Management

Bottom-Up

 

Bottom Up

Bottom-up. Image Adobe Stock & Vestadil.

Early in my career, as an engineer at Gambro (a Swedish medtech company), I was taught a simple method for expressing the core of the benefits of an offering to a client. The method requires the use of only a verb and a noun to explain what the customer needs.

For example, if you manufacture pencils, the “verb + noun” description is “make mark,” or if you manufacture jewelry and tie clips, the expression is “hold tie.” It is obvious that the business, market, and competitors will be completely different if you provide a solution to “make a mark” or “hold a tie” versus offering a pencil or a tie clip.

 

Verb plus noun

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Attracting talent: One of the Three Key Issues

 

Three questions

Image: Shutterstock & Vestadil AB.

Today, there are three questions that all boards and management must ask themselves. They are:

  1. In what business are we?
  2. Who are our new competitors?
  3. How can we attract and retain talent?

I have in two previous blog posts addressed the first two questions. In this post, I share my views on the challenge of attracting and retaining creative talents.

The ability to attract creative and innovative employees today is as important as access to raw materials is to steelworks or paper mills, for example.

The commercial market battles will be determined by companies that can recruit and retain the very best people in all professional functions. Creativity and innovation are paramount to the success of a company. These companies develop superior and smarter products/services than competitors do.

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New competitors — one of three key questions

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New Competitors

Image: Shutterstock and Vestadil AB.

There are currently three questions that all corporate boards and managements have to ask themselves:

  1. In what business are we?
  2. Who are our new competitors?
  3. How can we attract and retain talented people?

In my previous blog post I addressed the question: “In What business are we?“. The answer is vital input when positioning the company and its businesses. I highlighted the necessity, in the strategic business development, to make a thoroughgoing analysis of the business (industry) in which the company operates.

When making the business analysis, we need to drill down and deeply understand the “problems” that the company’s products aim to solve for the customer, i.e., the core benefits.

The chosen market position will, in turn, determine which products to be developed and what competition the company will meet. In this blog, I deal with the second question, namely the challenge to grasp who are the company’s competitors – particularly new, unexpected competitors. In an upcoming post, I will address the third question to give my view of the challenge of attracting talents to our businesses.

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What business—one of the three key questions

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Three queations

Image: Shutterstock and Vestadil AB

Currently, there are three key questions that all boards of directors and management teams must ask themselves:

  1. In what business are we?
  2. Who are our new competitors?
  3. How can we attract and retain young talent?

In this blog post, I will address the first question regarding the importance of deeply understanding the industry in which the company operates.

In future blog posts, I will address the other two issues, i.e., the importance of the early detection of new competitors that may enter the market and the challenge of attracting talents to our company.

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When does venture capitalists create value

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The business model of Venture Capital (VC) and Private Equity (PE) is to invest in non-listed companies and after five to seven years sell the… Read More »When does venture capitalists create value