On the Ganador business model

I am (obviously) fascinated by business models. That is how you design your business to respond to the opportunity in the market.

In my mind your strategic success is determined by your business model and thinking and tinkering on your business model is more important than strategic planning - which usually perpetuates the status quo.

When we started out, we replicated the business model that worked for us running our own business in South Africa. (Consulting, Training, Mystery Shopping.)

Those three elements work well together:

• Mystery Shopping finds the problems
• Consulting identifies the solutions
• Training Implements the solutions

Over time we also added:

• A Publishing division (we have so many training resources it makes sense to sell it to other companies)
• A Technology division (we use two amazing technology platforms for eLearning and for Knowledge Management and we are registered resellers of those platforms.

But putting all of the above into an ‘elevator pitch’ becomes hard. Explaining to a CEO of a potential client what we do is not easy. In fact, whilst it may be true, it is not credible to for a small organisation like ours to be a ‘one-stop shop’.

On a more personal note; we now simply say we are business architects: if you are business with a retail presence (brand or retailer) we will design and deliver solutions to make that happen. It may or may not include training and it may or may not include technology - and so forth.

I hope our message is clearer. I hope by stripping back everything that we do to only the essentials (building businesses in a retail environment) is a better way of communicating – because it is more relevant to the needs of the intended receiver.

Emails, comments and even phone calls are welcome.

Dennis Price

A landslide starts with this

Can you hear the dripping pipe?

Most people were asleep in their beds when the sound, described as being ‘like a fighter jet’, woke those in surrounding lodges.

Outside they discovered a black void where two large buildings had once stood and they started digging frantically, spurred on by desperate cries from the rubble.

The main cause of the 1997 Thredbo landslide was the collapse of the Alpine Way above the town. It was the result of a combination of factors, including wet weather and the way the road had been constructed. 

The Alpine Way, which runs above the village of Thredbo and through the Snowy Mountains, was originally built as a service road during the construction of the Murray 1 and 2 hydroelectric power stations in the 1950s. After the hydroelectric stations were finished, the road was upgraded, which included the addition of landfill.

The people weren’t killed by the snow or the weather; it wasn’t the buildings and it wasn’t a slow emergency response. At least none of these were the root cause of these deaths.

Why did the road collapse?

The eventual root cause was determined to be a dripping pipe that undermined the foundation of the road which eventually caused it to collapse.

In your business you are constantly troubleshooting, trying to find the problems and trying to fix them. The real issue is that people misunderstand the difference between problem and symptom.

Managers/ owners (even CEOs) say they have a ‘problem’ because of “poor sales volume”. Or that the “market share is declining” for instance.

How often do YOU say or think that you have a problem because of declining revenues?

Declining revenue is not a problem – it is a symptom. Ditto for market share. And shrinkage. And many more…

The Solution

The way to get to the root is to ask ‘WHY’ at least five times – or until the answer to your question is ‘just because’. Only then will you have reached the likely root cause. The same techniques can be applied to any ‘issue’ – say absenteeism or poor customer service.

The Exercise:

Most people say they have a problem with ‘declining revenue’. 

I cannot tell you why your business has declining revenue (without knowing much more) but I can tell you how to determine the answer. So, here is the challenge for AGHA members:

Keep asking WHY to the question below and keep going until the answer is ‘because’ or there is no other answer.

Q: Why is my revenue declining?

Have fun.

Dennis Price

GANADOR: Architects of high-performance retail environments.

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The power of social to do harm

There are obvious benefits to being social.

It creates a sense of belonging and it plays an undeniably important role in shaping your identity. It offers protection and enables growth thorough cooperation and sharing. It is efficient.

It is no surprise that psychologists have isolated social proof and reciprocity and peer pressure and the like as powerful drivers of behaviour.

But gangs and suicide bombers are also testimony to the power of social forces. Unarguably these are not good. In fact extremists of any kind are linguistically a misnomer in the sense that ‘extremity’ implies being isolated, single and somehow rare. On the contrary, extremists are some of the most closely knit social groups that exist. Their beliefs are extreme, but they are highly socialised.

As participants in various social groups, we must learn to appreciate that sometimes belonging to two social groups are mutually exclusively. In some cases it is obvious in others not so much.

You can’t be a member of two opposing gangs – that is obvious. As groups grow they become weaker after a certain point.

Let's compare one group everyone is familiar with (Christians) with the company/ organisation that employs us.

You can’t be a real Christian and also be ‘of this world’. Christianity is losing ground in developed countries – not because it is being challenged by more educated people who have a better grasp of science.  There are many believing scientists – those belief systems are not irreconcilable at all.

(Ironically, it is more likely that people who have a poor grasp of philosophy to end up favouring scientism, mistaking that for scientific thinking. But that is another topic for another day.)

Christians are losing ground because the glue that bound them together (strong beliefs in specific norms and values guided by the Bible) are weakened. Christians are progressively unwinding the more polarising beliefs (about sex, marriage, homosexuality etc.) and it is this misguided attempt at seeking acceptance with the broader society that makes the group less distinctive and undermines the loyalties that the existing members have to the group.

As the group seeks to grow and spread its influence, it finds that it has to become more permeable at the edges of its definition. And this causes it to lose shape.

The same principle applies to companies who grow beyond a certain size. Whilst the Dunbar number may not be scientific, it is intuitively a very appealing concept.

When companies lose their founders/ great leaders (Apple>>Jobs) then social cohesion suffers. We call it something different – we may call it culture or values for instance; but ultimately it is the glue that loses its power to make the component parts adhere to each other.

This has implications for community engagement/ management and all other groups too.

We all want to belong to groups, but there are lessons we should heed:

1. The bigger the group gets, the weaker the social cohesion
   
2. Not all groups are positive
3. Blind conformity is dangerous

Chuck Norris and Rambo have now joined forces in The Expendables, but belonging is not always all it is cracked up to be. 

We need our fair share of Lone Rangers too.

7 things you should know before signing a franchise agreement

1. Know how you are going to get out. Like a Hollywood wedding, the pre-nup is the most important part because when the romance is gone, all you have is the paperwork. Make sure you read yourself and ask professionals about the things you don’t understand – don’t simply rely on (e.g.) lawyers to do everything for you because YOU are the one getting married – not the lawyer.
2. The franchisor is in a different business to you. They are selling businesses (B2B) and you will run that business, which is more often than not a B2C business. This means franchisor and franchisee have different objectives and metrics of success. If both parties understand this, there is much less conflict later on.
3. You should know why you are getting into the business. Understand your own motives and be honest. If you are looking for an easy way to make money, don’t do it because despite what a franchisor might say, it is never easy – at least not the first five years.
4. Know that no one can guarantee anything and that you are still exposed to some risk. A franchise system is attractive because it offers lower risk – not because it has no risk.
5. Every market is different and every franchisee is different and franchisors are constantly learning and adapting their offer to the market. The franchisee has an important role to play in all that by providing feedback and market intelligence. However, you must be willing to accept and live by the system because whilst every market is different, yours is not as unique as you would like to believe. If you can’t live by the system, don’t buy into the system.
6. The franchisor wants to sell franchises so they will present the realistic, best-case scenario. You should instead plan for the realistic, worst-case scenario – especially in terms of financing the business.
7. The best franchisors have the best communication systems. Things like conferences, training opportunities, supplier meetups, newsletters and intranets demonstrate that they take their network seriously and franchisees can take comfort from that.

Dennis:

PS: Franchisors we can help you save time, money and reduce risk and effort. Have a look...

Adopting the cloud is risky but at least the insurance is cheap

To cloud or not to cloud - that is the question...

I am a big user of cloud-based applications

• Tradeshift (Invoicing)
• Sugarsync & Bitcasa (Backup)
• e-Academy Knowledge Management
• Social Learning
• All Social Media Applications (Hootsuite, Twitter etc.)
• Mailchimp (Newsletter/ Autoresponder)
• Dropbox
• Feedly

But at the same time, I am predicting a massive disruption for the internet (virus/ cyber-terrorism) which seems to be that I don’t believe my own predictions.

A few points:

1. When that disruption happens it will of course not be aimed at your business specifically – but at internet infrastructure.
2. Even if you manage to stay ‘up’ – your clients won’t anyway, so the disruption will be effective despite those local/effective back-ups  & strategies
3. Most companies nowadays do their back-ups to the cloud which does not make your back-up accessible anyway when the cloud has some thunder…J

So there are two distinctions here to be considered: internet as a piece of infrastructure and just data records and storage. (You may use the internet to access your storage or you may not.)

 INFRASTRUCTURE:

The internet may be temporarily disabled in a big way in the future (like a road being blown up in a war) but that will eventually be fixed.

The bigger risk I see is that if the cyber-terrorists destroy the integrity of the banking system (or health, or government). That would be a huge issue that affects every business. The general internet may still work and the cloud may still be relatively safe. There is not much you can do about this risk I imagine?

 DATA RECORDS:

You can easily store your data onsite – but will that data have value when you don’t have the infrastructure to access/service your clients?

If so, then local storage/servers is an option. This depends on the nature of your business and how mission critical your data records are.

Generally speaking, the cloud providers are easier, bigger targets for mischief makers, but this is balanced by the fact that they generally put resources into protecting their assets – probably more effectively and more robustly than you can?

 MY ADVICE:

On balance I would say that on cost/benefit analysis the Cloud is as good as any other option for most businesses (depending on the independent value of your data records).

What you SHOULD DO is to INSURE against these risks – because that is ultimately all that it is.

I don’t know for sure, but I reckon this risk is under-priced in insurance companies (because their actuarial models work on finding patterns in past data occurrences and they are NOT geared for these Black Swan events.) That means the insurance will be relatively cheap – until it happens once. That is; there are business continuity insurance products and there are ‘cyber’ products available – it is just that I do not think the insurance companies will have been able to truly cost the actual risk, and therefore these insurance products will be relatively cheap.

Why Marissa Mayer agrees with me and predictions about privacy

I continue my smartarse theme this week.

I wrote this in early 2001 and touched on the idea that people don't care too much about the information they share (privacy). If you consider what people put online via social media you will have to say that even people will say they value their privacy, they don't really act that way.

I also spoke about why tele-commuting is not going to take off in a big way any time soon,.

As I said, it is smart-arse week.

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The new world of work

A lot has been written and said about the new world of work where we will all tele-commute, work via the Web and where robots take over all manufacturing. Without exception, the main proponents of the new way have at the very least got their timing very wrong.

Predicting the future is a dangerous business made doubly so when you are trying to predict human behaviour and slap a deadline on it. However, there are some fundamental values and characteristics of human nature that you can pretty much bank on as being timeless. Man is a social animal. The people who predicted that the VCR would spell the death of the cinematic experience did not consider this simple fact. The consulting landscape is littered with corpses who staked their reputation on the extrapolation of a trend or the discovery of a new technology without due consideration of the essence of human nature. It is time to dispel a few myths about the new world of work.

Privacy.

Man likes to talk about himself and herself. All those who bemoan the demise of privacy on the Net should think again. Barring some really confidential information like a criminal record or serious lack of funds, people generally don’t mind talking about themselves. There are thousands of market research firms in the world who can attest to the fact that the vast majority of people who do not want to participate in a survey do so purely because of the perceived lack of time. They just could not be bothered at that particular point in time. It is very rarely a matter of principle.

Once aggregators of data such as marketers of consumer products and services have all the info they need, the real question will be what to do with it. People are a peculiar mass of contradictions and inconsistencies. Traditional market research has long perpetuated the notion that people can be grouped together as markets based on a slicing and dicing of their attitudes, behaviours or lifestyles. This has given the managers and accountants the false sense of security that marketing is an exact science. The real truth is that people are as unique as their fingerprints signify. In the past the (subtle) differences between people have been disguised by the limitations of research methodologies and the lack of data. If you ask people a few questions, chances are that their answers will be able to be grouped in a meaningful way. With access to perfect information and limitless data, the differences become more pronounced.

And even if marketers figure how to use data in some meaningful way, the targets of their advertising or sales techniques will have found a way to block them. The key in the privacy debate is not whether researchers/marketers will gain access to personal data. I think it was Scott McNealy [CEO- Sun Microsystems] who said famously that ‘privacy is dead – get over it’. He is right of course; but the funny thing is that, by and large, people don’t mind. The reason is that they fully expect to be able to somehow filter the appeals of the marketers – probably through the use of technology. Only messages from trusted sources will get through to them. It is the modern, adult version of “talk to the hand because the ears aren’t listening”. Somehow the Internet will have its own version of the TV remote that allows users to zap between channels and skip commercials at will. It might be as simple as filtering applications as they exist today or something more fanciful. The important point is that consumers/users don’t mind the loss of privacy (outward-bound data flow), but mind the intrusion (inward-bound data flow) of messages coming in. The overload of information has long been identified as an issue that has been made more ubiquitous with the advent of the Internet. But people will find a way to cope, they always do.

Like most people with Internet access, I have done the Amazon.com thing and I certainly do a lot of banking on the Net. There is a bit of concern when I pay by credit card, but I keep a low limit on the card anyway, so my exposure is limited. I tend not to divulge my e-mail address to all and sundry websites, and when I do, it is the freemail one. There I would monitor the spam vs. quality and if necessary, transfer it tio the regular address or attempt to cancel. I have never had difficulty in getting unsubscribed from a website.

Work from home

As stated earlier, man is fundamentally a social animal. Work from home and telecommuting is bound to increase – up to a point. It is a work style that will suit certain jobs more than others, and more importantly the ability to work from home will be important at certain stages of ones life. A career woman who wants to raise a family, a son who needs to look after frail parents or someone who needs to live in one city but work in another are examples of the people who might seek out telecommuting opportunities.

But most people seem to like the idea of leaving the drudgery and dirty dishes behind, dress up a bit and get out. It probably provides people with some meaning in their lives and also gives the man opportunity to play different roles, which are so necessary for their psychological balance. And employers will realise sooner or later that a lot of progress and problem solving comes from the creative tension fostered by direct interaction with peers, customers and competitors.

This means of course that if you had hoped traffic jams would become a thing of the past any time soon, you are wrong. I am rather more fortunate of course, as I drive for an hour every morning and an hour every evening down one of the most beautiful stretches of road in the world. The south coast of New South Wales, Australia is a beautiful part of the world. Particularly as the highway crests Mt. Ousley and follows a sweeping curve downwards it delivers a stunning view of Wollongong. The early morning sun paints the shimmering expanse of sea and harbour and this picture is framed by lush vegetation.

Source: www.mademan.com

We have created a market for IDEAS and you are welcome to swing by and get yourself some.

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Standing on the shoulders of giants to see retail's future

To continue this weeks theme on the FUTURE and PREDICTIONS, I want to take you back to the 1980s when Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock (1980) and The Third Wave.

Remember that when he wrote this, we had not yet seen the wide-scale adoption of the PC or the Internet.

This is what Toffler predicted:

"For Third Wave civilization, the most basic raw material of all--and on that can never be exhausted--is information... With information becoming more important than ever before, the new civilization will restructure education, redefine scientific research and, above all, reorganize the media of communication... Instead of being culturally dominated by a few mass media, Third Wave civilization will rest on inter- active, de-massified media, feeding extremely diverse and often highly personalized imagery into and out of the mind- stream of the society.

"The giant centralized computer with its whirring tapes and complex cooling systems--where it still exists--will be supplemented by myriad chips of intelligence, embedded in one form or another in every home, hospital, and hotel, every vehicle, and appliance, virtually every building-brick. The electronic environment will literally converse with us" (352).

"To operate these factories and offices of the future, Third Wave companies will need workers capable of discretion and resourcefulness rather than rote responses. To prepare such employees, schools will increasingly shift away from present methods still largely geared to producing Second Wave workers for highly repetitive work" (353).

Today we are living these predictions.

Toffler got it right because he did not simply look at basic statistical trends, he looked at the fundamentals and did a meta-analysis on the context. He understood human nature and based his thinking on those timeless principles.

I am sure there are a few companies out there who wished they had paid a bit more attention back then.

Dennis

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We have created a market for IDEAS and you are welcome to swing by and get yourself some.

Franchisors: Convert your OPS MANUAL into a custom-branded, interactive web-based application for $5k only

How do you think?

I am stealing this discussion from AC Grayling, renowned modern philosopher to make my point.

Science demands that every statement must be TRUE or FALSE. (E.g. that is how a computer works, that is how philosophy works and that is how all research works – disproving the null hypothesis.

But if you make this statement when there is no king of France, will it be true or false:

The present king of France is bald

You cannot disprove that statement because it has not been reduced to its core underlying assertions. In this case it would be:

• There is such a thing as the king of France
• There is only one such thing
• That thing is bald

My questions to you are:

1. How do you think?
2. How confident are you in your own logic?
3. Are your decisions habits or real thoughts?

This could be become a really long dissertation, but I shall assign that as homework to you.

The fun version of this is to get someone to answer this question?

Do you still beat up your wife?

Dennis Price

• GANADOR: Architects of high-performance retail environments.

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The secret sauce to any retail business

The big day has finally arrived - your birthday, Christmas or whatever.

Your parents have gone to a lot of trouble to find you the perfect gift: that supadupa robotised gizmo that all the rich kids have. It cost about the same as a mortgage repayment, but you are ten years old and you don’t care about anything like that.

You rip off the paper. You rip through the box. You quickly assemble the various bits – you have studied how to do so on YouTube for days.

Then you press the ON button and… nothing.

You look at the box in dismay and you see a small sign: Batteries not included.

No matter what you do next, the joy and the buzz will never be able to be recreated fully. No matter how quickly you seek, find and install batteries, the gift will never be appreciated in exactly the same way.

If it has happened to you, then you will understand.

It is the little things that count.

It is the little things that give big moments their meaning.

It is hard to lose track of the little things when we focus on the big things.

And it is the same for your business.

In every business there is something that ‘makes it tick’. It is the something that energises the whole business. It may or may not be visible to the customers, but it is what makes everything work.

In a supermarket it may be the cleanliness of the trolleys and baskets.

In the coffee shop it may be the chatter of the barista that makes the wait worthwhile.

What is that ingredient in your business?

If the customer presses the ON button to interact with your business; what happens?

Dennis

• GANADOR: Architects of high-performance retail environments.

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The benefits of the GFC for retail entrepreneurs

Imagine you are tasked with finding out how to make something better. (Aren’t we all?). As part of this process you have figure out whether a particular piece of steel is good for the product.

You apply pressure to it and discover that the beam remains intact (i.e. it successfully performs) at tension level 8. You learn from success.

You repeat the exercise. This time you discover it breaks at level 8.1. You learn from failure.

Which piece of information is more useful?

Obviously it is more useful to appreciate what makes something fail rather than what makes  it succeed.

And when we have learned that, we tend to seek more of that.

But this is the difference between real, sustainable success and terminal failure: Your real challenge is to seek the solution that will benefit under pressure.

Taleb has coined a term for this: Antifragile.

Something that breaks under stress is fragile - drop a glass vase on the ground.

Something that does not break easily under some stress is robust - drop a plastic vase.

Robustness is not the opposite of fragility. Robust is simply less fragile.

But what if there is something that actually benefits (grows stronger) from stress?

When you get a flu shot, you get a dose of germs that will make you stronger.

When you exercise, you stress your muscles but it makes you stronger.

When a child eats dirt, it strengthens their immune system.

When your father throws you against the fence for not hitting the tennis ball properly, you learn to play shots under pressure.

It is counter-intuitive to seek out stressors to get stronger in our business, but we seem happy accept that Botox is a good thing. (It works on the same principle.)

Some time ago the concept of a ‘burning platform’ was popular in management literature. (Here is a post by Harvard Business Review on the topic.)

This idea has been bundled into obscurity by sexier, more current jargon; and few practitioners actively use it.

Knowing what succeeds is not as useful as knowing what fails. But knowing what fails is not nearly as useful as knowing what improves under stress. And the only way to find out is to put your business under stress – inject some botox or set fire to the rig.

Then again; the environment will provide enough shocks to our economic system to foster the antifragility needed to prosper. (GFC anyone?)

What matters is whether you use this as an opportunity to become antifragile. As hard as that may be…

PS: I wrote a post in April 2009 predicting that we will regret our response to the GFC. I still stand by that view.

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TOMORROW'S POST:

How the internet transformed the world (VIDEO)

How to waste money and feel good about it.

YOU SPEND IT ON TRAINING.

Would I succeed if I tried to motivate you?

Of course not!

And here is the kicker:

If I tried to train you will you learn?

Of course not!

Spending money on training is a sure-fire way to win votes. And it is true that when you evaluate and analyse the reason why people can’t do something is because they don’t know how.

If almost all the training you could possibly want is out there and it is free, then 'training' is no more a solution than oxygen is the solution to a happy life: you need it to live, but it won't make one life happier than another.

Most people think it stands to reason that we should spend more money on training. Right?

Wrong.

Very little learning actually happens in a training interaction. Only about 10% in fact.

Think back to your own school days:

How many days did you arrive home thinking you learned a lot that day? Think of how many hours you doodled or gazed through the window while the teacher was talking and chalking?

When kids ask: ‘where am I ever going to use this?’ they are dismissed as not ‘understanding the importance of an education’ but we are dismissing their intuitive grasp of what it means to be fed redundant knowledge.

People who complete TAFE qualifications increase their lifetime earnings by nearly $325,000. The question is what does it cost the state – and is it worth it? Presumably society will get a third back in taxes over a 40-year period. It costs about $14 p/h per student in the TAFE system. In my estimates that mean we will spend $45K to train one person and get a $100K return over 40 years. About 5% p.a. Not great if you ask me. And comparing the TAFE cohort to the non-TAFE cohort is fraught with selection bias. Arguably the person who is ambitious enough and disciplined enough to go to TAFE would have earned more than the non-student anyway

Think about your experience with corporate training:

How much time in a 7-hr workshop do you spend learning? How did you get decide whether that workshop was exactly right for you? After attending it, how many notes did you take and how much do you remember afterwards and how much of it actually results in changed behaviour?

You’d be lucky to get an hour’s worth of learning. The rest is listening to other people show off or ask stupid questions. A good chunk is spent ‘getting to know each other’ in order to create an environment that is ‘safe’ for learning.

People attend training programs and seminars and then go back to the office and ask Nellie how to do something anyway.

Training that happens in classrooms play a role in fostering a certain culture and encouraging bonding. But so does any meeting of a group of people who engage for any the purpose.

In learning and development circles there are a few brave souls who are now advocating informal learning or social learning. Simply put, this is learning by doing – outside the structure of a class room. The general rule of thumb is that this accounts for 70% of all learning. Another 20% of knowledge/skills are acquired by coaching/mentoring (sitting-next-to-Nellie) and only 10% of learning happens in a formal environment.

This paper by Deakin University does a good job of bringing all the thoughts about informal learning together.

In practice this means that of the roughly 2400 days spent at school, you only experienced 240 days of actual learning. Arguably the other ‘skills’ you acquired at school (socialisation, self-esteem etc) and the connections/friends that you made has some value, but could equally also be acquired in a different setting.

Australian workplaces spend about half the amount on training compared to the US (1.5% vs 3%). This means that Australians are smarter than Americans (they know not to waste their money) or that the Government takes too large a role in provision of training. The Government spends about 8% of its budget on training and education (not counting economic participation expenditures).

Would you like to live in ANY of the Top 5 countries in terms of education spend as percentage of GDP? How would you like to live in:

(This is not a % of Budget but % of GDP. If you study the list you will see there is NO correlation between economic status and eagerness to blow money on education.)

The bottom line: Training (the way it is most often done) is NOT the panacea people think it is.

I see learning like I see motivation.

Motivation is intrinsic and the best you can do as a manager/leader/coach is to create an environment that is conducive to achievement. You cannot motivate anyone.

In the same way you cannot train someone; but people can learn. Your job as manager/leader/coach is to create an environment that is conducive to learning.

The training industry is being challenged by flipped classrooms and (free) MOOCs. And so it should. This is an environment that is geared for the true learners (autodidacts) and they are the ones shaping our future.

Classrooms are hotbeds of mediocrity as teachers serve the lowest common denominators.

The stuff you need to learn is out there, and you don’t need a teacher if you are really motivated.

Many people hold Zuckerberg/Gates up as examples of not needing a college/university education. That is ridiculous. For every dropout who has been successful there are hundreds of graduates who are successful. Warren Buffet for one. The percentage of successful dropouts is most likely much lower than the percentage of successful graduates.

University may provide the context for learning - or not. It depends on the individual’s commitment to learning. Wozniak (Apple co-founder) describes his experience like this:

One accident that happened to me was that I taught myself, with no books, how to design computers in high school. I loved doing it and designed computers all the time, from descriptions of them in manuals by the companies that made them. I designed the same computers over and over and made a game out of trying to use fewer and fewer parts, coming up with tricks to accomplish my task that could never be in a book. They were ’tricks‘ in my own head. I felt that some of these tricks would be used by probably no other computer designer in the world. In my game world, on paper, where I could never afford to build my designs, I felt I was one of the best in the world.

The best things I did in my young years leading up to the early Apple computers were done because I had little money and had to think deeply to achieve the impossible. Also, I had never done those technologies or studied them. I had to write the book myself. Being self-taught, figuring out how to design computers with pencil and paper, made me skilled at finding solutions that I had not been taught.

Read this article on how Richard Branson thinks training will happen, and you will not there is no reference to classrooms.

Training should be a trigger for learning and is the starting point for change and growth in a high-performance retail environment.

People, who want to learn, will - whether the training is offered or not.

Success is 0% training and 100% learning. That should be our aim. If you treat ‘more training’ as the whole solution, you are guaranteed to fail. Save your money or do it right.

Mark Twain is quoted as follows:

They Didn’t Know It Was Impossible, So They Did It’

Too much training is about conforming to what is known and the world does not need more of that right now. Too much training is offered as the solution when people don’t know what else to do.

NOTE: Compliance training required by Law may be equally stupid exercise in CYA, but that is an unavoidable fact of corporate life

A business model is not a business plan

I am not a fan of business plans. I am a BIG fan of business models. I have looked around a long time to find a solution or a system - and this is as good as it gets.

It is not perfectly adapted for retail business models - and maybe one day I will try and simply it.