No Compelling Value Proposition? No Business Needed!

Alex Osterwalder & team have created the definitive easy-to/must-uses guide on how to create a compelling value proposition - Value Proposition Design.  Yes, definitive.   Any business is first and foremost about the customer, even though it seems so many have forgotten that.  If you don’t have a compelling value proposition, you don’t need a business model because you won’t have a business. 

Value Proposition Design (#VPDesign) clearly teaches how to discover customers’ real needs – the needs they have for and by themselves, not the needs we want them to have or the needs we want to solve…even if they aren’t really the customers’.  The VPDesign toolkit – which is easy to follow, use and adopt – makes it difficult to retain your own biases and see reality.

It’s not just the words. The fabulous visual and symbolic style of the book makes it easy to follow, to use as a handbook and daily tool for prototyping, testing, iterating and creating meaningful and valuable solutions for customers. The icons are memorable and can become part of your team’s lexicon for thinking about customers. Just as in Business Model Generation, this book is a tool to use daily to think about your business – internally and externally. I’ve used the VPDesign extensively with entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and for customers outside the organization and inside the organization.

So, you MUST get this book (and Business Model Generation) and start using it.  It will change how you view your business, your customers – for the better, in ways you can’t even begin to imagine.

In full disclosure, I helped co-create Alex & Yves’ first book, Business Model Generation, was a pre-reader for Value Proposition Design book and is a friend of Alex's.  And that's why I know, first-hand, how incredible and necessary these books are! Get them!!

#Whatif We Valued Trying?

We humans love to divide the world: yes, no; either, or; black, white; true, false; winners, losers; successes,Arianna Huffington, Co-Founder Huffington Post (designed by behappy.me) failures.  Yet little in life is really that nice and tidy, despite how much we want it to be.  And our world is not going in that direction anymore.

Many of us know that new discoveries, the disruptions, the innovations are found in the grey – in between the extremes, by recombining what is out there through And and Both instead of Either and Or.  As someone with a head of black, white and grey hairs, believe me, I live it!

Perhaps one of the most dangerous of these artificial constructs is that of successes or failures.  This has insidiously permeated so many of our systems – especially the language of entrepreneurship and innovation.  We don’t allow a middle or blended path.  When we look at the successful entrepreneurs, how many of them were successful the very first time? How many had overnight successes that truly were overnight, instead of years? Very few. 

What if we start talking about Tryers (which obviously means people will go to the opposite extreme of Non-Tryers) instead of just winners or successes?

What if we started encouraging and supporting those who try, over and over, be it the same or a different venture. 

What if we helped the Non-Tryers to understand why they didn’t try? Perhaps it is fear, time, who knows… but perhaps we could develop a support structure to allow them to become Tryers, in their own time?

What if we started to infiltrate our education system with tools, lessons, examples, opportunities to Try so that our children could become Tryers at earlier and earlier ages.  And What If we rewarded them for it? And What if we rewarded our teachers for teaching smart Trying?

While a full societal adoption of the Trying construct certainly will take time, you can start now! There are many ways you can start embedding Tryers into your organization’s lexicon.  So What If you, tomorrow, asked one of your people to Try and What if you back her or him up when she/he raises objections for why something couldn’t be done?  What if you just started with that?

Thank you to @mattmurrie for helping me more fully embed “What If” in my lexicon.

February Top 5: Youth Rocks Again!

For two months in a row, Allen Kramer's post on Intrapreueneurship in Social Business is still one of the most popular posts! His story resonates on many levels - anyone who says 'this generation' is full of themselves needs to meet doers like Allen!  

1. If You Aren't Scared, You Aren't Leading
2. Give Yourself Permission by Jessica Esch
3. Nextsensing: Aspire and Ye Shall Find by Joseph Pistrui
4. Intrapreneurship in Social Business by Allen Kramer, Brown '13
5. Genecians Journey into Corporate Giving by Jess Chipkin