Q1: There is always a crossroad with growing family enterprises – that of professionalizing by hiring an experienced outsider or continuing governance within the family. How can you help in this regard? A: When a family enterprise is ready to professionalize, the first things that need to be done are the drawing up of the family governance constitution and the […]

Q1: You were in consumer advertising before marketing political campaigns. How do you influence decision making of specific voters? Do you use the same framework as marketing products or services? A:  The same principles are involved: a good narrative, authenticity, and a compelling reason to buy or vote, in the case of politicians. Q2: Say some politicians have approached you. What do you […]

Most companies today are stuck in what’s called a Red Ocean, a marketplace filled with intense competition, where businesses offer similar products and fight over the same customers. Coined by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, the term describes the bloodied waters of saturated markets, where everyone’s trying to take a bigger slice of an already shrinking pie. Here, the […]

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all” — Peter Drucker, “The Effective Executive” One of the hardest things for leaders is knowing when to stop. We’re taught to push forward. To persevere. To fight sunk cost by doing more, rather than asking if we should be doing it at all. But as […]

One of the most persistent myths in product development is: “If you build it, they will come.” This belief has led many businesses to launch not because the market demanded it, but simply because they could. It’s the classic trap of supply-side thinking, where the focus is on what the organization can produce, not what the market needs.  But hindsight has a way […]

Josiah Go features the movers and shakers of the business world and writes about marketing, strategy, innovation, execution and entrepreneurship

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