Friday, March 29, 2024

Consultant proposes business fine tuning steps to success

Posted by Elena del Valle on February 10, 2012

Find Your Next book cover

Find Your Next book cover

Photos: Andrea Kates

Andrea Kates, a branding specialist, believes many businesses share a similar “genetic” structure. She is convinced that by understanding what works for a company’s “genetic” type it is possible to fine tune that company focusing on strengths and avoiding weaknesses. In Find Your Next: Using the Business Genome to Find Your Company’s Next Competitive Edge (McGraw Hill, $30), a 226-page hardcover book published this year, she outlines the method and steps she proposes to unlock a company’s basic structure in order to focus on the fine tuning.

She believes there are six main parts to a business: product and service innovation; customer impact; talent, leadership, and culture; process design; trendability and secret sauce. Part of the research she conducted for the book consisted of in-depth interviews with representatives of P.F. Chang’s, GE ecomagination, GM/OnStar, IndieGoGo, Placecast, Autodesk, Cisco Systems, and Jones Lang LaSalle.

Andrea Kates, author, Find Your Next

Andrea Kates, author, Find Your Next

Kates fours steps are meant to combine experience and instinct. They are: sort through options and evaluate hunches; compare your business structure (she calls it genome) with existing successful businesses in your field; adopt the ideas of others you think will enhance your company; and release habits that are no longer useful and adopt those that can help your business grow.

Kates, according to her book bio, has worked as a business strategist, facilitator, and speaker, with 250 business innovation initiatives for corporations, entrepreneurs, and organizations including Royal Dutch Shell (Asia-Pacific), Audi, Allstate, Continental Airlines, Hewlett-Packard, JP Morgan Chase, KPMG, the Houston Texans (NFL), and OnStar.


Find Your Next book cover

Click to buy Find Your Next