Summary : The Personal Mba – Josh Kaufman

If you can eliminate unnecessary dependencies, you reduce the risk of cascading failures.

Service – where you provide some form of help or assistance and charge a fee. The challenges here are to ensure your service is delivered consistently well and to attract and then retain enough paying customers

Economic value generally takes one of twelve different forms:

Product – you manufacture or create a tangible item which you then sell for more than it costs to make. Products are good because their manufacture can be scaled up and duplicated many times over. The ongoing challenges with products are to keep costs of production low, to have inventory on hand to meet demand and then to sell as many units as possible at as high a price as the market will bear.

How businesses work

A successful business – by definition – provides something of value which other people want or need at a price they’re willing to pay in such a way that it satisfies the customer’s needs and expectations while at the same time the business brings

the modern world, there are a large number of information sources which compete for everyone’s attention. Your potential customers are in the same boat. Even if you have a magnificent product or service, you have to earn the attention of the people you hope will buy.
To earn the buyer’s attention, the options are:
Do remarkable things which will catch the eye of the people who will care about what you’re achieving and what you have to offer. Media coverage can help here.
Stay focused on the customer’s end result – what they’re trying to achieve by purchasing from you. Don’t talk features, talk about the customer benefits you deliver.
Ask questions to pre-qualify buyers from those who will never purchase. That way you can put more resources into attracting the attention of the right people and organizations.

The only thing you can realistically do about change is to increase your flexibility. The more flexible the system is, the greater its resiliency will be.

find and eliminate constraints:
Identify the largest limiting factor
Ensure resources for that constraint aren’t being wasted
Redesign the larger system to support that constraint
Find ways to increase the capacity of the constraint
Keep re-evaluating to find new constraints which may arise

Whenever you set a goal, ask “Why?” you want it at least five times until you get to the root cause of your intentions.

The most useful goals follow the PICS format:
Positive - they are something to move towards.
Immediate – they are things you need to progress now.
Concrete – you’ll be able to see and measure results.
Specific – they tell when, where and what you’ll do.

To get people to make decisions quickly, add an element of scarcity to your offer. This will encourage people to buy now because of their inbuilt aversion to loss. You can create a degree of scarcity by offering a limited quantity, by talking about coming price increases, by informing prospects a price discount will be lapsing in the immediate future or by making an offer good for a limited period of time. These are all techniques which align with the way people think.