Ricky’s Online Business Blog

In business and entrepreneurship, we often talk about “business model” and “revenue model”. Put simply, a business model describes how a business work and compete.  A revenue model says how the business earns its revenue and profit.

It’s my first time to come up with a more formal model on real life problems. It is not meant to be complete or entirely accurate.  A model is just a representation of the real world.  It is meant to help us make decision on real life problems. It has weaknesses and we shall not depend on a model entirely.

I came up with this model on personal branding as I’m preparing for a talk on the topic.  The model doesn’t try to cover everything about personal branding. Nor does it explain why we should do brand our self, or how to go about doing it. But it’s more on the elements of personal branding and the kind of questions we should ask our self when developing and evaluating our own personal brand.

I hope to elaborate more on the model soon. But for now, I’ll let the mind map do the talking. Click on the map to get the full picture. If you can roughly get the ideas I want to convey simply by looking at the mind map, then I know my mind mapping skill has improved

Your comments and criticisms are much welcome.

FB post #1 – Have you been saying you want to do something, but your action just doesn’t show you are doing it? Perhaps you need a little more motivation? Perhaps many things in life keep distracting you that you can’t focus? Perhaps you are over ambitious that your goal is just not practical? Or perhaps what?

FB post #2 - Have you been working diligently but other people just don’t see your hard work? Perhaps your performance is not yet good enough to attract their attention? Perhaps you need some “selling skills” to make them notice you? Or perhaps you are not exposed enough that they don’t even know your existence?

FB post #3 - Sometimes what we want to do conflicts with what other important people in our life expect us to do. Maybe we haven’t learned enough of their needs. Maybe we don’t know enough of our own ability. Or maybe we haven’t communicated enough with them on what we can do for them.

How do you respond to these posts and questions? I’m in brainstorming stage to prepare for an upcoming talk on personal branding. Your comments are welcome.

Last night in the Training & Development Management class, the lecturer was discussing business strategy.  Suddenly he turned to me and asked, “Ricky, how can a magazine compete?”

Without much thinking I replied, “Don’t be a magazine.” Before that, I had been habitually telling people to operate a successful bookstore, don’t be a bookstore; to be a successful nasi lemak store, don’t sell nasi lemak. That is, be bold to come out of your product category, create your own market space and be perceived as offering something different or more than what you sell.

As a matter of fact, I know of one magazine which is not really in magazine business.  The company behind is actually in branding business. They charge clients fees to certify their brand, give them brand awards, and promote them in a number of ways, magazine being one main channel. No wonder I can’t find advertisements in the magazine.

I guess the lecturer asked me about magazine because he knew I used to write a column for a magazine called MBA Edge Quarterly. Again, if I had resources and owned a magazine like this, I would do it in different way, rather than a traditional one going around soliciting for advertisers and presents only good things about MBA. Create an MBA 2.0 magazine!

Calling all business owners and managers! Would you like any of your businesses or divisions being featured in an MBA course? I can help. Please contact me and let’s discuss.

You may have read about companies being taught in business textbooks, or mentioned in management courses. Your company too, no matter public-listed or sole proprietorship, can get such exposure among the business community, starting from the nascent circle of business students.

Your company will be covered in areas of mutual agreement, such as management, leadership, marketing, human resources, finance, operations, strategies and so on. Please share your success stories too and how you cope with challenges, whether in the past or now.

So you not only get your company name out, you also get free consulting service as we work to analyze your issues faced and propose solutions to them. And by the way…

Have you seen many business students come out to work only to find themselves unable to cope with real world issues? Please help reform our management education and train our students by contributing a part to give them real business issues to solve as their case study.

Please don’t worry about any trade secrets, strategies, financial information and anything being leaked out. We can discuss on how to cover up and disguise these information for win-win situation for all.

Please contact me here. Your contribution will go a long way toward improving the quality of our business education.