The case for digital reinvention | McKinsey & Company

This finding confirms what many executives may already suspect: by reducing economic friction, digitization enables competition that pressures revenue and profit growth. Current levels of digitization have already taken out, on average, up to six points of annual revenue and 4.5 points of growth in earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT). And there’s more pressure ahead, our research suggests, as digital penetration deepens.

Source: The case for digital reinvention | McKinsey & Company

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How the API economy is igniting a cultural shift in businesses | CIO

It’s clear the big no longer eat the small; the fast eat the slow. Speed is one of the single most important characteristics that determine a company’s success today. It’s critical for bringing new products to market, establishing new global presences, changing existing processes and onboarding new partners—all faster than competition.

Source: How the API economy is igniting a cultural shift in businesses | CIO

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25% of CEOs’ Time Is Spent on Tasks Machines Could Do | Harvard Business Review

Like President Johnson in the 1960s, we see that automation could make a major contribution to productivity and prosperity… For companies around the world, automation will offer the potential to capture substantial value — and not just from labor substitution. These technologies enable higher throughput, enhanced quality, better outcomes, greater safety, and the opportunity to scale up or adopt new business models.

Source: 25% of CEOs’ Time Is Spent on Tasks Machines Could Do

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Do Things that Don’t Scale

If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks. It would be a little frightening to be solving users’ problems in a way that wasn’t yet automatic, but less frightening than the far more common case of having something automatic that doesn’t yet solve anyone’s problems.

Source: Do Things that Don’t Scale

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Lessons Learned Building A Productized Service – Smashing Magazine

It’s Not SaaS: It’s A Productized Service
I started out with the goal of building SaaS. But as it evolved, I learned that the value was not so much in the software part, but rather in the service. A more accurate way to describe the business today would be a productized service.
It’s largely built around manual processes. We personally talk to and follow up with every visitor who requests a consultation. We then manually set up every new customer’s website, input all of their content and make customizations. We even offer “done for you” ongoing support.

Source: Lessons Learned Building A Productized Service – Smashing Magazine

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How to ‘Productize’ Your Service Business Offerings

If you own or lead a professional services company, you understand the unique challenges you face in not offering a tangible product. Even if your business is thriving, you still only have so much time to exchange for money. Try as you might to maximize price or delivery and allow yourself a comfortable margin, you will still reach a natural ceiling.

This was the day things shifted from: “I know this and therefore others will pay me to do that for them,” to “I want to learn everything about marketing. Quantify and organize it, and then bring it to market in a highly repeatable manner.”

Source: How to ‘Productize’ Your Service Business Offerings

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Outcome based pricing Exploring an ‘everything as a service’ model

Pricing based on customer outcomes has the potential to turn the buyer/seller relationship into more of a partnership, because both sides are working toward common objectives. The seller is motivated to drive efficiency and positive outcomes – because the more successful the customer is, the more revenue it generates.

Source: Outcome based pricing Exploring an ‘everything as a service’ model | pwc

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Are You The Point Of Inflection?

Barry McCarthy, Netflix’s former chief financial officer, said in an interview with the Unofficial Stanford blog in 2008, “I remembered getting on a plane, I think sometime in 2000, with Reed [Hastings] and [Netflix co-founder] Marc Randolph and flying down to Dallas, Texas and meeting with John Antioco. Reed had the chutzpah to propose to them that we run their brand online and that they run [our] brand in the stores and they just about laughed us out of their office. At least initially, they thought we were a very small niche business. Gradually over time, as we grew our market, his thinking evolved but initially they ignored us and that was much to our advantage.” …

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