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InfoChachkie Nuggets #1 – May 22 2009
By Michael Cole
Title/Summary: How Davids (Smaller companies/teams/countries) beat Goliaths
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
infoChachkie Nuggets:
- In war Davids beat Goliaths (forces at least 10 times as powerful) 28.5% in military conflicts during past 200 years.
- When Davids chose to not play by the same strategies as Goliaths their win ratio went up to a stunning 63.6% ratio.
- Small companies/weaker teams should use leg’s speed, not arm’s strength – focusing on movement, endurance, innovativeness, and perseverance.
- Small companies can and do beat large companies when they change the rules of the game to take advantage of their natural strengths and limit exposure to their weaknesses.
Link: Click Here
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Title/Summary: The Psychology of Self-Control and Marshmallows
Author: Jonah Lehrer
infoChachkie Nuggets:
- Children with lower self-control were found to have worse grades, test scores, and struggled in stressful situations.
- Personality can’t be separated from context (You can’t understand fully predict how well potential hires will work in your company unless they have past examples which are a similar situation).
- Self-Control is mainly controlled by – Distracting yourself from getting overly obsessed with the task at hand.
- Simple mental tricks can reduce this such as abstracting the issue-at-hand significantly improved self-control.
- Crafting your mission statements is so critical because it gives your team a generalized method for reflecting on problems, rather than obsessing about details and making rash situations.
Link: Click Here
Title/Summary: Why Setting Goals can Backfire
Author: Drake Bennett
infoChachkie Nuggets:
- Enron had a hostile, dysfunctional, and ultimately criminal atmosphere created by its practice of rewarding executives based on meeting specific revenue targets.
- Although simple numerical goals can lead to bursts of intense effort in the short term, they can also subvert the longer-term interests of a person or a company.
- Need to have "learning goals" – one where someone pledges to come up with, for example, five approaches to a thorny problem – rather than a performance goal that assumes that the problem will automatically be solved.
- Make sure to foster an startup environment which focuses employees on long term rewards, while setting short term goals on a flexible metrics which rewards goals being achieved with innovation and efficiency wit.
Link: Click Here
Title/Summary: Steve Blank’s personal experiences as VP of Marketing for a resurrected from bankruptcy company SuperMac.
Author: Steve Blank
infoChachkie Nuggets:
- Generate information from acquired customers and put it to use when crafting marketing strategy.
- Example – Use questionnaires to understand overall customer’s needs.
- It’s significantly valuable information to know what kind of customer liked your product enough to spend 20 minutes on the phone for a questionnaire – focus on capturing that entire customer segment if possible.
- Make sure your marketing staff has a concrete understanding of who the customer actually is, not who they think he might be.
- The marketing department can get completely disconnected from the target customers their marketing too, if no one is guiding them and if it’s not in their job description.
Link: Click Here/
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Michael Cole is a Program Manager for the Online Marketing Company RevUpNet LLC. He also does the web development for the blog infoChachkie.
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