Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Hoover’s Vision
Hoover’s Vision
© 2001 by Gary Hoover
I found that copying the current leader is not the formula for success. Success is based not on thinking like today’s winner but on thinking differently, thinking in original and creative way. Vision must stand on four pillars: clarity, consistency, uniqueness and service. The result is what I call the essence of the enterprise. Essence must come from within.
What distinguishes the great entrepreneurs? It all starts with curiosity. They were the most curious people we had ever worked with. They ask questions about anything and everything, you simply could not stop the flow. In his book “Living To 100” Harvard researched with Thomas Perls reports on what he has learned from people. He stresses the importance of mental exercise of working the brain. “Wisdom begins in Wonder” said Socrates. We must recapture the ability and the willingness to be amazed. When was the last time some new creative knowledge took your breath away? After opening our minds to wonder the next thing we have to do is ponder. We need to think before we speak, before we act and most important before we conclude.
The more we think about our ideas the more we bounce them off people the stronger the ideas become even if we find that everyone disagrees with us. When you read something, pass it on to at least one person who would find it interesting. Speak out to the eccentrics around you. Find out what drives their passion. When you run into someone like this take them out for lunch. “What are the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World” is a great book. “How to think like Leonardo Da Vinci” by Michael Gelb and “Flatman” by A. E Abbot. Every evening ask yourself “what have I learned today?”
As we form our understanding that the subjects were part of the world we begin to see how things relate to one another. One way to do this is to think of how your industry whether education, religion or making pencils that would gain. In a new industry what are the chance of cards, what are the penalties, who are the players, how can they help you or hurt you, what are the defining moves, the moves that determine the outcome of the game, what is the full house in your industry, what is Boardwalk on your industry’s monopoly board? Even if you don’t think through the complete game at least diagram your business on a piece of paper. Old ideas come back again and again. One way to start connecting things is by understanding the chain that the thing you are studying is harder. Common chain to keep an eye out for include the time from past or future, age from old to young, passed from source to destination, price from low to high, hierarchies from chief to subordinate.
www.ideastation.com is a computer thesaurus.
www.inspiration.com is an idea processor.
Europe is not a continent. It is a peninsula on the continent of Asia.
The two things that booksellers really sell are information and entertainment. Aristotle Onassis said, “The secret of success is knowing something nobody else knows. The secret of success is seeing something nobody else sees”. Why did no one in the industry see what was coming? They never got out of the stores, they never looked to other types of retailing. All of us tend to think in a familiar channel. We all get interrupted. We never venture outside of our own industry. Doctors do not go to lawyer’s convention, hardware store owners don’t go to restaurant convention because the basic road to discovery is that nothing has ever been discovered by looking in the same place and in the same way as everyone else. You must look at the same things as everyone else, wear color glasses or stand on your head. Everyday when we get out of bed most of us are on the track, our old habits, our usual way of thinking, our comfortable routine.
Only by thinking about the unexpected, by looking for the undone thing we really jump the track and create a whole new vision. We initially only consider a tiny fraction of the possibilities available to us. At any given moment we should be doing any one of millions of different things. Open your minds to the possibilities. Go to a large newsstand and select $15.00 worth of magazines you have never heard of, take them home and scan them. Think about the people who read these magazines. Contact some living famous person in the area that interests you. Many are more accessible than you might think. When you go to the city there are places that sell the item. This exercise may take you to a neighborhood you have never even heard of.
It is difficult to exaggerate the power of serendipity. In the early 1950s George Mestral went for a walk in the Splits Wood and came home with bores in the socks. He invented Velcro. Percy Spencer was working on the microwave lab sat waiting on him in 1946 and the Hershey’s bar in his pocket melted. He invented the microwave oven. Listen to every kind of music, try every type of food, and go to a variety of movies, read books from every shelf in your local bookstore or library. Go to another industry’s invention. Play a game with yourself. I call it toss it up. Break out of your normal patterns of living and thinking.
Jack Watts of General Electric calls this phenomena pushing the peanut. If you have budgeted 6.9% of sales for customer service then you will probably going to consider going to 6.6% or 7.2% but you will never ever think about what would happen should business be slashed, service spending to 3% or raised it to 12%. Realistic graphs are so powerful we don’t even know we are in them. The best sources of financing are your customers and your suppliers. Perpendicular ways of thinking, finding strangeness in the familiar, your way of thinking, your friend’s way of thinking, and opposition way of thinking are parallel. Think perpendicular.
When Allen Newhart dreamed that America needed a national daily newspaper especially one in color, everyone laughed. Everyday entrepreneurs and other dreamers confront the impossible. If you look at the great enterprise builders, the people who have made a difference you find that breakthroughs are usually made by people with a broad view of the world. They make use of the tools of science, long sight tools of social studies and humanity. The more we see the things the way others see them, the more we can build a comprehensive view of what matters.
People that will make you think for the Nonzero The Logic of Human Destiny and The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century, also the Collapse of Complex Societies. There will be dramatic expansion of four key industries because of the baby boom: aging - health, education, travel and financial services.
As recently as 1980 people of Hispanic origin was only 6% of the U.S. population, by 2000 12%, by 2025 18%. Asian-American has risen from 1.6% in 1980 to 4.2 in 2000. It is expected to cross 10% in the second half of the 21st century. Islam is the fastest growing religion in America with estimates of four to seven million adherents.
Another book Time for Life: The Surprising Ways American Use Their Time.” “The further backward you look, the further forward you can see” Winston Churchill. “History may be divided into three movements: “What moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all” Fernand Braduel.
Thinking about the same through time, what’s different, what is the same, how do we get where we are today, can we get ancient ideas from the past? Think about a world in which the United States is no longer the world’s most powerful nation. Think about the world when its power is in increasingly centered in China. Avoid chronocentricity. In only ten years America crossed the magic 50% participation line in cars, electric lighting and indoor plumbing. Just one year later radio crossed the same line.
Hilton Grand Hotels, Ralph Fitz born in 1891 whose crowning achievement was opening the Hotel New Yorker, Manhattan’s largest hotel with 2,500 rooms, ten weeks after the stock market crash. How did Fitz do it? The May 1937 issue of Fortune talked about it. Fitz’s team tracked every regular customer. If they didn’t hear from that particular patron for few months they send a letter asking if anything was wrong. He would ask the little boy when his birthday was. A birthday card would follow. Hotel management knew the preferences of every regular guest. Teams of clerks kept track of all this information before computerized databases.
Whenever I meet the high school senior planning on college I am tempted to suggest that they would learn more if they went to college for two or three years then traveled the world for another year or two. This is one of the best investments a young person can make.
If you want to see people of all the races living together in harmony go see it in Singapore and Malaysia. Malaysia has roughly 60% Malaya, 30% Chinese and 10% India.
The single most critical ingredient of enterprise success is having a clear vision. The vision tells us why the enterprise exists. An enterprise without set purposes is like a ship without rudder. Next the vision should be informed. Hand in hand with being informed comes forward thinking. The vision is not intended to reflect whatever flaws your enterprise may have today. It should reflect what you expect and hope your enterprise will become. Your vision is by definition of statement of ambition. A forward-looking statement of purpose informs everyone of the direction the enterprise is moving. But the clear vision always lets everyone know what direction you want to be moving in. All priorities flow from a clear vision. Instead of vision that should be highly customized vision that could only come from your enterprise. Uniqueness and differentiation are crucial to a great vision. What adjectives and phrases would you use to describe that? Every enterprise has a personality. Inevitably the vision of an enterprise reflects its personality.
A vision inspires. A vision is an anchoring hard time from times to change. A vision is a potent, competitive tool. A vision builds community, clear, consistent, unique and serving. A third grade vision. Any third grader could understand it. While hidden values and a clear vision is there to confuse the enemy. People love complex stories and conspiracies. Simple stories seem less interesting and many people find it hard to accept that the truth can be still straightforward. Anything you can do to streamline your vision to simplify your story is a step in the right direction.
The part of an enterprise that does not change is the essence. Everything else, every aspect of the execution of the idea, every strategy and tactic every product and every price is subject to change, sometimes frequent change. Your customers change annually, monthly, weekly, daily even hourly. To serve them well your enterprise must also be able to change. At the same time fair consistent priorities the heart of vision must be in place if leaders and followers are to know what to change and what not to change. In real estate it is location, location, location, in business it is differentiate, differentiate, and differentiate. The reality is that most successful enterprises do one thing and do it extremely well.
When you are pursuing opportunities do not lose too much sleep if the single best part is already taken, take a really excellent alternate spot and pursue with all your heart. You should try to own a word in the customer’s mind. Each enterprise has a personality. The first question I ask the leaders of any enterprise is why does this enterprise exist? The only valid reason to the existence of any enterprise, for profit or non, is to provide products or services to people, to somehow make the world a better place. The only rule is that customers always get what they want and it is just a matter of who gives it to them and when. You will find workers to believe and it is a great privilege to have the opportunity to serve others. Service oriented people understand that serving is the priority. These people care. They get genuine satisfaction from helping others achieve their goals.
One solution is every week they invite applicants to a meeting at their offices and they put them all in a room with application forms. They then say our chief of recruiting is a little late please make yourself at home for a while. Then they watch the people who fill up their forms and then sit quietly awaiting the recruiter are not hired. The people who finish their forms then turn to the stranger next to them and start talking to them asking about them are taken to the next level of interview. Central market first looks for people who care then looks at résumé. Shared value defeats shared experience.
The most direct reach for prosperity is by asking our existing customers what else could I do for you, what else do you need, what do we right and how can we do it even better? Just most companies merely took their present customer base and focused on them, looked at how to serve them better, and attract more customers. Most companies would not have to look elsewhere for business. Customer acquisition cost has become one of the most closely watched statistics at any company. These new customers are the expensive ones. Once you have a customer and it is worth your while to do everything you can to keep them to make them even happier, how much you might spend during the rest of your life if they keep you happy. Whenever you get confused go to the store the customer has all the answers.
Microsoft person ask how we should fly? Is the hotel okay? What did you think of the alarm clock? Microsoft asks questions like this one because they want to know if you pay attention to details. Do these things matter to you? Are you willing to make sacrifices for the benefit of the customer? Value equals quality plus other factors divided by price.
First when you come up with a whole new idea there is no way someone else can visualize it like you can, not even your mom. Second customers do not always consciously know what they want. Streamlining, redefining and subdividing, any step towards simplicity is worth taking always these steps streamline your enterprise.
The truth is that many of the leading Internet companies of 2010 have yet to be founded.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587990598
© 2001 by Gary Hoover
I found that copying the current leader is not the formula for success. Success is based not on thinking like today’s winner but on thinking differently, thinking in original and creative way. Vision must stand on four pillars: clarity, consistency, uniqueness and service. The result is what I call the essence of the enterprise. Essence must come from within.
What distinguishes the great entrepreneurs? It all starts with curiosity. They were the most curious people we had ever worked with. They ask questions about anything and everything, you simply could not stop the flow. In his book “Living To 100” Harvard researched with Thomas Perls reports on what he has learned from people. He stresses the importance of mental exercise of working the brain. “Wisdom begins in Wonder” said Socrates. We must recapture the ability and the willingness to be amazed. When was the last time some new creative knowledge took your breath away? After opening our minds to wonder the next thing we have to do is ponder. We need to think before we speak, before we act and most important before we conclude.
The more we think about our ideas the more we bounce them off people the stronger the ideas become even if we find that everyone disagrees with us. When you read something, pass it on to at least one person who would find it interesting. Speak out to the eccentrics around you. Find out what drives their passion. When you run into someone like this take them out for lunch. “What are the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World” is a great book. “How to think like Leonardo Da Vinci” by Michael Gelb and “Flatman” by A. E Abbot. Every evening ask yourself “what have I learned today?”
As we form our understanding that the subjects were part of the world we begin to see how things relate to one another. One way to do this is to think of how your industry whether education, religion or making pencils that would gain. In a new industry what are the chance of cards, what are the penalties, who are the players, how can they help you or hurt you, what are the defining moves, the moves that determine the outcome of the game, what is the full house in your industry, what is Boardwalk on your industry’s monopoly board? Even if you don’t think through the complete game at least diagram your business on a piece of paper. Old ideas come back again and again. One way to start connecting things is by understanding the chain that the thing you are studying is harder. Common chain to keep an eye out for include the time from past or future, age from old to young, passed from source to destination, price from low to high, hierarchies from chief to subordinate.
www.ideastation.com is a computer thesaurus.
www.inspiration.com is an idea processor.
Europe is not a continent. It is a peninsula on the continent of Asia.
The two things that booksellers really sell are information and entertainment. Aristotle Onassis said, “The secret of success is knowing something nobody else knows. The secret of success is seeing something nobody else sees”. Why did no one in the industry see what was coming? They never got out of the stores, they never looked to other types of retailing. All of us tend to think in a familiar channel. We all get interrupted. We never venture outside of our own industry. Doctors do not go to lawyer’s convention, hardware store owners don’t go to restaurant convention because the basic road to discovery is that nothing has ever been discovered by looking in the same place and in the same way as everyone else. You must look at the same things as everyone else, wear color glasses or stand on your head. Everyday when we get out of bed most of us are on the track, our old habits, our usual way of thinking, our comfortable routine.
Only by thinking about the unexpected, by looking for the undone thing we really jump the track and create a whole new vision. We initially only consider a tiny fraction of the possibilities available to us. At any given moment we should be doing any one of millions of different things. Open your minds to the possibilities. Go to a large newsstand and select $15.00 worth of magazines you have never heard of, take them home and scan them. Think about the people who read these magazines. Contact some living famous person in the area that interests you. Many are more accessible than you might think. When you go to the city there are places that sell the item. This exercise may take you to a neighborhood you have never even heard of.
It is difficult to exaggerate the power of serendipity. In the early 1950s George Mestral went for a walk in the Splits Wood and came home with bores in the socks. He invented Velcro. Percy Spencer was working on the microwave lab sat waiting on him in 1946 and the Hershey’s bar in his pocket melted. He invented the microwave oven. Listen to every kind of music, try every type of food, and go to a variety of movies, read books from every shelf in your local bookstore or library. Go to another industry’s invention. Play a game with yourself. I call it toss it up. Break out of your normal patterns of living and thinking.
Jack Watts of General Electric calls this phenomena pushing the peanut. If you have budgeted 6.9% of sales for customer service then you will probably going to consider going to 6.6% or 7.2% but you will never ever think about what would happen should business be slashed, service spending to 3% or raised it to 12%. Realistic graphs are so powerful we don’t even know we are in them. The best sources of financing are your customers and your suppliers. Perpendicular ways of thinking, finding strangeness in the familiar, your way of thinking, your friend’s way of thinking, and opposition way of thinking are parallel. Think perpendicular.
When Allen Newhart dreamed that America needed a national daily newspaper especially one in color, everyone laughed. Everyday entrepreneurs and other dreamers confront the impossible. If you look at the great enterprise builders, the people who have made a difference you find that breakthroughs are usually made by people with a broad view of the world. They make use of the tools of science, long sight tools of social studies and humanity. The more we see the things the way others see them, the more we can build a comprehensive view of what matters.
People that will make you think for the Nonzero The Logic of Human Destiny and The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century, also the Collapse of Complex Societies. There will be dramatic expansion of four key industries because of the baby boom: aging - health, education, travel and financial services.
As recently as 1980 people of Hispanic origin was only 6% of the U.S. population, by 2000 12%, by 2025 18%. Asian-American has risen from 1.6% in 1980 to 4.2 in 2000. It is expected to cross 10% in the second half of the 21st century. Islam is the fastest growing religion in America with estimates of four to seven million adherents.
Another book Time for Life: The Surprising Ways American Use Their Time.” “The further backward you look, the further forward you can see” Winston Churchill. “History may be divided into three movements: “What moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all” Fernand Braduel.
Thinking about the same through time, what’s different, what is the same, how do we get where we are today, can we get ancient ideas from the past? Think about a world in which the United States is no longer the world’s most powerful nation. Think about the world when its power is in increasingly centered in China. Avoid chronocentricity. In only ten years America crossed the magic 50% participation line in cars, electric lighting and indoor plumbing. Just one year later radio crossed the same line.
Hilton Grand Hotels, Ralph Fitz born in 1891 whose crowning achievement was opening the Hotel New Yorker, Manhattan’s largest hotel with 2,500 rooms, ten weeks after the stock market crash. How did Fitz do it? The May 1937 issue of Fortune talked about it. Fitz’s team tracked every regular customer. If they didn’t hear from that particular patron for few months they send a letter asking if anything was wrong. He would ask the little boy when his birthday was. A birthday card would follow. Hotel management knew the preferences of every regular guest. Teams of clerks kept track of all this information before computerized databases.
Whenever I meet the high school senior planning on college I am tempted to suggest that they would learn more if they went to college for two or three years then traveled the world for another year or two. This is one of the best investments a young person can make.
If you want to see people of all the races living together in harmony go see it in Singapore and Malaysia. Malaysia has roughly 60% Malaya, 30% Chinese and 10% India.
The single most critical ingredient of enterprise success is having a clear vision. The vision tells us why the enterprise exists. An enterprise without set purposes is like a ship without rudder. Next the vision should be informed. Hand in hand with being informed comes forward thinking. The vision is not intended to reflect whatever flaws your enterprise may have today. It should reflect what you expect and hope your enterprise will become. Your vision is by definition of statement of ambition. A forward-looking statement of purpose informs everyone of the direction the enterprise is moving. But the clear vision always lets everyone know what direction you want to be moving in. All priorities flow from a clear vision. Instead of vision that should be highly customized vision that could only come from your enterprise. Uniqueness and differentiation are crucial to a great vision. What adjectives and phrases would you use to describe that? Every enterprise has a personality. Inevitably the vision of an enterprise reflects its personality.
A vision inspires. A vision is an anchoring hard time from times to change. A vision is a potent, competitive tool. A vision builds community, clear, consistent, unique and serving. A third grade vision. Any third grader could understand it. While hidden values and a clear vision is there to confuse the enemy. People love complex stories and conspiracies. Simple stories seem less interesting and many people find it hard to accept that the truth can be still straightforward. Anything you can do to streamline your vision to simplify your story is a step in the right direction.
The part of an enterprise that does not change is the essence. Everything else, every aspect of the execution of the idea, every strategy and tactic every product and every price is subject to change, sometimes frequent change. Your customers change annually, monthly, weekly, daily even hourly. To serve them well your enterprise must also be able to change. At the same time fair consistent priorities the heart of vision must be in place if leaders and followers are to know what to change and what not to change. In real estate it is location, location, location, in business it is differentiate, differentiate, and differentiate. The reality is that most successful enterprises do one thing and do it extremely well.
When you are pursuing opportunities do not lose too much sleep if the single best part is already taken, take a really excellent alternate spot and pursue with all your heart. You should try to own a word in the customer’s mind. Each enterprise has a personality. The first question I ask the leaders of any enterprise is why does this enterprise exist? The only valid reason to the existence of any enterprise, for profit or non, is to provide products or services to people, to somehow make the world a better place. The only rule is that customers always get what they want and it is just a matter of who gives it to them and when. You will find workers to believe and it is a great privilege to have the opportunity to serve others. Service oriented people understand that serving is the priority. These people care. They get genuine satisfaction from helping others achieve their goals.
One solution is every week they invite applicants to a meeting at their offices and they put them all in a room with application forms. They then say our chief of recruiting is a little late please make yourself at home for a while. Then they watch the people who fill up their forms and then sit quietly awaiting the recruiter are not hired. The people who finish their forms then turn to the stranger next to them and start talking to them asking about them are taken to the next level of interview. Central market first looks for people who care then looks at résumé. Shared value defeats shared experience.
The most direct reach for prosperity is by asking our existing customers what else could I do for you, what else do you need, what do we right and how can we do it even better? Just most companies merely took their present customer base and focused on them, looked at how to serve them better, and attract more customers. Most companies would not have to look elsewhere for business. Customer acquisition cost has become one of the most closely watched statistics at any company. These new customers are the expensive ones. Once you have a customer and it is worth your while to do everything you can to keep them to make them even happier, how much you might spend during the rest of your life if they keep you happy. Whenever you get confused go to the store the customer has all the answers.
Microsoft person ask how we should fly? Is the hotel okay? What did you think of the alarm clock? Microsoft asks questions like this one because they want to know if you pay attention to details. Do these things matter to you? Are you willing to make sacrifices for the benefit of the customer? Value equals quality plus other factors divided by price.
First when you come up with a whole new idea there is no way someone else can visualize it like you can, not even your mom. Second customers do not always consciously know what they want. Streamlining, redefining and subdividing, any step towards simplicity is worth taking always these steps streamline your enterprise.
The truth is that many of the leading Internet companies of 2010 have yet to be founded.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587990598
