Posts by Patrick Lefler
Turn Your Suggestion Box into an Innovation Engine
There’s one change above all others that can increase the effectiveness of your suggestion box and turn it into supercharged innovation engine. This action will eliminate the mundane ideas and allow the real gems to rise to the top. It will force your workforce to think about game-changing ideas that will help power your growth…
Read MoreCustomers Don't Care About Your Costs
If customers don’t care about cost, then why do so many firms put so much emphasis on cost when determining price? The answer is that these same firms who rely on cost to determine prices probably don’t understand the value of the products and services they deliver to customers. And because they don’t understand the…
Read MoreEntrepreneurs and the Art of Problem Solving
It’s been said that a problem clearly stated is already half solved, but for most entrepreneurs, impatience usually gets the best of them and they never get the chance to apply the necessary critical thinking skills to solve the myriad problems encountered on a daily basis. Even for the most critical of problems, their problem…
Read MoreThe Power of Storytelling
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore remains one of the best sources of information on how to market and sell “disruptive products to mainstream customers.” Despite being first published almost twenty years ago, the book remains on the recommended reading list for most entrepreneurs today. One of the best chapters of the book centers around…
Read MoreGet Out of the Office and Talk to Customers
The two most important steps for any new business venture are to understand whom you are selling your product to and why they will buy it. And to best answer these two questions, you need to dig a bit deeper and answer questions such as: What customer problem does the product solve? Who are the…
Read MoreDavid Didn't Beat Goliath with a Whiteboard
Tim Ferris, best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek has written a great essay that is featured in the entrepreneurial TechStars book Do More Faster talking about the value of ideas. Titled Trust Me, Your Idea is Worthless, Tim’s point is that “earth shattering and world-changing ideas are a dime a dozen. In fact, that’s being…
Read MoreWinning or Losing – Which is more powerful?
Loss aversion refers to the tendency of people to strongly prefer avoiding losses as opposed to acquiring gains. And this difference between gains and losses is so strong that some studies suggest that the emotions provoked by losses can be twice as powerful an as those for gains. Psychological researchers Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky…
Read MoreRisk – You Must Play to Win
There’s a great story out there about luck that goes something like this… A man kept praying to God to win the lottery. That week he found a dollar on the street and he donated it to charity to show God he is worthy. The lottery came and went and he didn’t win. So the…
Read MoreRelationship between Value and Price
We’re all familiar with the term “you get what you pay for”—but does it really factor into buyers’ perceptions of value today? There’s a really interesting story that comes from the Stanford Entrepreneurship Center where Christine Benninger, president of the Humane Society Silicon Valley, talks about how she leveraged the axiom “you get what you…
Read MoreInnovating with Price
Pricing and innovation are not normally associated together in the same sentence. Pricing is thought to be stagnant (and boring) and impossible to alter, replace or radically improve. Innovation, on the other hand, is….Well, innovation is radical and revolutionary! It’s what drives growth and separates the market leaders from laggards. For many people, innovation is…
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