Innovate. Activate. Accelerate.
A book for those who see every day as an opportunity to be smarter about how they approach their business, their customers and their competition.
CEOs & Entrepreneurs
It doesn’t matter if you are a small business owner or running a Fortune 100 company. It’s a common occurrence that the day-to-day stresses of running a business can take a toll on your ability to get above it all and think strategically. This book is designed to give a few minutes a day to reset that part of your brain that welcomes the comfort of business as usual, and to restart the process of evaluating strategies and asking, “What if?”
Innovators
An innovator’s job is not, as many think, to create new product ideas from thin air. It is to uncover real business opportunities. The ideas and concepts presented in this book were written to give you some added support for finding, evaluating, and launching new ideas. And, most importantly, to evaluate those new ideas in a framework consistent with your business goals and the markets in which you compete.
Strategists
Whether you’re looking for a new strategic approach to solving a business challenge or new approaches for maximizing results from the strategy to which you’re already committed, you’ll likely find some new ideas to explore.
What’s inside?
INNOVATE:
What will you do?
In business today, competition isn’t the most imminent threat—it’s complacency. The chapters in this section are less about the creation of ideas than they are about how you shape your attitudes, behaviors and processes in a manner that directs the greatest resources and energy into developing ideas that best serve the customer and the business alike.
Day 1: Remember, there's always a "day 1."
Day 2: Innovation culture begins with language.
Day 3: Learn to see with new eyes.
Day 4: Think like a customer from another planet.
Day 5: Pick the right path.
Day 6: Rig the odds in your favor.
Day 7: Play the long game.
Day 8: Put your big idea on trial.
Day 9: Always do the math.
Day 10: Take time to write the full story.
Day 11: Use story to examine failures, too.
Day 12: Beware "good enough."
Day 13: Rip success from the jaws of failure.
ACTIVATE:
How will you connect?
Our fractured media environment, together with accelerating technological advances, is making it more difficult than ever to gain traction in the marketplace. This section of the book provides examples of strategies, tactics, technologies and target market considerations to help you rethink, reimagine and revitalize your activation strategies.
Day 14: Learn Marketing from Jack Nicholson.
Day 15: Wield influence responsibly.
Day 16: Don't follow the leader.
Day 17: Ask WTF is ABM?
Day 18: Grab your SEM by the long tail.
Day 19: Take the Taylor Swift Agency Relationship Test.
Day 20: Learn to read the Tea Leaves.
Day 21: Don't overdose on the good stuff.
Day 22: Up your Millennials game.
Day 23: Meet Generation Z.
ACCELERATE:
How will you move ahead?
No business has unlimited time or resources. If the previous sections of this book are about choosing what game you’re playing, and in what arenas you’ll find the best luck, this section is about how you might strategically approach the game itself.
Day 24: Think like a challenger.
Day 25: Rethink your growth strategy.
Day 26: Distinguish between technology and transformation.
Day 27: Embrace deep-learning.
Day 28: Automate as much as possible—but no more.
Day 29: Don't outspend them. Outsmart them.
Day 30: Keep your chin up.