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Success Podcasts - Small Business Expert Ron Finkelstein

Small-business owners: you must listen to this podcast. Podcaster Wayne Hurlbert has an in-depth conversation with author and management consultant Ron Finkelstein on Blog Talk Radio. Finkelstein’s fascinating 1 hour talk only serves to scratch the surface of his decades of consulting experience. Finkelstein is an expert in small-business consulting and discusses his book Celebrating Success! Fourteen Ways to a Successful Company

Finkelstein has pioneered a business networking format called the Small Business Success Mastery Advisory Board composed of business owners-helping-business owners. He has skillfully abstracted and dissected the qualities that make businesses succeed.

Some of my favorite parts of the podcast:

• Owners, even technically-based owners can become “rainmakers" for their businesses with proper sales training


• Clients and employees (and all of us) need to be treated how they want to be treated, not how we want to treat them (the “Platinum Rule’, first articulated by Tony Alessandra)



• Business processes can be studied, and successful processes can be duplicated



• Successful businesses have important factors in common. Learn those factors, and your business will succeed.

Finkelstein does coaching, consulting, speaking, writing, and also has a blog. He comes across as a deeply thoughtful student of business: results-oriented, people-focused, and concept driven.

I look forward to listening to this podcast again and again, and to reading and reviewing his book.

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Tech Tags Ron Finkelstein Small business Business success Business podcast

Success Videos - Larry Keeley on Innovation

Humanity usually gains a great deal when a science progresses from the realm of anecdote to the realm of a rigorous theory bolstered by validating research. The germ theory of disease led to innovations such as vaccination and sanitation, saving billions of lives. The progressive understanding of physics led to radio, television, the computer, and, alas, the atom bomb.

In this brilliant video by Larry Keely, president of Doblin.com, Keeley takes the emerging science of innovation from the obscure, “hit or miss” landscape of accident and luck, towards the goal of reproducible, coherent, scientific results. Indeed, his talk centers on “The Science of Innovative Effectiveness”.

What tells us we are in the “dark ages” of innovation? Simple. His vast statistical studies have determined that current innovation practices have a 95.5% failure rate. In many respects this statistic is reminiscent of the drug-discovery methods that had to be employed before people had a theory of what drugs needed to do and how they did it. Immense research needed to be done on DNA, receptor sites, etc before a coherent body of theory could be leveraged to produce faster and more accurate results.

Keeley has studied decades of innovation in all fields, on all continents, in order to build huge statistical databases of how innovation works, and how it fails. In this video he gives a riveting account of his findings.

A few of my favorite points:

• As opposed to the “breakthrough” model of innovation, the vast majority of innovation is “sustaining”, i.e. incremental improvements.



• Innovation, while perceived to be about “new products” actually occurs in 10 domains, all of which are rich fields for profitable advances. An innovation in a delivery method can be as profitable, or moreso, than an innovation in product design.



• Great innovations innovate in more than one of these domains (think iPod for instance).



• Innovation via intent will produce more focused results than innovation via brainstorming. He calls it the Innovation Discipline Model.

I plan to view this video over and over again, and to get my hands on as much of Larry Keeley’s work as possible. This is the starting gate of a new era. By the way, many of the images on the video are available on the Doblin website.



Related Links :

Jack Welch Video

John Chambers Video

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Techtags:Larry Keeley Doblin Innovation Business Model Core Competency