Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

Yesterday on Groundhog Day, it seems that Punxsutawney Phil declared six more weeks of winter.  Certainly, as I sit here in Vermont this AM with the temp at 5 at 8:00 with a forecasted -25 ambient tonight, winta' like Phil is going to stick around for a while.  On balance however, this has been a very mild winter, and although I'm looking out at 18" of snow in front of my office window, when I left Tufts yesterday, there's no sign of any snow in Boston.  

Tags: Sales Management Best Practices, Tufts Marketing, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans

Last week, I noted with great pride that Pitchbook's annual university rankings of the top producers of U.S. venture capital-backed startup founders listed Tufts in its top 50 universities in the country!  Great to be listed alongside other MA-based universities like MIT, Harvard and BU, who also made the top 50. For me as a Tufts professor, this listing drives directly to the overarching mission of Tufts and its uniqueness to actively promote innovation and research across all of our 11 schools. 
 

Tags: how to write a business plan, Tufts Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurshipfortherestofus, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans

Every morning I'm up at 4:30. First, I ask Alexa to play WBZ 1030 Radio, so I get my "5 Things You Need to Know" with the local news plus what I really care about which is the traffic and weather to gauge my travel time from the NH beach to Boston.  The traffic is always wicked, so  I'm just listening for the big accidents like..."yet another truck got Storrowed early this morning", which if you live in Boston, you know what this means.

 

I then ask Alexa to "Play Bloomberg News", while I click into my newest edition of the WSJ on my iPad and comb through whatever appeals as interesting articles for the day. Last Tuesday, I stopped on this headline of "Millennials Are Changing What It Takes to Succeed in Sales".  

The next day, I was reminded of the same article when one of my most faithful blog readers and repeated entrepreneurs, Jerry Brecher, sent it to me. I'm going to link the article here, but my expectation is that by clicking on it, unless you're a WSJ subscriber, you will not get past their paywall. If you cannot, I would encourage you to hunt down the article and read it thoroughly.  

 

Me & Millennials

I began teaching at MIT 22 years ago and Tufts 17, so where I started in this wonderful profession was initially working with Xers and then mostly with Millennials.  Exciting, extremely smart, powerful in their statements and curiosity, very energetic, fast-paced and always questioning to move ahead and make an impact in the world!  Clearly in numbers, the largest generation: more than the Boomers who carried that badge since the 1940's.

Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts, 2022 sales planning, Teaching at Tufts University, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans

When I returned from a couple of years in the Peace Corps, it was relatively easy for me to find a job...even given the fact that I had zippo experience in business and only an undergraduate degree from BC with a major in English.  No one really cared about the degree or my skills; they just wanted to hear about the Peace Corps.  One of my primary takeaways from those early years working first at Honeywell in their newly launched memory chip initiative and then at Becton Dickinson in their medtech division was the criticality of time management.   

 

Maybe, it was my inherent drive to make sure that I could stay ahead of the curve working with really bright manufacturing and engineering types, or maybe it's just the way I'm wired, but I've become highly focused and highly protective of my own time and that of the teams I work with both in my consulting role and at Tufts.

Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, Teaching entrepreneurship, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans

I was sitting in a board meeting two weeks ago-great company and a superb team of directors and management-when one of the directors used this phrase of "no profit, no mission".

That quick comment crystallized for me in an instant that exacting balance we want to achieve in all our companies between "doing good" and "making money".  In fact, in this particular company, we're a public corporation that manufactures specialty chemicals, so immediately one would think "well, there's an immediate problem with doing any good". The reality, however, is totally the opposite:

Tags: Teaching entrepreneurship, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans

Tomorrow morning I'll send out my normal Friday blog on an issue that I am increasingly very concerned about which is that it seems to me that we are rapidly talking our way into the downward spiral of a recession and a very cold winter.    That's for tomorrow!

Tags: Sales Management Best Practices, Tufts internships, Tufts Entrepreneurship, Teaching entrepreneurship, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans

Tags: Tufts marketing projects, Tufts internships, 2022 business planning, 2022 sales planning, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning

There are certainly more than a few universities both locally and across the country that feature entrepreneurship programs.  In fact, every university and most standalone colleges have an entrepreneurship program from the giants of Babson, where entrepreneurship is their DNA, to the halls of MIT, where I also teach, to excellent programs at BU, BC, UNH and across all the campuses of UMass.  Very simply, a university cannot be taken seriously without entrepreneurship studies in their program at some level since. in fact, entrepreneurship is not about tech startups.  Real entrepreneurship is about innovation and very few universities are as well-equipped as is Tufts, which is recognized as one of the top research universities in the U.S.  

Tags: Tufts marketing projects, interns for marketing projects, jack derby professor at Tufts, Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts, 2022 business planning, entrepreneurshipfortherestofus, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts

Somewhere deep in the rhythm of the lives of all of us are the memories which awaken around this time of year of "back to school" whether that results from buying clothes and supplies for our own kids or the anxieties that came in our own lives with major shifts into a new building or going off to college as a freshman.  The rhythm of operating our businesses, especially as it relates to our employees, is often in sync with the rhythms of the school year.  

Tags: free marketing projects from universities, marketing planning, social entrepreneurship, 2022businessplansuccess, Teaching entrepreneurship, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts