What assets aren't you selling?

Often individuals and organizations become so focused on their primary business, they don't fully appreciate all their core skills, talents, and resources. It takes an outsider sometimes or a bestselling book like Strength Finder 2.0.
Charles McCabe founded People's Income Tax, Inc. in 1987. He planned to open multiple tax offices in central Virginia, so he started The People's Income Tax School in 1990 with the intention of staffing his offices with graduates from this program.
McCabe couldn't have foreseen how the tax-preparation industry would shake out. Over the past two decades, Peoples has lost market share to national tax firms, TurboTax, TaxCut, and IRS Free File. The tax school, however, is thriving.
Initially, the tax school was a way to level-out the extreme seasonal cash flow of the business. When Warren Drake, a vendor from Drake Software, asked, "Peoples Income Tax is the only independent tax firm I know of that has an income tax school like Block's; why don't you sell it to other independent tax firms?" McCabe was tempted to brush the idea aside. Thankfully, he didn't.
Peoples' highly seasonal tax business has morphed into a year-round operation with seasonal tax preparers working during the off-season to develop and update curriculum, sell to licensees, exhibit at national trade shows, provide instructor support and administer the learning management system (LMS) used to deliver tax courses directly to thousands of distance learning students via the Internet. Peoples' new vision is to become the de facto standard for tax preparer training nationwide, and they are well on their way to attaining that goal. The tax school revenue from e-learning alone was up in 2008 (month-to-month compared to 2007) by 44% for October, 90% for November, and 248% for December.
With a poor holiday shopping season in the books; layoffs, foreclosures, and bankruptcies dominating the news; and no clear end to the recession in sight, it's time to take stock. Not just of who is left, but what is left. Discover your strengths as a brand and as an operating entity. And play to win on those assets.What assets aren't you selling?

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Book Review Outiers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell knows how to tell a good story, but his books (Blink, The Tipping Point, and Outliers) make me a bit impatient. "Get to the point," I want to tell him.
In Outliers, Gladwell's point is this: Those on far edges of the bell curve—either the far right (totally at the top end of their profession, like Bill Gates and the Beatles) or the far left (totally at the tragic end of the curve like Korean Airlines, who own one of the worst crash records)—are largely the product of their cultures, advantages, and opportunities. Skill and intelligence, in other words, may not be the primary drivers of success.
Gladwell notes that Bill Gates grew up in an upper-class community, and his school was one of the few to have a computer terminal. Gates and others who, at that age and time, had similar access to computers dominate the technology industry today. With the Beatles, it's more of a case that practice makes perfect. They had an opportunity to play as a group together more than 1100 times in public before becoming famous—far more audience exposure than most entertainers get in an entire career.
Being the right age as the world is entering a new phase of development can be your lottery ticket to huge success, according to Gladwell. You have to be old enough to take advantage of the innovation and not so old that the risk of jumping-in seems perilous.
In The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb would have us believe that the only thing that is certain is that the unpredictable will happen, so it may be too early to say that the Green Movement will be the next success-maker, but I think it shows some promise.
Outliers and The Black Swan—like Freakonomics and Made to Stick—rely on systems thinking (without calling it that), cognitive bias, and empirical skepticism to draw conclusions about why things are not as they may first appear.
If you like good storytelling, you will definitely enjoy Outliers, but if you're looking for more take-away points per page, you may wind up skimming some of it.