The Mindfulness Thing

How doing nothing helps.

What do Google, Rupert Murdoch and KPMG have in common with Apple, eBay and Ford Motor Company?  

All of them embrace the notion of mindfulness.

A decade ago, it was virtually unheard of outside spiritual circles. Now everyone is trying it. Even Goldman Sachs offers employees in-house courses on the practice. That’s a firm that regularly turns up in lists of the world’s least-respected corporations. What’s going on? 

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Planet of the Apps

Old ideas for managing new technology.

Your business is ticking along nicely. Out of left field a low-cost start-up zooms into your market and starts picking off customers. They’re small, so they can cherry-pick. Their cost base is low and they undercut you. They sell via an app that’s soooo easy to use and they outsource delivery to a logistics firm that gets the product to the customer quicker than you can.

Welcome to the digital challenge.

It is hard to think of an industry where this isn’t happening. For many managers it’s overwhelming. Wherever they look, everyone is talking digital delivery on mobile devices. The sheer breadth and scale of new technology can be threatening. It’s constantly changing. How do you cope?

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The upside of your limitations

Focus is as important as effort.

There are infinite ways to improve your life. Trying to do them all is a recipe for underperformance. Success often comes down to doing a small number of things extremely well.

Business is no different. Quality rather than quantity makes customers come back for more. What you do is what they want.

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Planned prosperity Vs lucky breaks

Googling Good Fortune.

In 1999, Sergey Brin and Larry Page took their fledgling product to George Bell, CEO of established search engine, Excite. Wishing to realize the value of their startup, they offered him Google for US$1m. Bell was unexcited, even when they dropped the price to US$750,000.

Both sides made bad decisions: the young entrepreneurs wanted to sell too much too soon; the potential buyer didn’t see the potential. For Brin and Page, it was one of their luckiest setbacks. For Excite, it was a missed opportunity. But that’s only with hindsight. Neither could have forecast the future.

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Beware: Cliches Ahead.

Sometimes there’s a reason the road less travelled is not congested.

It’s easy to come up with slogans to explain success. Management commentary is full of them yet they often describe a singular success that isn’t easily transferred to another business.

“Sticking to your knitting” might be a successful strategy for one firm but not for a competitor. You could say it works for Walmart, but it didn’t for Sony. It stuck to the Walkman way past the arrival of the MP3 player. A better cliché might have been “when the horse is dead, get off”.

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