Business and Money Tips

Two words are often confused: creativity and innovation. Creativity is the ability to generate lots of new ideas, new concepts or new ways of doing things, including problem solving and fulfilling opportunities. Innovation is the process of generating and applying creative ideas in some specific context. Creativity is full of ideas while innovation is full of achievements. Creativity starts with a dream while innovation completes the journey. The 8 Steps to Innovation: I (The mindset) - You as the 'I' must have the mindset to want to innovate Innovation Statement - which focuses on both the problem and the upside Ideas Generation - Need to generate lots of ideas in a short period of time to be effective Ideas Selection - need to filter the 1,000 ideas into a few good ones Incubation - put some thought into the ideas' practicality Investment decision - the selling of the ideas selected Implementation  Iteration - where the innovation project is connected

People often think that mentally strong salespeople do certain things. The truth is that mentally strong salespeople don't do certain things, and the 5 things they don't do are: Blame the company for not having products and services that are competitive in price and specifications. They know that if the company's products and services are so strong, they will sell by themselves and don't need any salespeople at all. That's why mentally strong salespeople will instead find out how to turn the product's weaknesses into strengths Look at their 'upstairs' for help. Mentally strong salespeople know that their business and strengths come from below, i.e. people that they take care of, be it their clients, support staff or sales team Give away power. Mentally strong people know that they are powerful, and they don't give away power in negotiation, meetings and daily communication. The biggest power we have is our own choice. So mentally strong salespe

A Letter from my heart: Dear all friends, Over the last 2 months, I have been approached by 10 friends, each with very interesting business proposals. Some of them have business proposals that span the globe and run into millions of dollars of income. Others are more subdue, but none of them conflicts with what I am doing now - coaching and training. After thinking for 2 nights with some meditations, I conclude that I have to evaluate each proposal not based on how attractive they are in terms of money and business models, but what type of people that I am working with.  Without a pinch of doubt, I only can work with people that s hare the same values and philosophies as me. I am not interested in just making money, there must also be meaning in the way I make the money . Also, the business must contribute to mankind , and not just some ideas to take advantage of opportunities. That's why I think these 5 businesses I will never deal with: computerized trading, gambling, m

S N Venkat is senior associate director, Office of Postgraduate Professional Programme, Singapore Management University At the end of the first set of United States presidential primaries, and as Super Tuesday — the biggest primary election — starts today, it is becoming clear there is a real possibility that billionaire Donald Trump may be the Republican presidential candidate this year. While it might have taken many political pundits by surprise, there were some, like the creator of the famous Dilbert comic strip, American cartoonist Scott Adams, who warned in 2015 that there was a method to Mr Trump’s apparent madness and that it came from the art of persuasion. There are scholarly attempts to explain them, based on well-known books on the subject such as Mr Robert Cialdini’s Influence — The Psychology of Persuasion, but what explains Mr Trump’s method is one simple sentence. Mr Blair Warren, author of the e-book The One Sentence Persuasion Course — 27 Words To Make

By: Ziyad Jawabra During the press conference to announce NOKIA being acquired by Microsoft, Nokia CEO ended his speech saying this “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”. Upon saying that, all his management team, himself included, teared sadly. Nokia has been a respectable company. They did not do anything wrong in their business, however, the world changed too fast. Their opponents were too powerful. They missed out on learning, they missed out on changing, and thus they lost the opportunity at hand to make it big. Not only did they miss the opportunity to earn big money, they lost their chance of survival. The message of this story is, if you don’t change, you shall be removed from the competition. It’s not wrong if you don’t want to learn new things. However, if your thoughts and mindset cannot catch up with time, you will be eliminated. Conclusion: 1.      The advantage you have yesterday, will be replaced by the trends of tomorrow. You don’t have to

Some people think that a coach has something that they don't know. So they consider the coach to be god-like and create miracles like god.  Truth be told, the coach is an ordinary human being that claims no inspiration from any external power of being. He attributes all his wisdom and realization to human endeavour and human intelligence. Each person has within himself the potential to be a great person, all the coach does is to help each person to achieve par excellence.   This is because the coach understands that each person is his own master and we are all responsible for our own destiny. A good coach encourages and stimulates each person to develop himself and to work out his own emancipation. If the Coach is to be considered a guru or saviour, it is only in the sense that he let us know that we each can be our own guru and saviour.  Whether you are leading a group of companies or a team of people, you know that you the manager and leader play a big role in your organ

(This article was published in the Straits Times on 24 Feb 2016 page C31) As time passes, you fall into your comfort zone and feel bored at work. You think of changing your job. Instead of changing your job, why not think of new ways to make your work more exciting?  As we know, many employees get too engrossed in the daily grind. They just want to get the job done and fail to consider if what they are dong is really necessary.  A lack of mndfullness is a sure sign an employee needs to up the ante at work. When you find yourself becoming absent-minded, it means that are getting too stressed or bored at work.  Before you decide to leave your job, find out if the problem lies with your job or with yourself. If you are the problem, don't need to blame yourself. Just acknowledge it and move on.  There are 5 ways that you too can fall in love with your job and excel at work: Learn something new every day and better still, help others and you'll learn more in the proce

Why people hate salespeople? Because they always do the following 7 things: They talk about their products and services without first finding out what customers need and want They use proof sources (like case studies, testimonials, white papers and even demonstrations) when the customer feels that his situation is very different from those they cited Their values and visions are out of sync with the customer, e.g. talking about saving money when the customer’s priority now is not enough time They like to talk down to customers by saying that their should not have bought from other vendors They are always so nice before the deal is closed. After collecting the money, they are always so busy Salespeople are money minded, they think in terms of how much they themselves earn and not the client’s interest They think they know a lot, and seldom go for training, for they see training as a waste of time and prefer to sell to earn money. They did not realize that by not improving on th

In the next 30 days, I want you to climb your own mountain and really ‘huat’ in this new year. Everybody wants higher sales, but we know that sales come from customers, and customers give you sales transactions with a certain dollar sale. And customers come from prospects, and prospects come from our target market. So from here I derive the “ 5-Way Sales Leverage Chart ”: Target Market X Marketing Conversion = NO. OF PROSPECTS X Selling Conversion = NO. OF CUSTOMERS X No. of Transactions X Average Dollar Sale Price = SALES From the above formula you see that there are  only 5 variable things – the target market, marketing conversion, selling conversion, no. of transactions and average dollar sale.  So how to change the 5 things so as to build your business?  Let’s look at an example. I have inserted some simple figures into our formula: Target Market 4,000 X Marketing Conversion Rate 10% = PROSPECTS 400 X Selling Conversi