I was recently made aware of a book called "Zone to Win" and having just watched a video summarising the key points, I found it fascinating.

It's not just about why established companies struggle to embrace disruptive innovation but about how they can do it. 

Even though I have not yet read the book, I thought it would be helpful to share some of the key points with you as they can be an eye-opener. 

The author, Geoffrey Moore, argues that companies struggle with disruption because of internal issues. Having worked in different types of industries and different organizational sizes, I can definitely agree. Internal processes and challenges stall innovation. Companies get too bogged down into fixing things rather than innovating and changing.  

To resolve such issues, the book says organisations need to segment the enterprise into distinct management zones, each with its own methods and metrics.

These zones are also aligned with the strategic horizons of the company - a model defined by McKinsey around annual planning of investments and resources and when you get a return on them. 

The Three Investment Horizons

This is a guest post by my friend and former colleague Sam Hirbod. 

This year, INBOUND 2020 - HubSpot's yearly inbound conference - moved to an all-digital immersive format featuring exceptional speakers ranging from Sandy Carter, VP of Amazon Web Services to Chrissy Teigen, Bestselling Author.

The move to digital events is not something HubSpot is alone in doing, it’s been an ongoing trend for the past years but 2020 definitely accelerated the process of having industries digitising their efforts.

When applicable, digitalisation removes the physical barriers of COVID-19, making it easy for people to still meet, albeit online. As a result, people were able to attend INBOUND 2020 from all over the world from the comfort of their own homes or offices.

What’s the downside of digitalisation? From my perspective, although biased as I work within the tech industry, there aren’t too many as it’s all about putting customers first and making sure everything still works the way they want it to.

With the coronavirus having dramatically shaken our world (although I have my thoughts about this whole thing), many companies are encouraging or even requiring their employees whenever possible to work from home. 

I've been fortunate enough to have worked for two companies where working from home is a normal part of the company culture (and that my job permits for me to work at home). In fact, I work from home most of time now.

But there are a lot of businesses and whole countries even that don't have that basis - working from home has never been the norm, managers distrust team members as they don't have direct, eye control or individuals even struggle to concentrate at home. 

The above issues happen because of lack of experience but if you as a company and as an individual give it a go, I promise you that you'll find working from home a wonderful experience. It makes people more productive and happier due to better work-life balance or as I prefer to call it, work-life integration. 

But truly making this work, requires some planning and thoughtful organisation. 

Here are my top tips about working from home as an individual that I've developed over the last five years.

One of the most popular buzzwords nowadays is customer-first or putting your customer at the centre of every business decision and activity.

I stand behind it. The Inbound PR methodology preaches this customer or as I call it persona-first thinking and in fact doesn't really work without it. 

Far too many businesses are still putting their products and services first when it comes to their marketing, sales and communications decisions even though they say they're customer-centric. 

In fact, over 80% of businesses are talking about the benefits of a customer-first approach, but few of these are turning talk into action. 

This stat comes from Optimizely - a leader in customer experimentation technology that did research earlier this year around the digital experience economy. 

I dug into it and I want to share some key findings and learnings: 

8 Key Problems for Customer-First:

This is a guest post by Liuda Nebozhak from Crello.

Every start-up undergoes some trial and error in its first 1-2 years. Those are probably some of the most difficult and crucial learnings of any new business. 

There's a ton start-ups need to figure out, including their own PR and marketing. PR especially plays a key role because as a start-up nobody knows you and you need to get the word out about your existence, your products and the new value that you add in the market. 

Our company Crello - which offers a design tool specifically for marketers and bloggers - has gone through multiple trials and errors but we've learned a lot.

We recently announced and celebrated reaching the major milestone of 1 million users over the course of just 20 months.  However, it took us some time to find our product-market fit and we are continuing to tweak it to this day. Along the way, we are leveraging our product development with the help of PR, brand ambassadors, and market research, amongst others.

Below are my 5 key takeaways for getting your start-up off the ground.