Get free content for your website
Search for articles that your audience will appreciate and reprint them for free. Ideal for finding content for your blog, website or other publication. Read our publishers guide to get started.
Articles by Donald Mitchell
For Great Success, Go To The Best Place To Plant The First Water Lilies
Everyone wants to know how companies get big fast. First, you need a great industry to enter. Then, you need to pick the right way to enter that industry. Planning for maximum growth is a good way to locate that entry point.
The Strategic Advantages Of Maximizing Natural Business Growth
Growth can occur naturally . . . or it can be forced by using bad methods. This article suggests abandoning the forced methods that have led to the current global recession in favor of using natural growth opportunities to succeed.
Before Your Market Becomes Unattractive, Take Your Assets And Go
Sometimes markets decline and just get worse. This article looks at how to respond when that happens by taking your capital and moving to a better market, much as a venture capitalist would.
Be Fascinated By Where You Are -- Grab Excellent Opportunities Everyone Has Overlooked
Companies want to grow faster and always imagine that areas they haven't explored are full of better opportunities than where they are. The truth is usually the opposite. This article explores the missing opportunities at toymaker Hasbro.
Genetifcally Engineer Breakthrough Business Models That Deliver More Stakeholder Benefits
Using genetic engineering, scientists can take qualities of a weed for hardiness and transfer those strengths into a food crop. In the same way, you can genetically engineer your business model by adding on all of the attractive qualities of complementary business models. If you combine enough business models, you'll have an amazing advantage that will deliver myriads of benefits to large numbers of people.
Get Smart And Create More Prosperity: Add Knowledge For Your Stakeholders
Most strategies call for being smart, efficient, and effective. Expand the timeline for delivering those qualities, and you see that improving the knowledge and opportunities of stakeholders is critical to long-term success. This article looks at examples of how this principle has been applied.
Cast Bread On New Waters To Create More Benefits
Business models can be adjusted to provide new types of benefits to more stakeholders. In the process, the value of the business model expands and social benefit, as well as organizational success, increases.
Avoid The Wrong Leadership And Sprint To Business Victory
What are the ways that you as a leader can ensure or destroy business success? You probably don't realize that most things you do don't make a difference. In this article, you will find some common self-sabotage problems that leaders bring on themselves and how you can avoid those mistakes.
To Get A Chance To Persuade, Write About What Others Have Written
Do you have a message for the masses? Try writing book reviews on similar subjects as a way to get your point across. You'll reach many more people that way with less effort.
Head For The Open Road To Add More Dimensions Of Customer Value
A strategy can tie you onto a path that leads nowhere. Long before that happens, you should look for new strategies that allow you to add more kinds of value for customers and other stakeholders. This article looks at how Huffy improved its performance as a bicycle marketer by stopping its manufacturing.
A First-Aid Kit For Fixing Your Broken Business Model Innovation Process
Business model innovation is task one for success in the 21st century. Yet most organizations have a broken process for doing such innovation. This article provides questions that can quickly fix your broken business model innovation process.
For The Largest Profits Cover The Biggest Lily Pond You Can
Profit growth potential begins with choosing the highest potential markets to serve. Then, select the way to innovate that will expand the market and your market share the fastest.
For More Success, Carefully Study And Improve How You Made Successful Business Innovations
A building will be stronger if it has a sound foundation. By studying how you have made superior business model improvements in the past, you can repeat those successes while adding more helpful elements.
Test Your Business Model Innovation Options For The Enthusiasm They Generate And Pilot The Winners
Powerful improved business models are created more often by organizations that have continually processes for developing them. Selecting such a process is an important strategic leadership task. Those who check for the enthusiasm such processes generate and pilot how easy they are to use will make better choices of processes to use.
Encourage Your Business Model Innovations To Grow Like Bamboo
Business model innovation should be top priority. Where should you start? Begin by understanding what your process has been . . . and then improve on it.
Establish And Improve Business Models That Accelerate The Potential For Greater General Prosperity
Wouldn't it be nice to have more customers? You will if you focus on developing improved business models that increase general prosperity as well as the size of your industry.
Before Your Harvest Unexpectedly Slows Down, Search For The Next Generation Of Business Models
When should you start on another generation of business model innovation? This article uses an example from the technology industry to show that an early start is essential, long before your current business model starts to run out of steam.
Have A Core Business Model Insight That Helps You Quickly Move On To The Next Opportunity
Creating successful new business models is a lot like chess: You have to plan several moves in advance. In this article, you will learn how a core insight can drive continuing business model innovation in the way that a chess strategy helps crown a champion.
Profit From Soaring Like A Nonprofit Eagle
The best nonprofit organizations often innovate practices that for-profit companies should develop. Here's how to look for and benefit from those practices.
The Pathway For Exponential Improvements
Exponential improvements are available to those who can get over bad habits and start focusing on the right process to achieve breakthroughs.
Share What You Learned From Reactions To Your Proposed New Business Model And Your Intentions
Develop a new business model in cooperation with listening to and reporting to stakeholders if you want to get the best ideas and have the most support.
Seven Key Questions To Create A Highly Profitable Business Model
Business model innovation is all about providing more value to more people in more ways . . . while exciting those who are working on the task.
Put In The Right Values And A Helpful Organizational Structure That Will Stimulate Innovation
Organizational values can help inspire and encourage innovation by releasing the aspirations and talents of everyone within the organization.
Fast Progress On Several Fronts At Once In Ways That Serve Customers
Take care of your employees and they will take care of your customers. This article looks at how AES and Southwest Airlines have applied this principle.
Develop A Better Business Model Faster By Considering Past Performance As If These Were New Tests
Past successes and failures show clues concerning opportunities and hurdles for creating superior business models. Learn from those experiences.
Before Choosing A New Business Model, Check On The Values Your Organization Holds
Value-based business models do better than those that ignore important human values. This article suggests what some of those values are as a starting point for your business model innovations.
Benefits: Locate Business Model Concepts To Make A BiggerPie Through Investing
Don't wait for successful business model innovation tests to begin organizing your new business model's implementation.
Be More Skeptical About Cost Reduction Tests
Plausible ideas often contain huge errors. With the poor track record behind cost-reduction tests, you need to be more skeptical to find the right tests to implement.
Before Cost Improvements, Be Sure That Performance For Customers Will Improve Or Be The Same
It's difficult to spot harmful cost reductions. This article helps you appreciate the need to focus on the customer impact.
Pick High Potential, High Probability Cost-Reduction Tests
Pick the right cost reductions to test, and you'll be off to a faster start in successful business model innovation.
Eight Questions That Deliver Valuable Cost Cuts
New perspectives can keep you focused on the most highly productive areas of cost reduction.
Avoid Hurting Sales By Ill-Chosen Cost Cuts
Don't assume that cost reductions will leave sales unaffected: Take the time to consider what will probably happen before making cost cuts.
In Implementing Cost Reducitons, Look At Total Cash Flow Costs Rather Than Accounting Costs
If you are a privately held company, look to reduce overall cash costs when considering alternative cost reductions, rather than the impact of reported earnings.
Reducing Your Cost Of Capital Gives You A Discount On Everything You Buy
Reduce your cost of equity capital and you can both grow faster at lower operating cost.
Use Outsourcing To Improve Your Business Model
Outsourcing can narrow your focus, make you more effective, and lower your costs.
Avoid Conflicts Of Interest And Bad Ideas To Gain Successful Cost Reductions
Cost reductions often don't work. Why? Conflicts of interest get in the way, as do incorrect ideas about how to reduce costs.
Redirect Your Cost Savings Into The Most Productive Investments
It's more important to invest the benefits of cost savings well than it is to save the costs in the first place.
Costs: Locate Great Ideas For Greater Reductions In More Places
This article explains that changing business models can lead to breakthrough cost improvements.
Profit Greatly By Picking The Right Price Tests!
Price tests can create more problems than benefits unless you evaluate potential drawbacks in advance. This article poses questions to help you check for those issues.
Control Strategic Management Of Emerging Technologies With Pricing
Price too high and you'll get too many competitors at lower prices. Price too low and you'll expand the market faster than you can serve it, and even more competitors will pummel you. So what's the right price?
Adjust Prices To Make Your Offerings More Appealing In Non-Price Ways
High prices suggest higher quality and lower prices the opposite. Where are your prices sending the wrong message?
Apply Price Incentives To Encourage Customers To Help You Lower Costs
Prices can raise profits by helping encourage customers to ask for things that are very expensive to deliver. This article looks at two examples of creating lower costs and higher profits by using this technique.
Use Lower Prices To Reduce Costs And Increase Demand For Your Offerings
Look for ways to lower costs rapidly with lower prices so that your profit and growth soar.
Use Innovative Pricing To Become More Profitable
Sometimes lower prices can deliver higher profits. This article explains what to look for to identify such an opportunity.
We are used to thinking about the passage of time as being the equivalent of having our lives go downhill. But time can instead be our friend, helping us achieve what we could never do before.
What Are The Potential Gains For Your Life?
If you focus on creating 2,000 percent solutions, you can lead a longer, happier, and more affluent life. This article explores some of the dimensions.
Guidance For Nearsighted Optimists
Our limitations will melt away if we believe they will, keep the faith, and act on opportunities.
Use Pricing To Change The Way Your Offerings Are Used And Expand Consumption
Pricing can be used to change the perception of the value involved in using your offering. This example explains how reducing incremental prices as low as possible can expand use and profits.
Locate High Potential Ideas To Create More Profitable Sales From Adjusting Prices
Price testing needs to explore a wider range of strategies and elasticities than most price tests consider.
Check Your Successful Business Model Improvement Tests For Implementation
To succeed with profitable innovations, you have to be running enough business model improvement tests, have some succeed, and take the right next steps.