Crowd funded, built in England, and marketed in the US at SlowPoursupply.com, this little grinder is a dream come true. And it sells at a very affordable price.

Marketing and brand planning work through three sequential phases. First, we diagnose the situation using data. Second, we put together a strategy. Third, we plan the tactics that will deliver the strategy and success in the market. Then, all things being cyclical, it is back to a new diagnosis the following year to see if the strategy worked and start the process again. A good marketing plan will follow these three phases in its structure. Diagnosis should lead to a strategic section and finally to tactics and the budget associated with them. There is no single ideal marketing planning format. Every young and desperate marketer searches online and in vain for a magical standard template that you fill in the night before the big presentation day. But Google rewards you with 100 dumb-ass versions of different stupid plans. No standard exists. And each company should and does riff on the design to create their own gold standard. But this overall three-part structure of diagnosis feeding strategy, which drives tactical choices, is inarguable if you know what you are doing. Try and stick to it.

The 21st century CMO is expected to be a marketing miracle worker, an alchemist who combines classic art of branding with the latest advances in data and measurement. All this while you serve as the connective tissue of the C-suite and stay a step ahead of the rapidly changing landscape of digital technology, cultural trends, and shifting consumer expectations — things becoming ever more important to the stock price. Customers matter more than ever, and since you’re responsible for them, your role should matter more than ever too. But board members don’t seem to have one cohesive definition of the role. So what are you to do? Internally, steer expectations for your role by defining growth you have some control over. And recognize that the talent of your team is half the battle to achieving that growth. Hire the best measurement people because marketing will be held to some metric that is currently beyond reach, and you’ll need them to invent it. There are many ways you can impact revenue — but be prepared to show the “I’m indispensable” math. And don’t forget the most visible CMOs also take big risks. Only 3% of board members interviewed were marketers. Likely, they don’t hear you. Listen closely and find the overlap between what the board is interested in and your responsibilities. And instead of building slides about everything you do, build one slide that puts you in a position to start a conversation around those common interests and goals.

There’s also a management angle. Paris-based automotive author Gautam Sen said there is a similarity in the mistakes automakers make when they come in here: “They hire foreign CEOs who almost always don’t understand the business landscape. They come in with a sense that this market is going to be like China or other emerging markets, which it never is, and they push products that have worked elsewhere assuming they will here.”

The menu also features a go-for-broke option called “Build Your Own Damn House,” which consists of a coffee, a coconut, and a piece of cinnamon toast. Hanging in the door is a manifesto that covers a green chalkboard. “We are local people with useful skills in tangible situations,” it says, among other things. “Drink a cup of Trouble. Eat a coconut. And learn to build your own damn house. We will help. We are building a network.”

It is not enough to think about difficult problems one way. You need to think about them forwards and backward. Inversion often forces you to uncover hidden beliefs about the problem you are trying to solve. “Indeed,” says Munger, “many problems can’t be solved forward.” Let’s take a look at some examples. Say you want to improve innovation in your organization. Thinking forward, you’d think about all of the things you could do to foster innovation. If you look at the problem by inversion, however, you’d think about all the things you could do that would discourage innovation. Ideally, you’d avoid those things. Sounds simple right? I bet your organization does some of those ‘stupid’ things today.

Then answer these questions to get a good sense of your market. Demand: Is there a desire for your product or service? Market size: How many people would be interested in your offering? Economic indicators: What is the income range and employment rate? Location: Where do your customers live and where can your business reach? Market saturation: How many similar options are already available to consumers? Pricing: What do potential customers pay for these alternatives?

Efficient operations. Fast food franchises benefit from consistent delivery of both food and experience - look for franchise opportunities with a proven and cost effective system. Effective marketing. As a franchisee you don’t have to handle the marketing - but you sure want to make sure the mother ship knows what they’re doing. With so many options to choose from it’s important that a franchise can effectively market their unique value proposition. Innovative menus. Menu options need to be creative and offer both healthy and indulgent options. New plays on old favorites, healthier versions of classics, or unique flavor profiles like a spicy dessert are just a few examples. Know Your Niche. There is something to be said for the traditional burger joint - some would say don’t fix what isn’t broken - but increasingly specialty or regional food options are gaining in popularity. Figure out what will work in your community. Effective use of technology. Many franchises are using the same exact model of limited service that launched in the 50's. Restaurants with kiosk or automated table ordering help keep costs down. Look for an iPad.

Advertisers get only 25% of the value for which they pay because any ad must be sent through agencies, exchanges, and platforms within microseconds before it appears in front of consumers. And every agency, exchange, and platform takes a cut and marks up the price. In effect, advertisers pay $4 for $1 of advertising. But that is only the beginning. Let’s look at it the opposite way. Here is the online ad journey from $1 to three cents. Let’s break it down. You spend $1. You lose 60 cents to ad tech middlemen and have 40 cents left before you ad even appears on a website. But only 50% of that spend is on ads that are “viewable,” leaving you with 20 cents. After accounting for ad fraud such as bot activity and deceptive publishers, you have 16 cents. But only two-thirds of the resulting “viewable” impressions are actually seen by someone, leaving you with 11 cents. And among those ads that are actually seen by human eyeballs, 75% of the time, people do not look at them for more than a second — rendering those “impressions” useless. So, after you account for all of these new middlemen, you get three cents of real value for every dollar that you spend. That is average data. Here’s a real world example. The Guardian bought its own online ad space in a test. And what happened? The Guardian got only 30% of the money that they paid to themselves.

I believe that the German course to future success lies in combining traditional values with modern thinking. Firms such as my own should keep designing and crafting first-rate products but we need to apply our expertise in “making things” to a digital age. Successful German start-ups – such as Infarm (automated farming), Door2Door (rural ridesharing), FlixMobility (long-distance travel), Horizn (smart luggage) and n26 (banking) – already do this. The country’s economic future depends on translating its production prowess to new, sometimes less tangible, products. Yes, you can manufacture a great digital user journey too.

“If I have made a turnover of about ₹5 lakh, I have to pay about ₹90,000 per month as GST. I get the payment from the customer after a minimum of 90 days, that too, sometimes, partially. This has been the procedure in the market for years. But now, after you have made the bill, you have to pay the GST within 20 days... even before the full amount comes to you," explained Maheswaran.

The small and medium businesses in Coimbatore are almost completely running on credit, said Maheswaran. A local vendor usually supplies some spare parts on credit to a company, with the assurance of payment when the final product gets sold. In a slowdown, as products pile with sales drying, the vendor naturally suffers payment delays. But in the meanwhile, he has to pay his GST by the 20th of each month.

At least 10,000 units in the broader region have shut down, and some 25,000 workers have lost their jobs in just a year

The microenterprises here used to get a monthly business of about ₹120 crore. Now, it has dropped to just about ₹50 crore. There is almost a 60% drop in orders

“I was selling real estate in Syracuse a long time ago and I couldn’t stand it. So I went to two old tailors that made both my grandfathers’ suits and I would hang out in their shop all day because I liked them and they liked me. And one day I just started working with them. I picked up a thimble and that’s how it all started. “

Q. Are not you worry that many bad reviews on yelp can impact your business?A. The day that we think that reviews on Yelp are the key for our successful business, is the day we should change business. Yelp for us is just a source where we can find our "Village Idiot" of the month for our web page. The right customers for us are more likely to browse our website than yelp. We never ask any of our loyal customers to write something positive about us.We actually reward with 50%off any pizza anyone who give us a one star review on Yelp.When we face an idiot we make sure he is going to hate us so he can spread the word with his Yelpers friends! The more agressive and angry reviews are the more unreliable are.There is nothing more useful than an angry idiot! In fact we post our worst reviews on our website and we use them to attract many new great customers ever day.Check the best three superheroes in our HALL OF SHAME, because of these three idiots we got more and better customers.

Back in summer 2001, an art show called “I ♥ Taxi” took over Madison Square Park. In addition to all sorts of taxi-themed displays, there was a hot dog stand that quickly became a hit for its friendly service and Chicago-style dogs. Little did patrons know, it was actually run by restaurateur Danny Meyer (who headed up the Madison Square Park Conservancy) and staffed by off-season coat-check workers from his upscale restaurants. The operation lost money over the three summers it was in business, but Meyer was encouraged by the turnout. So he asked the Parks Department for a full-time business permit, pledging to donate some of the earnings to the park’s development, and they obliged. In 2004, Shake Shack opened, and notoriously long lines ensued.

Technological adoption is not acceleratingThere’s a series of similar charts that make the rounds on social media every few years. The charts plot the amount of time various technologies have taken to reach 50m users. One of the most popular, from Boston Consulting Group, claims it took 75 years for the telephone to reach 100m users, 16 years for the mobile phone, 7 years for the internet, 4 and a half years for Facebook and under 2 years for Candy Crush Saga.Again, it paints a compelling picture. But again, the truth is not quite so neat.First, the charts tend to combine data from a number of sources. The BCG chart referenced above, for example, cites over 15. In the process of aggregation, different metrics are treated as if they are the same. According to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal:“The chart botches the basic rule of apples-to-apples comparison. The gauge for telephones, radio and TV appears to be the number of U.S. households with that technology, (…) while the Internet, Facebook and Angry Birds numbers include users of all types.”Household penetration is a different measurement to user penetration. And as such, the two metrics should not be directly compared.Secondly, the chart maintains the same 50m threshold over time despite huge changes in population. This is a problem. The telephone, for example, “launched” towards the end of the 1800s, 50 years before the USA even had 50m households. It took the telephone so long to reach the required adoption because there were not enough households in the country for the first five decades of its being.To account for this, many economists use a proportional (50%), rather than absolute (50m), threshold. This reframing has a dramatic effect. In his analysis, the computer scientist Gisle Hannemyr found the internet reached 50m households more quickly than television but reached 50% of households more slowly. The change in metric, reversed the finding. This inversion is consistent with research conducted by the Leading Edge Forum:“The time it takes for a new technology to be adopted by 50 percent of US households has long been used by economic historians for cross-technology comparisons. (…) Experts generally agree that both radios (8 years) and black-and-white televisions (9) reached the 50 percent threshold much faster than personal computers (17) or mobile phones (15).”A third and final critique is that the older technologies (TV, radio, mobile phones) tend to be expensive hardware. In contrast, more recent technologies (Facebook, Candy Crush, Angry Birds) tend to be software that is downloaded to that hardware for free. When viewed through this lens the apps which achieved lightning fast adoption are more akin to TV shows, films and songs. These have always gained widespread adoption quickly. Again, these are different categories and should not be directly compared.So the pace of change isn’t accelerating. Nor is the rate of technological adoption.But these are not the only myths.

The Obama administration spent more than $25 billion encouraging doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic medical records systems. Crucially, rather than forcing competing systems to be compatible to receive federal support, the administration believed the market would decide on a standard to communicate.What happened was that competing companies deliberately created incompatible systems. Doctors’ offices and hospitals that use different records databases can’t communicate with each other digitally — but they can via fax. For many medical professionals, particularly independent physicians, faxing is far easier than dealing with expensive, hard-to-use software that doesn’t actually do what it was supposed to: securely share patient information.

A worldwide survey in 2017 found that of 200 large firms, defined as companies with more than 500 employees, 82 percent had seen workers send the same number of, or even more, faxes that year than in 2016. A March 2017 unscientific survey of 1,513 members of an online forum for information technology professionals found that 89 percent of them still sent faxes.

That was in 2011. In the intervening years, Miceli has sold nearly 30,000 of her handmade earrings and feather hair extensions, all of which she assembles by hand at home. After a couple of years, Miceli quit her job as a mechanic. Etsy “has given me the opportunity to work from home and watch my grandkids,” she told me. Everything was humming along nicely until last summer, when the site began implementing a new search algorithm that gives priority to sellers who guarantee free shipping. Those who charged even a few dollars, like Miceli, were removed from their spots on the first page of search results. In August, Miceli’s revenue was down 40 percent from the previous year—a huge dip that she blames on the free-shipping finagling.

This demonstrates the economic principle known as “pain of paying,” a psychological discomfort that keeps people from completing purchases. Certain factors seem to sharpen the pain. Using cash rather than credit cards typically hurts more

The rise of 5-Hour began in the spring of 2003, when Bhargava found himself at a natural products trade show in Anaheim, Calif. At one booth the sales reps peddled a 16-ounce concoction claiming to boost productivity for hours. Bhargava took a swig. “For the next six or seven hours I was in great shape,” he says. “I thought, Wow, this is amazing. I can sell this.” Right away, though, he knew 16 ounces wouldn’t sell. He didn’t want to compete with Red Bull, at the time new to the market. Nor did he want to share fridge space with Coke or Pepsi. “I thought, If I’m tired, am I also thirsty? Is that like having a headache and a stomachache? It didn’t make any sense.” He glanced at the ingredients label and made a mental note. Six months later his version was on the shelves, two ounces of ­caffeine-infused B vitamins such as niacin mixed with acids like taurine.

Tips for performance reviews: Managers should act as coaches. The team works best when managers are viewed as coaches and more experienced peers to help employees with their career development. Have a clear agenda. Oftentimes, employees don’t know that they can use these meetings to talk about things they need coaching on that relate to their career. Don’t tie performance reviews to pay increases (or decreases) – have this be a separate conversation. Here’s a Harvard Business Review article that discusses this more in-depth. Separate peer feedback from reviews. It’s important to make easier for peers to give feedback regularly. One Watercooler member does this in video form. Ask specific questions to better understand where the person is at, uncover blindspots, etc. (This should take up about 70% of the time.) High Output Management by Andy Grove has great tips on how to run good one-on-one meetings. Bring up topics that would be hard to talk in a bigger group.Don’t wait for the meeting to give critical feedback. Tools like recurring surveys in Know Your Team can nudge employees in the right direction.

In order to answer those questions, let’s first examine the purpose of a performance review to begin with. Ultimately, these fixtures in organizations were created because we, as managers, are accountable for our team’s performance. Performance reviews are intended as a mechanism to help our team perform well. We must keep this in mind. At the heart of things, the intention behind performance reviews are meaningful: To encourage performance positively, and to help ensure the outcome you both want for the team is achieved. If the goal behind performance reviews is anything other than that (e.g., because other companies do them), then, well, you should really stop wasting your time 🙂

“I think social commerce will become the largest ecommerce for categories such as fashion, accessories cosmetics and more because 93 percent of total commerce in these categories is unbranded,” says Aatrey. Social commerce remains among the only channels that work with unbranded products, giving them a first-mover advantage in this largely untapped product category in India. “This has just started in India. So I think it’s going to get bigger and more innovative,” Sinha adds.

GlowRoad, along with platforms like Meesho and Shop101, has a B2B2C model, where the reseller sees a product on the app, and sends product images and description to potential buyers via social media.

Social commerce is a broad term where eventually somebody has to use his personal contacts to do business,” says Kunal Sinha, co-founder and CEO of GlowRoad, a social commerce platform that started in November 2017.

Limiting the demand for data could happen in many ways, some of which are more practical than others. We could outlaw the use of video and turn the internet back into a text and image medium. We could limit the speed of wireless internet connections. We could allocate a specific energy budget to the internet. Or, we could raise energy prices, which would simultaneously affect the offline alternatives and thus level the playing field. The latter strategy is preferable because it leaves it to the market to decide which applications and devices will survive.

Importantly, the increasing energy consumption of the internet is not so much due to a growing amount of people using the network, as one would assume. Rather, it's caused by a growing energy consumption per internet user. The network's data traffic rises much faster than the number of internet users (45% versus 6-7% annually).

hese researchers estimate that by 2017, the electricity use of the internet will rise to between 2,547 TWh (expected growth scenario) and 3,422 TWh (worst case scenario). If the worst-case scenario materializes, internet-related energy use will almost double in just 5 years time.

Keeping all this in mind, we selected what seems to be the most recent, complete, honest and transparant report of the internet's total footprint. It concludes that the global communications network consumed 1,815 TWh of electricity in 2012. [4] This corresponds to 8% of global electricity production in the same year (22,740 TWh)