For one to be creative, he must destroy what so called “associative barriers”, they are our previous assumption, old ideas of what things should be. At Sun microsystem in order to keep the company creative, they invites college students to give critics for everything aspect of the company. Sun called them “distinguished engineer”, their task are “to do things differently and to tell people what they’re doing is not the right thing”.

another way to be creative is by reverse assumption such as a restaurant without a menu :). And also from customer’s complaint like what Bill gates said “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest resource of learning”. Basically the company need to build habbits of active listening and give people opportunity to speak.

These are 8 killer differentiation strategies:

1. Sales leadership (creative selling campaign/promo ?)
2. Technology leadership (applied the latest tech in your product/process?)
3. Position your brand as something next generation
4. Differentiation on How a product is made (againts animal testing ??)
5. Differentiation on Where a product is made (made in indonesia ?)
6. Differentiation on attribute of ownership (limited edition?)
7. Develop brand personality (like Nike, Zara, Harley etc ?)
8. Taking the opposite position (restaurant w/o menu?)

last week on the newspaper, there a story about a sucessfull entrepreneur, he sells meatball. today he runs 15 meatball restaurant. Its revenue around 22 billion rupiah (roughly USD 2,2 million) per month. He start small by selling meatball from house to house. He said that the main principles in food business (restaurant) are what so called 3P: Place, Product, Price. He emphasized on the first P = place is the most important.Thats why before he open new branch, he would hang & loop around the target location, counting how many peoples pass through that area; sometimes he could stay on the spot upto three days just to watch the situation & asking the peoples around the spot. Once he open a new restaurant branch near the hospital, he counted that at least several hundreds of people pass trough the spot. But when the restaurant open, it doesn’t runs well. Then he realized that people are affraid and have association in their mind  that hospital is the place for disease.

tonight on tv i listen to this motivator guy named Mario Teguh. One of his quote is “Its better doing small things with honesty rather than having big act/things with bad(dishonest) ways” (me: offcourse it would be much better if we do big things based on honesty ^_^) . He said, we can lie to everyone in this world, but not to ourselfes. Deep inside of us, we know who we are and if what we’ve done is wrong, we just have to listen to that inner sound. Believe me, when you start to be honest with yourself, you start doing everything with honesty, your life will changed. It would be more peaceful in yourself, thus made us free in doing everything (our job, daily life, relationship, etc).

And then the audience ask “How to start effectively ?”, he said “The best way to start something new, is by ending the previous one (previous bad habit:dishonest)”. Then he quote from Hellboy movie :

What makes a man a man? A friend of mine once asked. It’s the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he finishes them.

Life is simple, make a choice and don’t look back

its a quote from a movie i just saw: “Jumper”, nice quote

also this quote from Hellboy:

What makes a man a man? A friend of mine once wondered. Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don’t think so. It’s the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them.

Jino sugiarto was ex. marketing director of sharp indonesia, he start becoming entreprenur at 44, now he runs several gas station & minimarket. He said no problems entering new business not related to previous job. “What’s important is How to sell the product by giving value-added“. There’s an old saying “Whatever we want, its depend on us. Age is not a problem if we think we can” jino said. He mentioned the skill includes “Network, fund/capital, business concept, mental, and willingness to start”. and here are my favorite, he said “Asset is important but Access is more important“

Think big, start small, act now

Think big, start small, move fast

It’s too late for Later

there is a small groceries store in the town operated by mr.ayun. its a small store but it has a lot of customers come and go, mostly smaller groceries store in suburb. my parent also often buy  the goods at mr.chow store to resell at our store. One day when we shop there, i saw mr.ayun writing the invoice of the goods we boughts, beside the invoice i notice that he also write in a book for each item we bought but with different values. For 10 kilogram of sugar we bought, he wrote $10 in the invoice and $1 in his book, and for the other item he wrote $50 in the invoice and $3 in the book. So i dare myself to asked him, why he a different amount in the book. Then He stare at at me for a while before he began to answer my question.

He said, “I am not good at accounting, so this is the simplest way to know my profit day by day”, “the number that i write in the book is the profit for each item i sold, so by the end of the day i just sum them all to know what is my profit today. 20% of the profit today is to buy food for tomorrow, 50% goes for investment in property, 20% is to be added into the working capital and as a backup for emergencies, and the rest 10% is for the church” he said. “This way, i could never overspend/consumption using my working capital, the principal is Never use the capital for consumption. If i get less today, my family would eat less tomorrow, but i get more today my family will enjoy big meal tomorrow”, again he said “the first 20% is to add more working capital and to overcome agains inflation rate, so my store will keep growing”

Wow … its such a simple finance system, yet it proven to be working so well for him, until now his shop is keep grow
ing bigger and bigger (because of the 20%) and so as his property (50%).

Lets be an MBA in a simple way ^_^

source: http://dantonprabawanto.com/2008/01/13/sistem-akuntansi-sederhana-untuk-bisnis/