Cees Quirijns
Blog Posts
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Feb 6th, 2012 Cees Quirijns
Strategy
Blog Post
Every company needs a strategy. A strategy for solving the most important challenges a company faces in its market. Few companies actually have a strategy though. What they do typically have is a set of ambitions and/or goals and mistake these for strategies. For example: “Our...
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May 9th, 2011 Cees Quirijns
Value = Idea x Execution
Blog Post
There isn’t a day that goes by without a couple of splendid ideas that are thrown at me. Sometimes, people just hint at having a brilliant idea, but are so afraid that somebody will steal it, that they get all defensive in requiring a complicated signed NDA, before even disclosing the...
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Apr 19th, 2011 Cees Quirijns
The Mismatch Between Business and Society
Blog Post
Technological progress over the past 50 years has been tremendous. If a person who died in say 1930 were to be brought alive today, he would be truly amazed about being able to telephone without a wire, seeing high quality color TVs that are as flat as a dime and mind boggling advances in the...
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Mar 2nd, 2011 Cees Quirijns
Why every CEO should be Tech-savvy
Blog Post
Every CEO should be tech-savvy because Technology no longer merely facilitates business, but actually drives it. Most CEO's would agree that their business is now highly dependent on Information Technology, and without it properly functioning nothing much will get accomplished. Fewer...
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Feb 26th, 2011 Cees Quirijns
RAPID decision-making
Blog Post
About four years ago Bain consultant Paul Rogers coined the acronym RAPID - Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input and Decide- as a tool for allocating decision roles in a company. For every strategic decision, make sure the following roles and responsibilities are in place: Input . Providing...
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Feb 23rd, 2011 Cees Quirijns
Doubting who to hire? Go for the lazy one
Blog Post
Hire the LAZY one??? Yes. German military leader Helmut von Moltke already explained why in the 19th century. According to this general there are namely 4 classifications of people: the smart, stupid, active and lazy. Some combinations of these characteristics are very desirable, others are...
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Feb 20th, 2011 Cees Quirijns
Do you really need specialist knowledge?
Blog Post
There are many people who specialize in something. The increasingly complex world seems to dictate that, and I often hear specialist knowledge as being an important requirement for consulting buyers. A specialism namely indicates experience and expertise in a specific field or industry...
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Feb 13th, 2011 Cees Quirijns
5 Things to Stop Doing as an Entrepreneur
Blog Post
Here are a few things that I try to stop doing: 5. Delay small tasks If it takes less than two minutes to accomplish, do it now. Postponing it will simply take more time ( including to make sure to remember and plan it as a task). 4. Multitask A growing amount of research...
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Feb 7th, 2011 Cees Quirijns
From Shareholder Value to Shared Value
Blog Post
Professor Michael Porter argues to make a leap forward in the thinking about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in his latest article in Harvard Business Review . According to Porter it's even time to rethink capitalism. So far we have assumed that what's good for business is good for...
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Jan 19th, 2011 Cees Quirijns
Top 5 Startup Best Practices
Blog Post
In my book Startup Best Practices; Conversations with Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs , advice and more than a hundred lessons learned on starting up a business have been brought forward. So what is the common denominator in these stories? What are the entrepreneurial best practices that...