Cash flow is the silent killer of businesses and never more so than in the current economic climate. There is rarely a week when the business pages tell of another story of a small or large business that is struggling to access suitable lines of credit. In the UK yesterday was the ‘quarter day’ when…
“Agility” is a much written about topic. If you do a search in Amazon in “agility” it lists 18,000+ books written on the subject. Admittedly most of the top 10 relate to “dog training” and are nothing to do with commercial agility. Interestingly, I struggled to find too many books on “commercial agility” and most…
I just read ‘What’s The Future of the Sharing Economy‘ on Fast Company and it re-kindled some thinking about the business models that we’re seeing in the digital publishing world. Many of us are now used to receiving books, magazines and newspapers in a digital form, however, how is this impacting the sharing economy? Where…
In this cost conscious age many organisations are looking for ways to maintain margins by managing their cost base. When they look around for low hanging fruit they see the opportunities opened up by the increasingly connected world and the changes in people’s willingness to do themselves, what others have done for them before. The…
In my last post I commented on the consolidation of mobile phone networks in the UK and left a number of questions open at the end of the post. One of the questions related to whether users would over time be willing to pay a premium for higher quality distribution of content, thereby allowing the…
Back in the early ’90s I happened to do a piece of research in relation to the UK government’s intention to award mobile phone wireless spectrum and accompanying PCN licences. At that time there were two mobile phone incumbents, Cellnet (now O2) and Vodafone, who both had licences and operated on the GSM network at…
If we look at business models in the last century then the major innovation was the introduction by the Ford Motor Company of the assembly line. The approach created competitive advantage through efficiency and since this breakthrough in Detroit which began operation on 1st December 1913 many people have embellished and adapted it to further refine it. For…
At the recent IACCM conference in London there were a number of presentations and discussions on the topic of contract visualisation and the use of plain language in contracts and agreements. It was a topic that seemed to spark people’s imagination and resonate with many whether it was the use of simpler language, the ordering…
I spent yesterday at Salesforce’s Cloudforce event in London which was a great day out with most innovative company (as decided by Forbes magazine). What was clear was the energy and enthusiasm that they have created in the ecosystem that sits around their platform. What they now coin “the social enterprise” is a really savvy…
It was interesting to hear today of the deal between Waterstones, one of the diminishing number of UK-wide book retailers, and Amazon, whereby Waterstones will have a digital section in their stores to help people try and buy Kindle devices and then select content. The two companies come at the same space, book retailing, from…