WASHINGTON - Google's Chairman Eric Schmidt plans to sell 3.2 million
"A" shares, currently worth $2.5 billion, over the next year, Google
said Friday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The sale amounts to 42 percent of Schmidt's 7.6 million Class A and
Class B shares in the company, a 2.3 percent stake in the company, but
8.2 percent of voting power.
The sale is part of a pre-arranged trading plan for Schmidt's
"long-term strategy for individual asset diversification and liquidity,"
according to the filing.
"Using this trading plan, Eric can diversify his investment portfolio
and can spread stock trades out over a period of one year to reduce
market impact."
Google's share price climbed 1.5 percent Friday to a new all-time
record of $785.37, putting the value of the shares Schmidt will sell at
$2.51 billion.
In its September 2012 billionaires list -- when Google shares crossed
the $700 line for the first time -- Forbes ranked Schmidt 138th in the
world, with his fortune worth $7.5 billion.
Saturday, 9 February 2013
1 Critical Marketing Rule Steve Jobs and Marc Benioff Taught Us, and Google Helps Us Apply for Free
Divert a river, don’t dig a well.
Simple.
Find existing need, tap into it, shape it. Don’t try and create need.
Now to really divert a river, you shape need. Steve Jobs was a master at diverting a river, shaping need… anticipating the future. He used innovation and human ingenuity.
Look at his iPod.
Everyone loves music. That’s the river. Sony built the Walkman for portable listening, first on cassette, then CD. They dug a well. MP3 players were around, but not exciting, no ‘sizzle’. Too hard to dig a well. It took some innovation… flash memory, simple interface, iTunes, deals with record labels, Bono and U2, and finally, The Beatles.
Steve Jobs diverted a river, he didn’t dig a well.
Look at his iPad, and the iPhone. They are relegating desktop computers to a support device. They diverted the river around them. Steve saw portable and mobile devices as bigger than the Internet. He was right.
I’ve heard more people have a mobile device around the world than a toothbrush. Really?
We learned this ‘divert a river’ rule again when we invested in the domain name for our company, InsideSales.com, in late 2004.
Why was this so powerful?
If you go to Google and type in the phrase ‘inside sales’, you see 277,000,000 results. Tens of thousands of companies hiring inside sales people. And we appear first, and second, and third. Then Wikipedia shows up. Then something about us appears fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth…
Ok, so what?
Now go to the Google Keyword Tool and type in the keyword ‘inside sales.’
It is searched 60,500 times a month globally, 40,500 times monthly locally. That is over 60,000 searches with 9 ads appearing for our business every month. What would that cost? To us, it’s free.
Divert a river, don’t dig a well.
My grandfather, William E. (Bill) Baker, was over the water department in St. George, Utah. He found and developed most of the water sources that helped put St. George on the map. St. George is the thriving retirement community in southern Utah that wouldn’t be nearly what it is today.
Bill knew the value of water.
They have irrigated lawns and gardens with streams of flowing water in the gutters throughout all of St. George for the last half century. You lift the gate on the ditch to your yard and put a gate down in the main ditch and divert the flow during your watering time. If your yard is angled well, it even flows back into the gutter at the end of your property. When your time is up, you switch the gates again.
There was a little lady up stream who would sneak and steal my grandfather’s watering time. She would divert the water before it even got to him in the middle of the night. He often had to stand guard by looking out the window. Talk about feuding neighbors!
Bill usually won. I miss him.
Salesforce.com, the dominant player in the SaaS cloud computing software industry learned this early on. Marc Benioff knew that Seibel had already started a river flowing of demand for a customer relationship management (CRM) database package for businesses, but they were a traditional software model. They had invested incredible time and money to start the flow. They had already dug the well. It was like plowing the deep snow (we know that metaphor well in Utah.) For the person walking behind it’s easy. No effort. No money. Little time.
Marc Benioff, diverted the river by offering a much better model, he didn’t have to dig a well.
As Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen says, he ‘disrupted’ an entire industry, never to be the same. In Benioff’s case, the water never came back to the ditch. Too many great things are growing and
My #1 Most Popular article on Forbes was called The Death of SEO: the Rise of Social, PR, and Real Content. I knew what I wanted to say. But before I wrote it, I went to Google Keyword Tool, and found that the phrase ‘death of seo’ had some pretty good recurring traffic: 880 searches globally a month, 480 in the US. I get 2-3 comments a week and hundreds of readers a month… still. I wrote it on July 20, 2012 from Philmont, the Boy Scout camp in New Mexico. In the arid country of New Mexico you really think about water. Trust me.
Divert a river, don’t dig a well.
I applied this ‘divert a river’ rule when I wrote an article for my blog, KenKrogue.com, called What is Inside Sales? Our Definition of Inside Sales. My goal was to try and put a definition around this new up and coming industry that would stand the test of time. It has. It’s been quoted in several books, hundreds of blogs, and at inside sales industry events even a few days ago.
How will it stand the test of time?
Continual traffic, long after the newness wears off.
I started by going to the Google Keyword Tool to find rivers that were continually flowing:
I’ve written hundreds of articles. This article generates more traffic, even today, than almost all the others combined.
Why?
I diverted a river rather than digging a well.
Try it!
Simple.
Find existing need, tap into it, shape it. Don’t try and create need.
Now to really divert a river, you shape need. Steve Jobs was a master at diverting a river, shaping need… anticipating the future. He used innovation and human ingenuity.
Look at his iPod.
Everyone loves music. That’s the river. Sony built the Walkman for portable listening, first on cassette, then CD. They dug a well. MP3 players were around, but not exciting, no ‘sizzle’. Too hard to dig a well. It took some innovation… flash memory, simple interface, iTunes, deals with record labels, Bono and U2, and finally, The Beatles.
Steve Jobs diverted a river, he didn’t dig a well.
Look at his iPad, and the iPhone. They are relegating desktop computers to a support device. They diverted the river around them. Steve saw portable and mobile devices as bigger than the Internet. He was right.
I’ve heard more people have a mobile device around the world than a toothbrush. Really?
We learned this ‘divert a river’ rule again when we invested in the domain name for our company, InsideSales.com, in late 2004.
Why was this so powerful?
If you go to Google and type in the phrase ‘inside sales’, you see 277,000,000 results. Tens of thousands of companies hiring inside sales people. And we appear first, and second, and third. Then Wikipedia shows up. Then something about us appears fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth…
Ok, so what?
Now go to the Google Keyword Tool and type in the keyword ‘inside sales.’
It is searched 60,500 times a month globally, 40,500 times monthly locally. That is over 60,000 searches with 9 ads appearing for our business every month. What would that cost? To us, it’s free.
Divert a river, don’t dig a well.
My grandfather, William E. (Bill) Baker, was over the water department in St. George, Utah. He found and developed most of the water sources that helped put St. George on the map. St. George is the thriving retirement community in southern Utah that wouldn’t be nearly what it is today.
Bill knew the value of water.
They have irrigated lawns and gardens with streams of flowing water in the gutters throughout all of St. George for the last half century. You lift the gate on the ditch to your yard and put a gate down in the main ditch and divert the flow during your watering time. If your yard is angled well, it even flows back into the gutter at the end of your property. When your time is up, you switch the gates again.
There was a little lady up stream who would sneak and steal my grandfather’s watering time. She would divert the water before it even got to him in the middle of the night. He often had to stand guard by looking out the window. Talk about feuding neighbors!
Bill usually won. I miss him.
Salesforce.com, the dominant player in the SaaS cloud computing software industry learned this early on. Marc Benioff knew that Seibel had already started a river flowing of demand for a customer relationship management (CRM) database package for businesses, but they were a traditional software model. They had invested incredible time and money to start the flow. They had already dug the well. It was like plowing the deep snow (we know that metaphor well in Utah.) For the person walking behind it’s easy. No effort. No money. Little time.
Marc Benioff, diverted the river by offering a much better model, he didn’t have to dig a well.
As Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen says, he ‘disrupted’ an entire industry, never to be the same. In Benioff’s case, the water never came back to the ditch. Too many great things are growing and
My #1 Most Popular article on Forbes was called The Death of SEO: the Rise of Social, PR, and Real Content. I knew what I wanted to say. But before I wrote it, I went to Google Keyword Tool, and found that the phrase ‘death of seo’ had some pretty good recurring traffic: 880 searches globally a month, 480 in the US. I get 2-3 comments a week and hundreds of readers a month… still. I wrote it on July 20, 2012 from Philmont, the Boy Scout camp in New Mexico. In the arid country of New Mexico you really think about water. Trust me.
Divert a river, don’t dig a well.
I applied this ‘divert a river’ rule when I wrote an article for my blog, KenKrogue.com, called What is Inside Sales? Our Definition of Inside Sales. My goal was to try and put a definition around this new up and coming industry that would stand the test of time. It has. It’s been quoted in several books, hundreds of blogs, and at inside sales industry events even a few days ago.
How will it stand the test of time?
Continual traffic, long after the newness wears off.
I started by going to the Google Keyword Tool to find rivers that were continually flowing:
- ‘inside sales’ – 60,500 searches
- ‘what is inside sales’ – 60,500 searches
- ‘definition of inside sales’ – 880 searches monthly
I’ve written hundreds of articles. This article generates more traffic, even today, than almost all the others combined.
Why?
I diverted a river rather than digging a well.
Try it!
And it helps that the river keeps growing. Inside sales as an industry is growing significantly faster than traditional outside sales, or field sales.This article was written by Ken Krogue, a contributor of Forbes.
By the way, Google Trends tells you if your river in increasing or ebbing. Let me know your thoughts and comments! – Ken
The Power Of 'What If'
What if? What if you could reinvent your business? What if you could change the perception of your brand? What if you could break from the status quo? What if you could attract better talent? What if you could reenergize your corporate culture? What if you could make the changes you know you need to make? What if? To the one, great leaders aggressively pursue what if – do you?
I’ve always said status quo is mediocrity’s best friend. While static thinking is the best short cut to obsolescence you’ll ever find, why would you want to travel that path? The sad thing is, I observe many more people willing to travel a path of ruin than I do people willing to change their thinking. While companies destined to fail reward average thinking, successful companies reward the bold thinking revealed through the microscope of what if.
Much has been written about the power of creative thinking, ideation, disruptive innovation, etc., but little has been written on how to successfully implement these processes. If you’ve ever wondered how to find those “ah-ha” moments, they all begin through observations inspired by asking what if. Just because what I’m espousing today is simple doesn’t mean it isn’t effective.While many so-called business gurus sell profit through complexity, the reality is leaders rarely profit from complexity – real profit is found in the pure elegance of simplicity.
Change doesn’t need to be complex. In fact, what’s more simple than using the filter of what if? It doesn’t require any special skills or ability, just the willingness to look beyond what presently exists. Let me be as clear as I can – there is simply no reason to continue to do things that make no sense. Leadership and herd mentality should have nothing to do with one another. If you want to become a better leader stop doing things the way they’ve always been done – don’t copy create.
What if Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t ask what if search could be more simple and relevant? What if Steve Jobs failed to ask what if you combined technology and design to create the ultimate customer experience? What if Richard Branson didn’t ask what if about almost everything? Real leaders are open to the possibility that most things not only can, but should be improved upon. They understand it’s the ability to innovate and change which creates competitive advantage, adds value, and ensures sustainability.
The process of unleashing what if begins with not painting yourself into corners. Perhaps the single greatest barrier impeding the transition from what is to what if is allowing yourself to fall into the trap of either/or thinking. The best leaders realize there’s rarely a good reason to juxtapose one option against another. This is simply a false paradigm created by intellectually dishonest rationalizations. The use of A/B frameworks as a decision making model unnecessarily limit opportunity by impeding creative thought and innovation. The job of a leader is to create, expand and preserve options – not limit them.
Utilizing what if thinking allows you to maximize the present while securing the future. The best leaders know how to attain desired outcomes while remaining discovery driven. It’s clearly important to achieve short-term hurdles, but not at the expense of long-term sustainability. Smart leaders understand the present is simply a springboard to the future. Absent an aggressive forward leaning bias, short-term wins will represent little more than pyrrhic victories as the innovators, the what if thinkers, pass you by.
My recommendation is a simple one – not only do I suggest you put everything you do through a “what if audit,” but ask your team to do the same thing. Question: What if you challenged everything, slaughtered a few sacred cows, and stopped holding false truths as real? Answer: creativity would be inspired, innovation would occur, and things would change for the better. Remember, conventional wisdom usually isn’t.
Source: www.forbes.com
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