Entrepreneurship Archives

How to Launch a Business Using the Ready-Fire-Aim Strategy

What’s the easiest way to figure out how to reach customers? Why should you experiment with multiple versions of your product? In Ready, Fire, Aim, Michael Masterson argues that you shouldn’t try to perfect your product before putting it on the market. Rather, you should go ahead and put variations of it out there. Then, let that experience help you perfect your marketing strategy. Continue reading to learn how to launch a business in Masterson’s unorthodox way.

How to Grow Your Career as a Startup: Follow These 3 Principles

How do you grow your career like a startup? What are three entrepreneurship principles everyone should follow? There are three principles you need to treat your career like a startup: developing your competitive edge, becoming adaptive to changing circumstances, and cultivating a network of supporters. By applying these principles, you can stand out from your competitors, make bold career decisions, and navigate unexpected obstacles. Continue reading to learn how to grow your career, according to Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha’s book The Startup of You.

How to Sustain Business Growth: Switch From CEO to Adviser

Once your business has achieved success, how should your role change? Should you grow by merger and acquisition or go public? In Ready, Fire, Aim, Michael Masterson explains that successful, multimillion-dollar businesses progress through four stages of development: launch, expand, optimize, and sustain. For this last stage, he recommends moving to an adviser role and focusing on tactics that promote continued growth. Read on to learn how to sustain business growth with Masterson’s strategies.

How to Be More Competitive: 3 Tips for Career Progression

Why do you need to develop your competitive edge in the work world? How can you be more competitive and stand out? To stand out in any career field, Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha suggest you develop a unique competitive edge. This is something that makes you different and better than other people. Let’s look at how to be more competitive, with advice from The Startup of You.

How to Mitigate Risk: 4 Ways to Free Yourself to Create

What are some ways to test the waters before you put your product on the market? How can you protect your reputation while you experiment with new things? To be an innovator, you have to take creative risks. Experimentation—and failure—come with the territory. In Decoding Greatness, Ron Friedman shares four ways to lower the stakes for inevitable failures on the road to innovation and success. Continue reading to learn how to mitigate risk as you learn and create.

Suffering From a Lack of Innovation? We Have Solutions

What happens to businesses that lack innovation? How can you come up with ingenious ideas that will make customers swoon? A lack of innovation is a serious problem in many companies. Without it, they fail to come up with new ideas that excite customers and fall behind in the market. Keep reading for some suggestions to help you embrace innovation and start thinking differently about your product.

How to Reverse Engineer Anything to Recreate Greatness

What work do you admire? What if you could make your own version of it? How does reverse engineering enhance creativity? Ron Friedman argues that doing great work isn’t just about being talented or working hard. It’s about learning from the greats in your field by reverse engineering their creations. He explains how to reverse engineer the work you love and make it your own. Read more to learn how reverse engineering works and how to make it work for you.

The Adjacent Possible: Steven Johnson Explains Reachable Ideas

Why did it take so long for the invention of the computer to take hold? How can different people, working independently, come up with the same innovation? Good ideas don’t materialize miraculously from nothing. Instead, they build on existing knowledge and ideas. Emergence from the adjacent possible, Steven Johnson argues, is a hallmark of the most successful ideas. Keep reading to learn what the adjacent possible is and how we can mine it for good ideas.

Tony Fadell, Nest, & the Beginning of the Smart Home Revolution

How did world travel inspire the concept of a smart home? Why did Tony Fadell end his relationship with Nest? In Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making, entrepreneur Tony Fadell tells the story of his career. He talks about starting Nest—a smart home device company—and later selling it to Google for billions of dollars. Keep reading to learn about Tony Fadell, Nest, and the start of the smart home revolution.

The Slow Hunch: How Small Inklings Become Novel Inventions

Do you have any half-baked ideas rattling around in your head? What if you could turn them into fully-baked brilliance? Sometimes hunches lead to full-fledged ideas. If you’re patient and keep working on them, you could end up with something quite usable. In Where Good Ideas Come From, best-selling author and theorist Steven Johnson explains how good ideas grow from minor inklings to groundbreaking inventions. Keep reading to learn how the “slow hunch” can mature into something of great value.