Everyone always talks about the rational and immediate term reasons why you need a value proposition, such as: it will improve your sales; it will make it easier for customers to buy from you; it speeds up the sales process and leads to greater profitability. But there are also deeper and subtler reasons which have [...]

August 3, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

People always say to me, “But value is just like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder”.  OK, so one man’s value can be another man’s poison (to mix metaphors) but there are ways in which you can start to quantify value.  We always use the equation ‘Value = Benefits minus Cost’, where cost [...]

June 1, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

Laid up in bed before Christmas with the inevitable holiday flu, I was watching re-runs of QI, a very funny and clever British quiz show hosted by the wonderful Stephen Fry.  They were talking about Paris Syndrome which is the extreme culture shock experienced by Japanese tourists upon visiting Paris.  Apparently the difference in Latin [...]

January 5, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

Or, ‘how does having more to choose from affect your choice’? Have you ever felt so daunted by the amount of different things to choose from that you ended up not choosing anything at all? If so, you are not alone, as the results from the following experiment show. A stall was set up in [...]

July 16, 2009 by Cindy Barnes

When times are tough, you’ve had to lose good people and you can’t afford to hire more, the key to growth is innovation and the best way of achieving this is pairing a left-brain thinker with a right-brain thinker. Innovation is a messy process – hard to measure and hard to manage. Most people only [...]

July 16, 2009 by Cindy Barnes

I had a conversation with a journalist the other day who asked me if the best way of weathering the recession was to put strategic plans on hold in favour of more tactical actions that produce more immediate results. I resisted the temptation to snarl and politely told him that if I see yet another [...]

March 23, 2009 by Cindy Barnes