Sunday, November 18, 2007

Gas Prices and a Home Based Business

Many are the reasons that a Home-Based business might sound attractive to people nowadays. Among them are working in an arrangement that allows more quality time with the family, working for you versus working for someone else, or working on your own schedule versus answering to the schedule requirements of someone else. If you ask any four people why they want to build a home based business, you might get 4 different answers.

Add fuel costs to that list! As gasoline creeps up toward $4 per gallon, many people are going to have trouble paying for that trip to work and back each day. Building a home based business is one of the greenest business models around, unless of course your home based business involves driving (for example, a mobile eBay consignment business).

If your home business does involve driving, can you re-form your business plan to cut back or eliminate your driving? If you're still looking at home based businesses, perhaps consider driving requirements as criteria. Look for the home based businesses that require little or no driving such as a Drop Ship Home Business or a Home Business taking Infomercial Calls. According to all indicators, the cost of fuel isn't going down anytime soon!

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Saturday, November 10, 2007

To Be Innovative In Today's Market Requires Some Structure

Is innovation just a buzz word or reality for businesses today? According to Andrew Graham, CEO of Kepner-Tregoe, Inc., "The factors that must be in place to support innovation are not a mystery. Companies that rely on ‘innovative thought’ to advance their product development, sales and customer service processes must be sure that they close any gaps in their capacity to encourage and support this breakthrough thinking."

So how can you tell if your business has the proper factors in place? You can perform your own "innovation health check" by looking closely at some key variables.

Does your organization have a clear strategy? Strategy defines the field in which an organization operates and involves questions such as "what products will the firm offer and how much will the firm invest in each?"

Do your company’s business processes measure up? Business processes are the workflows through which business is conducted. Consider, "How can we do this better" or "How would we do this if we had no constraints?" Ask, do we have methods in place for addressing innovation issues?

Does your organization have clear goals and do you measure results? In order to be innovative, your company must have clear, strategy-driven expectations for innovation. Goals must be defined and measured and results must be reported.

Do employees have the inherent skills or the tools necessary to learn to be innovative? Hiring innovative people is one way to foster innovation, but innovation skills and knowledge can also be taught, and creativity nurtured.

Leadership is critical to success. This is the overarching factor that affects all of the other variables of innovation. Leaders must establish an organization’s strategy and ensure that innovation goals are being met, successes and failures measured, and innovative people developed and supported.

But that's not all. Other factors that can make or break an organization’s ability to innovate are structural and cultural. Do information systems enable people to share ideas and learn from the past? Are structures and roles impeding innovation or enabling it to blossom? Does the culture -- including the reward system -- encourage innovation?

What do you think? Leave me a comment.

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