Category Archives: Box-Free Thinking

Marketing Involves Distraction, Good & Bad

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Businesses and professionals, with good or bad intentions, create distraction.

Marketing, advertising, and promotion intentionally distract targets—consumers or business-to-business decision makers, depending on the business.

These self-serving communication approaches refocus prospect and client attention on the company (its products or services) which pays for the marketing and promoting.

In this highly-distracting world, do your target prospects and clients see genuine value in the additional distractions you subject them to?

  • Your marketing and promotion distract target prospects and clients in an attempt to shift their focus toward your service or products. You consider this interference “good distraction.” Would your target prospects and clients agree?
  • Competitors’ marketing and promotion distracts your target prospects and clients away from your company and toward competitors’ products or services. Would you consider this interference “bad distraction”? Would your prospects and clients agree with you?

I am someone’s target prospect. So are you.

This means we are regularly distracted and interfered with in the name of marketing, advertising, and promotion, whether we want to be or not.

Are you always caught by a marketing or promotion message at the best possible time to make a buying decision for that product or service?

Even if you’re interested, don’t these messages often catch you in the middle of something that is as, or more important, to you than spending your money in response to someone else’s distracting marketing or promotion message? How do you feel about the value of these marketing, advertising, promotional, and other self-serving messages in view of the time they cost you?

Emails and online advertising are honed and data-manipulated to attract select prospects and clients, but these intrusive sales pitches can miss their mark when timing is off—distraction plus.

When the sender—that’s the marketer or promoter—decides what’s the “best” timing for them, not targets. When targets find the messages unnecessary or untimely, the resulting distraction can be a nuisance, an annoyance, an interruption, or a major turn-off.

How are you sure that your marketing and promotion messages carry value in their own right? Is the timing ideal for targets or is the message just a waste of time? Do your selected prospects and clients respond to your marketing, advertising, and promotion? Would your targets label your messages “good distractions”?

From The Target’s Perspective

Targets can be distracted by the cloud of marketing, promotion, and advertising you, your competition, and your industry surround them with, online and off. These distractions can keep target prospects and clients from making clear, confident buying or selling decisions which are in their own best interest.

What is your full intent when marketing?

Most of us are consumers of real estate and its related services in our personal or business lives. This means you may relate to the following example of how one aspect of distraction affects real estate buyers. Prospects and buyers can be diverted from clear thinking and decision making by real estate marketing, promotion, and other deliberate marketing distractions.

Take a look at “Seven Essentials for Buying a Safe Home:”

“In dazzling summer sunshine, everything in a home looks great. But…and it’s a big but! Buyers can be distracted by strategic staging, clever decor, and time pressures.
They benefit from stepping back to determine whether the home they’re considering will require expensive additions or overhauls to keep everyone safe—not just this summer, but every day of the year. As well as any safety concerns specific to your family, there are seven main safety issues that should be top of mind for buyers of houses, townhomes, or condominiums. How long is your safety list when home shopping?” Continue reading…

Are you aware how your marketing, advertising, and other communication distractions could intentionally or unintentionally undermine targets’ decision making?

Is distraction an intended or an unintended consequence of your determined outreach to prospects and clients?

For more on effective client communication and for client retention insight:

Coaching Skill & Recognizing Good Advice

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The under-valued, but essential 21st-Century skill is recognizing good advice—relevant, forward-thinking, practical insight—and knowing what to do with it.

This crucial skill expands opportunity as it overcomes or counterbalances deficiencies, increases advantages, and diminishes problems.

The results include lowering stress, reducing anxiety, and enhancing outcomes.

Change and uncertainty are now standards.

The pervasive influence of both means that to successfully navigate the future, you can no longer rely entirely on your own experience and knowledge to forge ahead.

Achievement in this ever-changing world demands flexibility and resourcefulness based on confident decision making, clear strategic thinking, and an open receptive mind—none of which are commonplace skills.

Continue reading →

Stand Out: Get The Jump On Spring!

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How can you make this spring different for your targets?

How can you help them take advantage of unexpected changes and rise above seemingly undermining influences?

Most industries have seasonal patterns that are followed and addressed in annual marketing campaigns:

  • Your goal should be to remain a step ahead of the predictable. Can you see opportunities for setting new standards or revealing new goals?
  • Can you attract increased market share by redefining client goals and expectations for this season and following seasons?
  • Redefine the negatives of this season with new products or niches that address shifts in target lifestyles, workplaces, or family structures. Can you see new opportunity and benefits for your prospects and clients?

Or, look ahead and get the jump on the following seasons or the whole year. There are new opportunities out there to discover before you’re in the middle of others jumping on them.

For instance, if Facebook has been a fav of your targets, explore the changes in this platform to uncover opportunities to communicate your value to targets.

Each year, Facebook reports:

  • Increased daily active users (DAUs)
  • Increased mobile DAUs
  • Increased monthly active users (MAUs)
  • Increased mobile MAUs
  • Ongoing battles over privacy and lack of respect for user data

That’s just the change over one year! What’s next here or in any platform your target loves?

How was that reflected in your targets’ use of your Facebook contributions? What’s you’re involvement going to generate this year?

What could you help make happen this year for your targets?

If you don’t think ahead for prospects and clients who will? Wouldn’t you rather it were you?

For example, spring is traditionally accepted as the “big market” for real estate. In a blog I write for a client, my question was: “Are real estate buyers making a mistake when they wait for the ‘hot’ spring market with its price increases and multiple offers?”

This question and content has a double purpose:

    1. This query and the related content start the client’s clients—real estate and financial professionals—thinking differently about what they take for granted about this season and what they can do differently this year.

AND

    1. The question and content trigger fresh thinking and enhanced reception to new ideas in the professionals’ clients who could gain from thinking differently about their reactions to spring.

The ideas shared do not have to be “big” or outrageous. Sometimes, a gentle nudge is all that is needed to shift thinking into innovation mode.

FYI: The blog I write for this client deliberately builds on my work as a futurist, business strategist, and committed communicator to help real estate and related professionals and their prospects and clients think differently both about “Decisions & Communities.” This combined topic-title focuses on the real issues involved in real estate for professionals and their clients, not on rehashing the traditional.

Do spring and other seasons offer overlooked opportunities to cast new light on buying, selling, and user patterns for your industry, product, or services?

Can you see how to take a different perspective—drawn from a different profession, industry, or communication technique—to provide new insight, products, or services for helping target prospects and clients get the jump on spring and everything else?

FYI: If you’d like to be a buyer or seller, or a professional with a jump on the spring real estate market, visit “Decisions & Communities.”

Back to HOME… TheCatalyst.com

Eliminate “Two-Faced” Customer Service Experiences

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Even the most reputable company can create “two-faced” customer service experiences.

If face-to-face service creates a customer experience vastly different from the online shopping or call-center customer experience, customers can be left with a “two-faced” impression of the business.

  • One face, the pleasant, inviting marketing brand we have all seen
  • The other face, a negative reality which may appear as disinterest, dishonesty or deception.

“Two faced” may seem an overly-strong adjective since it smacks of deceit, but it’s not. Personal and emotional customer reactions are involved when services and products are bought and delivered, so customer perceptions define reality. Inconsistencies in service delivery may leave the perception of disinterest in customers or of dishonesty or deception.

Example: My Starbucks “two-faced” customer experience could have undermined years of “Grande decaf” loyalty.

Starbucks provides a globally-consistent example of extremely-responsive face-to-face service excellence. However, even this can be undermined by online or call center experiences that contradict the branded customer-centric experience of good-natured coffee delivery.

When you walk into a Starbucks or text ahead, you know exactly what to expect. The attentive all-about-you staff seem happy to see everyone who wanders in. This is such a predictable reaction that I often give Starbucks gift cards as thank-yous: A positive experience in exchange for the positives I received.

Then in one afternoon, I discovered this reliable positive brand could be undermined in this customer’s mind by a disagreeable online experience followed by a more frustrating, dismissive call-center conversation. Years of positive impressions dissolved into experiences of being dismissed and of not being valued. I felt fooled into thinking the frontline experience penetrated right through the corporate body, so that everyone I encountered would perpetuate Starbucks customer excellence.

My attempt at “just takes a few minutes” online registration of my card turned into a frustrating experience that took more than an hour. Since loss of my time ranks as a number one crime against this customer, I was beyond disappointed.

No preamble diminished the sense of intrusion brought on by the depth of personal details required by this impersonal online registration form. Finally, an account was created.

A few minutes later, I decided to log into my new Starbucks account. The login told me firmly I had no account. Wasting time sucked as much as not being valued.

Finding Starbucks humans to talk to seemed to be the solution. Finally dug out a phone number and connected with a Starbucks voice. I explained what had happened. My questions?

  • Where did my personal information go?
  • What happened to the account I created?

Now, I’m into hour two on this “just takes a few minutes” project.

The Starbucks phone voice told me to be patient. Curt and unsympathetic, the voice said it would take care of everything. More information required. Long wait on hold. I was informed there was no account on record. No answer was given to my queries regarding the information I input or how this could happen. The offered solution: Go back to the Starbucks store and get my money back. No apologies for inconvenience. No alternatives. No warm Starbucks fuzzies there.

An indifferent or bad online experience followed by a worse call-center experience may be enough to overshadow even the best face-to-face experience.

Returning to my local Starbucks #16896 reminded me how pleasant picking up my favorite coffee is.

  • When I handed in the gift card and asked for my money back, the cashier was puzzled, but immediately obliging.
  • The manager, ever watchful of workplace flow, noticed our exchange. He offered a new card which I declined saying only that the negative experience had turned me off and I’d had enough of that. He offered to make my current order complimentary to ensure today’s experience was a pleasant one.
  • Seamlessly, pleasantly, and without debate, he and the staff set about deliberately counteracting my negative Starbucks experience.

Act on Your Brand Definition to Achieve Extreme Service Excellence.

Are your main service delivery methods consistently strong enough to overcome negative experiences with your other service delivery methods?
Question: If I were a customer or client, displeased with any two of your company’s online, call-center, or face-to-face experiences, would the third delivery method be consistently terrific enough to erase the bad feeling generated by the two negative experiences?

Answer: If you say “Yes,” how sure are you? Assumptions are dangerous.

  • When was the last time you made a mystery visit, call or email to test out the actual customer experience for each of your delivery methods?
  • Are the nice service delivery people in your company counting on nice customers who will forgive them for making mistakes at the customer’s expense?
  • If redesigning your service model is practical and essential, where is the best place to start on the evolution to Extreme Service Excellence?
  1. How will you create a process that innovativly aligns with your style, brand, and the challenges your business considers top priority?
  2. Experiment with key variables for your industry and related industries since client needs rarely fall in one industry to the exclusion of all others. Overlaps between industries and niches can offer more opportunities since these may be areas ineffectively covered by everyone.
  3. Whether this is a creative thinking exercise or a practical evaluation, experiment before you finalize your process and begin making widespread changes.
  4. Don’t rush this process or turn it into a marathon. Work through a few ideas and then let things percolate. Haven’t you found that your subconscious keeps processing, even while you’re working on something else?

Whisper in the Ear: Experiment with service variations. Involve target clients in evaluation and valuation of new services and products rather than assuming you understand everything.

  • How will you monitor effectiveness?
  • How will you let participating clients know how much you value their insight and suggestions?

P. S. My Starbucks experience has left me less likely to give Starbucks gift cards as gifts to people whom I really want to thank. The possibility that they could have a “two-faced” experience similar to mine, has me hesitating. Still a great fan of the brand and I remain hooked on my Grande Decaf coffee, so I’ll keep showing up for more.

Back to HOME… TheCatalyst.com

Make Faces Top Priority Not Screens

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How many face-to-face conversations do you have each day? Each week?

Before our current obsession with screens, business questions like these would not be necessary.

Face-to-face meetings were where significant decisions were made, relationships cemented, and deals done. Big business still revolves around face-to-face meetings, but small business owners and professionals, swept up in technology’s apparent access have shifted business to screens.

Are most of your 1-on-1s with people you know well—friends, family, co-workers?

Much as you love them, does it make good business sense that the majority of your face-to-face time goes to those whose trust you have already earned, in meetings that do not generate revenue?

How do you engage new clients?

Email and phone contact play important roles in connecting with target prospects for many professionals. For you, are face-to-face meetings—either initial or to close a deal—essential to transition target prospects to client status?

Earning trust is what you’re doing when prospects willingly become clients. The skills and time involved in earning trust through email or over the phone can be considerably more challenging, than earning trust face-to-face.

Everyone is too busy for meetings, you say.

Yes, but I say, target prospects have interests that they prefer to pursue in person. Knowing how they spend this hands-on time is part of learning how to engage your target market.

For instance, if your service focus is B2B:

  • Do you know if many target prospects would favor business events introducing new products or systems?
  • Would they prefer professional-development conferences or out-reach campaigns promoted by professional organizations?
  • Perhaps, their line of work would lead them to favor restaurant openings…family charitable events…sports in any format…or meetings about shared interests in anything from WordPress or Buffer to wine tastings or photography.

I’m not suggesting you become a business predator, tracking target prospects down in their off-time and pouncing on them.

However, to effectively develop and deliver products and service that attract and engage your preferred target group, you must understand them. Not as statistics and marketing projections, but as individuals and as contributing members of groups, organizations, and communities that matter to them.

You love what you do and believe in your ability to contribute benefits to target clients. Take that deep commitment and share a some of it with the individuals you are intent on serving.

Each week, get out there. Meet target prospects face-to-face, so you can flesh-out the profiles your research frames. Enjoy yourself in the process. These experiences will assist you with naturally and confidently arranging the face-to-face opportunities that drive your business and client success.

Face-to-Face Question: Your online venture may be designed without face-to-face client contact, but would your prospects be receptive to a get-together that would simultaneously give your client base and your revenues a big boost?

Back to HOME… TheCatalyst.com

The Ideal Length Of Everything

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It’s not about the length you want to write or how short you tweet, but what your ideal target client believes is an ideal length—enough, but not too much.

Journalists and copywriters are trained to write length “to count”—to fill the exact space available in print context, like column inches or above the fold in newspapers. Online lengths are measured in bytes and bandwidth. Digitally, “above the fold” continues to set limits, but it now means before the need to scroll. Publishers limit nonfiction authors “to count” in tens of thousands of words, especially when creating a print book which has size and weigh limitations for a lot of practical reasons. Yet these decisions may be flawed.

Don’t think about the length—number of words, number of lines, number of pages, amount of scrolling required—when you write or send messages to engage your target prospects and clients. Instead, carefully consider time—theirs.

Time is the precious and limiting resource for all of us and no less for your targets.

Make sure you consider length by determining exactly how much of their time your communication will use up. How long will it take prospects and clients to read, watch, or listen to content you’ve created, or had created, to promote you and your offerings? Be sure that you aren’t wasting their valued commodity:

  • Wasting time, because you are not on point, that is, clearly sharing valuable knowledge that targets can easily use to their own benefit.
  • Wasting time, because you’re not reaching them when it’s convenient for them to receive your information and ideas and to act.
  • Wasting time, because the result is not more revenue, more work, and more trust for you and your business or practice, but possibly less of all three.

Search the net and you’ll find lists of the ideal length for almost any communication product or service. Averages and generalities are ball-park figures. Unless these lengths were generated by or for your specific target, they may distract you from your target’s ideals.

Start by deciding how much time target prospects and clients might invest in a specific written, audio, and/or video message because they value your expertise. Remember, miss the point and deliver little that targets consider relevant, and hard-won trust is eroded regardless of the length.

Back to HOME… TheCatalyst.com

Panel How-tos: Chronic Pain Forum

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With panel discussions, the whole is not always greater than the sum of the parts.

An amazing group of expert panelists needs an amazing communicator and analyst as the moderator and more time than the event is usually assigned. The most important ingredient for an amazing panel discussion is a clearly-stated topic which has the breadth to showcase panelist expertise and allow them to drill down into the subject for inspired insight. If the panel topic tries to cover “everything you every wanted to know about…” the discussion can be superficial or just ordinary.

My work and research make me a frequent and enthusiastic conference and meeting attendee. I admit that I am drawn to panel discussions because communication and the lack of it are what fascinates me. Panel-fan that I am, many panels leave me wondering more about what wasn’t said than what was.

The Best Advice for Panel Design

When you plan a panel discussion for your conference, client-appreciation event, or professional-development meeting, my advice as a panel-fan is to always apply the best advice for successful travel. Why “travel”? When panels catch fire and generate transporting edu-tainment (education combined with entertainment) for their specific audience, the experience is “mind travel” to a new exciting, even surprising place.

My advice for a transporting panel discussion is the same I give for travel: Take half as many clothes and twice as much money.

  • For your panel discussion, the “half as many clothes” will be half as many topics, subjects, and perspectives. Just as novice travelers don’t travel light, panel planners can get carried away with the brain power at their disposal and pack in every subject possible. Ready for all occurrences, just in case, can mean missing the point of the panel discussion in the conference’s context.
  • The panel discussion’s “twice as much money” does not refer to paying panelists more (usually there is little or no payment for these experts). Instead, the “money” refers to how the panel’s value—knowledge, experience, humor, and insight—materializes for the audience. When designing a panel discussion, ramp up the value to audiences. “Twice as much” is just the beginning. At business events, audiences expect to make money from what they learn and who they meet during the conference or meeting. Concentrate on how audience members can take their exposure to the panel discussion “to the bank.”

Example: Chronic Pain Forum

This Panel Discussion, presented by The Forum at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, jointly with The Huffington Post, is deliberately tackling a big subject head-on to ramp-up attention to The Chronic Pain Epidemic—attention that is long overdue.

The expertise of Forum meeting planners, panelists, and audiences will make this event matter. I’m suggesting you take a look at this event to see how subsequent panel discussions within this umbrella topic could “take half as many clothes and twice as much money” to further ramp-up attention to the issues here.
(The Epidemic’s impact on business is a topic for another post.)

Forum advance notices state: “Panelists are open to exploring relevant pain care policies, including prescription monitoring program regulations, drug development, funding for research, and a variety of pain management options, including marijuana and mindfulness meditation.”

With only one hour for the panel and diverse audiences invited, how will this talented panel rise to create value for audiences?

The Dr. Lawrence H. and Roberta Cohn Forums

THE CHRONIC PAIN EPIDEMIC: What’s to Be Done?

Presented by The Forum at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health jointly with The Huffington Post

11am ET — a brief pre-event Q&A with panelist Vaughan Rees and moderator David Freeman. Post your questions during the Q&A on Facebook.
12:30-1:30pm ET — During the one-hour panel discussion, panelists will examine how clinicians can best serve their patients, highlighting the recommendations of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ recent National Pain Strategy.

  • The Forum video will be on demand after the event.
  • Tweet @ForumHSPH #chronicpain

The Panel of Experts

Josephine Briggs, Director, National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, NIH

Anne Louise Oaklander, Associate Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, and an attending neurologist, Massachusetts General Hospital

Vaughan Rees, addiction specialist and Lecturer on Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Cindy Steinberg, National Director of Policy and Advocacy, U.S. Pain Foundation; Member, Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee, NIH; and Policy Council Chair, Massachusetts Pain Initiative

Moderator David Freeman is the managing editor of Impact & Innovation at The Huffington Post. He is also host of the weekly NPR radio program Science Insider.

Back to HOME… TheCatalyst.com

Clients Demand: Pay Attention To Earn TRUST

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To engage and hold the attention of a prospect or client, professionals must first PAY ATTENTION.

The media and marketing are committed to distraction, interruption, and redirection to achieve their goals, not your client’s.

The more information, phone time, and social media noise distracting a prospect or client, the less of their attention there is to apply to the client problem you expect to solve. Ignore this attention-diverting context, and you won’t be prepared for success with clients who are distracted from making decisions and commitments.

To ramp up your “attention paying” and attention receiving:

1. Tailor to Earn Trust: Your approach, delivery, and service design may have worked before smartphones took over. Now, changes may be necessary to counterbalance the level of information overload your client is operating under or coping with each day. For instance, you may prefer one phone call or meeting to cover everything that you need said, concluding with the client signing on-the-dotted-line and buying your product or service. What’s the client’s preference? Today, many clients need more time and different methods of information delivery to become confident enough to buy. Others may want to take themselves through the sales process online with opportunity to search out details, alternatives, and reviews as they go. What learning tools do your target clients prefer: video, audio, experiential?

2. Concentrate to Earn Trust: It’s not only paying attention to your client that matters, but demonstrating that you’re concentrating. Reduce your level of distraction to elevate concentration. Put down your phone. Eye contact matters. Ask for details; listen constructively to client answers by taking notes; think about the points they make; analyze what’s missing; ask for details to clarify needs and gaps that your product or service is designed to fill. Every time the client has to repeat something to you or remind you that their earlier answer dictates their response to subsequent questions, you’re not earning trust and you may be losing accumulated trust.

3. Prepare to Earn Trust: Take-away content in print, audio, video, digital, or email form may give the prospect or client confidence in your sincerity. During a meeting, give them time alone to review the details and decisions involved. This focused attention may be all they need to sign up. Prepare a client-centric sales or consulting process that incorporates follow up, product/service customizing, client satisfaction, and above-average results for the client. This may mean tweeking your pre-smartphone sales or consulting system or completely overhauling your existing process so it’s smartphone-friendly.

The smartphone changed everything. How have you changed the way you do business to accommodate this communication revolution?

More: An example of how distraction and multitasking can undermine client decision making during a common buying process…”Multitasking vs A Real Estate Frame of Mind“

Pay attention: What’s below the water with clients?

Back to HOME… TheCatalyst.com

Entrepreneurship: What’s Your Edge?

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Serial entrepreneur Tunde Kehinde’s successful mimic of Amazon astounded Africa—and many others, too. Now, he fosters entrepreneurship across the emerging African market of 1 billion…and beyond.

Dynamic entrepreneur Tunde Kehinde, with three successful start-ups to his credit and another well on the way, shared ideas on entrepreneurship and emerging markets as a speaker, panelist, and attendee at the recent Global Forum. I had the privilege of speaking with Kehinde privately to explore entrepreneurship further.

Listening to Kehinde explain his business theories and strategies, I was struck by one question: “What gives Tunde Kehinde his unique entrepreneurial edge?

The list of career highlights for this man—who has many more decades ahead—is already impressive. When matched with essential entrepreneurial skills, the list explains a lot about his serial success, but not everything…

  • Nigerian Kehinde credits his education and work experience as the foundation of his entrepreneurial success. A finance major, he earned an MBA at Harvard Business School. Hands-on experience as a business development executive with Diageo in London and as an Investment Banking professional with Wachovia Securities in North Carolina and New York City revealed the difference between theory and reality. This experience accounts for his solid foundation in analysis, quick thinking, and flexibility, but it’s only the beginning.
  • This impressive communicator has a warm, natural style and a creative command of public speaking that facilitates his delivery of his point in any context. For all these reasons, he was a popular Forum speaker. One media colleague referred to him as a “rock star” since each time he spoke, lines of attendees gathered, eager to speak with him and snap a pic. Essential communication skills and salesmanship often separate successful entrepreneurs from those who merely have a good idea, but there’s more to this.
  • Kehinde’s track record has created a credibility and momentum that makes future success almost predictable:
  1. Kehinde began by co-founding Bandeka.com, an online dating platform identified by Forbes Magazine as one of the hottest tech start-ups in Africa.
  2. Then, he saw the need for a version of Amazon that would fill infrastructure and other system gaps for Africa and Jumia.com emerged as Nigeria’s leading ecommerce platform. As Co-Founder and former Managing Director of Jumia, Kehinde helped grow the business from 5 employees to almost 1,000 to serve customers across Nigeria.
  3. Next, he emerged as the Co-Founder and Co-Managing Director of Africa Courier Express (ACE) (www.ace.ng), a technology-driven logistics platform, that enables ecommerce companies, financial institutions, and healthcare businesses to ship items directly to consumers across Nigeria. ACE shipped to almost 400,000 customers and collected payments on behalf of 1,000 merchants. ACE plans to expand across Africa.
  4. To address financial and banking barriers for ACE clients, merchants, entrepreneurs, and the growing African online middle class, Kehinde co-launched Lidya.co which offers easy, reliable, secure online access to finances.

What gives Tunde Kehinde his unique entrepreneurial edge?

When I explained to Kehinde that I had met entrepreneurs with credentials similar to his that explained his and their polished professionalism, he nodded. When I went on to say that I saw more than the sum of these parts in his ability, magnetism, and calm resolve, he smiled. When I asked, “How’d you get so smart?” He laughed and began to explain…

Acknowledging the importance of education, career opportunities, and practical start-up experience, Kehinde revealed that his parents were both entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial mind set was ingrained in him. That’s what makes the difference for him.

That’s the key to a powerful entrepreneurial edge: a clear inner, empowering “you can do it” voice.

This inner determination is either instilled early in life or deliberately acquired later. Parents who embody entrepreneurial drive and repeat entrepreneurial sentiments to their children can be powerful role models. The resulting family environment, can make the business drive to succeed part of both conscious and unconscious thinking and decision making in the next generation.

Family is what gave Kehinde a very early start and a unique entrepreneurial edge. He’s taken it from there.

What gives you your entrepreneurial edge?

Even if your parents were not in business and never encouraged you—or, perhaps were even a discouraging force—that inner certainty came from somewhere. The more conscious you are of how your certainty arose, the more in control of it you’ll be, even in the toughest times.

For more from Tunde Kindhe…see “Harnessing the Potential of Emerging Middle-Class Markets” in “Explore New Markets At A Global Forum”

Back to HOME… TheCatalyst.com

Disruptive Technologies: Hyper Local & Diamonds

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“Disruptive” has evolved into an exciting business word, but it remains full of surprises, especially when linked to “disruptive technology” and its sea of opportunity.

“Disruptive” used to be a negative word meaning “burst asunder,” “throw into disorder,” or “dash to pieces.” Now, many see the term as a provocatively-positive invitation to dismantle or redirect the existing and drive home their over-riding point of view à la Uber and Amazon.

Lots of opportunity there but, new disruptive technologies do not automatically over-write everything. However, they will always require new ways of thinking and communicating. As a result, re-engineering and re-designing are now ongoing business processes, not once-in-a-while overhauls.

Professionals, entrepreneurs, and organizations ready to jump in and grab the emerging “brass ring”—that is, “disruptors”—benefit most when, from the start, they have client-centric vision. Once clear about existing target market needs, wants, and the untapped elements of both, opportunity emerges. As the new technology alters context for both disruptors and their target clients, competition can heat up. Client-centric disruptors can maintain their “first in” advantage because they understand how to communicate advantages, not disruption, to target markets.

At a recent Global Forum entitled “Leading in Uncertain Times,” arguably the most popular of the 11 break-out forums was “Riding the Wave of Disruptive Technologies.” A panel of forward thinkers explored the question: “What is the potential long-term economic impact of disruptive technologies?”

One panelist set the stage for disruption of globalization and emergence of a new “hyper local.”

“The path of light determines decentralized architecture,” said panelist Marcus Weldon, Chief Technology Officer of Nokia and President of Bell Labs. “It is the speed of light that determines this. [Light] can only travel about 100km (round trip, meaning there and back) in 1 millisecond. So any application or service requiring this latency/delay has to be located within 100km maximum, which we say [as] 50km allowing for some additional processing time.”

According to Weldon, this means that the “within 50 kilometers” necessity leads to a focus on “hyper local because it must be that way.”

This predicted disruptive shift from globalization to a new hyper local arises from internet of everything demands. Resulting significant change may open up local or small venture opportunity.

Weldon (by email): “Going local will require the deployment of cloud infrastructure within 50-100km from each user/enterprise and not everyone will be willing or able to build out the cloud to this level. That is not to say that Global providers cannot become local cloud providers, but they may choose not to, and just partner or federate with other cloud providers who do. Telecom operators are one potential local cloud provider for these local clouds as they own local facilities (switching offices etc.) with fiber running to those facilities, and [they] need to run their networks in this way anyway.”

How would this disruption alter context for your target markets and their income earning?

Panelist Adam Khan, Founder and CEO of Illinois-based Akhan Semiconductors and co-inventor of the Miraj Diamond™ Platform explained how diamond semiconductor technology provides “new pathways of flexibility” that have the potential to disrupt electronics, including consumer electronics and wearable applications.

If diamond—known as the “Ultimate Wide Bandgap semiconductor material”—were a key successor technology to silicon, where could disruption materialize in electronics? How would your target markets be affected? Or, would the change created open new targets for your venture?

Disruptive bonus: Later in a phone interview, Khan talked about how local and global interplay is growing his semiconductor business. He also candidly explained why disrupting his work schedule to spend three days at the Global Forum was the best use of his time.

How do you disrupt your routine to benefit your business and, therefore, your clients?

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