Yesterday we have another amazing session with four entrepreneurs sharing their biggest business and professional blunders. Here are some of their blunders and lessons learned: Don't be too attached. Your services may be irrelevant in the near future.Reinvent yourself. The market is always changing. Learn to delegate. Work On your business, not IN your business.Who…

Everything runs like clockwork when all staff members show up for the hectic Sunday morning shift at the cafe. Customers are greeted at the door, informed about delays and offered a drink while they wait for a table. The whole system falls apart when one team member calls in sick. The restaurant staff double as…

When you are designing a product or service it is easy to believe that making it the best in the world is what gives you a competitive advantage. But the thing about ‘best’ is that it’s subjective. ‘Best’ is not determined by you, it is your customers and users who decide. The truth is that…

Successful innovations always start with the customer’s story. The products and services people use and keep coming back to, create a change in that story. There is life before the product or service existed and a different life after. And so if follows, then, we succeed by thinking less about what we are creating, and more about what…

Things we usually talk about: The weather, celebrities, our mood, random memes, the cat video of the moment, television, gossip, politics. Things we don’t usually talk about: Tough decisions, dreams, caring, challenges, books, lessons learnt, ideas that inspire us. What if we flipped these around? Image by Naassom Azevedo 

An innovation is a new answer to an old question. A paradigm shift is a new question, and thereby a new answer. When the first iPhone came out we were all absolutely blown away.  I had a friend named Mo who was really into ‘all that stuff’ [most people were not back then] and he…

There is not a whole lot of innovation in the milk business these days. Milk is not getting better. Milk is milk. Except changing the packaging into a purple cow carton, milk is remains milk, the product does not change, the packaging does. You can have a purple cow cover, but not purple milk. So…

Alan shared this short blog post, I loved it and I thought it is worth sharing: ____________________________________________ When you look at a tree, the flower is most readily noticeable. But it comes and goes. What about a leaf or a branch? A leaf is green and pretty, but animals eat it. The branch seems more…

“In undisturbed ancient forests, youngsters have to spend their first two hundred years waiting patiently in their mothers’ shade. As they struggle to put on a few feet, they develop wood that is incredibly dense. In modern managed forests today, seedlings grow without any parental shade to slow them down. They shoot up and form…

Simplicity, as a concept, is ever so powerful. Just ask the Orlando Pirates players who got ripped apart over the weekend by Mamelodi Sundown’s consistent ‘simple’ passing game. Inspired by that, for today’s thought, I am going to leave you with a very simple idea. Let’s take a minute to study the picture below. It…

From time to time, I am reminded of an exchange between Albert Einstein and his Assistant a few days before his passing. Einstein had just walked into his office for what would turn out to be the last ever time. His Assistant noticed his discomfort and asked: “Is everything okay?” “Everything is okay. I am…