For decades, goal setting has been promoted as a halcyon pill for improving employee motivation and performance in organizations. Advocates of goal setting argue that for goals to be successful, they should be specific and challenging, and countless studies find that specific, challenging goals motivate performance far better than "do your best" exhortations. The authors of this article, however, argue that it is often these same characteristics of goals that cause them to "go wild." Key conc...

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Subhiksha's setback in organized retail highlights some of the critical failures in execution of a growth strategy.

1. Failure to understand and compete with Kirana or 'Mom and Pop' stores. The Kirana stores offer convenience, sophisticated CRM, credit  etc.  The model for retail stores is to co-exist with a Kirana store, and work out a model, or a 'role in customer's life'

2. Build scale at any cost. Subhikha's case shows how they went about a debt-driven growth and had a very low equity base ...
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Not everybody needs to discover something absolutely new. Entrepreneurs can , however, build a strong value proposition by working with existing products, processes, supply chain, value chains and customer insights.

1. Product Usage Innovation by finding  new uses for existing products. 

Case-let : Vélib', the self-service bicycle hire scheme adopted by the City of Paris and invented by JCDecaux was one way where JC Decaux created a completely new category of bicycle mass transit system.  JCD...

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90% of entrepreneurs or businesses spend a lot of time and effort on product development, infrastructure and other areas. But very few of them spend adequate time on the consumer. This can be attributed to the fact that they think 'they know' what the customer wants or they have a big ego about what they think is right.

It is this ego or gut-feel (which encouraged them to be entrepreneurs in the first place) which impedes their connection with their customers. The lack of understanding of cust...
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