Here's a copy of the Thursday instalment of my Facebook group - Finance Coach (by Gareth Cotten)...
Finance tip: Savings
Pay yourself first. The single biggest excuse people use when explaining why they don\'t save is \"I don\'t have any money left at the end of the month\". Well, quite frankly, that\'s doing it the wrong way round. If you are truly committed to saving up a nest-egg, or building wealth for retirement, the first \'bill\' you should pay every month should be your savings. Think about it: By paying your bills first, you\'re saying that you\'re month-to-month expenses are a higher priority than your financial well-being in retirement. If you believe that, then I hope you know how to live off a social grant when you\'re 65! By \'paying yourself\' first, you are committing yourself to being financially secure when you need it most. And what about that extra bill now not getting paid, you ask? If you\'re worried enough about getting it paid, you WILL find a way to make the extra couple of bucks to do so - the human mind has an amazing capacity for innovation when it\'s forced to use it.
Business tip: Strategy
Adaptability. In the previous edition of Finance Coach, I wrote about focus. At first sight, you might think that focus and adaptability are at odds with each other. Well, they\'re not. Whatever type of business you run, you should focus on what you\'re good at, yes, but not to the point where you\'re completely overzealous, and closed to any other opportunities. Always have an eye out for aligned opportunites, close to your current service or product, that have good prospects. Take, for example, the web photo-sharing company, Flickr. When they started out, they were building a program to share photos and messages within a multi-player game. They realised that the program they were building had huge potential as a stand-alone business, and tweaked it to become the huge success story it is today (a multi-million dollar world-wide business). Now, they were focused (they stayed within the program-development sphere that they were good at) but they were adaptable (they weren\'t stubborn about only using the program in the game, and were prepared to make some changes for wide-spread usage). Look at what you are doing at the moment, and ask yourself whether there are any potential adaptations you have thought of, or turned down, recently.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
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"In a forthcoming book, Don Sull of London
ReplyDeleteBusiness School identies two contrasting
approaches to corporate strategy: absorption and agility. Strategic agility means that a firm is able to exploit changes in the environment faster and more effectively than rivals. Absorption describes management’s way of protecting an organisation from such changes by, for instance, diversifying out of the core business or growing 'too big to fail'. The difference between the two approaches
is illustrated by the most famous boxing match of the 20th century. The 'rumble in the jungle', staged in (then) Zaire, pitted George Foreman, the world heavyweight champion, against the veteran Muhammad Ali, who was making a
comeback bid. Ali’s normal style was agility
personifed-'float like a butterfly, sting
like a bee.' But faced with the younger
Foreman, Ali spent six months learning to
absorb heavy punishment. From round two he went defensive, leaning on the slackened ropes to absorb blows. In the eighth round, when Foreman had exhausted himself, Ali sprung of the ropes
and knocked him out. His blend of absorption
and agility had paid off". Economist Feb 2007