IBM’s $100 Million Venture Fund; End of Humans; Great Music; 4Es of Markets
January 9, 2014Dilbert on Goals; End Aging; Diets Suck! Solutions; Fortune Stories Needed
January 23, 201452,000 Applicants; IBM’s 5 Predictions; 100 Best Places; Verne Webinar Tuesday
"…keeping you great"
HEADLINES:
Verne Harnish Webinar Jan 21 1pm – 2pm ET — I'll be hosting a complimentary one hour webinar entitled "Eliminate the 5 Business Diseases so you can Scale-up Your Business in 2014."
Five ways to make it in the U.S.A. — this is the headline (very US centric, my apologies to our global readers) of my latest Venture column in the Feb 3 Fortune magazine – here's a link online. It focuses on five ways for US-based firms to differentiate themselves from global competitors including playing the patriot card in the US. Thanks to Steven Krane at start-up 800razors.com and Thomas Hill at $230 million Kimray for sharing their insights.
100 Best Places to Work — Fortune's annual list was released this week and Google tops the list as the Best Place to Work. SAS, Boston Consulting Group, Edward Jones, and Quicken Loans round out the top 5. Here's a link to the entire list – worth taking 1 minute to scan down through – then you can click on any company to get the lowdown on why they won to mine ideas you might implement in your own company. Have your head of "People" take a few hours to sort through the ideas and make recommendations.
52,000 Applicants for 569 Openings — And perennial favorite Rackspace came in at #29, up from #34 last year. One indication of their popularity – last year nearly 52,000 applied for their 569 new job openings, blowing away the 20:1 ratio we recommend as a minimum if you're going to hire great people (one of the reasons it's important to apply and win local awards like this). Here are the details behind Rackspace's success.
IBM's Top 5 Predictions in 5 Years — after 8 years of providing these predictions, IBM has about a 50% success rate – not bad. I find their insights valuable as we help clients explore their 3 – 5 year priorities using our new SWT Trends tool. Here are IBM's latest predictions:
- Smarter Schools using Big Data
- Self-correcting Cities
- Digital Guardians
- Medical Treatment Tailored to your DNA (the one of think will do more harm initially!)
- Local Shopping Makes a Comeback
Here's a link to more details behind each 5 year trend – worth 2 minutes to scan through if you're on the strategic thinking team for the company.
New Top International Fashion Brand in India — and congratulations to YPOer Sanjeev Mohanty and his team at Benetton India for besting Levi's and becoming the new top international fashion brand in India. His team have been active practitioners of the Rockefeller Habits and Sanjeev is chairing the first "Making the Rockefeller Habits Rock" 2.5 day workshop for YPOers and their teams April 2 – 4 in New Delhi, India.
COACHING:
