Amazing Speaking Workshop Tonight

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By accident I attended a workshop meeting tonight held by a meetup group ‘Toastmaster’. I’m still confused what exactly is this group about but did have a great time then. The main purpose is to offer people who want to improve their speaking skills the chance and guidance they need. 10-20 people meet together, each give a short speech on arbitrary topics and evaluate each other’s performance.

屏幕快照 2014-10-01 下午10.14.11

I was like a dog sneaking into cats’ get-together but still enjoyed it a lot. For me it’s not like a speaking training class but more of listening to others’s thoughts and experiences. I could just focus on what they talked about rather than how they performed the speech.

There are 3 speaker tonight to give a short speech.First one is Elena Vernigora, a Swedish lady with a likeness of Princess Kate. Her title is ‘Where Buda and Pest meet…’ , and she talked about her experience of a week in Budapest and around. She was planning to spend one-week holiday in Milan for shopping, but by accident she ran into Budapest, a city not that famous for tourism. But instead of complaining and desperation,she had a great time exploring this mysterious city and fell in love with it. That’s her story where Buda and Pest meet, life is like that, full of surprise for you to find out.

The second speaker is Elena Fadeeva, she talks about water–the BLUE GOLD. She put emphasis on the importance of water and worldwide use of it. She points out that water is the base of agriculture and without water there’s not food, no life at all. So shouldn’t we treat water the same way as gold? I think it’s quite old stuff and well-know fact, so didn’t pay much attention.

The last and most amazing speech is given by the president of Toastmaster, Antoinette Olander. She is a passionate and friendly woman. Her title is ‘What Have We Done?’ She enumerates the historical events happened in her generation( the boomers, as she puts it).15 years from high school graduation, some become entrepreneurs and bosses, some are employers and some are employees, some went to Vietnam and some become widows. Some marched with Martin Luther King and some died with the twin building in NY… but all these just make her stronger and give her tools to make it in this world: respect to others, self-discipline and not to be judgmental. In the end, she quoted the lyrics of the famous song ‘Forever Young’ to end the speech and we all felt passionate and confident.

Here is what I want to share with you 🙂

 

May God bless and keep you always 
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others 
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars 
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young 
May you stay forever young.May you grow up to be righteous 
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth 
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous 
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young 
May you stay forever young.

May your hands always be busy 
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation 
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful 
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young 
May you stay forever young.

 

Key partnerships and dependencies – how do you know if it is a trap or not?

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We came across an interesting subject the other day in class; the importance of partnerships when forming a business model vs. not being dependent on one single actor.

The issue presented and that has been vividly studied in media is the massive enterprise Amazon that has disrupted the sales of book sales for firms like Barnes & Noble. This has been an enormous opportunity for smaller writers to put their product in stock on the shelf of the e-commerce giant. What has happened now is that these writers are dependent on Amazon in order to sell their products; the huge retailer has a very strong bargaining power and can easily drop prices to directly compete with the smaller writers – loosing a couple of hundred thousand dollar won’t matter much if you are the biggest player.

This is a position that you do not want to find yourself and your business in. So in order to reduce the risk of dependency, is it enough to just increase the number of partnerships?

Another interesting, and very contemporary, subject is the music distribution industry. Spotify, one of the largest actors in the industry has somewhat reincarnated the idea of music distribution – but it has been around for several decades. Despite the, excuse my objectivity, louse pay-checks that has been paid out to record labels and musicians, somehow Spotify has lured big players in the music industry and millions of active users have followed their value proposition.

Now, I have had a couple of friends that have worked for Spotify here in Sweden. When asked about the future and their business model the response is this:

‘There will be a dominant player in the music distribution industry within the next 5 years. The focus of Spotify is not profitability, but “users, users, users”. Spotify must come out on top and then we can make money.’

It will be interesting to see how the dynamics between Spotify and the labels/musicians will develop, but it seems like they will be dependent on one large actor in the end and that their music won’t get a long reach without that actor. According to the history and how other markets have developed (read the book industry, mentioned above), then this is a bad sign for the musicians. Just as the consumers brought this down upon the book-wholesalers, so it will be brought down on the musicians.

I would like to discuss how musicians could work against the dominant player and, in the end, save their industry. Any thoughts anyone? 🙂

BR Ludwig Widén

Canvas example

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Hi everyone!

Talking about business model canvas I would like to share with you a work done by me and my friends in Italy this year.
We had to write a business plan for a Californian startup (with Italian origins): this firm wanted to launch in europe (our investigation regards only Italy) a diet product already approved by FDA in  U.S.A.
The first step was indeed to draw a first version of the business model canvas.

Canvas version 1

At the beginning we didn’t have so much knowledge  about the product (it was not an our idea…), so it was difficult to undestand the possible value proposition and the other parts.

After few weeks and some researches we change the canvas

Canvas version 2

We change the customer segments: the previous two segments (Middle age and Health conscious people) became only one single segment, and a new one was added (customer with age & weight diseases).

The changes occured also in other parts in the third version of the canvas.

Canvas version 3

Pay attention only to the channel part, you can notice that we added pharmacy like a possible channel, that’s because our research showed us that in Italy similar products use this channel.

The final version went under a deep change!
Our interviews pointed out that in Italy the people trust only in dieticians advices, if a physician say them that they have to purchase a certain product they will buy, and through the pharmacy.
So also our customer segment completely changed.

Canvas version 4

You can notice other changes, but my example want only to show you how many changes in the canvas occur during the time,especially in the important areas; and this was only a student work in 6 months.

Thanks, I hope that you like this simple example!

P.S. I’m sorry for the small pictures 🙁