There is a clear difference between making decisions and taking decision and making them work. Take for example the following scenario, you buy a particular company’s stock in order to invest in that business. You have made that decision. Once you have committed to the investment, your options are only two-fold, you can either buy or sell. You cannot in any way influence over the success of that organization.

On the other hand, instead of investing your money in a stock, you could invest it by starting your own business. Naturally, doing so entails strategic decision making, knowing your customer, identifying a target group, and creating a product for it. The success or the lack of it, is essentially in your hands. The success of your organization will depend on your business decision making skills. You have to make your decisions work for you.

Once you start examining and minutely scrutinizing the decision making tree which the average Joe takes, there appears to be different approaches to a common problem. Although inherently, there is nothing wrong with that, but it only goes to show that there is always scope for further tweaking our approach to extract maximum mileage.

Take for example, the question of a talented individual and the regular Joe working in an organization, doing the same routines and the same tasks. You would naturally expect this naturally gifted individual outperform the regular Joe, after all, he is exceptionally talented. Fact of the matter is that, the difference in output by both individuals, is not much. Question is, as a business entity what are we doing in order to make our HR policy work? What systems are in place to ensure that the exceptional individuals that we hire, are put to use in an exceptionally effective manner? Or as Warren Buffet puts it, what is the performance benefit when a talented individual is tasked to work in a distinctly average business concern? The answer, as you have guessed it, is pretty obvious.

On the other hand, when it comes to product strategy, we tend to lean on the other extreme. Whenever an organization’s services or products suffer, more initiatives and men are poured into it, so as to solve the problem. If a product line is going south, efforts are redoubled to ensure increase its sales, in order to secure market share. Selling strategies are cooked up and the marketing budget increased … all so that the problem is effectively solved. Our energies are directed towards making our decisions work. But the root question does not come to mind, given the scenario, whether we still want to be selling products in this market? Whether we still want to be in this business?

Biases are naturally occurring events. It happens to everybody. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out why we tend to focus on recruiting instead of focusing on the organization’s requirements and needs. Focusing on shiny talented individuals is way more appealing than focusing on tedious matters of rethinking the business’s marketing strategy.

Psychologically, product strategy comes to us more naturally too: it is much easier to proactively defend the product by pushing sales vide brilliant marketing strategies. On the other hand it is distinctly less appealing to entertain the possibility that the market does not give a damn any more about our product.

Given the economic scenario, as far as making decisions are concerned, it is high time that we step back a little and review our decision making process. As for product strategies are concerned we need to make some tough decisions and ensure that they in fact work.


References:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alastairdryburgh/2015/03/15/memo-to-the-ceo-are-we-making-decisions-or-making-decisions-work/

Being a global leader in the billing and subscription commerce model of the new economy, Zuora, lends a helping hand to industries wanting to cross over from the old model to a newer subscription-based one.

Founded in 2007, Zuora is a company that has recognized the new age of subscription as a service model pretty early on in this game. It prefers to describe itself as relationship business management company that helps you manage subscription across customer segments, your revenue inflows, recurring receipts and payments, order tracking etc. Essentially, it helps you manage aspects of your business which deal with subscription as a business model.

Subscription as a business model, is a new way of thinking and of doing business. If, as a company, you have yet to switch over to the new subscription-model economy, and you are used to working on ERP and SAP based models, you may rightly question the need to switch over to this subscription model. Tzuo of Auora has a ready answer for you.

Simplification of a working system is a sign of its genius, and the new age thinking of subscription-as-a-service is nothing but that. Although ERP and SAP have both worked consistently in the past for many companies, they are very tedious and time consuming to setup and maintain. This is especially true in large multinational corporations.

That does not go to say that subscription as a model can be setup by a child. It certainly has its own challenges. But in the long run, it streamlines and simplifies your business to a large extent, which can be achieved by ERP and SAP based solutions, but at a much greater cost.
Zuora offers three kinds of services:

1.   Pre-paid plans that provides you with all the necessary details for a consumption based model

2.   Subscription lifecycle plan which create a new metric and a new way of measuring a product’s lifecycle

3.   An integration plan that takes the above plans and integrates and fuses them with your existing systems such that you can gradually cross over to the new age subscription based model without having any downtime.

Thanks to the splash it has been making in the market, Zuora received a whopping $115 million funding, for its subscription as-a-service model. This additional funding brings its capital base to $250 million, which is a clear and definite sign that more and more companies are switching over to the new subscription-age business model. It is also a sign and a vote of confidence from investors that the subscription based model works.
 
Cofounder and CEO, Tien Tzuo was naturally and understandably all smiles.
 

In the new economy, the focus is on recurring relationship as opposed to a buy and forget model. The subscription based model cultivates the relationship between a seller and a buyer and provides a valuable service, as a subscription.

More and more companies are switching over to this subscription based model. Thermo Fisher Scientific, which builds all kinds of scientific instruments and data analyses software, has quickly made the transition to this new business model.

As per its CEO Mark Field:

He went on to say that not only was Zuora’s solution “a good fit,” because of the manner in which it “easily” integrated into their supply chain management systems and enterprise resource planning, moreover and very importantly “the implementation would cost less and [could] be delivered quickly.”
Zuora’s subscription platform is based on a tried and tested model and Tzuo informs that more staff will be hired to support analytics and other areas of this platform thanks to the new funding.

References:
http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/11/zuora-lands-a-massive-115m-as-the-world-goes-as-a-service/