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55 articles by Donald Mitchell · showing 50

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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Cooperate With Strangers and Volunteers and Help Unemployed People Start Complementary Businesses

This article explores three sources of cost-reducing help that most businesses ignore: strangers, volunteers, and unemployed people. Think of the unifying themes for this lesson as helping to overcome the unattractiveness and tradition stalls. Let's begin by considering what strangers can do to help your enterprise reduce costs for all stakeholders through applying zero-based analysis to providing the minimum core offering. How Can Strangers Contribute to Reducing Costs for all Stakeholders by 96 Percent?

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Get To The Top At Work, And Enjoy It!

I was inspired to write this article after reading an essay arguing for becoming a salesperson, rather than a CEO ... claiming that a salesperson's hours are shorter, the stress is less, and moment-to-moment tasks are more enjoyable. That didn't make sense to me. While I certainly know some stressed-out, overwhelmed CEOs, I know many more hopelessly frustrated, discouraged salespeople. Yes, it's no fun to lead a failing organization. It's even less fun trying to sell offerings for such a faltering company.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Develop the Minimum Core Offering to Reduce Costs Per Unit by 96 Percent

We consider an older concept in this article, one that has often been applied to cost-reduction thinking: zero-based analysis. You may know this concept as "zero-based costing." Zero-based analysis reverses the usual way of thinking in which many people start by looking at how to remove costs from what is already being spent. Zero-based analysis starts, instead, by assuming that no costs need to be spent and grudgingly adds costs only after being convinced that they cannot be avoided.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Sell More Through Liking People and Encouraging Them to Like You

Joe Girard was the champion vehicle salesman for many years in the United States, averaging more than five daily sales of cars and trucks. What were his secrets? According to Mr. Girard, it was simply due to offering a fair price and being someone customers liked to buy from. Mr. Girard made the car-buying experience pleasant; he asked for referrals from customers to family and friends by sending out preprinted holiday cards monthly to everyone who had ever bought from him that said on the front, "I Like You."

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Increase Stakeholder Value by 20 Times — Inspire Confidence through Your Vision

Entrepreneurs are rarely indifferent to how others value their businesses, but their reasons vary in why they care. For some, valuation is a primary goal. For others, it’s a scorecard delivering a sense of what progress has been made. Still others like that increasing enterprise value can help attract and retain talented people.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Go and Get It

Many children are shy, which can make them more dependent on their parents. If a shy child wants something, chances are good that the child will ask a parent to get it … even if the item is easily accessible and in plain sight. Since most parents understand the importance of encouraging independence, a frequently-heard response to such a request is, “Go and get it.” In reaction we’ve all seen a worried-looking child’s face shifting into a furrowed frown, flushed red with anxiety and near tears at the thought of possibly confronting a stranger or a situation that seems daunting.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Take Five Steps Towards a Better Career by Being an Original

Have you ever gone to a party and discovered that you had dressed quite differently from everyone else? How did that make you feel? For some people, this experience would be the height of embarrassment. For others, noting the differences might just draw a slight smile. No copycats need apply to these people! By just looking around most organizations you can quickly tell whether the norm is fitting in or standing out. Which work environment do you prefer?

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Here Is What I See

Each individual's perceptions of what's happening and why are unique. Never assume that others share your perspective unless you tell them what your perceptions are. This article contains seven rules for better communications and increased mutual understanding. It's natural to assume that others see what's going on in exactly the same ways that we do. I was reminded several times in the last 24 hours that such an assumption is often mistaken.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

How Can Operating Only on the Internet Enable a Low-Cost Minimum Business Model?

I was inspired to consider this question in 2008 when the two largest newspapers in Boston featured a headline that the larger of the two, The Boston Globe (which was owned by the same company that published The New York Times), had threatened to shut down the print version of the paper and to operate online only unless employees agreed to cut their salaries and benefits by over $20 million a year.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Develop Breakthrough Business Models Based on Superior IT Security

Where can leaders find the next breakthrough business models and strategies that will delivery superior corporate performance? I believe that such innovations will come from having closer relationships with, greater mutual understanding of, and more meaningful interactions with all stakeholders (including end users, beneficiaries, customers, colleagues, colleagues’ families, partners, owners, lenders, suppliers, distributors, neighbors, communities in which the enterprise operates, those affected by the company, regulators, critics, and commentators).

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

What Will You Work On Now?

In business, one skill rises above all others in determining how much success will occur: choosing the right task to work on next. Let me explain why I came to that conclusion. While working as director of strategic planning for a Fortune 200 company, I recall a time when my list of "official" assignments had 112 items on it. As you can imagine, I wasn't going to get around to doing most of those tasks, even if I just delegated them.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

You Are the Only Person with a Ph.D. in Being You

Most people don’t realize how unique and valuable they are. How could personal characteristics seem to be unusual, or even rare, to oneself? After all, people are with themselves at every moment, view their own qualities as being normal, and cannot hope to perceive and understand others nearly as well. As a university professor, I am constantly astonished and filled with joy by the unusual, delightful qualities of my students. It’s as if God had convened a symposium of world-class learners about to accomplish amazing things just for my benefit.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Be More Cautious in Approving Cost Reduction Tests

Most business people use the same level of skepticism about everything they consider. Some are always optimistic that things will work out. Some are always pessimistic. Most people are somewhere in the middle. When a problem selecting the right choice is difficult enough, you will probably find that being very skeptical is the right route. How can you learn to be skeptical if that is not your usual way of thinking?

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Are You New to This? -- Seven Practices for Rapid Mastery

Chances are good that you don’t know too many people who learned to run before they began to crawl. Likewise, you may not have met anyone who broke par while playing golf for the first time. As beginners, even people whose skill now causes us to marvel would more likely have produced laughter and grins rather than applause. Now, why is that?

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Grow Your Business by Providing Sensible Reasons to Purchase Now

Give most executives the choice between some wild “blow-out” price-based promotion or taking time to first locate powerful new reasons to buy that are good for one and all, and the circus will soon be hired to tout the latest short-term deal. While such approaches can clearly add sales, doing so can also cause long-term damage that can more than offset the short-term gains. Here are three possible reasons for such contradictory results:

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

What Will Your Life Be like in 2030?

Due to recent cutbacks and until further notice, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off. -- Unknown If you are over the age of 55, you may assume you won't be around in 2030. Keep reading. The odds favor you being here then … unless you are already over 70. Even so, you may want to know what your descendants will face. If you are under 55, you might see threats ahead and describe 2030 in pessimistic ways due to your sense of certain troubling and deteriorating trends:

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Build Your Business Around Solving Engaging Problems

Entrepreneurial focus is immeasurably helped by finding engaging problems - ones to which you and others are irresistibly drawn. Many people make a mistake by instead picking problems to solve that are of interest only because of the potential financial gain that might result from solutions. Others make a different mistake: picking problems that bore them.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Make Changing Jobs and Careers Easier and More Rewarding

Hollywood often captures the downside of changing jobs and careers with dramatic tales about unexpectedly losing a long-held position and not being able to find a suitable replacement. If I asked you to describe what such an experience would be like, you might choose words like “traumatic,” “depressing,” and “difficult.”

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Seven Essential Questions for Accomplishing What Others Believe to Be Impossible

Some of today’s ordinary activities were seen as “impossible” dreams just a few years ago. For example, 20 years ago decoding the human genome was viewed as being one of the world’s most difficult yet-to-be-accomplished projects. Yet today, an individual’s genome can be decoded in a few weeks for about $1,000, a tiny fraction of what was spent for the first one.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Work With Part-Time and Nonprofit Suppliers To Reduce Your Investments and Costs

If for no other reason than expanding your business model to include new types of offerings, you will probably add new suppliers from time to time. In addition, sometimes suppliers go out of business or are unwilling to make necessary changes to improve their and your business models. In other instances, your rapid expansion may outstrip the quantities that current suppliers can provide. Regardless of the reason, working with part-time and nonprofit suppliers can add breakthrough resources for reducing your and your stakeholders' investments. Let's start by looking at part-time suppliersr

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Go from Faking It to Making It in Business

When it comes to “making it” in business, many people feel as if they have more to hide than to display to impress employers, bosses, colleagues, and customers. To compensate for lacking credentials, skills, knowledge, and experiences some insecure businesspeople wish they had, some of them choose to adopt a “know-it-all” attitude.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Let Viewers See More Through Sharing a Greater Artistic Vision

Artists have long held a privileged role in society, allowing them to spend more time “seeing” what is going on than do most others. In addition, artists’ perspectives have often been sought by those who want to transcend the mundane to draw closer to the sublime. As a result, a greater artistic vision can open the door for ordinary viewers to experience a broader and more delightful world. What a wonderful gift! Such expansions occur today for fortunate viewers in these five ways:

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Why You Should Turn Your Customers Into Eager Business Evangelists

Eager business-evangelist customers are always telling others how wonderful your business is and encouraging potential customers to try your offerings. Most network marketing businesses are based on word-of-mouth promotion. You learn about a great product or service from a relative, friend, or neighbor who then helps you to experience the offering's benefits. Soon, you can't wait to share your happiness with others to improve their lives, too!

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Do the One Thing That Makes All the Difference

When you watch most people working, you notice that they are doing many things at once: what is often described as multitasking. Recent research has shown that while such an approach seems to be highly efficient to the person using it, quality and quantity of results are actually less than when concentration focuses on one task at a time. A recent book, The One Thing: The Surprising Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, pays attention to the important implications of concentration by noting that in addition to such focus, you also need to: 1. Work toward the right goal.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Free Your Company to Do More

Many organizations seek to accomplish their purposes with so little effectiveness that it's as if they were literally chained to the past and to procrastination. Yet when away from work, and doing something they love, many of the same people act more like forces of nature... moving themselves and others with great emotion by drawing upon compassion and genuine conce to make needed improvements.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Five Things No One Ever Told You about Earning a Ph.D. — A Professor Advises on How to Gain Better Career Results

In 1900 few Americans finished high school. Those who did had a huge advantage over everyone else. By 1950 high school graduates were common, and gaining a career advantage from education required a college degree. By 1970 people with bachelor’s degrees often began adding master’s degrees to stand out from the crowd.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Seven Essential Questions for Establishing a Superior Business Model

Many people have trouble deciding where to start when considering possibilities to establish a better business model. With these questions, you'll make more effective changes ... and faster. Let me start by describing what a business model is so that you'll better understand the questions. A business model incorporates all the ways that a company provides its goods and services, receives value for its efforts, and affects others. Consequently, a business model is the combined

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

To Move Forward in Your Career, Work with a Servant Professor — Helpful Methods for Locating One

What is your image of a graduate-school professor? Based on my student experiences, I think of an older person standing behind a raised lectern, well separated from the large number of students who are madly taking notes on the words that flow so composedly from the oracle’s lips. Such a scene feels a bit like being present at the fountain of all knowledge.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Invent the Future to Build a Better One for Yourself by Establishing Your Own Successful Business

Many people dream of having their own successful business. Such dreams are much more likely to be filled with visions of innovative solutions for common problems that negatively affect and annoy people than with plans for effectively leading exercise classes, refilling vending machines, or assembling sandwiches, tasks that are core activities for so many small businesses.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Seven Lessons for Profiting from Gaining the Right Experience

Almost everyone would like to be more successful in earning a living. Yet many people report that putting forth greater effort leads to actually accomplishing less. How can that be? Well, it takes learning from experience to become more successful. If you seek experience just by trying things on your own, it takes a lot of mistakes before you learn enough lessons to avoid mistakes often enough to mark an improvement. By putting in more effort, you initially just increase the day-to-day frequency of mistakes. Oops!

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Fast-Expanding Exponential Cost Reductions

This article describes a new concept for creating and implementing 96 percent cost reductions: fast-expanding exponential solutions. This is a subject I'm very excited about, and I hope you will share my enthusiasm for and interest in this process. When I was a youngster, controlled atomic chain reactions were being developed as a source of electricity. To help children understand the difference between an atomic blast (an uncontrolled atomic chain reaction) and an atomic power plant (a controlled atomic chain reaction), scientists designed impressive demonstrations.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Get More Out Of Your Business Work

Have you ever counted the minutes until the work day was over? If so, you are not alone. Business work can be stupefying, leaving you feeling dull while randomly musing about more pleasant activities and places. That's the bad news. But... wait! There is good news, as well. Your time at work can, instead, be fun, stimulating, and personally fulfilling. What makes the difference? Use your business work to learn more about what fascinates you and then apply what you learn to make improvements.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

What Is New With You?

By staying alert to career alte atives, you can nimbly move from one occupation to another in ways that are personally and professionally satisfying and profitable. This article provides guidance for how to do so. Some people know exactly what they want ... and how to get it. They move single-mindedly forward and gain what they seek. When they gain something gratifying and enjoyable, the straightforward approach can feel as if it's perfect.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Prepare Yourself for Entrepreneurial Success

I recently watched a televised interview with John Scully, the CEO Steve Jobs recruited from PepsiCo in 1983 to lead Apple when Jobs was twenty-eight. Reflecting on what happened to Apple over the subsequent twenty-seven years, Scully commented that Apple's board made a mistake in hiring him.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Search For More Of What You Like

How can you gain enjoyment and accomplish more in your business career? It's easy: Just search for more of what you like ... and then do more of what you find. Let me explain by starting with what I don't mean: I'm not suggesting that those who love to eat chocolate ice cream at work seek out jobs that involve hourly samplings of such frozen treats.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Check And Double Check What You Do

It’s easy to miss your most rewarding and satisfying career opportunities. Why? Most people assume that there are no better alte atives to whatever they are doing or planning. Such assumptions are almost always wrong. If people who are quick to assume they know about all the choices would just check and double check their assumptions about there being nothing better available, they would routinely find more interesting work to enrich their lives.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

How To Learn More About Business

Many business founders have encyclopedic knowledge about how their organizations work, as well as how to gain and to retain profitable customers. Why? Founders have probably either designed or done all of the major tasks at one time or another and may have played a role in attracting almost all of the key customers. Doing so was just part of what was required for their businesses to succeed.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Go For All Of It

If you ask most people how they are doing, they will respond by saying something like "Good." What does that mean? Well, for some people it could mean that they aren't suffering from any illnesses, they are still employed, not one of their children is in jail, and they still have a place to live. For them it would, perhaps, be more apt to say, "Not bad." For an entrepreneur who has launched a successful new business, "Good" might mean instead that the business is growing 128 percent a year and is comfortably meeting its commitments to customers and investors.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Start The Best Business You Can

I just started teaching a new class of aspiring entrepreneurs. One of them asked at the end of the first meeting, "Are you going to tell me what's the best business for me to start?" He was surprised when I said "no" and told him, instead, about places where he could find lots of statistics about profitability and growth for various kinds of businesses as a way to begin narrowing down the possibilities.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Do All The Business You Can

While I'm driving on the highway, I often find my compact car hemmed in by high-powered sports cars proceeding at well below the speed limit, despite having engines that could easily speed up to 140 miles per hour. What's with that? Well, many people are more interested in putting on a show than in actually accomplishing more. These drivers probably want to have the fastest look at the curb, rather than on the road. Consider, instead, that in many business activities performance ultimately counts for much more than appearance.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Offer Price Incentives For Customers to Help You Lower Costs

With so much global competition, the customer is more in charge than ever. That doesn't mean that you need to offer services that cost you a fortune: Better designed pricing can be a great help. Let's consider an industrial example. A building materials manufacturer studied its customers in terms of how the mix of products they ordered affected profits.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Increase Awareness

Unless you receive an offering as a gift and try it out, ignorance will keep you from using a superior choice. When such ignorance is widespread, the market will not develop to its full potential. Let's explore back surgery as an example. Until a few decades ago, patients who underwent back surgery were as likely to be worse off after the surgery as they were to enjoy any improvement. Harmful outcomes included increased pain, reduced mobility, and serious infections.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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By Donald MitchellRecently published1 topic

Work Up to Having the Best Career

People who want to lift heavy weights usually start with light ones. After that they gradually increase how much they lift. When their muscles strengthen enough, heavy weights that were impossible to lift at first are then raised with ease. Similarly, those who want to improve other capabilities often start by learning how to better perform simple tasks. When doing these tasks is mastered, the improvers move on to enhancing their performance of more difficult activities. Eventually, these learners can accomplish much more in less time with fewer errors.

Primary topic: Management Skills
Management Skills
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