The Smith Report - Operational Tips for Busy Execs - Weekly

One of the key drivers of shareholder value is the quality of second tier management. Buyers of companies, sponsors of IPOs, and PE & VC companies invest in products, people and markets….. but especially people! As a recent WSJ article put it so well, investing in great talent (as opposed to one superstar) assists in four key areas:

• the creation of knowledge, sources of information.

• insightful and honest feedback.

• provides a critical link to clients.

• allows senior management ...

Those clever guys at Inc.com pushed out a great little thought provoking piece titled
The Best Industries for Starting a Business Right Now.

So I thought it would be useful to list them and offer a few comments:

#1 Candy – industry grew 3.7% – think niche and value, be remarkable

#2 iPhone Apps – 30,000 apps to date – keep the day job, 95% of these apps will not make money for the developer

#3 ...

I thought my

I had the pleasure of addressing some smart people at the first New England XPO on Compelling Stories and building remarkable businesses. Here is a version of my speech:

Growing a private company is about being the best in the world at something. It’s about defining and dominating your unique market, your micro-market, your sliver of the world.

It’s about Positioning & Performance. Today’s business climate has one upside, there is more time to focus on choosing who you want ...

Much publicity has been given to the stress tests handed down by the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program and applied to the Banking Industry. These tests are designed amongst other things to ensure banks have sufficient capital reserves to trade safely. What about the rest of the population? What stress tests would you apply to private companies to ensure they have a healthy, robust, sustainable future?
Here are a few:

#1: Cash Balances are fit for purpose.
Gold Standard: Under all reasonable ...

Over the last few weeks it’s funny how certain phrases start to rise to the top of the noise.Three phrases have jumped out at me, economic recovery, behavioural economics and scenario planning. In one sense it’s not suprising, we all want to know the future is better, it has to be!

Economic recovery appeared in Google search results 6,991 times in January, 7831 times in February and in the first week in May – 24,443 times. Another two I ...