know, because you try to push the frontier. It's a wonderful experience to learn more and to say, ‘Okay, I understood something that maybe other people have not yet understood', and or at least from this perspective, have understood, and then you talk about it, and you get feedback. It's a process that keeps you young as well. Ula:  37:46 It's important to enjoy the process as well, don't you think? Marc Gruber:  37:50 Yeah, but don't tell it to my employer because he is paying me for doing this job you know. Ula:  37:56 I wouldn't. Okay, right. So how can the audience reach you Marc? Marc Gruber:  36:27 The audience can email me at marc.gruber@epfl.ch. We have an interesting website that you might want to check out, it's called wheretoplay.co, www.wheretoplay.co. There, you can register for our newsletter. So, we every other month, we update the latest news, latest slides that you can download all this stuff for free. You can get webinars about the method. You can, if you're a trainer, a coach or consultant, you can get the material there for free to apply it in your activities. So, worksheets are in the open domain download. We have basic slides that you can use for teaching the method, for doing your consulting. All of that up on the website, check it out, wheretoplay.co. You just have to register and then all this material is available to you. Ula: 38:50 Oh wow. All for free?   Marc Gruber:  38:52 All for free Ula:  38:53 Wow, that's impressive Marc Gruber:  38:56 You know, we're currently also working on an app - so that what I described as a process becomes more of a very playful exercise. Ula:  39:01 That's great. Are you on social media? Marc Gruber:  39:04 All on the usual suspects except for Instagram. Marc B Gruber on Twitter, it's on LinkedIn, on Facebook - you find me with my name. That's about it, you know? Ula:  39:14 Is there anything else you want, the audience to check out, or do? Marc Gruber:  39:19 You know, if people (would) send us emails about how useful it was? If you have the chance to apply (these concepts) please do and let us know your experiences. It's so rewarding for Sharon and myself to just listen to your stories, how it helped you, etc. You know, we get many stories of entrepreneurs saying ‘Oh, we wish would have applied it when we were young…'  ‘…We could have avoided some mistakes', you know. Then they still applied and they are a bit progressed in their careers and that's exciting to hear as well. Please share your stories, email us, leave them on the website. We want to hear from you. Ula:  39:55 Great! Well, thank you so much for your time, Marc. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. Marc Gruber:  40:02 It's my pleasure entirely. Thank you very much, Ula.

Agnieszka begrüßt in dieser Folge von Female Future Finance als Gast Claudia Bienentreu, Head Open Innovation bei der AXA. Mit ihr spricht sie über die Definition von „Open Innovation“, die Zusammenarbeit mit Startups und das Zusammenspiel der oftmals unterschiedlichen Unternehmenskulturen, wie eine erfolgreiche Kooperation in weiterer Folge dann aussieht, wie sich der Arbeitsmodus durch die pandemischen Verhältnisse verändert hat und welche Themen, Technologien und Geschäftsmodelle Versicherungen im Jahr 2031 möglicherweise haben werden. --- • (00:30) Was genau ist mit "Open Innovation" gemeint? • (01:25) Wie funktioniert die Zusammenarbeit mit Startups? • (02:38) Wie sieht ein Beispiel für diese Kooperation zur Lösung eines Kundenproblems aus? • (05:51) Wie erfolgt die Abwägung von Chance und Risiko bei den Projekten? • (07:53) Werden neue Innovationsmodelle auch intern entwickelt? • (09:42) Wie läuft die Zusammenarbeit angesichts oft unterschiedlicher Unternehmenskulturen? • (12:35) Wie sieht eine Kollaboration mit einem Startup genau aus, wird hier auch investiert? • (14:19) Wie werden Startups gesourced? • (15:33) Was steht im Vordergrund: Das Kundenproblem oder die Technologie? • (17:40) Wie hat sich der Arbeitsmodus angesichts der Pandemie verändert? • (20:05) Welche Themen, Technologien, Geschäftsmodelle werden Versicherungen in 10 Jahren haben? • (22:56) Zum Thema Predictive Insurance --- (27:14) Die Buchempfehlung von Claudia Bienentreu: Frederic Etiemble, Alan Smith, Yves Pigneur, Alexander Osterwalder: ”The Invincible Company: How to Constantly Reinvent Your Organization with Inspiration From the World's Best Business Models” https://www.amazon.de/Indestructible-Company-Alexander-Osterwalder/dp/1119523966/ --- Alle weiteren Folgen, Infos und Kontaktmöglichkeiten hier: www.femalefuturefinance.creativeconstruction.de --- Feedback, Fragen, Wünsche und Ideen bitte an: podcast@femalefuturefinance.de ---

043: It was such a pleasure interviewing another great example of collaboration - fully virtual by the way. I am thrilled to introduce this episode with Daniela and Alex to you. Alex is a leading author, entrepreneur, and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started. He's currently ranked No. 4 of Thinkers50, the top 50 management thinkers worldwide. He invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map together with Yves Pigneur. His books include the international bestseller Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, The Invincible Company, and the newest one, High-Impact Tools for Teams. Since August 2018, Swiss Daniela Leutwyler has been a Personal Assistant to Alex Osterwalder. Just a few months earlier, in March 2018, she had started her own business as a Virtual Assistant with the goal of being able to pursue her profession regardless of location in the future. Leutwyler can look back on over 20 years of professional experience as an assistant, most recently for over seven years as Executive Assistant to Marc Walder, CEO Ringier AG. Follow Daniela, Alex and Strategyzer: https://strategyzer.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/osterwalder https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniela-leutwyler/ https://twitter.com/alexosterwalder

In this episode, my guest Alex Osterwalder shares 3 common traits you'd expect to find in an invincible company, the back story of how his book Business Model Generation came about from his PhD thesis, how he stays grounded as a leader and much more. You'll need a pen and notepad ready for taking some notes!   Bio: Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is one of the world's most influential innovation experts, a leading author, entrepreneur and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started. Ranked No. 4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide, Osterwalder is known for simplifying the strategy development process and turning complex concepts into digestible visual models. He invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map – practical tools that are trusted by millions of business practitioners from leading global companies.   Strategyzer, Osterwalder's company, provides online courses, applications, and technology-enabled services to help organizations effectively and systematically manage strategy, growth and transformation. His books include the international bestseller Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want, Testing Business Ideas, The Invincible Company, and the recently-published High-Impact Tools for Teams.    Books/ Articles: The Invincible Company: Business Model Strategies From the World's Best Products, Services, and Organizations by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur High-Impact Tools for Teams: 5 Tools to Align Team Members, Build Trust, and Get Results Fast by Stefano Mastrogiacomo & Alexander Osterwalder Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation by David J. Bland & Alexander Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur Brain Rules, Updated and Expanded: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School by John Medina Article: The Culture Map https://www.strategyzer.com/blog/posts/2015/10/13/the-culture-map-a-systematic-intentional-tool-for-designing-great-company-culture Article: Allan Mulally (former President and CEO, Ford Motor Company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Mulally Article: Ping An (Banking & Insurance Group/ owner of Medical Platform ‘Good Doctor') https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_An_Insurance   Alex's website & social media profiles: Website: https://www.strategyzer.com/ Twitter handle: @AlexOsterwalder LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osterwalder/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexosterwalder/     Interview Transcript Ula Ojiaku: [00:28] In this episode we have Dr. Alex Osterwalder. To many, he needs no introduction. He is known for his phenomenal work on developing the Business Model Canvas. He has authored or co-authored a growing library of books including Business Model Generation; Value Proposition Design - How to Create Products and Services Customers Want; Testing Business Ideas, and one of the topics we focused on was his book that was released back in 2020, The Invincible Company. Since then, he has released a new book that's titled, Tools for Teams. I must mention though, that some of the references to concepts like travelling around the world may not be relevant in this current COVID-19 pandemic situation. However, the key principles of entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, innovation, leadership (mentioned in this conversation with Alex), I believe these are still timeless and valid. Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, with no further ado, my conversation with Alex Osterwalder.   Ula Ojiaku: [01:49] Thank you, Alex, for joining us. It's an honour to have you on the show. Alex Osterwalder: [01:53] My pleasure. Great be here. Ula Ojiaku: [01:55] Great.  So, what would you say is your typical day, typical day in the life of Alex? How does it start? Alex Osterwalder: [02:04] It depends. So, you know, there's two typical days, one typical day is when I travel, and one typical day is when I don't travel, so they're very different - if you want. I probably spend about 50% of my time traveling all across the world talking about innovation, growth and transformation strategies. And then, you know, my day is I wake up, and it's “Oh, what country am I in now?”... And just trying to get the best out of the day and talk to people about growth and transformation. When I don't travel, my typical day is mixed between helping grow and manage, Strategyzer, the company I founded, but also spending a lot of time thinking about how, can we really help business leaders, business doers do a better job, right? So, I spend a lot of time thinking, sketching out things, I wouldn't say writing because when my co-authors and I create some content, it's usually more drawing first and writing after. But I'd say a lot of time, spent on pretty fundamental questions. And the rest of that when we're not thinking that we're doing or sharing. So that's the kind of mix - not very concrete maybe. But you know, it's so diverse, it really depends a little bit on the type of day, where I am, what the project is. So - very, very diverse days, I'd say. Ula Ojiaku: [03:22] What do you prefer - traveling or not traveling? Alex Osterwalder: [03:26] I enjoy both, right. So, what's important is after intense days of travel, you know, I just this week, I was in Paris with the CEOs of one of the largest companies in France. I like coming back to Switzerland and going on a hike in the mountains, while thinking about certain topics and digesting some of the things that I've seen. What I really enjoy is being in the field with doers and leaders seeing what they struggle with. But then being able to take the time to digest that and turn that into practical tools and processes that help them do a better job, right. So that mix is what I enjoy. The diversity is exactly what I enjoy. Ula Ojiaku: [04:07] That's great. You mentioned you like hiking, am I right in understanding that when you're not running workshops, or helping doers and businesses would hiking be one of your hobbies? Alex Osterwalder: [04:21] So, I can give you a concrete example, this week, I was traveling at the beginning of the week, and for two days, I had back to back calls for 12 hours with either leaders with my own team. So, tomorrow morning, I'm going to drive to the mountains - from my office, it's about an hour away. During the drive, I take calls so I work on the drive, because I can schedule that in advance. And then I pack out my skis and I put what we call skins on the skis and I walk up the mountain for maybe 90 minutes, take the skins off and ski down for 10 minutes. That's it, right. So, during that kind of hike, it's just kind of airing out the brain. But, you know, I wouldn't say that's just leisure time that's actually thinking and digesting. So, I would think about either the topics of the week when I was in the field with real clients and business people struggling with growth and transformation issues, or thinking of my own team in my own leadership challenges. So, it's work but it's in a different context. Then, what's going to happen tomorrow is I'm gonna jump in the car again and drive back to the office in the afternoon - I work out of my office. So that's how a typical kind of day looks like when I have some time to get out of the building. I do go for a ski tour. But it isn't really disconnecting. It's just thinking in a different environment, and then come back to the office, and maybe sketch something out on the wall or on the whiteboard. Ula Ojiaku: [05:46] It also sounds like you're kind of a visual person. So, you do lots of graphics, I mean, your books, The Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, and Testing Business Ideas - they are very visual and easy to read. Are you a very visual and artistic person? Alex Osterwalder: [06:06] Artistic, I'd not say because my visuals are pretty ugly, but visual 100%. So, I believe if you can't sketch it out, if you can't draw a problem, you probably didn't understand it well enough. Even complex challenges can be simplified down, not to mask the complexity, but actually just to get a handle of it and to think about the most essential things. So, the reason we use visuals in our books is actually less to just make them look pretty. It's because I do believe visuals are a language, a shared language. There are some things you can't describe easily with words. Like how am I going to describe with words my business model portfolio like that makes no sense, or even describing the business model with words doesn't really make sense. Sketching it out very quickly, and then having a paragraph that accompanies that sketch, that works right or even better, when I do presentations, I would build up the visual piece by piece while telling the story. So, I get bored when people say storytelling, and then it's a lot of blah, blah, blah. I like the storytelling with the visual message. And it's like a good voice over, you know, in a movie, that will go hand in hand. So, I think we don't use visual tools enough in our business practices. In certain circles, it's a tradition. If we take more of the IT field, you don't map out a server infrastructure without using visual tools. But in strategy and transformation, people talk too much, and they draw too little. Visual tools are unbeatable, they're unbeatable. They won't get you to do things completely differently. But they will get you to do things much faster, much clearer, because you have a shared language. So, when you have a shared language to map it out, to capture it, to create a visual artifact, you have better conversations about strategy, about business models, about culture. And that is incredibly important when we talk about these fuzzy topics, right? Or change management, like what the heck does that mean? But when you start visualizing this, we're moving from this state to that state. These are the obstacles; this is how we're going to overcome it. And you make all of that visual and tangible, not too much visuals, because then it's complicated, just the right amount. That is, you know, the magic of visual communication, where you still use words, you still can tell stories, but you just use the right communication tool at the right time. Ula Ojiaku: [08:37] You're saying, ‘…not too much visual, not too many words, just the right amount…' How do you strike the balance? Alex Osterwalder: [08:46] You don't. So, the way you figure out if you're on track or not, is by testing it right? So, let's say I share a slide deck, I can see in people's faces, are they getting it? Are they not getting it? I can listen to their questions. When the questions are really about good details where you can see they understood the essence and now they're going a step further, they got it – right? When people are confused and they ask very fundamental questions of what I just explained. Well, guess what, then the problem is with me, not with them. I made a mistake in the way I told the story. So, I never blame the audience, I always look for the mistake within and say, ‘okay, what should I have done differently?' So, the way you figure out if you struck the right balance, is by continuously testing. And then obviously, over time, if you take visual language, we've gotten pretty good at creating visual books; we know what works, we know what doesn't. The challenge then is when you get good at it, is to not get arrogant. So, you always need to remember, well, you know, maybe the world changed. So, what worked yesterday doesn't work today. So, you go fast, because you know, but you always need to remain humble, because maybe you know something that was right yesterday, not today, you got to be careful. So you go fast, because you know, but you still listen enough to question yourself enough that you figure out, when do you need to change, because a lot of people get famous, and then they believe what they say, believe their own BS, they forget to stay grounded because the world changes, and you need to go with the change. So that's another balance - once you figured it out, you need to make sure time doesn't move faster than you otherwise you become the dinosaur in the room. Ula Ojiaku: [10:26] So how do you keep yourself grounded? Alex Osterwalder: [10:30] Yeah, so it's not always easy, right? So, if I just take our company, it's constantly trying to create a culture where people can speak up. Constantly trying to create a culture where people don't fear critique - design critique. That's not easy, because even though we have a pretty flat hierarchy, when you're the founder, you're the founder. So, people will say ‘yeah, but you know, I'm not gonna tell this guy he's full of BS.' So, you need to create that culture where people dare to [speak up], that's number one. But then number two is just constantly staying curious, right? When you think you figured it out, you probably just know enough to come across, like looking like you figured it out, you know too little for really understanding it. So, I just work on the assumption that I never know enough. You can't know everything. Sometimes you don't need to go further because it's just you're now looking at the 20%. They're going to take too much time. But if you stay curious enough, you'll see the big shifts. If you listen to the weak signals, you'll see the big shift coming and you can surround yourself with people who are a little bit different. The more people are like you, the less you're going to see the shift coming and that's the problem of established companies. They do the same thing day in day out. They don't see what's coming. However, if, for example, you create a portfolio of projects where people can explore outside of your core business, then all of a sudden you see, ‘…wow, they're getting traction with that? I thought that was never going to be a market….' And, ‘they're starting that customer segment – really?' So, you need to create ecosystems that keep you alert. It's very hard again, so I don't trust myself to be able to check my own BS. So, you need to create ecosystems that keep you alert. I think that's the challenge. And you know, maybe my team will say, ‘yeah, Alex, you're talking about these things on a podcast.' But you know, you don't really do that. So, I really have to be careful that that doesn't happen. That's why I admire people who can rise to really, really senior positions, but they stay grounded. One of my favorite examples is Alan Mulally. He turned Ford from a 17 billion loss-making monster into a profitable company. I was really fortunate to get to know him. And he's just grounded, like, a really nice guy. So, it doesn't mean when you have some success, you have to get full of yourself, you just stay grounded, because… we're all just people at the end of the day, right? But it's a challenge, right? It's always a challenge to remind yourself, I knew something now, maybe tomorrow, it's different. I get passionate about this stuff. So, I just go on rambling. Ula Ojiaku: [13:09] You know, I could go on listening to you. I am passionate about it from a learning perspective. Now, let's move on to the next section. I understand that the Business Model Generation, the book, which you wrote in collaboration with Yves Pigneur, I hope I pronounced his name correctly. Yeah. Oh, well, thank you. So, it came about as a result of the work you were doing as part of your PhD studies. Could you tell us a bit more about that story? And how, you finally arrived at the Business Model Generation book and the artifacts? Alex Osterwalder: [13:46] Sure, sure. So, in year 2000, I became a PhD student with Yves Pigneur. And he was looking for somebody who could help him with mapping out business models. And the fundamental idea was, can we kind of create some computer aided design system- so, we could build business models, like architects build buildings and computer aided design? That was the fundamental assumption. But in order to make computer systems like that, you need a rigorous approach, right? You need to model, what is a business model can be fuzzy, because otherwise, how are you going to build some kind of system around that? So, in architecture, it's easy. We're talking about structures and about materials. In business, it's a bit harder, what are the structures? What are the materials, what are the building blocks? So that was the starting point. And I did my PhD with him - amazing collaboration. Then I went out into the world and did a couple of things that work to help scale a global not-for-profit, then I had a consulting firm together with a friend. But then ultimately, the business model work I did on my PhD got some traction; people started asking me if I could speak in Colombia, in Mexico. First at the periphery - it was pretty interesting. People started downloading the PhD (thesis), reading it in companies… So, there were a lot of weak signals. And then, when I had enough of those, I asked Yves, ‘hey, let's write this book that we always wanted to write.' So, we embarked on the journey of Business Model Generation. And we thought we can't write a book about business model innovation without doing it. So, we tried to do it in a different way. We did Kickstarter, before Kickstarter existed, we asked people to pay us, you know, because we needed the funding, or I didn't have any money, I just came out of doing not-for-profit work. So, we got people to pay us to help us write the book. And I did workshops around the world. And it was, really fun, entrepreneurial experience. And then we launched it and became a big success. And I think a little bit of the secret was, we built something with that book, or we designed something that we would have wanted to buy, there was no that there was no visual business book, there were visual business books, but not the type we wanted to buy. And turns out, almost 2 million people had the same kind of desire. And with that, we realized the power of visual books, we realized the power of visual tools. And we started digging deeper. And then we made more books, not because the world needs more books, they're enough out there. But we always tried to address the next business challenge we would see; we would try to create a tool. If the tool works, we would create a book around it. That was the Value Proposition Canvas. And we thought, okay, people are doing testing, but they're not really good at it. Let's write another book: Testing Business Ideas. And we did that in collaboration with David Bland. So, we created a library of experiments to help people get more professional. And then you know, we saw okay, large companies, they still can't innovate. Why don't we write a book called The Invincible Company and we give them a tool that helps them to do this in a large established company. So, every time we see a challenge, we try to build the tool and the book around it to help people around the world. So, it's kind of the same. And what's fun is that behind that, behind the books, we build the technology stack to help actually bring those tools into companies. So, you know, Strategyzer doesn't earn, we earn some money from the books, but the core is really building the technology stack. So, the idea that we had in the PhD is now what we're building 20 years later. Ula Ojiaku: [17:21] Oh wow! Now when you mentioned that your company, Strategyzer, builds the technology stack on which the books are based. What do you mean by that? Alex Osterwalder: [17:32]  Maybe the easiest way to describe it is that we believe in technology-enabled services. So typically, let's say big company comes to us and says, we want to work on growth and transformation, can you accompany one of our teams. Now, traditionally, a consultancy would just put a number of people on that. And then it's just the people are going to try to solve the problem - they sell hours. We look at it slightly differently. And we say there is a type of challenge that we can productize because it's actually the same challenge all the time, how do we go from idea to validation to scale. So, there are a couple of things there that are actually exactly the same for every single team that needs to go to through that process. And then there's some things that are very domain specific; in Pharma, you will test ideas differently than in Consumer Goods, etc., etc. But we would then start to build the online training and the software platform that would allow us to address that challenge of going from idea to validation to scale, in a lot more structured way, in a lot more technology enabled way. There're things where a human coach adds huge value. And there's things where online learning or a software system will create a lot more value; online collaboration, tracking the data, comparing the data understanding how much have you de-risked your idea so far. I'm sharing that with senior leaders. All of that can be automated. The way I like to compare it is like ERP's in companies like SAP and so changed operations, there are tons of companies out there and today, we have a lot less. But when they changed operations, they did that with software, I think the same is going to happen to strategy and innovation today. That today, we don't use a lot of good software, we use PowerPoint, Word, and maybe Excel, right? That's not good enough. Those are general purpose tools, which create a lot of value. But you shouldn't use those to manage your strategy and innovation, because that's becoming a very dynamic process. When you talk to a big company, a corporation, they have thousands of projects going on at the same time; thousand innovation projects. How do you manage that portfolio? It's more than just typical project management, we're talking innovation project portfolio, so you need to understand different things. That's the kind of infrastructure that we build, not just the software, also the tools and the content, online training, so become scalable, so people can change the way they work. Ula Ojiaku: [20:08] Fascinating. Now, when you talk about the automated part of your tech platform, are you talking about dashboards? Alex Osterwalder: [20:16] Yeah, let me give you a simple example. Right? So, when I'm a team, and I start mapping out my idea, an idea is just an idea, right? Technology, market opportunity… I need to create my Value Proposition Canvas and my Business Model Canvas to give it a little bit more shape. How am I going to capture value from customers? How am I going to capture value for my organization? Right - that you need to sketch out. Okay, you could use a digital tool to do that because then you can share as a team – sort of useful but not breakthrough. But then as a team, when you start to manage your hypothesis, you need to ask yourself, ‘okay, what needs to be true for this idea to work?' You might have 10, 20, 50 hypotheses, you want to start to track those hypotheses. You want to start to track ‘how are you testing those hypotheses? What is the evidence that I've captured?' You need actually whole-knowledge management around the evidence that you've captured in the field. ‘Oh, we did 50 interviews, we have about 30 quotes that confirm that people have a budget for that particular process', right? That is not something you easily manage in a spreadsheet, it gets a mess very quickly; that's at the team level. Now, once you have that data captured, what if you could take that data and automatically create a risk profile so the team knows ‘this is how much we de risk our idea. Oh, we looked at desirability, maybe 10% of desirability, 20% of feasibility. We looked at some viability...' Once you have data, you can manipulate the data in very different ways and understand the challenge better - that's at the team level. Now imagine at the senior level where you have, again, you know, 100, 500, 1,000 teams doing that; you want to understand which team is working on the biggest opportunity. ‘Okay, this one. But yeah, we invested maybe half a million dollars in that team, but they actually didn't de-risk the idea at all.' So, it looks like a great opportunity, but there's no de-risking. So actually, that might just be hot air, right? And you want to be able to do that for a thousand teams. Today, the way we do it is the teams pitch to a manager who pitches to the senior leader. And that's just a mess. So, it's very similar to what I mentioned with ERP. There's a lot of data there, that is hidden in different places - in spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. There's no way to aggregate that. So, guess what? Strategy today and innovation is badly managed - if people are doing it right, that's already another challenge. You know? Ula Ojiaku: [22:45] Okay Alex Osterwalder: [22:46] Today, people are not that good at strategy and innovation. But that's radically changing, because the tasks are getting really big. It's not just about profit, it's also about impact. So, there are a lot of exciting challenges ahead of us, that require a different toolset and different software stack to even be able to do that. Ula Ojiaku: [23:05] Wow. So, do you consider lean innovation important for organizations of all sizes? And if so, why? Why? Why? I know, it's an obvious question. But why do you consider that the case. Alex Osterwalder: [23:20] Very simple and the challenge is different for the startup than for the established company. So, for the startup… So, for both… let's start with what's shared. For both, it's a matter of survival, okay? Now, let me start with the team first. Well, what's the challenge when you're a startup, you don't have any customers, you don't have any revenues, you might have some self-funded or VC funding, you're gonna run out of money. And I think we're in an age where there's too much money. So, for a while you for quite a while, you can live without a business model, we have some great examples, billion-dollar unicorns that have no business model, and they're still alive, because they're just funded by VCs. That is a very rare thing. That's not for everybody. So, at one point, you do need to understand how you create and capture value. So, you want to get as fast as possible, from idea to not just validated business, but actually a company that makes money that captures value, right? Because, you know, yes, it is. You can say, ‘yeah, but the beginning is about users.' That's okay. But users, you know, without revenues, not going to keep you alive for a while, VC funding is not a revenue stream. Let me just make that clear. VC funding is not a revenue stream. Ula Ojiaku: [24:34] They are out for a profit as well. Alex Osterwalder: [24:36] So sometimes young founders confuse that. Yeah, you can focus on funding. But ultimately, the funding needs to allow you to find a profitable and scalable business model. Sometimes people forget that. So that's survival at the startup stage, right? Now, what Lean does, and I'm not sure the word is very well chosen, because Lean comes actually from making things better. But in the startup world, is actually figuring out what's going to work in the first place, you're not making your business model better, you're trying to figure out which one is going to work. So, the testing of your idea is essential to get faster from idea to real business, or, in some cases, to shut it down. Because let's say you take VC money, and you find out, this is not a scalable business, you better give the money back or buy out the VC share, because all they care about is scale. And there's quite a few companies that bought back their shares, Buffer is a very well-known example, because they figured out the business model they're comfortable with, which is not further scaling. Highly profitable… definitely growth, but not the insane kind of growth VC venture capital's looking for. So you get faster from idea to real business with the Lean Startup approach and Customer Development by Steve Blank and Eric Reis, or you get faster to the point where you say, ‘this is not working, I'm going to change, I'm going to stop - not pivot - I'm going to stop.' And then, radical pivot - maybe you start a new startup with a completely different goal. That's for startups. For the established companies, it's a matter of survival for a different reason. Because their business models are dying and expiring. So, most established companies are very good at efficiency innovation; new technologies, digital transformation…, they improve their business model. Now, that is important, and you need to do it. But if you just get better at what you're doing while your business model is dying, you're just going to more efficiently die. So, at the same time, you need to learn how to reinvent yourself. So, it's a matter of survival that you figure out what's tomorrow's business model. And you can't do that without the Lean approach because it's not about making big bets, it's about making a lot of small bets. But here's the nugget that people get wrong. So, they say, ‘yeah, we're gonna do Lean Startup.' So, they have five projects, and they believe that out of those five projects, if we just pivot enough, we're gonna get a multibillion-dollar growth engine. That is delusion at its best. Because, if you look at early stage venture capital, you actually need to invest in at least 250 projects to get one breakthrough success. So, what it means for established companies, if they really want to find the winner, they need to invest in tons of losers. And they're not losers, per se. But some of those projects need to be killed after three months, some of those projects might make 10 million or $100 million in revenues. But only something like one out of 250 will move towards 500 million or a billion. That, is a matter of survival. So, the companies that don't build an innovation portfolio and don't apply Lean in a broad way, not for five projects, not enough - that's what I call innovation theater. They need to apply it across the board, right? And I think that's where Steve Blank's work, our work together has actually made a pretty big difference. Now, we just need to convert a couple more companies, because there are only very few that have been able to pull this off - that are really what we would call ‘Invincible Companies.' Ula Ojiaku: [28:15] Can you tell me a bit more about the book, Invincible Company? Alex Osterwalder: [28:19] So, there are three main components to the Invincible Company. Let me tell you about the three characteristics of an invincible company. The first thing is, invincible companies constantly reinvent themselves. So, they're not laying back and saying, ‘hey, I was successful', they don't get arrogant. They constantly reinvent themselves. Typical example is Amazon, constantly reinventing their business model; going into Amazon Web Services, going into logistics, etc. That's number one. Number two, invincible companies, they don't compete on products and technology alone. They compete on superior business models. I believe it's much harder to stay ahead with technology because it's easy to copy. Patents don't make that much sense alone anymore. It's all about speed. So today, if you don't build a superior business model, it's hard to stay ahead. Let me give you an example. Take Apple with the iPhone. It's not the phone per se that's keeping them ahead. What's keeping them ahead is the ecosystem around iOS, with a lot of developers that create a lot of applications; you cannot copy that. You can copy the phone technology - there are tons of phone makers out there. There're only two operating systems, right. So that's a superior business model. The third one is, invincible companies; they transcend industry boundaries. Today, if you look at Amazon, you can't classify them in an industry. They do e-commerce, they do logistics for IT for, you know, web, web infrastructure for companies around the world. Their logistics company - they're competing with UPS. So, you can't classify them in an industry, they have a superior business model. My favorite example, at the moment is a company called Ping An in China, one of the top 30 largest companies in the world, in terms of profitability. Well, what did they do? They moved within seven years, from being a banking and insurance conglomerate, towards becoming a technology player that built the biggest health platform on the planet, a platform called Good Doctor. That came from a bank and insurer - can you imagine that? Right? So, they transcended industry boundaries. And that's why they're ahead of everybody else. So, those are the three characteristics of invincible companies. And then in the book we show well, how do you actually get there? We just described you know, how that animal looks like. How do you become that? So, three things. One, you need to manage a portfolio of business models, you need to improve what you have, and invent the future - innovation funnels, etc… What I just told you before.  It's not about making five bets, it's about making 250 bets. And how do you manage that? How do you manage measure risk and uncertainty? Second thing, superior business models; we have a library of patterns, business model patterns, where we give inspiration to people so they can ask themselves questions: ‘How could I improve my business model? How could I create recurring revenues? How could I create a resource castle to protect my business model? How could I shift from product to service? How could I shift like Apple from selling a device to becoming a platform?' So that's the second aspect. And then the third one, which most companies are struggling with, is ‘how do I create an innovation culture systematically? How do I design and manage an innovation culture?' So, it's almost, you could say three books in one. So, you get three for one, if you get The Invincible Company. Ula Ojiaku: [31:54] It sounds very exciting in terms of the work that you must have done to collate these trends and attributes that make up an invincible company. So, what exactly made you guys now say, ‘hey, we need to write this book?' Alex Osterwalder: [32:09] That's a question we always ask because there's so many books out there; the world does not need another business book. So, if we put energy into this, because these projects are pretty big, we had a team of five people working on it, three designers actually six people, three content people. So, it's a crazy effort. The reason was very simple. We had already put a lot of tools out there  - and processes - and companies were not moving at the scale we believe is necessary for them to transform to either revive their business models, or tackle challenges like climate change, right? So, you have to be very inventive, innovative, to actually make a profit and become sustainable, like Unilever. So, we said, ‘well, what's missing?' And the big piece missing is the shared language at the senior level, where they can think about ‘how do I manage a portfolio of businesses to fight off disruption? So, I don't get disrupted. But so, I am among the disruptors. So, I invent the future, like Ping An, like Amazon - they invent the future.' You know, they're not the victim of Porter's five forces, they shaped entire industries, right? Porter's five forces was 1985. That's quite a while ago. ‘The world's changed; we need new analytical tools…', I like to joke, right? But so, we didn't see companies moving enough. So, we asked, ‘could we create the tools to help these companies to help the leaders change?' So, we created a very practical set of tools and processes, and procedures so these companies would start to move. Because a lot of senior leaders will tell you, ‘but innovation is a black box. I don't know how to do this. I know how to do mergers and acquisitions. But I don't really know how to do this innovation thing.' So, they kind of move towards buzzwords. ‘Yeah, we're gonna do agile!' Well, that means nothing per se. So yeah, we're gonna work in an agile way when we do this. But that's the mindset. But there's a more to it when you really want to start building an invincible company. So, we packaged all of what we've learned in the field, plus our whole thinking of how can we make it easy for them to capture and work on it. So, taking down the barriers to action, so nothing would prevent them from action. That's how we always decide, ‘should we do another book?' Well, only if we believe we have a very substantial contribution to make. Ula Ojiaku: [34:37] Talking about the three ‘hows' of becoming an invincible company, you did say that the third element was about changing the culture.  Alex Osterwalder: [34:48] Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Ula Ojiaku: [34:49] Now, there is this book I read by John Kotter about Leading Change... Alex Osterwalder: [34:57] Yeah, yeah absolutely Ula Ojiaku: [34:58] And culture changes last. So, what's your view on how best to change culture because usually, people are resistant to change? Alex Osterwalder: [35:09] So, I believe you can actively design and manage culture. You know, every company has a culture.  It's just that very few companies design and manage their culture. So, the first thing is, you need to map out the culture that you have. So again, we're tool obsessed. So, we created a tool together with Dave Gray called the Culture Map. And with the Culture Map, you can map out the culture you have, and you can design the culture you want. Okay, that's in a general way. In The Invincible Company, we talk about innovation culture. So, we show what are the blockers that are holding companies back from creating an innovation culture? And we show what are the enablers that companies would have to put in place to create an innovation culture? So simple stuff, right? What's the blocker? I'll give you some blockers. Companies require business plans, business plans are the enemy of innovation, because you force people to sketch out a fantasy over 50 pages, and then you invest in a fantasy and it blows up in your face. It's ridiculous. So, business plans are one enemy of innovation. It's a blocker. Okay, let's look at an enabler. An enabler would be to embrace a culture where you can experiment, fail, learn and iterate. That sounds trivial. But in most companies, you cannot fail, you'll jeopardize your career. So, you need to create a space where experimentation and failure is not just possible - it's mandatory because you know, you need to test ideas. So, if you don't do that deliberately; if you don't have the governance that's going to reward that, in the right place, it's not going to work. And now a lot of people would say, ‘yeah, we do that… we do that.' But it depends how you're doing ‘that'. So, we're very specific with these things and say, well, ‘you're at risk of having an innovation theater, if you don't enable leadership support.' ‘Yeah, well our leaders are supporting it…' Okay? ‘How much time is your leader, your CEO spending on innovation every week?' If he or she is not spending 40% of his or her time on innovation, innovation will not happen at that company, period. So that's an enabler that is not a soft factor is a very hard factor. Because it's actually even less about what the CEO does. It's the symbolic value of a CEO spending 40% of his or her time on innovation, which will show ‘this is important.' And then everybody will work towards what's important for the senior leadership. So, all those kinds of things - we codify them, to take them from the anecdotal evidence towards, ‘here are the three areas you need to look at: leadership support, organizational design, innovation practice. You need to work on those three areas. And you can start to systematically design an innovation culture.' So, I'd say the difference between the days of Kotter, I still love Kotter's work, is I do believe today, we can more actively design culture and make it happen. Is it easy? No, it's really hard. Are we going to face resistance? Yes. But if you do it well, I can tell you when it comes to innovation, people are hungry for it. They're just waiting for it. So, all you have to do - you don't even need to design enablers, just take away the obstacles and everything else will happen. Ula Ojiaku: [38:40] Oh, fantastic. So, the what book do you find yourself giving as a gift to people the most and why - in addition to your fantastic suite of books? Alex Osterwalder: [38:53] So… there's just so many that I don't have one ‘go-to' book that I would really recommend. It's depending on what are people looking at, you know, what is their challenge, and I would recommend the right kind of book that I have in mind for the right challenge. So, I don't like doing an overall thing. There is one book that I just put is the foundation of working the right way, which is John Medina's Brain Rules. So, it's actually a brain scientist. He's very funny. He wrote a book called Brain Rules. It's all based on peer reviewed science, there's a certain number of rules that you need to follow in everything you do: designing a workshop, managing your company, you know, teaching something, being a parent. So, if you follow those brain rules, well, you're very likely to have more success. With the work you're doing, you're gonna achieve better results, because you're following the way your brain works, right? And a lot of the work we do is actually not, not right. So, I'll give you an example. He talks about visuals, every single person on the planet is visual, guess what? It's evolution – (there) used to be a lion running after us. Well, we would need to see it and run away. That's visual. That's evolution. Those who didn't see it coming, they're not here anymore, right? Evolution ate them up. So, we're visual, by definition. That's why when you write when you create a book or a slide deck, using visuals is not a nice to have; of course, everybody has their style. But if you really do it well, you use the words for the right thing, use visuals for the right thing, you're gonna have a huge impact. Because by evolution, every one of us, every single one of us is visual. So that's one brain rule, which sounds a little bit trivial. But the really good insights there of rules you should never break. Right? So that's one I do recommend. But then everything else is based on the challenges I see with, you know, what people are struggling with. Ula Ojiaku: [40:47] I would add that to my library of books to read then. Now, would you have any advice for individuals starting up in their entrepreneurship journey? And also, what advice would you have? So, there are two questions here: what do you have for organizations starting off their lean innovation journey? So, individuals and organizations. Alex Osterwalder: [41:14] So, for both, I would say fear nothing, embrace failure. So, you know, then people tell me, ‘don't always talk about failure. It's not about failure. It's not about failures, is it? It's about learning.' No, it's not about learning. It's about actually adapting your idea until you figure out what works, right? But a lot of that will be failure. And a big part of the innovation journey is you know, falling down and getting up. So, my big advice to individuals is, don't believe those people on the cover of a magazine because you don't see the failure they went through. And if there's somebody who didn't have that much failure, they kind of got lucky. But that's one in a million. So, don't get blinded by those pictures that the press put in front of us. Success; there is no shortcut. Yeah, you can get lucky. But that's one out of a million. Success is hard work. It's a lot of failure. It's a lot of humiliation. Those who get over humiliation, those who can stand up, those are, those are gonna win. However, sometimes you need to stop, right? So, when people say, ‘ah, never give up!' Well, knowing when to stop is not giving up. When you're not made for something, when the idea (you had) – (you find out) there's no business there, you better stop because you're gonna waste all of your money and energy for something that's not there. But you can take those learnings and apply it, maybe to a different opportunity. So never, never fear failure, right is an important one to always get up. That's for individuals. For companies, I'd say go beyond innovation theater. So, break the myths and figure out how innovation really works. Open up what still might be a black box or question yourself, you know, are we really doing Strategic Growth and Innovation? Because a lot of companies will say, ‘Yeah, we do that, we do Lean Startup, we do Agile.' Yeah, but then you look under the hood, it's really innovation theater. When you really do this well, you actually invest in 200, 300, 400 projects at a time, small amounts. And you're really good at killing ideas to let the best emerge. So, it's not about making a few big bets. It's about making hundreds and hundreds of small bets. And then continuously invest like a venture capitalist in those ideas and teams that are bubbling up, right. So, go beyond innovation theater, learn how this really works. This is a profession. This is not something you learn over a weekend at a masterclass anymore. That's how you get started. This is a hard profession treated differently than management. Managing an innovation, management and execution and innovation and entrepreneurship are two different planets. So please accept that. That's my advice to organizations. Take it seriously, otherwise, you're gonna die. Ula Ojiaku: [43:51] Thank you so much. It's been a wonderful conversation with you, Alex, thank you again for being on this show. Alex Osterwalder: [43:58] Thanks for having me. Wonderful questions. Great conversation.

What does it take to write a truly useful book? How do you measure and optimize reader engagement? Our guest today is Rob Fitzpatrick, author of The Mom Test and entrepreneur. You’ll hear Rob’s take on traditional publishing vs self-publishing, customer interviews, testing, iteration cycles, book marketing, reader profiles, and his DEEP writing framework.Podcast feed: subscribe to https://feeds.simplecast.com/4MvgQ73R in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts.Show NotesThe Mom Test, Workshop Survival Guide — Rob’s booksDEEP — Rob’s framework for writing (Desirable, Effective, Engaging and Polished)Authority — a book by Nathan BarryThe E-myth Revisited — a book by Michael E. GerberSense & Respond Press, Rosenfeld Media — tech-themed publishersThe Tiny MBA — a book by Alex HillmanThe Brain Audit — a book by Sean D’SouzaAlexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur — the authors of Business Model Generation who invested heavily in illustrations for their bookwriteusefulbooks.com — Rob’s websiteFollow Rob on Twitter or email him at rob@robfitz.comToday’s SponsorThis episode is brought to you by Userlist — a lifecycle messaging tool for your SaaS product. At Userlist, our mission is to make your founder journey more enjoyable and less overwhelming. That’s why we built an email automation tool that does exactly what you need. No more, no less. Manage your users, segment them, and get in touch throughout their journey — all based on their behavior. Try Userlist free whenever you’re ready at userlist.com.Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here.Leave a ReviewReviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here’s how.

In this video I will talk about the Business Model Generation book by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. This is a book on how to generate ideas for businesses, how to create good ideas and how to valuate and evolve them. Twitter: https://twitter.com/AttilaonthWorld YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCADpTO2CJBS7HNudJu9-nvg Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/124834970-attila

Przełomowe innowacje i kryzysy, jak ten obecny związany z Covid-19, sprawiają, że otoczenie biznesowe staje się coraz bardziej nieprzewidywalne. Menedżerowie szukają więc sposobów na zabezpieczenie przed nagłymi zmianami koniunktury. O tym jak stworzyć firmę odporną na zagrożenia i dlaczego innowacyjność musi być wpisana w jej działalność opowiada Yves Pigneur z Uniwersytetu w Lozannie. Rozmawia Paweł Górecki, redaktor naczelny "MIT Sloan Management Review Polska”. Zredagowana wersja tej rozmowy ukazała się w MIT Sloan Management Review Polska, w numerze Zima 2021. Special Guest: Yves Pigneur.

In this episode, I interview Michelle Gallaher, a Melbourne-based award-winning entrepreneur, speaker, and advocate for the Australian health technology sector and for women in science, technology, engineering maths, and medicine (STEMM). As CEO of Opyl Ltd (ASX:OPL), a company working at the intersection of social media, clinical trials, health data, and artificial intelligence, Michelle is a sought-after mentor, collaborator, media commentator, and influencer particularly on the pace of advancement of emerging digital health technologies. After 25 years in Biotech, aged 48 in 2014 with a massive mortgage, she bootstrapped a business focusing on social media and healthcare. Three and a half years later in 2018, she sold to a listed company that did marketing in AI for $1 Million. She really wanted to get into the AI space and so after the sale, she stayed on as general manager and in early 2019, there was a significant strategic shift and the CEO left. She took over, rewrote the business plan within two weeks, and pivoted the business within seven months. The business started with two full-time employees and currently has six. Their first-year sales were $311,000 with a profit of $80,000 and the two founders paid themselves $26,000 each after leaving a $220,000 a year corporate salary. A year before selling, her business partner got sick and never returned. Michelle’s father came in once a week for six weeks to help her with the restructuring and they grew their annual sales from $500,000 to $700,000 with a profit of just under $200,000.  She put up her office across the road from her kids’ school. Michelle recommends growing a business through collaboration and feels that she has not yet succeeded in business, but is killing it as a parent. She believes the hardest thing about growing a small business is cash management and says that the one thing she would tell herself on day one of starting out is, “Go hard” Stay tuned to gain from Michelle’s wealth of small business growth wisdom. This Cast Covers: Solving the problem of recruiting people into clinical trials and the mining of social media for data that help inform healthcare strategy and forward development of new products and services for healthcare organizations. Enabling an environment where patients’ voices are brought into the development of new healthcare technologies and clinical interventions. Monetizing their work by offering consultancy services and selling enterprise solutions. How she started the business, sold it three years later, and stayed on to manage it to date. The intricacies of how artificial intelligence technology works and how they use it. Pivoting from a social media consultancy to an AI-Based company that facilitates healthcare design, development, and delivery. Leaving a cushy corporate job to bootstrap with no capital injection at all. Why she feels she could have taken on an investor if she had to do it all over again. Being left to run the business solo after her business partner got very sick and couldn’t help manage the business anymore. Selling the business at a million-dollar valuation. Shifting from a revenue-based business and pivoting into building out an intellectual property portfolio. Scaling the business by collaborating with a company in a similar space. Building a diverse team and implementing flexible workplace policies that ensure people enjoy coming to work. Not there yet with success in business but killing it as a parent.  Success in seeing an idea coming to fruition and not getting too hung up on the idea of social proof. Why articulating what your value proposition is is key to succeeding in marketing. Leveraging R&D tax incentives and looking at government grants to raise gainful financing. The wonderful validation that comes from being listed at the ASX and the challenges that come with it. Spending a lot of money to generate revenue and then selling intellectual property to get investor funding that can be immediately allocated to more research and development. The level of expensiveness in terms of both time and money of being a listed company. Working on improving her skills in talent management by having more difficult conversations with her team members. Learning not to be affected by people not believing in her and to think fast to be able to evaluate where the business is at any one time. Meeting Ariane Huffington and learning the value of sleep and sleep hygiene. Being able to make all her decisions herself and fail without anybody watching. Shifting from a growth mindset to a transformational mindset. Consciously building on their culture on a daily basis and struggling to find some work-life balance. Trying not to tie her identity to the success of her business. Spending $100k on her professional development and how it has improved her strategic and core functional skills. The advantages of having a diverse board of directors. Additional Resources: Opyl Limited Value Proposition Design By Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, and Alan Smith Manager Tools Podcast Difficult Conversation By Bruce Patton, Douglas Stone, and Sheila Heen The Goal By Eliyahu M. Goldratt Music from https://filmmusic.io "Cold Funk" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Fred is an executive advisor on strategy and innovation. Fred works with senior leaders on how to develop an innovation culture, explore new growth engines and transform their business. He has been working with or in large organisations for more than 20 years and knows their challenges from the inside. Fred is the co-author with Alex Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur and Alan Smith of The Invincible Company, a guide to make innovation more manageable and help executives build resilience in their organisation.

Un fois n’est pas coutume, Niptech Explore diffuse un live event. C’est le Rendez-Vous de l’Inspiration à la Foire du Valais qui a eu lieu le 2 octobre 2020. Podcast: Téléchargement Cet événement est organisé par JIYU et Loyco et on y retrouve le professeur Yves Pigneur, ainsi Mike (aka @syde) et sa sœur Julie, […]

www.newworkhero.es/podcast Wie kann es gelingen, die Idee zu entwickeln, die den Durchbruch schafft? Woran merkt man, welches Projekt das Potenzial hat zu wachsen und möglichst viele Kunden zu erreichen? Und einmal geschafft, wie hält man als Unternehmen diesen Erfolg und innoviert ständig weiter? Mit The Invincible Company haben Alex Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur und Co eine hochspannende Blaupause veröffentlicht, die Entrepreneurship auf eine neue Ebene hebt. In dieser Erfolge erzähle ich warum.

In this episode of #TheSpeakerShow, Sean Pillot de Chenecey interviews Alex Osterwalder - one of the world's most influential strategy and innovation experts, a leading author, entrepreneur, and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started.   Ranked No. 4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide, Osterwalder is known for simplifying the strategy development process and turning complex concepts into digestible visual models. Together with Yves Pigneur, he invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map – practical tools that are trusted by millions of business practitioners from leading global companies. Strategyzer, the company he co-founded, is an innovation powerhouse, providing online courses, applications, and technology-enabled services to help organizations effectively and systematically manage strategy, growth, and transformation.   In this dynamic episode, we discuss a range of his viewpoints on issues including:  Business Model Generation  Value Proposition Design  Testing Business Ideas Invincible Companies Inventing the Future

In this episode, I am going to talk about what I’ve termed the “Silver Entrepreneur,” which is an expansion of my journey.  Companies are still short of talent, and when they can find new talent from new areas, they need to help them build skills.  Meanwhile, the majority of the older population are either being released or retiring in their 60’s – trying to figure out their “next act.” There’s definitely a huge amount of talent sitting on the sidelines. And tapping into the experience and expertise of Silver Entrepreneurs may just be one of the best hiring decisions businesses will ever make. We'll dive deeper into these concepts: Why do we need Silver Entrepreneurs?   Who are the Silver Entrepreneurs?   What do the Silver Entrepreneurs do?    How can Silver Entrepreneurs do the work they want to do?   How can Silver Entrepreneurs get started?  Connect with Me: LinkedIn Facebook Resources: SCORE https://www.score.org/ Business Model You by Alexander Osterwalder by by Alexander Osterwalder, Tim Clark, and Yves Pigneur https://www.amazon.com/Business-Model-You-One-Page-Reinventing/dp/1118156315 Company of One by Paul Jarvis https://www.amazon.com/Company-One-Staying-Small-Business/dp/1328972356 The Million Dollar One-Person Business by Elaine Pofeldt https://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-One-Person-Business-Great-Money/dp/039957896X The Consultant’s Quick Start Guide by Elaine Biech https://www.amazon.com/Consultants-Quick-Start-Guide-Business/dp/0470372311 Getting Started in Consulting by Alan Weiss https://smile.amazon.com/New-Consultants-Quick-Start-Guide-dp-1119556937/dp/1119556937/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1600782761 Your Message Matters by Jonathan Milligan https://www.amazon.com/Your-Message-Matters-above-Noise/dp/1540900339 Please leave a Rating and Review:Since this podcast is new, I’m asking for Apple Podcasts reviews. Reviews help others discover and learn what Leading the Factory Forward is all about. I thank you so much for being here and I’ll see ya next time on Leading the Factory Forward. — Lynn   *** Episode Credits If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment. He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Alex Osterwalder is the bestselling author of Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, and Testing Business Ideas. He also released a new book back in April called The Invincible Company: How to Constantly Reinvent Your Organization with Inspiration from the World’s Best Business Models.  Alex is ranked #4 on the Thinkers50 list of the top 50 management thinkers in the world. Along with Yves Pigneur, Alex invented several practical business tools, including the Business Model Canvas, that are used by millions of business leaders today. For this invention they won the Thinkers50 Strategy Award in 2015.   He is also the founder of Strategyzer, a company that provides organizations with corporate innovation strategy, training, tools, and software.  This episode is brought to you by Cisco. Nearly overnight, the entire world has found itself adapting to a new way of working. The future of work requires a modern approach to collaboration – helping people securely connect wherever they work, while staying safe and being productive. Cisco is shaping this path forward. Check out their new page devoted to the future of work to learn more and check out their resources including articles, videos, and a workplace maturity assessment.. In the midst of the pandemic organizations are facing challenging times and over the last few months we have seen positive and negative decisions occur in response to what is happening. There have been some companies who have handled tough decisions while still keeping their people first--showing employees respect, empathy, and transparency. And there are other companies who have made, what seem to be, harsh and unfair decisions in a way that create anger and chaos. The question is, is there a way for organizations to prepare for uncertainties and challenging times in advance, so we don’t have to get to a point where these tough decisions have to be made?  Creating resilient organizations There are situations where leaders will have to make tough decisions, regardless of how much advanced planning is done. But, as Alex’s book examines, there are ways to make our organizations more agile and fluid, so that when a crisis comes, they are able to not just survive, but thrive through it.  Alex gives a great example of two companies who faced the same crisis and their different outcomes. There were two large photography/film companies, Kodak and Fujifilm. Both were extremely successful at one time, but when the industry was disrupted Kodak kept using the same business model, which no longer worked. As a result Kodak went bankrupt and completely went away.  Fujifilm on the other hand had a CEO who had been obsessed with the thought of the company dying for awhile and had put a plan in place before it was too late. The company aggressively reallocated resources into a whole new way of business, which was cosmetics. It turns out the chemical process and the intellectual property related to aging film can be used in cosmetics for aging skin. So instead of staying on the same logical path of film, they saw the industry coming to an end and went an entirely different direction. They are still around today.  The key is they planned for this extreme disruption before it happened. If you wait until a crisis happens to react, you are never going to have a resilient company. You can’t make a change that big overnight, which is what a lot of companies are trying to do right now. You have to do the work upfront and be a bit of a futurist so that you can see multiple possibilities ahead.   So really, the responsibility for creating resilient organizations starts with the leaders. But the traditional way of leading organizations is not the right model for this type of change. We need a different style of leadership.  Moving away from the stereotypical leadership style In the past a lot of people have viewed a leader as someone who is the smartest one in the room, the one who makes all of the decisions and picks the right ideas. As Alex shares, if you as the leader are the smartest one in the room, you have failed in your hiring.   Being a leader is not about being knowledgeable in every aspect of business and it is not about making every decision, it is about creating the environment for great ideas to emerge and succeed. It is the job of the leader to create the culture that embraces creativity and innovation, and to give authority to individual employees to make decisions.  Alex gives a great example from the German company, Bosch. They decided they were going to invest in 200 projects inside the organization. So they gave those 200 projects a budget of 120,000 Euros and they gave them three months. After the three months were up the company looked at the results from all 200 projects and they killed off 70% of the projects and re-invested a bit more into the remaining 30% based on the results they saw. The remaining projects got to continue on for a bit more time and then after that time was done they all got reevaluated. And based on the findings from the evaluation, they discontinued 75% of those projects. So at the end of the process they got down to 15 projects (out of the 200) to continue on with.  The important part, as Alex explains, is, “It wasn't the leadership that decided on the ideas, per se, it was the evidence that showed if they would get follow up investment. So what's the leader's role? It's about creating the right environment where these teams can explore, fail a lot, and learn the environment where the teams that didn't get follow up investments are not kind of stigmatized as losers because they couldn't get the project, right? No, that's a normal ratio from early stage venture capital. We actually know that one out of 250 ideas is an outsized winner. So, it's that kind of culture you need to put in place. So we don't start to stigmatize those who didn't succeed, because they're contributing to the portfolio. So as a leader, again, you shouldn't be the expert, because then you hired wrong. That obviously depends on the kind of domain you're in. And your main job is to create the conditions for success to emerge. So,you know, that is one of the messages that I found really, really intriguing from Alan Mulally, he likes to say, sometimes, as a leader, you can create too much value.” How to create a culture of innovation Leaders can’t just let culture happen, culture has to be designed and managed. If you want to create a culture of innovation, it has to be done intentionally. A lot of organizations have failed at innovation because the CEO is not spending a lot of time focused on it. And if people inside the company see that the leaders don’t care about innovation, or worse, that leaders are punishing creativity and new ideas, then people are going to stop trying. CEOs do have to spend time focusing on executing and managing the existing, but if innovation doesn’t have enough power, it’s always going to play second fiddle.    As Alex shares, “At Logitech, the CEO Bracken Darrell spends 40 to 60% of his time on innovation. That gives innovation power because it's symbolic if the CEO spends a lot of time on innovation. Then the next question is oh, so the CEO picks the winning ideas? No, the CEO creates the culture and metrics and spaces where innovation can emerge. And that is a partnership between innovation and execution. Those are two different domains and they need to live in harmony, not kind of entrenched in a kind of Warzone. So, sometimes innovators like to call themselves pirates or rebels. I think that's silly because pirates and rebels get killed. Like why would you want to be a pirate or rebel? It’s not about breaking the rules. It's about the leadership creating the right rules so we can do both. World class execution and world class innovation.” If a leader feels like they just don’t have an innovative team, most likely there is a cultural problem. Either that leader or a previous leader in the company has punished people for actually exploring ideas or there is no incentive to innovate. The first thing that needs to happen to create an innovation culture is to tear down all of the blockers that are preventing people from innovating.  One of the biggest blockers to innovation that Alex mentions is business plans. He says business plans are the enemy of innovation because it is an execution document where you describe a dream in detail and you execute it. Innovation is about picking an idea, adapting it, and then changing it until you create value. There are other blockers like focusing on the wrong metrics and leaders thinking they can do everything on their own. You have to get rid of all of the blockers to innovation before you can put innovation into place. Alex suggests leaders read the shareholder letters from Jeff Bezos, which are publicly available.  How start building an invincible team If you are a mid-level manager, or a leader who is responsible for a team, but maybe you are not the CEO of the company, what can you do to start building an invincible team? Using a method from Rita McGrath, Alex says the first step is to take a look at your CEOs agenda and see how much time is carved out for innovation. Or look at the company’s last four important meetings and see how much time was spent talking about innovation. In either of those instances if the answer is not over 40%, you actually need to consider if it is worthwhile to spend your time on innovation, because as he says you will be “fighting against windmills”.  This is an important first step because you have to know what your company’s innovation readiness is. Is your environment ready for innovation to happen? If it is not, take a look at the top levels of the organization and ask yourself who can you get on board as a sponsor to support innovation. Is there someone at the top level who is willing to push for innovation and offer top level protection for people to explore?  Alex says, “You need that top level protection, I'd say, because otherwise all you're going to do, and unfortunately we still see this in quite a few companies, all you're going to do is innovation theater. No company is lacking innovation activities. There's incubators, there's all that kind of stuff. I'm not even talking about ping pong tables, I'm talking about real innovation activity. But as long as it's not connected to strategy, it's really a little bit of a suicide mission. I know a lot of innovation leads are up for that suicide mission. That's why they call themselves rebels and pirates. But I think we need to be a little bit more pragmatic. And, you know, first understand, how ready is the company. And then based on that assessment, either change the job or say, Okay, here's the strategy.”

No último episódio da série de episódios sobre Transformação Digital falamos sobre como desenvolver novos modelos de negócio usando ferramentas de inovação, e ressaltamos a importância da Tela do Modelo de Negócios (também conhecida como "Business Canvas", nome original em inglês). Originalmente publicada no livro publicado “Business Model Generation: Inovação Em Modelos De Negócios” por Alexander Osterwalder e Yves Pigneur, a Tela tomou o mundo de surpresa e causou um profundo impacto. Empreendedores e gestores que anteriormente tinham dificuldade em entender o seu negócio agora conseguiam visualizar a sua íntegra em uma única página. Equipes trabalhando em inovação tinham um modelo inicial para formular ideias. Startups emergentes podiam discutir abertamente o seu modelo de negócios em busca de validação. Investidores e venture capitalists conseguiam entender o que um negócio fazia sem precisar ler páginas. O ecossistema empreendador e de inovação ganhava uma ferramenta simples e confiável para dar pequenos grandes passos na construção de novos negócios.  Esse assunto é inspiração constante aqui no Octanage. Ao longo dos últimos anos, fiz algumas Lives a respeito do assunto (Como Funciona o Canvas da Proposta de Valor e Estudo de Caso do Airbnb) e utlizo com frequência em projetos e em mentorias com gestores. Antes de falar sobre a Tela, revisamos o conceito de modelo de negócio. O que é um modelo de negócio? É a forma como uma organização cria, entrega e captura valor. Criar valor: desenvolver ofertas que entreguem soluções para clientes específicos Entregar valor: para esse cliente Capturar valor: recompensa dada pelo cliente Por quê usar a Tela de Modelo de Negócios? O Business Canvas oferece a oportunidade para gestores terem uma visão clara de todos os elementos chave de qualquer negócio em apenas uma folha de papel. Ele é: Simples e fácil de entender Focado e flexível  Entregar mais valor para o cliente Fácil de ver relacionamento entre os blocos - muito mais difícil de ver em um plano tradicional de negócios Clareza na comunicação para outros / equipe e integração entre as equipes Alocar melhor os recursos da empresa Visão Estratégica da sua atuação como gestor A Tela de Modelo de Negócios é o seu negócio descrito em apenas uma folha 9 Blocos Inter-relacionados disponível em octanage.com/lab020  No centro, o mais importante e onde acontece as inovações mais transformativas: a proposta de valor No lado esquerdo, a infraestrutura: os fornecedores e insumos necessários para entregar ofertas No lado direito, os relacionamentos: canais e clientes Abaixo, as finanças: custos e receitas Segmentos de Clientes Para quem nós estamos criando valor? Quem são os clientes mais importantes? Como segmentá-los? As necessidades de cada segmento justificam ofertas específicas? Quais canais de distribuição usados para atingir cada segmento? Exemplo: Google tem no mínimo 2 segmentos diferentes Anunciantes Consumidores  Para cada um deles, a empresa desenvolve uma proposta de valor diferente. Proposta de Valor Qual problema do cliente estamos resolvendo? Quais ofertas disponibilizamos para cada segmento? Qual o valor que de fato entregamos através da oferta? Exemplos que vão além das funcionalidades: Desempenho Personalização Design Marca Preço Redução de Custo Conveniência Canais Como você promove, venda e entrega para o seu cliente? Você vai utilizar um canal próprio ou terceirizado? Quais canais funcionam melhor? Direto vs. indireto  Quais canais são mais eficientes em custos Como integramos com a rotina do cliente Relações com Clientes Como você conquista, mantem e aumenta a sua base de clientes Entenda a jornada do seu cliente e as expectativas para enumerar o que é importante e como você interage com eles - LAB015 -Experiência do Cliente Satisfação e lealdade determinam recompra Fontes de Renda De onde vem a sua receita? Como cada fonte contribui para a receita total do negócio? Como o cliente prefere pagar? Qual é o seu modelo de receitas? LAB016 - Novas Formas de Receitas e LAB012 - 7 Dicas para Criar Novas Formas de Receitas Como você fatura baseado na sua proposta de valor? Recursos Chave Descreva e liste os seus recursos mais importantes para entregar valor Canais: recursos para atingir os segmentos Receita: recursos necessários para gerar receita Relacionamento com os clientes: recursos necessários para gerenciar a experiência Tipos de recursos: Fisico, Intelectual, Humano ou Financeiro Atividades Chave - Core Business Quais as atividades mais importantes para fazer o seu negócio funcionar? Se ele não está relacionado diretamente com a sua proposta de valor, ele não é chave Canais: atividades para atingir os segmentos Receita: atividades necessárias para gerar receita Relacionamento com os clientes: atividades necessários para gerenciar a experiência Parceiros Chave Quais os nossos parceiros e fornecedores mais importantes? Quais atividades e tarefas são extremamente importantes para entregar o seu produto/serviço mas não são realizados por você? O que o seu negócio pode NÃO fazer para focar mais nas Atividades Chave? Estrutura de Custos Liste os custos chave da sua operação relacionados somente a sua proposta de valor Como eles estão relacionados às receitas? Como eles estão relacionados às atividades? Passo-a-Passo de Como Preencher a Tela de Modelo de Negócios Não existe uma ordem certa, mas nesse artigo sugerimos essa: Inicia em torno do cliente: segmentos de mercado / personas e incrementa a Proposta de Valor para cada um deles Canais e Relacionamento com Clientes Fontes de Receita Recursos e Atividades-Chave  Parceiros e Estrutura de Custos

En este programa descubrirás las pepitas de oro de los mejores libros de Emprendimiento, Innovación y desarrollo personal. Los libros que todo innovador debe leer. más información en www.disoftacademy.com/validation

Welcome to episode #728 of Six Pixels of Separation. Here it is: Six Pixels of Separation - Episode #728 - Host: Mitch Joel. I've been following his work for many years. Books like Business Model Generation, The Team Alignment Map, Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas and more, are not just jam-packed with ideas, but are also visual stunning and hyper-graphical. Alex Osterwalder's passion for both making business better and business model creation is contagious. It's hard not to think differently about business after spending any amount of time with his content. His company is called Strategyzer and they’ve also deployed the Business Model Canvas (along with many online courses). Most recently, Alex and I both took part in a multi-day online event called, SpeakAid 2020 (put together by another great thinker, Dan Pontefract). Out of the multi-day/many speaker event, I found Alex's to be the best presentation (by far). With his latest book, The Invincible Company, Alex (along with his regular co-author and business partner, Yves Pigneur) are digging deep into how to constantly reinvent your business with inspiration from the world's best business models. Enjoy the conversation... Running time: 55:47. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at iTunes. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on Twitter. Here is my conversation with Alex Osterwalder. The Invincible Company. Business Model Generation. Value Proposition Design. Testing Business Ideas. The Team Alignment Map. Strategyzer. Business Model Canvas. Follow Alex on Instagram. Follow Alex on Twitter. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'.

In this episode, Simone Cicero is joined by a special co-host and former guest on the podcast - Bill Fischer - Professor of Innovation Management at IMD Business School in Lausanne.  Together they pick the brain of nobody less than Alex Osterwalder, whose work continues to influence the way established companies do business innovation and how new ventures get started. The inventor of the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map together with Yves Pigneur, Alex just released a new book called The Invincible Company, whose ideas are mentioned throughout the conversation. Alex talks about why, in the furiously changing world of today, innovation portfolio management is a must, as well as transforming innovation into a pervasive process inside the organization: we also debate a lot on the several ways to do it.We also talk about the responsibility of companies to become great workplaces - being able to keep and reallocate talent across business units - and serve society beyond shareholder interests. Enjoy this jam full episode! Read our story on Medium to access our key insights and the interview transcript. Here are some important links from the conversation:> About Alex Osterwalder and his work:> Alexander Osterwalder  (Author), Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, Frederic Etiemble, The Invincible Company: https://www.amazon.com/Invincible-Company-Alexander-Osterwalder/dp/1119523966> Strategyzer: https://www.strategyzer.com/ Other mentions and references:> Ritha McGrath, “Transient Advantage”, HBR, 06/2013: https://hbr.org/2013/06/transient-advantage> Scott Anthony, “Breaking down the barriers to innovation”, HBR, 11/2019: https://hbr.org/2019/11/breaking-down-the-barriers-to-innovation> Ritha McGrath, Seeing around Corners, interview with Aperture: https://medium.com/aperture-hub/seeing-around-corners-19-ec64b2260337> All Things Marketplaces with Dan Hockenmaier, Casey Winters, and Lenny Rachitsky,> Village Global's Venture Stories: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/all-things-marketplaces-dan-hockenmaier-casey-winters/id1316769266?i=1000467536947 Companies mentioned: Amazon, Ping An, W.L. Gore, Logitech, Kodak, Haier Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcastThanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/musicRecorded on May 11th 2020 

This episode is brought to you by Collective Campus brand new online innovation courses. Whether you want to learn about business models and testing ideas with Alex Osterwalder, building a corporate startup with Dan Toma, or learn about topics such as design thinking, and agile fundamentals, head to www.collectivecampus.io/online I’ll also be running a 2-hour webinar on remote work and productivity in early July, based on the popularity of my five levels of remote work article, which you can learn more about at bit.ly/fivelevelswebinar And to today’s episode. Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is one of the world's most influential strategy and innovation experts, a leading author, entrepreneur, and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started. Ranked No. 4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide, Osterwalder is known for simplifying the strategy development process and turning complex concepts into digestible visual models. Together with Yves Pigneur, he invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map - practical tools that are trusted by millions of business practitioners from leading global companies including Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, MasterCard, Sony, Fujitsu, 3M, Intel, Roche, Colgate-Palmolive, and many more. He returned to the podcast to talk about what leaders can do to build truly invincible companies and weather storms that are a result of technological and social change, financial market shocks and of course, viruses. We explored: 1 - what defines an invincible company 2 - how companies can balance a portfolio between exploration of new business models and exploitation of existing ones 3 - what companies like Amazon, IKEA and Logitech have done to play the long game and stay relevant 4 - and finally, how one such invincible company profiled in the book, Airbnb, might weather the storm of COVID-19 With that, I bring you the one and only, Alex Osterwalder. Topics Discussed: Lockdown in Switzerland Alex’s new book What is an invincible company The wakeup call we needed? Cashflow runway and business model reinvention Case studies and success stories Tools for managing innovation Leading indicators v trailing indicators Hilti Bosch Culture lags systems The optimism bias and the narrative fallacy Transcending boundaries Explore v exploit portfolios When to kill a project Why entrepreneurs are more risk averse than the general public Why market validation isn’t a conclusive test, but an indicative one The ‘science vs art’ of innovation and entrepreneurship How to use patterns to shift from outdated business models Questions to ask when assessing business opportunities How to play the long game amidst ROI uncertainty Metered funding Innovation Project Scorecard Placing many bets, and how Testing business ideas The culture map Values alignement and intrinsic motivation Delegations of authority Airbnb in crisis mode and why they’ll come out of it Show Notes: Online courses: www.collectivecampus.io/online Remote work webinar: http://bit.ly/fivelevelswebinar Strategyzer: Strategyzer.com The Invincible Company: https://amzn.to/2Lg2tEM Testing Business Ideas: https://amzn.to/2YLSpLo Twitter: @alexosterwalder --- Listen to Future Squared on Apple Podcasts  goo.gl/sMnEa0 Also available on: Spotify, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Stitcher and Soundcloud Twitter: www.twitter.com/steveglaveski Instagram: www.instagram.com/@thesteveglaveski Future Squared: www.futuresquared.xyz Steve Glaveski: www.steveglaveski.com Medium: www.medium.com/@steveglaveski Steve's book: www.employeetoentrepreneur.io NEW Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/futuresquared/ Watch on YouTube: https://bit.ly/2N77FLx

How do you generate or refine a business model? In this episode, Matthias introduces the Business Model Generation canvas developed by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. He describes the nine building blocks and dives into different business models: the long tail, multi-sided platforms, freemium, and open business. Finally, he explains the phases of a business ... Read more

How do you generate or refine a business model? In this episode, I introduce the Business Model Generation canvas developed by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. I describe the nine building blocks and also dive into different types of business models: the long tail, multi-sided platforms, freemium models, and open business models. Finally, I explain the phases of a business model generation process. .fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-1 .nav-tabs li a.tab-link{border-top-color:#f1f2f2;background-color:#f1f2f2;}.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-1 .nav-tabs{background-color:#ffffff;}.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-1 .nav-tabs li.active a.tab-link,.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-1 .nav-tabs li.active a.tab-link:hover,.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-1 .nav-tabs li.active a.tab-link:focus{border-right-color:#ffffff;}.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-1 .nav-tabs li.active a.tab-link,.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-1 .nav-tabs li.active a.tab-link:hover,.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-1 .nav-tabs li.active a.tab-link:focus{background-color:#ffffff;}.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-1 .nav-tabs li a:hover{background-color:#ffffff;border-top-color:#ffffff;}.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-1 .tab-pane{background-color:#ffffff;}.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-1 .nav,.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-1 .nav-tabs,.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-1 .tab-content .tab-pane{border-color:#ebeaea;}ResourcesTranscriptSubscribeOther episodesResources Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur (2010): Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers Free download of the Business Model Canvas Transcript Today, we will be talking about business models and more specifically, how you can generate business models or you can analyze them and how you can refine them. It's a very important part of being a leader. Welcome to another episode of the Wholegrain Leadership Podcast. My name is Matthias Catón. Welcome to the show. Today we will talk about business model generation. The business model is essentially the master plan of what your organization has to offer. So this is a vital central part of what you [00:01:00] do, and it is a very important part of a leader's job to make sure that business models are up to date. They are working, that you can come up with innovation. And we'll talk a little bit about how you can do that. There is a great book that I will present to you today, or the ideas, the main ideas of that book. It's called "Business Model Generation", and the subtitle is: "A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers." So if you think you could be one of those three envisionary a game changer. Or a challenger, then this will be useful and interesting for you. The book is written by two people, Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. They have a very particular approach that I like a lot. They've also written other books, so we'll probably get back to them in other episodes of this [00:02:00] podcast again, but today we want to talk about the business model generation. The podcast will have different parts, and I'll go through the main ideas of that book and obviously as usual, you will find the exact link to that book in the show notes. So if you want to go ahead and purchase it, which I think you absolutely should, then you can find the link there. The two office of the book was to Stivarga and Pega. They work with a design thinking approach. For me, that works very well. I have used this approach myself. I like it. There are obviously other ways you can generate or work on business models. I like it because they approach they're using is at the same time. Very creative allows for innovative out of the box ideas by this. Also structured enough to make sure that what comes out of it at the end of the process is [00:03:00] something coherent that you can actually put into practice. The central element of the business model generation process is the business model canvas. You cannot see this in the podcast of course, but if you go to the show notes,

My guest today is Alexander Osterwalder, one of the world's most influential strategy and innovation experts, a leading author, entrepreneur, and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started. Ranked No. 4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide, Osterwalder is known for simplifying the strategy development process and turning complex concepts into digestible visual models. Together with Yves Pigneur, he invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map – practical tools that are trusted by millions of business practitioners. The topic is his book The Invincible Company: How to Constantly Reinvent Your Organization with Inspiration From the World's Best Business Models (The Strategyzer Series). In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss: Diversified Portfolio Quarterly Return Predictability in your Execution Business Experimentation and Adaptation Strategic Exploration Capability Business Models Leadership System Exploration and Execution The Invincible Company Innovation Building Fundamentals Creating Value Jump in! --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel Facebook: @trendfollowing LinkedIn: @covel Instagram: @mikecovel Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!

Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneurs’ Business Model Canvas changed the way the world creates and plans new business models. It has been used by corporations and startups and consultants around the world and is taught in hundreds of universities. After years of researching how the world’s best companies develop, test, and scale new business models, the authors have produced their definitive work. The Invincible Company explains what every organization can learn from the business models of the world’s most exciting companies. The Invincible Company explains how companies such as Amazon, IKEA, Airbnb, Microsoft, and Logitech, have been able to create immensely successful businesses and disrupt entire industries. At the core of these successes are not just great products and services, but profitable, innovative business models–and the ability to improve existing business models while consistently launching new ones. The Invincible Company presents practical new tools for measuring, managing, and accelerating innovation, and strategies for reducing risk when launching new business models. Serving as a blueprint for your growth strategy, The Invincible Company explains how to constantly stay ahead of your competition. In-depth chapters explain how to create new growth engines, change how products and services are created and delivered, extract maximum profit from each type of business model, and much more. New tools―such as the Business Model Portfolio Map, Innovation Metrics, Innovation Strategy Framework, and the Culture Map―enable readers to understand how to design invincible companies. Bio: Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is one of the world’s most influential strategy and innovation experts, a leading author, entrepreneur, and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started. Ranked No. 4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide, Osterwalder is known for simplifying the strategy development process and turning complex concepts into digestible visual models. Together with Yves Pigneur, he invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map – practical tools that are trusted by millions of business practitioners. In this episode of Trend Following Radio: Diversified Portfolio Quarterly Return Predictability in your Execution Business Experimentation and Adaptation Strategic Exploration Capability Business Models Leadership System Exploration and Execution The Invincible Company Innovation Building Fundamentals Creating Value

Today, on the Disrupt Yourself Podcast, we welcome innovation expert and one of the top-ranked thinkers in the world, Alex Osterwalder. You will hear how Alex views failure, about his mentorship with Yves Pigneur, and which companies he views as leaders in business model innovation. Alex explains the ideal work structure in the 21st Century, including why your company might need a Chief Entrepreneur or Chief Internal Venture Capitalist. We also talk about the power of using visuals, and what it’s like to be a company in the “sweet spot”. For links and a complete transcript, please visit https://whitneyjohnson.com/alex-osterwalder

Our special guest for today is one of the world’s leading business thinkers, David Burkus. His forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach innovation, collaboration,  productivity, and networking.   As a skilled researcher and inspiring communicator, David’s award-winning books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and his TED Talk has been viewed over 2 million times. By making cutting-edge organizational research accessible and applicable, he pushes audiences to reconsider how they work both individually and in teams and unlocks the methods top performers use to thrive at work and in life. A renowned expert, David’s writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, USAToday, Fast Company, and more.   In this episode, David shares with us his in-depth knowledge of the world of networking. Regardless of what industry you belong to, I’m sure there’s a lot for you to gain as you tune in with us. Enjoy!   Episode Highlights: ●       How David Got Started with His Latest Book: A Friend of A Friend (3:19) ●       More Than a Book on Advice (7:54) ●       Understanding the Small World Effect (11:08) ●       Weak Ties and Dormant Ties: What’s the Difference and How Can We Utilize Them? (17:03) ●       Becoming a Super Connector (25:16) ●       David’s Take on Email Introductions (29:34) ●       The Socially Awkward Super Connector Adam Rifkin (34:36) ●       Book Recommendations (36:40)   AND MUCH MORE!   Resources Mentioned In This Episode: ●       If you are a future or aspiring business leader who wants to achieve the next level of success in your profession, get started by getting my FREE video short course: The Secret to Unleashing Your Top 1 Percent. ●       Go to David’s site, davidburkus.com, to know more about him and get access to helpful resources. ●       Connect with David: o   Twitter o   Facebook o   LinkedIn o   Instagram o   YouTube o   Instagram   ●       Book Recommendations: o   Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale Into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days by Joey Coleman o   Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur o   List of Daniel H. Pink’s Books   Quotes:   “As we say in the research world, advice is a sample size of one. What I’m looking for is much larger sample sizes so we can know what’s universally true.” “Your best strategy is to figure out where you are in the network of your industry, city, or wherever you are looking to have a little more success in. And then figure out where you want to be, who you need to be connected to, and what the right pathway there is.” “The most fascinating to me, in small-world networking, is if you have a Facebook account, you are 4.2 introductions away from anybody on Facebook. ” “Weak ties and dormant ties are the reason why the small world effect falls into place.” “Put in the work now, and it will be easier later.”   Ways to Subscribe to The Top One Percent:   Apple Podcast Stitcher PlayerFM Podtail

Defining and executing strategy is one of the most important tasks of a leader. In this episode, I explain what strategy is, what it isn't, and how it differs from other concepts such as operational excellence. I talk about two principles you can apply when developing your strategy: the Blue Ocean strategy and mission-driven strategies. Furthermore, I explain how you can analyze your company's situation or develop a new strategy by using a simple SWOT analysis or the more sophisticated business model canvas. .fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-3 .nav-tabs li a.tab-link{border-top-color:#f1f2f2;background-color:#f1f2f2;}.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-3 .nav-tabs{background-color:#ffffff;}.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-3 .nav-tabs li.active a.tab-link,.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-3 .nav-tabs li.active a.tab-link:hover,.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-3 .nav-tabs li.active a.tab-link:focus{border-right-color:#ffffff;}.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-3 .nav-tabs li.active a.tab-link,.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-3 .nav-tabs li.active a.tab-link:hover,.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-3 .nav-tabs li.active a.tab-link:focus{background-color:#ffffff;}.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-3 .nav-tabs li a:hover{background-color:#ffffff;border-top-color:#ffffff;}.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-3 .tab-pane{background-color:#ffffff;}.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-3 .nav,.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-3 .nav-tabs,.fusion-tabs.fusion-tabs-3 .tab-content .tab-pane{border-color:#ebeaea;}ResourcesTranscriptSubscribeOther episodesResources Blue Ocean Strategy Thomas W. Malnight, Ivy Buche and Charles Dhanaraj 2019: Put Purpose at the Core of Your Strategy (Harvard Business Review) Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur (2010): Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers SWOT analysis Transcript [00:00:48] This will be another solo episode where we will talk about strategy. Now, leadership has many facets, but obviously one of the most important ones is to work with strategy, define it, implemented, evaluated. That's what leadership is about. This is not a topic that we can cover entirely in just one podcast episode. [00:01:15] So we will get back to this. It should probably a number of times over the course of this podcast in the future. Recently, I had to run a one-day workshop here at Frankfurt School on strategy, so it was a good opportunity for me to refresh some of the things and I thought it might be a good idea. To put that into a little podcast episode. [00:01:37] So let's, let's get started with what strategy is and what it isn't. And a lot of these things, they go back to what could be called the guru office strategy. Michael Porter, he's a professor at Harvard Business School, and he has developed many of the ideas that underlie, we understand, ask corporate strategy today, and all the things I will mention. [00:01:59] Don't [00:02:00] worry, I will put them in the show notes. So you don't have to worry about missing some of the information. If you want to read more about different things, everything will be in the show notes. So let's start with a little bit of a definition of what strategy is. Now. If you imagine a company, maybe you're a company or any other than you can imagine it as being a set of different. [00:02:24] Activities, lots of different activities at make obvious enterprise. So you're producing something. You will have production elements, cars or other parts. You will have marketing and sales. You will have general administration. You will have research and development. And so on and so forth. Different things. [00:02:46] And depending on the size and the complexity of your organization, those activities may be many, many, many. And you could map them in a activity map and you can show the connections between those elements. Here we get to the fundamental difference between strategy and other things such as operational effectiveness. [00:03:07] And when we're talking about effectiveness, and we're talking about.

This is HCD is brought to you by Humana Design and The Academy.ie - Design Training and Education Have feedback on this episode? Click here to leave us a voice mail. Hello, and welcome to Bringing Design Closer. My name is Gerry Scullion and I’m a service design trainer a practitioner based in Dublin City, Ireland. I was in Toronto recently for the service design networks global conference and caught up with Alan Smith, the wonderful co-founder and design leader at Strategyzer HQ at one of the coolest ends of the city. In this episode, we chat about the earlier days of forming the business with Alex Osterwalder and working with Yves Pigneur and how this led to becoming one of the most celebrated business educators on the planet.  Pre-order Validating Business Ideas book https://www.strategyzer.com/books/testing-business-ideas-david-j-bland Learn more about Strategyzer We are hosting our first conference in Dublin - March 30, March 31 2020. Stay up to date by joining our newsletter https://mailchi.mp/thisishcd/2020-dublin-hcd-conference Connect with This is HCD Follow This is HCD us on Twitter Follow This is HCD on Instagram Sign up for our newsletter (we have lots of design giveaways!) Join the practitioner community on This is HCD Slack Channel Read articles on our This is HCD Network on Medium Other podcasts on This is HCD Network Power of Ten with Andy Polaine EthnoPod with Jay Hasbrouck Bringing Design Closer with Gerry Scullion ProdPod with Adrienne Tan Getting Started in Design with Gerry Scullion Talking Shop with Andy Polaine and Gerry Scullion Decoding Culture with Dr. John Curran Support the show.

This is HCD is brought to you by Humana Design and The Academy.ie - Design Training and Education Have feedback on this episode? Click here to leave us a voice mail. Hello, and welcome to Bringing Design Closer. My name is Gerry Scullion and I’m a service design trainer a practitioner based in Dublin City, Ireland. I was in Toronto recently for the service design networks global conference and caught up with Alan Smith, the wonderful co-founder and design leader at Strategyzer HQ at one of the coolest ends of the city. In this episode, we chat about the earlier days of forming the business with Alex Osterwalder and working with Yves Pigneur and how this led to becoming one of the most celebrated business educators on the planet.  Pre-order Validating Business Ideas book https://www.strategyzer.com/books/testing-business-ideas-david-j-bland Learn more about Strategyzer We are hosting our first conference in Dublin - March 30, March 31 2020. Stay up to date by joining our newsletter https://mailchi.mp/thisishcd/2020-dublin-hcd-conference Connect with This is HCD Follow This is HCD us on Twitter Follow This is HCD on Instagram Sign up for our newsletter (we have lots of design giveaways!) Join the practitioner community on This is HCD Slack Channel Read articles on our This is HCD Network on Medium Other podcasts on This is HCD Network Power of Ten with Andy Polaine EthnoPod with Jay Hasbrouck Bringing Design Closer with Gerry Scullion ProdPod with Adrienne Tan Getting Started in Design with Gerry Scullion Talking Shop with Andy Polaine and Gerry Scullion Decoding Culture with Dr. John Curran Support the show.

This week on Career Buzz, Mark goes to Houston Texas for the National Career Development Association conference. He first sits down with Pam Fillmon, who has a hunger for the stories of people. Pam brings insight into the complexity of change and the struggle of fitting passions and skills together. As principal of Fillmon and Associates, Pam offers people development programs that equip organizations, education, and military clients with best practices, tools, and training. Collaborating with Pam is Hyung Joon Yoon. He’s Assistant Professor of Education, in Workforce Education and Development at the Pennsylvania State University. Hyung is also on the Board of NCDA. Mark sits down with Pam and Hyung to discuss their presentation on Impact of a Corporate Career Development Program, that they gave at NCDA2019. Later in the show, Mark gets a chance to connect with Tim Clark. Tim Clark’s personal business model approach evolved over 30 years doing 40 jobs, from washing dishes and tending bar to starting and running a professional services venture — and later selling it in a multimillion-dollar transaction. Tim conceived the Business Model You methodology while pursuing doctoral studies at Stanford, and cocreating the book Business Model Generation, by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. And bonus! Mark gets a chance to speak with Angela Chisholm. Do you want to know what’s it like to have a pendulum career that swings between freewheeling and finance? Angela Chisholm spent over 10 years leading adventure travel with Freewheeling Adventures then with Walking Adventures. She swung in business admin and finance and is now Operations Manager at Copernicus Studios. Copernicus Studios in Halifax is an entertainment content development and production company based.

This week, on the Agile Coaches’ Corner, your host Dan Neumann and his AgileThought colleague, Sam Falco, will be taking a look at the Product Owner role in Scrum! The Product Owner Role sometimes gets overlooked in a lot of discussions around Scrum — yet, they’re one of the most important, complex, and crucial roles. They’re the visionary behind the product. Primarily, their responsibility to the Scrum team is to maximize the value of what the development team creates.   Tune in to hear Dan and Sam’s conversation to get more insight into the incredibly important Product Owner role — what it is, the challenges of being one, the valuable traits and skills for a PO to have, and some of the anti-patterns around the role!   Key Takeaways What is the Product Owner Role in Scrum? It is one of the three roles of Scrum (product owner, scrum master, and the development team) They’re the visionary behind the product They’re a crucial reason to why we have Scrum teams in the first place — they’re feeding the Scrum team the most valuable backlog items to turn into an increment of product every sprint The primary role of the Product Owner is to maximize the value of what the development team creates It’s important that it’s only one person; not a committee Challenges of the Product Owner Role: Managing and representing the opinions and voices of the dev team and stakeholders by distilling them into a coherent product backlog that’s optimized for value Valuable traits for a Product Owner: Someone with a distinct understanding of the market and a vision for a product that they want to bring into the world An entrepreneurial mindset Someone with very deep domain knowledge and business knowledge Understands the customers (or potential customers) Decisiveness Open-mindedness Strong leadership skills and the ability to motivate others Important skills for a Product Owner to have: Domain and business knowledge The ability to write a good business proposal as well as a strong canvas that articulates to funders what it is you’re trying to accomplish A willingness to test your hypothesis and do market research Communication skills and articulating things in a way that makes sense to your development team Negotiation skills Having a well-crafted and well-ordered backlog Being able to define the sprint goal Being able to communicate the vision and having the organizational skills to put the backlog in a good order so the dev team, customers, and stakeholders always know what’s next Technical skills (though it is not a must-have, it is helpful for them to have an understanding of the technology they’re working with) — but be careful, a PO with technical chops can sometimes interfere with the dev team Anti-patterns within organizations that are not setting up their Product Owner for success: Having someone without the right traits and skills in the Product Owner role Having a proxy PO stand-in for the real Product Owner, which jumbles the message and leads to “answer shopping” Having the role split into two people (where one becomes the ‘business’ PO owner and the other person becomes the ‘technical’ PO), which affects team self-organization and leads to uncertainty Product Owner anti-patterns: Rigidity Disregarding estimates Product Owner is an ‘order-taker’; simply taking notes and doing everything that is said (which causes issues because they cannot articulate a clear vision) When a Product Owner is not valuing everyone’s opinions equally (and instead, giving more value to those who are loudest or had the last say) Presenting a release plan to stakeholders that is wildly at odds with what the dev team can accomplish and expecting the dev team to live up to that Unbalanced focus and either being too involved with the dev team or not enough Spending too much time with the stakeholders Only showing up for sprint reviews   Mentioned in this Episode: Scrivener User Stories The Professional Product Owner: Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage, by Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts, by Annie Duke   Sam Falco’s Book Pick: Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers, by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur   Want to Learn More or Get in Touch? Visit the website and catch up with all the episodes on AgileThought.com! Email your thoughts or suggestions to Podcast@AgileThought.com or Tweet @AgileThought using #AgileThoughtPodcast!

Ryan sent us a blog post that just didn't hit home with him. Dave breaks it into three pieces and then shreds it. Wherein we note that The Google can't lie. Then we slip into a very serious discussion of business models and business model generation. Book: Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. They define the business model based on nine things (all of which contribute to value): - Customer Segments - Value Propositions - Channels - Customer Relationships - Revenue Streams - Key Resources - Key Activities - Key Partnerships - Cost Structure Taken together, all of these define your value proposition. But, we seem to argue with each other, most of us don't have a clear focus on the most important elements of a business model when we use the term "business model." Question: Do you buy into your own value prop? Final analysis: Don't use the term "Business Model" to mean some small subset of what's important in your business. . . . Then we segue . . . to who's who . . . Is it useful to create a menagerie of the IT industry? Wherein we explore the ways that we all use labels and titles and categories? How do we get a big picture of the universe when we KNOW that most of the universe is invisible to us? . . . And then, suddenly, we move to a discussion of the Gartner report on what we need to pay attention to. See https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2018-10-15-gartner-identifies-the-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2019 Gartner's The Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019: Autonomous Things Augmented Analytics AI-Driven Development Digital Twins Empowered Edge Immersive Experience Blockchain Smart Spaces Digital Ethics and Privacy Quantum Computing For comparison . . . Here are Comptia's Top Ten Emerging Technologies for 2019: Internet of Things Artificial Intelligence 5G Serverless Computing Blockchain Robotics Biometrics 3D Printing AR / VR Drones Please give it a listen. Share with your friends. Subscribe. And give us your feedback below. :-)  

DESIGN THINKING: Si eres un emprendedor y te encuentras en la fase de creación de tu empresa o startup, seguramente alguien ya te habrá comentado sobre la importancia de crear un plan de negocios antes de arrancar, sin embargo es muy normal que te encuentres perdido mucho antes de comenzar a escribir las primeras lineas de tu plan, y esto es debido a que ni tu, ni nadie en este planeta cuenta con la habilidad de ver a través del futuro para adivinar todo lo que puede pasar dentro y fuera de tu nuevo proyecto.Para esto, grandes pensadores e investigadores del ecosistema emprendedor a nivel mundial como Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Eric Rise, Steve Blank, Tim Brown y David Kelley han creado metodologías de mucho valor que te ayudarán a pensar de manera más asertiva al momento de crear la propuesta de valor que entregarás a tu mercado.Aunque todas las metodologías creadas por estas personas funcionan, cada una tiene diferentes objetivos, y lo más importante, todas tienen un punto donde convergen entre ellas, que es el tema que tocaremos el día de hoy en este artículo.El primer paso que debes hacer es priorizar la metodología con la que debes empezar, y esta es:DESIGN THINKING: Esta herramienta fantástica creada por David Kelley profesor de la Universidad de Stanford y fundador de IDEO la consultora de innovación más importante a nivel mundial, tiene el objetivo de ayudar a los emprendedores y directores a crear un factor de innovación en sus empresas, enfocándose 100% en el usuario de sus productos, no en el producto mismo, recordando que innovación significa crear valor valor. Para esto se utilizan 5 pasos dentro del Design Thinking, donde el primero es "Empatizar", esto significa ponerse en los zapatos del usuario, para comprender a detalle las necesidades y deseos de este en la vida diaria y así descubrir los problemas a los que se enfrentan tus posibles clientes y que nosotros como emprendedores estamos dispuestos a resolver.El segundo paso es "Definir", es decir, ponerle nombre y apellido al problema principal que vas a resolver, y aquí es donde comienza todo, definiendo las habilidades y talentos con las que cuentas y que usarás como armas para enfrentarte a resolver dichos problemas, recordando que tu propósito en la vida, es ese punto donde converge tu pasión, profesión, vocación y misión.El tercer paso dentro de la metodología Design Thinking es "Idear", es la etapa en donde debes invitar a varias personas con diferentes profesiones y gustos para crear un brainstorming grupal, donde por medio de esta lluvia de ideas comenzarás a generar la llamada estrategia de innovación abierta. Recuerda que la diversidad de pensamientos, creencias y habilidades harán más rica la creación de tu solución innovadora.Dentro del cuarto paso se encuentra el "Prototipado", aquí lo más importante es llevar de una forma ágil y rápida el desarrollo de un producto mínimo viable, dándole forma física a esa gran idea que salió del brainstorming para solucionar el problema antes definido. En esta etapa lo más importante no es crear el producto perfecto, ni con todas las funcionalidades que te has imaginado, si no crear el producto más básico y de bajo costo que solo te ayude a validar la viabilidad del nuevo producto, y aquí es donde entra el quinto y último paso del Design Thinking, el "Testeo", una vez desarrollado en MVP ó Producto Mínimo Viable, es necesario probarlo en el mercado para obtener información valiosa por parte de los usuarios, quienes te retroalimentarán con información importante sobre el producto, y aquí tendrás que recopilar dicha información para volver al laboratorio de prototipado y adaptar rápidamente los posibles cambios o mejoras que fueron solicitadas por las personas.Es aquí en estos dos últimos pasos del Design Thinking donde converge la segunda metodología más usada por el ecosistema emprendedor, el denominado Lean Startup. Alejandro Lomas, es fundador y director de la Incubadora de Alto Impacto y Aceleradora de Empresas Startcups®, y especialista en impulsar empresas de base tecnológica en México y Latinoamérica por medio de la metodología Silicon Valley Innovation Model y realizando inversiones ángel de capital privado mediante Caffeine Ventures® Angel Capital Fund. www.startcups.comwww.alejandrolomas.comwww.caffeine.vc

Dr. Marko Jakob startete seine berufliche Karriere in der Bundeswehr. Als Offizier erhielt er eine hochkarätige Führungsausbildung. In seinen Auslandsaufenthalten, unter anderem in Afghanistan, lernte er auch in schwierigen Situationen einen kühlen Kopf zu bewahren. Nach zwölf Jahren beendete Marko die aktive Dienstzeit und ging in die Wirtschaft. Hier begann er zunächst als Unternehmensberater. Sein Fokus lag auf digitalen Innovationsprojekten börsennotierter Konzerne. Die Eindrücke, die er aus dieser Tätigkeit mitnahm, sollten ihn später dazu animieren, selbst ein Unternehmen zu gründen. Nach zwei Jahren als Berater, wechselte Marko in die Reisebranche. Bei damals deutschlandweit größten 'Online Travel Agency' ('Unister') verantworte er den Bereich Corporate Development und erlebte so Manches. Während dieser Zeit gründete Marko - damals noch als side business - gemeinsam mit 2 Freunden TinkerToys. Heute führt er die Geschäfte von TinkerToys in Vollzeit. Marko ist sehr wissbegierig, was sich nicht zuletzt in seiner akademischen Vita widerspiegelt. Mit TinkerToys hat er sich auf den Weg gemacht, die Spielzeugbranche zu revolutionieren. Was man dabei alles falsch aber auch richtig machen kann, wird er uns heute erzählen. Dein größter Fehler als Unternehmer?  Im Grunde gibt es nicht den einen großen Fehler. Es sind eher viele kleine Fehler, die ich gemacht habe. Aus allen habe ich jedoch eine wichtige Lektion mitgenommen: Wenn Du willst, dass eine Sache, ein Projekt oder ein Start-up wirklich funktioniert, musst Du Dich 150% reinhängen. Egal wie gut Dein Team ist, die Verantwortung trägt man selbst. Für mich bedeutet das auch 'Führen durch Vorbild'. Was ich von meinem Team erwarte, muss ich mindestens selbst erbringen. Deine Lieblings-Internet-Ressource?  - Trello - Slack - Google AdWords, Analytics, TagManager   Buchtitel 1:  Business Model Generation; Alexander Osterwalder u. Yves Pigneur [audiobook_button url="http://tomstalktime.com/audiobooks/"][/audiobook_button] Kontaktdaten des Interviewpartners:  www.tinkertoys.de info@tinkertoys.de   +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Mehr Freiheit, mehr Geld und mehr Spaß mit DEINEM eigenen Podcast. Erfahre jetzt, warum es auch für Dich Sinn macht, Deinen eigenen Podcast zu starten. Jetzt hier zum kostenlosen Podcast-Workshop anmelden: http://Podcastkurs.com +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Erfolg kann man lernen. Jeder. Im Erfolgspodcast TomsTalkTime von Tom Kaules lernst Du in inspirierenden Interviews und einzelnen Storys die Strategien von erfolgreichen Unternehmern und Prominenten. Du lernst in Experten-Interviews wie erfolgreiche Menschen erfolgreich geworden sind und warum sie erfolgreich bleiben. Wie sie den richtigem Umgang mit Erfolg und auch den Umgang mit Niederlagen gelernt haben. Das richtige Mindset ist wichtig, um richtig viel Geld zu verdienen, glückliche Beziehungen führen, mit sich selbst im Einklang zu sein und dadurch Beruf und Familie bestens miteinander vereinbaren zu können. Einschalten. Zuhören. Sich motivieren und Inspirieren. Lernen. Tun. Erfolg haben.

Natalie Foley joins me to talk about her design thinking and learning journey, and how she became the VP and COO at Peer Insight. We'll also talk about the design process, some of the key methods that drive her work, and a pathway that organizations can use when developing their own internal design thinking capacity. Natalie talks in this conversation about what to do when you work with people who are user-centered and able to handle the ambiguity involved in design thinking. Her job as COO, she explains, is to give a guardrail or enough structure to enable people to be successful, without giving so much direction and structure as to stifle the process. She also emphasizes the value of small teams. You'll hear that Natalie's emotional journey to where she is now involved coming out of her undergrad experience feeling pretty smart and thinking that with every year of experience, she would get smarter. Stumbling on design thinking opened her eyes to a new perspective: she doesn't have to be right, because her customers or the marketplace will tell her if she isn't. Instead, the more important angle is to know how to run a good experiment. The design process that Natalie uses typically involves four questions. The first is “what is?” The second question, or the ideation portion, is “what if?” This second part is anchored on the first question. After this brainstorming portion, the third question is “what wows?” This involves asking people what they think about some of the ideas that came out of the brainstorming process. The final question is “what works?” Our conversation will also cover what Natalie's clients initially present as their desired outcomes, and how that changes during the course of their interaction with Natalie and Peer Insight. She'll also discuss how she reframes clients' problematic expectations into something that she can design with, as well as her workarounds for common points of struggle. Tune in to learn about all of this and much more! Learn More About Today's Guest Natalie Foley on LinkedIn Natalie Foley on Twitter Natalie Foley at Peer Insight Peer Insight Peer Insight on Twitter In This Episode [00:33] — Dawan introduces today's guest, Natalie Foley. [01:21] — Natalie takes a moment to talk about her work at Peer Insight in both of her roles there, and offers a brief description of what the company does. [03:48] — We hear more about the people piece of what Natalie does, and she explains that she's lucky in terms of the people she works alongside. [06:37] — How did Natalie arrive where she is at Peer Insight? She shares both the high-level practical answer as well as the emotional answer. [11:09] — Natalie digs into how she has seen the types of problems or challenges that she's seeing evolve over the last couple of years. [14:08] — When people come to work with Natalie, what are they initially presenting as the outcomes they're seeking, and how does that change during the interaction? [17:28] — Natalie talks about reframing clients' expectations when necessary. [21:02] — There's an easy way and a hard way to get a client to move through the pain of changing the way they're used to thinking, Natalie explains. [24:18] — Natalie digs deeper into the basics of the design process that she uses. [29:36] — We hear about the dynamics involved for Natalie in managing both her internal team and the client team. [32:59] — How does Natalie coach leaders in the kind of decision-making that she has been talking about? [37:08] — Natalie talks about the areas where she typically sees points of struggle, as well as her workarounds. [43:17] — We learn more about the dynamic involved with the peer insight side of things. [47:28] — On the technology front, what are some of the challenges and benefits in working with a remote or distributed client? [49:34] — Dawan asks Natalie what she would say to someone who is new to the field or wants to get into the design thinking space. [51:44] — What are some of Natalie's favorite books in terms of design thinking? [55:53] — Natalie shares her advice for someone who is a CEO or running a business who is interested in making an investment in design thinking for their company. [59:04] — Where can people learn more about Natalie, her work, and Peer Insight? Links and Resources Natalie Foley on LinkedIn Natalie Foley on Twitter Natalie Foley at Peer Insight Peer Insight Peer Insight on Twitter Jeanne Liedtka Jeanne Liedtka on Design Thinking 101 Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (Strategyzer) by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, and Alan Smith yes@designthinking101.com (Dawan Stanford)

Natalie Foley joins me to talk about her design thinking and learning journey, and how she became the VP and COO at Peer Insight. We’ll also talk about the design process, some of the key methods that drive her work, and a pathway that organizations can use when developing their own internal design thinking capacity. Natalie talks in this conversation about what to do when you work with people who are user-centered and able to handle the ambiguity involved in design thinking. Her job as COO, she explains, is to give a guardrail or enough structure to enable people to be successful, without giving so much direction and structure as to stifle the process. She also emphasizes the value of small teams. You’ll hear that Natalie’s emotional journey to where she is now involved coming out of her undergrad experience feeling pretty smart and thinking that with every year of experience, she would get smarter. Stumbling on design thinking opened her eyes to a new perspective: she doesn’t have to be right, because her customers or the marketplace will tell her if she isn’t. Instead, the more important angle is to know how to run a good experiment. The design process that Natalie uses typically involves four questions. The first is “what is?” The second question, or the ideation portion, is “what if?” This second part is anchored on the first question. After this brainstorming portion, the third question is “what wows?” This involves asking people what they think about some of the ideas that came out of the brainstorming process. The final question is “what works?” Our conversation will also cover what Natalie’s clients initially present as their desired outcomes, and how that changes during the course of their interaction with Natalie and Peer Insight. She’ll also discuss how she reframes clients’ problematic expectations into something that she can design with, as well as her workarounds for common points of struggle. Tune in to learn about all of this and much more! Learn More About Today’s Guest Natalie Foley on LinkedIn Natalie Foley on Twitter Natalie Foley at Peer Insight Peer Insight Peer Insight on Twitter In This Episode [00:33] — Dawan introduces today’s guest, Natalie Foley. [01:21] — Natalie takes a moment to talk about her work at Peer Insight in both of her roles there, and offers a brief description of what the company does. [03:48] — We hear more about the people piece of what Natalie does, and she explains that she’s lucky in terms of the people she works alongside. [06:37] — How did Natalie arrive where she is at Peer Insight? She shares both the high-level practical answer as well as the emotional answer. [11:09] — Natalie digs into how she has seen the types of problems or challenges that she’s seeing evolve over the last couple of years. [14:08] — When people come to work with Natalie, what are they initially presenting as the outcomes they’re seeking, and how does that change during the interaction? [17:28] — Natalie talks about reframing clients’ expectations when necessary. [21:02] — There’s an easy way and a hard way to get a client to move through the pain of changing the way they’re used to thinking, Natalie explains. [24:18] — Natalie digs deeper into the basics of the design process that she uses. [29:36] — We hear about the dynamics involved for Natalie in managing both her internal team and the client team. [32:59] — How does Natalie coach leaders in the kind of decision-making that she has been talking about? [37:08] — Natalie talks about the areas where she typically sees points of struggle, as well as her workarounds. [43:17] — We learn more about the dynamic involved with the peer insight side of things. [47:28] — On the technology front, what are some of the challenges and benefits in working with a remote or distributed client? [49:34] — Dawan asks Natalie what she would say to someone who is new to the field or wants to get into the design thinking space. [51:44] — What are some of Natalie’s favorite books in terms of design thinking? [55:53] — Natalie shares her advice for someone who is a CEO or running a business who is interested in making an investment in design thinking for their company. [59:04] — Where can people learn more about Natalie, her work, and Peer Insight? Links and Resources Natalie Foley on LinkedIn Natalie Foley on Twitter Natalie Foley at Peer Insight Peer Insight Peer Insight on Twitter Jeanne Liedtka Jeanne Liedtka on Design Thinking 101 Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (Strategyzer) by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, and Alan Smith yes@designthinking101.com (Dawan Stanford)

Descubre cómo dar más valor al cliente, pero no de una forma subjetiva, sino con un ejercicio claro en el que vas a: - conocer más y mejor a tu cliente, sus necesidades, sus frustraciones, sus deseos. - diseñar una propuesta de valor que será un producto o servicio que va a dar solución a esas frustraciones y a esos deseos no alcanzados. - cohesionar ambas cosas mediante un proceso de encaje, para asegurar que el producto funciona, es aceptado y cumple con su función y, además, es interesante económicamente. :) En este episodio te resumo Diseñando la Propuesta de Valor (Value Proposition Design, 2014), también de Alexander Osterwalder e Yves Pigneur, que nos detalla dos módulos de aquel lienzo de modelo de negocios que vimos en el episodio anterior, y que necesitamos dominar para tener el mejor producto y resultado posible.   Este libro lo puedes adquirir ahora mismo en Amazon, aquí: Diseñando la propuesta de valor - https://amzn.to/2H7PAg7 Aquí te puedes descargar la plantilla para practicar libremente con la creación de valor: plantilla de propuesta de valor Si quieres profundizar en el tema, los creadores tienen una página con cursos y recursos: Strategyzer.com Y en esta página encuentras las notas del episodio de hoy: https://librosparaemprendedores.net/084  ________ Episodio patrocinado por Instituto de Emprendedores: Conoce el Plan Midas, 5 fases y 10 pasos para pasar de no tener ni siquiera una idea de negocio a tener una empresa de éxito, funcionando, generando ingresos y calidad de vida para ti y los tuyos. Enfócate en conseguir tus metas con una empresa que te proporcione los mejores resultados. El Instituto de Emprendedores te da el plan de ruta para alcanzarlo. Contenidos y coaching grupal con Luis Ramos, de Libros para Emprendedores. Consigue tus metas, ¡AHORA!  ________ ¿Necesitas un hosting de garantías para tu página web? ¿Rápido y con el mejor servicio al cliente? En Libros para Emprendedores utilizamos Siteground, porque nos da flexibilidad, rapidez en el servidor y rapidez en el servicio. Habiendo probado muuuuchas otras opciones, nos quedamos con Siteground, porque por muy poco más, obtienes mucha más calidad y tranquilidad. Haz click aquí para obtener un 60% de descuento al contratar tu servidor Siteground: https://librosparaemprendedores.net/siteground   _______________   Esta es nuestra página oficial de Facebook: http://librosparaemprendedores.net/facebook   Además, recuerda que puedes suscribirte al podcast en: - Nuestra página: http://librosparaemprendedores.net/feed/podcast - iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/mx/podcast/libros-para-emprendedores/id1076142249?l=es - Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/c/LibrosparaemprendedoresNet - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0qXuVDCYF8HvkEynJwHULb - iVoox: http://www.ivoox.com/ajx-suscribirse_jh_266011_1.html - Spreaker: http://www.spreaker.com/user/8567017/episodes/feed - Stitcher: 

Descubre cómo dar más valor al cliente, pero no de una forma subjetiva, sino con un ejercicio claro en el que vas a: - conocer más y mejor a tu cliente, sus necesidades, sus frustraciones, sus deseos. - diseñar una propuesta de valor que será un producto o servicio que va a dar solución a esas frustraciones y a esos deseos no alcanzados. - cohesionar ambas cosas mediante un proceso de encaje, para asegurar que el producto funciona, es aceptado y cumple con su función y, además, es interesante económicamente. :) En este episodio te resumo Diseñando la Propuesta de Valor (Value Proposition Design, 2014), también de Alexander Osterwalder e Yves Pigneur, que nos detalla dos módulos de aquel lienzo de modelo de negocios que vimos en el episodio anterior, y que necesitamos dominar para tener el mejor producto y resultado posible.   Este libro lo puedes adquirir ahora mismo en Amazon, aquí: Diseñando la propuesta de valor - https://amzn.to/2H7PAg7 Aquí te puedes descargar la plantilla para practicar libremente con la creación de valor: plantilla de propuesta de valor Si quieres profundizar en el tema, los creadores tienen una página con cursos y recursos: Strategyzer.com Y en esta página encuentras las notas del episodio de hoy: https://librosparaemprendedores.net/084  ________ Episodio patrocinado por Instituto de Emprendedores: Conoce el Plan Midas, 5 fases y 10 pasos para pasar de no tener ni siquiera una idea de negocio a tener una empresa de éxito, funcionando, generando ingresos y calidad de vida para ti y los tuyos. Enfócate en conseguir tus metas con una empresa que te proporcione los mejores resultados. El Instituto de Emprendedores te da el plan de ruta para alcanzarlo. Contenidos y coaching grupal con Luis Ramos, de Libros para Emprendedores. Consigue tus metas, ¡AHORA!  ________ ¿Necesitas un hosting de garantías para tu página web? ¿Rápido y con el mejor servicio al cliente? En Libros para Emprendedores utilizamos Siteground, porque nos da flexibilidad, rapidez en el servidor y rapidez en el servicio. Habiendo probado muuuuchas otras opciones, nos quedamos con Siteground, porque por muy poco más, obtienes mucha más calidad y tranquilidad. Haz click aquí para obtener un 60% de descuento al contratar tu servidor Siteground: https://librosparaemprendedores.net/siteground   _______________   Esta es nuestra página oficial de Facebook: http://librosparaemprendedores.net/facebook   Además, recuerda que puedes suscribirte al podcast en: - Nuestra página: http://librosparaemprendedores.net/feed/podcast - iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/mx/podcast/libros-para-emprendedores/id1076142249?l=es - Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/c/LibrosparaemprendedoresNet - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0qXuVDCYF8HvkEynJwHULb - iVoox: http://www.ivoox.com/ajx-suscribirse_jh_266011_1.html - Spreaker: http://www.spreaker.com/user/8567017/episodes/feed - Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=81214   y seguirnos en Twitter ( https://twitter.com/EmprendeLibros ) y en Facebook ( https://www.facebook.com/EmprendeLibros/ ).

Cette semaine : 1 Le dernier livre de Eric Ries "The Startup Way" à gagner pour les abonnés 2 Peu de français dans le Youtube Rewind 2017: 3 Yves Pigneur intervient à l'ESCP pour parler innovation des modèles d'affaires/business/économiques 4 Voitures volantes d'ici 3 ans ? 5 Wish l'application que l'on ne souhaite pas 6 Tendance de la semaine : VUCA

On today's episode, Ian and Jeff are joined by Alan Smith, Co-founder of Strategyzer. His work in collaboration with Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur brought us the business model canvas among other major business design strategies.   

¿Cómo analizar y diseñar o rediseñar nuestra empresa, ya sea nueva o existente? ¿Qué método nos puede permitir analizar todos los puntos a tener en cuenta a la hora de plasmar nuestra idea de negocio en algo tangible? En este episodio te resumo Generación de Modelos de Negocio (Business Model Generation, 2010), de Alexander Osterwalder e Yves Pigneur, que nos detalla el "lienzo de modelo de negocios", o Business Model Canvas, y los 9 módulos que lo componen, y que nos va a facilitar enormemente esa tarea.   Este libro lo puedes adquirir ahora mismo en Amazon, aquí: Generación de Modelos de Negocio - http://amzn.to/2G2Fj3H Aquí te puedes descargar la plantilla para practicar libremente con la creación de modelos: plantilla del Business Model Canvas Si quieres profundizar en el tema, los creadores tienen una página con cursos y recursos: Strategyzer.com Y en esta página encuentras las notas del episodio de hoy: https://librosparaemprendedores.net/083   ________ Episodio patrocinado por Instituto de Emprendedores: Conoce el Plan Midas, 5 fases y 10 pasos para pasar de no tener ni siquiera una idea de negocio a tener una empresa de éxito, funcionando, generando ingresos y calidad de vida para ti y los tuyos. Enfócate en conseguir tus metas con una empresa que te proporcione los mejores resultados. El Instituto de Emprendedores te da el plan de ruta para alcanzarlo. Contenidos y coaching grupal con Luis Ramos, de Libros para Emprendedores. Consigue tus metas, ¡AHORA!  ________ ¿Necesitas un hosting de garantías para tu página web? ¿Rápido y con el mejor servicio al cliente? En Libros para Emprendedores utilizamos Siteground, porque nos da flexibilidad, rapidez en el servidor y rapidez en el servicio. Habiendo probado muuuuchas otras opciones, nos quedamos con Siteground, porque por muy poco más, obtienes mucha más calidad y tranquilidad. Haz click aquí para obtener un 60% de descuento al contratar tu servidor Siteground: https://librosparaemprendedores.net/siteground   _______________   Esta es nuestra página oficial de Facebook: http://librosparaemprendedores.net/facebook Nuestro grupo de Retos para emprendedores: http://librosparaemprendedores.net/retos   Además, recuerda que puedes suscribirte al podcast en: - Nuestra página: http://librosparaemprendedores.net/feed/podcast - iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/mx/podcast/libros-para-emprendedores/id1076142249?l=es - Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/c/LibrosparaemprendedoresNet - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0qXuVDCYF8HvkEynJwHULb - iVoox: http://www.ivoox.com/ajx-suscribirse_jh_266011_1.html - Spreaker: http://www.spreaker.com/user/8567017/episodes/feed - Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=81214   y seguirnos en Twitter ( https://twitter.com/EmprendeLibros ) y en Facebook ( 

¿Cómo analizar y diseñar o rediseñar nuestra empresa, ya sea nueva o existente? ¿Qué método nos puede permitir analizar todos los puntos a tener en cuenta a la hora de plasmar nuestra idea de negocio en algo tangible? En este episodio te resumo Generación de Modelos de Negocio (Business Model Generation, 2010), de Alexander Osterwalder e Yves Pigneur, que nos detalla el "lienzo de modelo de negocios", o Business Model Canvas, y los 9 módulos que lo componen, y que nos va a facilitar enormemente esa tarea.   Este libro lo puedes adquirir ahora mismo en Amazon, aquí: Generación de Modelos de Negocio - http://amzn.to/2G2Fj3H Aquí te puedes descargar la plantilla para practicar libremente con la creación de modelos: plantilla del Business Model Canvas Si quieres profundizar en el tema, los creadores tienen una página con cursos y recursos: Strategyzer.com Y en esta página encuentras las notas del episodio de hoy: https://librosparaemprendedores.net/083   ________ Episodio patrocinado por Instituto de Emprendedores: Conoce el Plan Midas, 5 fases y 10 pasos para pasar de no tener ni siquiera una idea de negocio a tener una empresa de éxito, funcionando, generando ingresos y calidad de vida para ti y los tuyos. Enfócate en conseguir tus metas con una empresa que te proporcione los mejores resultados. El Instituto de Emprendedores te da el plan de ruta para alcanzarlo. Contenidos y coaching grupal con Luis Ramos, de Libros para Emprendedores. Consigue tus metas, ¡AHORA!  ________ ¿Necesitas un hosting de garantías para tu página web? ¿Rápido y con el mejor servicio al cliente? En Libros para Emprendedores utilizamos Siteground, porque nos da flexibilidad, rapidez en el servidor y rapidez en el servicio. Habiendo probado muuuuchas otras opciones, nos quedamos con Siteground, porque por muy poco más, obtienes mucha más calidad y tranquilidad. Haz click aquí para obtener un 60% de descuento al contratar tu servidor Siteground: https://librosparaemprendedores.net/siteground   _______________   Esta es nuestra página oficial de Facebook: http://librosparaemprendedores.net/facebook Nuestro grupo de Retos para emprendedores: http://librosparaemprendedores.net/retos   Además, recuerda que puedes suscribirte al podcast en: - Nuestra página: http://librosparaemprendedores.net/feed/podcast - iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/mx/podcast/libros-para-emprendedores/id1076142249?l=es - Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/c/LibrosparaemprendedoresNet - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0qXuVDCYF8HvkEynJwHULb - iVoox: http://www.ivoox.com/ajx-suscribirse_jh_266011_1.html - Spreaker: http://www.spreaker.com/user/8567017/episodes/feed - Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=81214   y seguirnos en Twitter ( https://twitter.com/EmprendeLibros ) y en Facebook ( https://www.facebook.com/EmprendeLibros/ ).

Libro: High Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way de Brendon Burchard. Podcast: Walking Mastermind - Nuevo podcast de Miquel Gabarró de Besuricata con James Kockelbergh Episodio: First Aid Kit para eventos con James Kockelbergh - Podcast BeSuricata Episodio: EB 34 Meditación Mentat con Jackberry (extraball) Google Takeout - Descarga tus datos de Google. Web: ssyoutube.com - Descarga vídeos de YouTube Artículo: 90 frases de George Bernard Shawe sobre la vida y las personas - Psicoactiva.com Canal de YouTube de Carles Caño: https://www.youtube.com/choulo Episodio: ZT 29 Diez mil horas y “Show your work!” de Austin Kleon Curso online: Malcolm Gladwell Teaches Writing (Coming Spring 2018) - Masterclass.com Libro: Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom de Daniel T. Willingham Libro: El poder de los hábitos. Por qué hacemos lo que hacemos en la vida y en la empresa de Charles Duhigg. Amazon: José Cuervo Tequila Tradicional - 500 ml Web: meneame.net Benjamí Villoslada Gil Libro: Will It Fly?: How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don't Waste Your Time and Money de Pat Flynn. Libro: Tu modelo de negocio de Alexander Osterwalder,‎ Yves Pigneur,‎ Timothy Clark. Somos zetatesters Episodio: ZT 95 Mindfulness Artículo: Los trucos psicológicos de los supermercados: aplicando toques de ciencia para «hacer el mal» - Microsiervos. Episodio: Programa 236 – “Peak Oil” amb Antonio Turiel – El phising de Lenovo - mossegalapoma (en catalán) https://mossegalapoma.cat/programa-236-peak-oil-amb-antonio-turiel-el-phising-de-lenovo/ Os recordamos nuestros grupos de Telegram: Somos zetatesters (grupo general). ZetaKids (padres y madres preocupados por la educación de sus hij@s)

Matt Cheung is CEO and Co-Founder of Clarasys. Since founding Clarasys in 2010 it has grown from an idea to a team of over 70 Consultants working across a range of industries including financial services, events, healthcare, utilities and information services. Matt is an expert in Agile programme delivery having spent the majority of his career delivering large, complex system programs using Agile. We cover a huge range of different topics in this conversation including: Why many Agile projects fail and what you can do to ensure yours doesn't Why you don't need an expenses policy and what it says about your firm's culture How you can succeed when moving from a large Consultancy to a small one What holds people back in Consulting and what separates the best from the rest And so much more! You can find out more about Matt on his Linked In page – https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattcheungclarasys/ And you can find out more about Clarasys at www.clarasys.com Specific things we discuss in the show: Trello – www.trello.com The Agile Manifesto - http://agilemanifesto.org/ Matt's Agile Primer - https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum-Guide-US.pdf The Lean Start Up by Eric Ries - http://amzn.eu/9qXbGK6 Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman - http://amzn.eu/7cdKA8Q The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey - http://amzn.eu/6bIK4ir Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur - http://amzn.eu/9NddtpN The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack - http://amzn.eu/5M0gA6I

Boris Thomas ist gelernter Tischler und Inhaber der Firma Lattoflex - dem führenden Hersteller von Lattenrosten. Falls du dich als Handwerksunternehmer gerade vor Aufträgen kaum retten kannst, dann solltest du dir unbedingt das Interview mit Boris anhören. Er hat sein Unternehmen am absoluten Höhepunkt – als Marktführer – mit einer vollkommen neuen Strategie ausgestattet. Und das mit nachhaltigem Erfolg! Was dazu erforderlich war und weshalb man immer erst nach dem „Warum“ fragen sollte, erfährst du in diesem Interview.   Boris Homepage http://www.lattoflex.com   Boris Blog http://blog.boristhomas.de     Boris Buchtipps "Frag immer erst: Warum" von Simon Sinek   http://amzn.to/2sgGnHb "Business Model Generation von Yves Pigneur http://amzn.to/2rHrEbp "Rock your Idea" von Martin Gaedt http://amzn.to/2rHA2rl   Ted Talk mit Simon Sinek https://youtu.be/qp0HIF3SfI4     Service-Offensive Handwerk 2017  Die Seminarevent, das Deinen Service auf das nächste Level bringt! Termine: 11.11.2017 Nürnberg, 18.11.2017 Dortmund, 25.11.2017 Hamburg Infos und Tickets unter www.joerg-mosler.de/soh2017     Bitte bewerte meinen Podcast auf iTunes --> https://itun.es/de/knqphb.c Eine Videoanleitung dazu findest du hier --> https://youtu.be/vcQ7aMW1pH8     4 kostenlose E-Books für dich in meinem Shop „5 Gründe, warum deine Stellenanzeigen nicht funktionieren“ „Nie mehr Fachkräftemangel“ „Schluss mit Kampfpreisen“ „Wahre Kundenbegeisterung“ Jetzt kostenlos runterladen --> www.joerg-mosler.de/shop

https://www.pensamientovisual.es/divulga-tus-ideas-creando-rapidamente-composiciones-profesionales-gracias-a-canva/ En este episodio veremos un RECURSO ONLINE gratuito MUY util para crear composiciones gráficas. Pero antes, recuerda visitar la web pensamientovisual.es para acceder gratis a la intranet formativa con el ABC del Pensamiento Visual, así como VER este episodio por escrito y un ejemplo de composición. Hoy te voy a presentar Divulga tus ideas creando rápidamente composiciones profesionales gracias a Canva ¿te gustaría divulgar tus ideas de modo profesional? ¿no te crees capaz de crear composiciones profesionales y divulgativas? ¿conoces la herramienta CANVA? Te presento una herramienta gratuita y online con la que podrás divulgar tus ideas de un modo muy rápido y a la vez profesional. La herramienta Canva es a la vez sencilla, intuitiva y completa. Te recomiendo probarla y verás cómo en unos minutos ya te enganchará, ya que se maneja prácticamente sin necesidad de explicación ninguna, pero además con resultados como te digo profesionales. Es una aplicación on-line y gratuita, y no necesitas pagar para nada, ni tampoco deja marcas de agua en tus composiciones finales como sí ocurre con muchas otras herramientas gratuitas. Por otra parte, si que hay ciertos elementos (fotos, símbolos, plantillas,…), que no tienes porque usar, pero que puedes optar por incluirlos en tus diseños por un simbólico precio de 1 euro por elemento. Pero repito, no es necesario en absoluto: ejemplo imagen del post! CANVA pensamiento visual Un momento… ¿Canva no era otra cosa? ¡ hagamos un paréntesis! Canvas es una palabra de origen inglés que se utiliza con frecuencia para hacer referencia a documentos que ayudan y guían en el diseño creativo. Por otra parte, seguro que te suena… Canvas de modelo de negocio: es una herramienta nueva, que hace unos años (2010) vio la luz gracias al libro “Generación de modelos de negocio” (Business Model Generation) escrito por Alex Osterwalder e Yves Pigneur. Es una magnífica guía para visionarios, revolucionarios y retadores como TÚ! que quieren desafiar los anticuados modelos de negocio y diseñar las empresas del futuro. Pero ahora no te voy a presentar eso… …hablamos de una herramienta online, también llamada CANVA, y que te ayudará sin duda a promocionar ese modelo de negocio, ese marketing online y visual… …y en definitiva divulgar tus ideas! Canva es una potente herramienta online de diseño gráfico, con millones de usuarios en todo el mundo y con versión en español. Como persona multipotencial y/o profesional del conocimiento, si quieres elaborar una imagen para divulgar tus ideas en un post, presentación, o clase,… necesitas herramientas sencillas, ya que no dispones de mucho tiempo precisamente. ¡Necesitas herramientas online, gratuitas, potentes y fáciles de usar! ¡Te presento CANVA!

  Jakob Hager ist Facebook Marketing Experte und Startup Unternehmer. Er betreut die Facebook Kampagnen der erfolgreichsten deutschen Online Marketer wie Ralf Schmitz, Alex Riedl, Said Shiripour sowie auch der Golden State Warriors (Basketball Verein) und Manchester City (Fußball Verein). Jakob betreut damit etwa ein Marketing Budget von 500.000 € / Monat. Er hat auch eine intelligente Outsourcing Plattform entwickelt, die Unternehmern dabei hilft mehr Traffic auf ihre Webseite und damit mehr zu bekommen und damit mehr Verkäufe zu generieren. Dein Pitch:  Ich helfe Unternehmern dabei, mehr Besucher auf Ihre Webseite zu bekommen und mehr Umsatz zu machen, indem ich genau die richtige Traffic Strategie für jeden Typ entwickle und sie mit meiner Firma auch umsetze. Dein schlimmster Moment als Unternehmer?  Es gab nicht einen Moment, aber eine Phase, in der ich am Ende war. Ich habe vor meinem Unternehmen ein anderes Startup gehabt, das Virtuelle Assistenz angeboten hat. Das sind Sekretariatsdienstleistungen online. Ich habe da alles was ich hatte, investiert. Ich hab sogar mein Studium dafür abgebrochen und wollte das Ding groß machen. Doch es lief einfach nicht. Es gab zu viele Fehler, die Kunden waren unzufrieden und ich bin oft bis in die Nacht dagesessen und habe selbst Aufgaben fertig gemacht, damit wenigstens die Kunden nicht darunter zu leiden haben und pünktlich ihre Ergebnisse bekommen. Eines Tages war es dann soweit, bzw. eines Nachts. Bis 3:00 früh habe ich eine Übersetzung fertig gemacht, da die Übersetzerin ausgefallen ist. Ich habe das dann abgesendet und am nächsten Tag um 8:00 nach 5 Stunden Schlaf eine E-Mail vom Kunden bekommen „wurde aber auch zeit“. Da habe ich mir gesagt, ich mach das nicht mehr. Ich habe das alte Unternehmen gestoppt, habe eine E-Mail an alle Kunden gesendet, dass wir keine virtuelle Assistenz mehr anbieten und bin nach San Francisco gegangen. Wie hast Du es geschafft, Deine Leidenschaft zu finden?  Ich habe das alte Unternehmen gestoppt, habe eine E-Mail an alle Kunden gesendet, dass wir keine virtuelle Assistenz mehr anbieten und bin nach San Francisco gegangen. Ich habe hier sehr viel gelernt. Unter anderem auch das Facebook Marketing. Was war der wichtigste Schritt, der Dich zum großen Erfolg gebracht hat?  Ich habe immer versucht, Wert für andere zu schaffen. Ich bin zu Veranstaltungen gegangen, habe dem Veranstalter angeboten kostenlos bei der Organisation zu helfen. Veranstalter sind gut vernetzt und sie haben gesehen, dass ich gute Arbeit liefere. Darum habe ich auch relativ bald dann gute Kontakte geknüpft und bin auf die Golden State Warriors gekommen. Das war mein Durchbruch. Deine Lieblings-Internet-Ressource?  Facebook Audience Insights. Damit kann man eine Zielgruppe unglaublich gut recherchieren, auch wenn man Facebook Werbung selbst gar nicht nutzt. Das sollte man auf jeden Fall verwenden, wenn man ein Unternehmen führt. Link zur Ressource:  facebook.com/ads/audience_insights Buchempfehung:  Business Model Generation, Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur http://amzn.to/2juD4aK Kontaktdaten des Interviewpartners:  Jakob Hager jakob|at|jakobhager.com www.jakobhager.com www.taskwunder.com   +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++   Mehr Freiheit, mehr Geld und mehr Spaß mit DEINEM eigenen Podcast. Erfahre jetzt, warum es auch für Dich Sinn macht, Deinen eigenen Podcast zu starten. Jetzt hier zum kostenlosen Podcast-Workshop anmelden: Podcastkurs.com   +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In this episode of the Art of the Kickstart podcast, we talked to Sam Hickmann. With the team at Joy, he has created the perfect icon-based watch that teaches kids the concept of time and helps them develop good daily habits. Listen below to learn more about their work with the HAX Accelerator, how they leveraged their community to make their Kickstarter campaign a success and other crowdfunding tips and tricks. Octopus by Joy, the training wheels for good habits Key Crowdfunding Takeaways How incubators like HAX can help startups create and develop products The benefits of being in China while building a hardware product Why you need a community behind your product How to build a strong community before launching on Kickstarter How to get valuable feedback as you’re creating a product Links Octopus by Joy on Kickstarter heyjoy.io Value Proposition Design by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda and Alan Smith The Success Principles by John Canfield The Hardware Startup by Renee DiResta, Brady Forrest and Ryan Vinyard Peaceful Parents, Happy Kids by Dr. Laura Markham Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout Smaller, Faster, Better by Charles Duhigg The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg Connect with Joy JOY on Facebook @joyfamilytech on Instagram @JOYfamilytech on Twitter JOY on Pinterest Sponsors Art of the Kickstart is honored to be sponsored by The Gadget Flow, a product discovery platform that helps you discover, save, and buy awesome products. The Gadget Flow is the ultimate buyer's guide for cool luxury gadgets and creative gifts. Click here to learn more and list your product - use coupon code AOTK for 20% off! Transcript

This week's episode is about the tools we use at the #startupLab to help the team understand the direction they are going in, who they are trying to serve and how to achieve that with limited resources. Strategy on Page Deri ap John Llewellyn Davies http://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategy-Page-Deri-Llewellyn-Davies/dp/1908691387 Value Proposition Design Alex Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Greg Bernarda, Alan Smith https://strategyzer.com/books/value-proposition-design https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1118968050 Impact Mapping Gojko Adzic https://www.impactmapping.org/ http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0955683645 MindMup https://www.mindmup.com/

Yves PIGNEUR, professeur UNIL

Yves PIGNEUR, professeur UNIL

Yves PIGNEUR, professeur UNIL

O Man in the Arena é um videocast sobre empreendedorismo e cultura digital apresentado por Leo Kuba e Miguel Cavalcanti.   Neste episódio (#023):   A prodígia história de Bel Pesce, brasileira formada pelo MIT que, aos 23 anos, é co-fundadora de duas startups em Silicon Valley e já teve passagens pelo Google, Microsoft e Deutsche Bank.   Alguns dos temas abordados:   - A incrível história da entrada no MIT. - A descoberta do empreendedorismo no 2º ano da faculdade, no MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition, concorrendo com o projeto MeshPhone, para aumentar a cobertura de telefonia celular na área rural na África. - O trabalho no Google, em Silicon Valley. - A experiência como gerente de projetos na Ooyala, plataforma de vídeo digital. - A fundação da Lemon, startup que propõe organizar e gerir recibos financeiros. - Sua experiência como co-fundadora da Talenj. - Como gerenciar o tempo com tantos projetos e negócios? - Sua visão sobre o mercado de vídeo digital. - Dicas de blogs e conteúdo.   Para saber mais:   - Site pessoal: http://www.belpesce.com - Micro-blog: http://facebook.com/MakeItHappenNow - Twitter: http://twitter.com/belpesce - Lemon: http://lemon.com - Talenj: http://talenj.com - Entrevista na Globo: http://belpesce.com/jornaldaglobo.php   Dicas mencionadas:   - Blog do Fred Wilson - http://avc.com - Blog do Reinaldo Normand - http://palebluedot.posterous.com/ - Livro: Made in America (Sam Walton) - http://www.amazon.com/Sam-Walton-Made-America/dp/0553562835 - Livro: What I wish I knew when I was 20 (Tina Seelig) - http://www.amazon.com/What-Wish-Knew-When-Was/dp/0061735191 - Livro: Business Model Generation (Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur) - http://www.amazon.com/Business-Model-Generation-Visionaries-Challengers/dp/0470876417 - Livro: Lean Startup (Eric Ries) - http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898 - Livro: Four Steps to Epyphany (Steven Blank) - http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/0976470705   Acompanhe e participe nos canais do Man in the Arena:   - YouTube: http://youtube.com/maninthearenatv - Facebook fan page: http://facebook.com/maninthearenatv (cadastre-se na fan page e receba nossa newsletter)