EQ Journal

Category

Artifex

Professional Artpreneur Gala We want to take this opportunity to thank all the sponsors of Artifex in advance of this very special event that will take place on June 20th, 2012 at the National Gallery Of Canada. These organizations make it possible to celebrate the essential role that the arts play in building better, more [...]

Great Art

At TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) 2011, U2′s Bono made an offhand, almost throwaway comment that stopped me in my tracks. He said something like this: ‘The difference between good, maybe even very good art and great art is HUGE.‘ Entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and artpreneurs would do well to keep this in mind. Steve Jobs was [...]

Can You Bootstrap a Chain of Specialized, Cash-Only Restaurants?

I recently had a chance to ask one of the founders of Toronto-based vegan ‘fast food’ restaurant The Hogtown Vegan (http://www.facebook.com/TheHogtownVegan), Madeleine Foote, six questions about her startup. There are some terrific entrepreneurial lessons here—like KISS (Keep It Simple), be authentic, have a sense of humour about yourself, deliver a lot of value to customers, [...]

MMB, Magic Marketing Button

(How Picture Inc can Develop a Sustainable Community Built Around its Redesigned Biz Model) If your enterprise cannot connect efficiently and cost effectively with customers and clients, you’re dead. This is the sine qua non of marketing. It also means that each enterprise (non-profits, charities, for-profits, even NGOs and gov’t departments) needs to have a [...]

More About Curation

(Curating Sweden: http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2995) (Profession to Watch for in the 21st Century: Curator: http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=487) The proliferation of information in the last Century and this one is beyond belief. In 2008 alone, 487 million gigabytes were added to the collection of digital information world-wide according to an IDC study: As the Economy Contracts, the Digital Universe Expands, [...]

Why You Can’t out-Amazon, Amazon

Also: how the addition of a GIS layer to Amazon’s Price Check turns it into a bookstore-killer app. In Wal-Mart’s HQ in Bentonville, Arkansas there are signs that say: ‘You can’t out-Amazon, Amazon’ and if Wal-Mart can’t do it, you and I probably can’t either. Amazon’s incredible inventory of products and services, its unmatched delivery [...]

Case Study: Digicel’s Decision to Enter Haiti Cell Phone Market

(Undergrad Mid Term Exam) I reproduce below a case study we did on Digicel’s decision to enter the cell phone market in Haiti. It was a controversial decision by Digicel CEO Denis O’Brien to go into Haiti, by far the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Digicel already had 11 million customers in 32 other [...]

Loose Button’s Business Model

[The biz model discussed below was developed by Loose Button Founders Ray Cao and Aditya Shah. What they are building based on it is truly an amazing story. It's a very well thought out model and demonstrates a lot of the principles of GTBMR, Get the Biz Model Right. After review, we added two new [...]

Defining Leadership

Scott Adams, Dilbert creator, says leadership is about getting people to do things they know are not in their best interests. WRONG. This is absolutely not what leaders do, at least, not the successful ones I have known in RL (Real Life). So for Adams and others, here is my attempt at defining what a [...]

Corporate Culture

Why a Stage 4 or 5 Corporate Culture is Essential to Startups and Established Enterprises Alike Why is it that corporate culture is so important to the success of startups and, in fact, all organizations? We know that Zappos.com’s wacky corporate culture and resultant great customer service* were key contributors to making it a billion [...]

Large Companies that Suck at Customer Service

I heard a rather pathetic story today which underlines just how bad many large companies have become at (what is now an oxymoron): customer service. Here’s how it went: A deadbeat customer of Virgin Mobile gave Virgin Mobile the cell number of his ex-roommate, who is a former student of mine. So Virgin Mobile starts [...]

Negative Cost Marketing

Negative Cost Marketing (NCM) is all about getting other people to pay some or all of your marketing costs, in effect, turning your marketing function from a cost centre into a profit centre. NCM is a specific form of Guerrilla Marketing*. The 1964 Tribute Band (Beatles) does this with an ingenious promotion during concerts. They [...]