Book Review - Business Model You: A One Page Method for Reinventing Your Career

Identifying a viable and profitable business model is a key step in starting a new business. The business model shows how the new business will sustain itself financially; without a solid business model, a new venture is unlikely to succeed. The premise of Business Model You: A One Page Method for Reinventing Your Career is that individuals can benefit from defining their own personal business models, and can use the model as a tool to help reinvent their careers.

The Business Model Canvas

“One Page” refers to the Business Model Canvas, a simple yet effective one-page representation of a business or individual’s business model. Using real-life examples from individuals who have used the tool successfully, the book walks the reader through the process of creating their own Business Model Canvas, which has 9 building blocks as shown below.

For an entrepreneur starting a new business, a one-page business model can be extremely valuable, as it captures the essence of the business on a page, showing the big picture at one glance. But does it work at the individual level?

It absolutely does. Thinking about the work one performs in terms of who the customers are and what value is provided to them in itself is an exercise which can reveal eye-opening insights. If you stopped just at this point, you would have gained perspective and insights well worth the time spent.

The book goes one step further with its promise of a method of reinventing one’s career. How does this work? For an entrepreneur, the Business Model Canvas can be a useful prototyping tool; vary one or more element on the Business Model Canvas, and analyze the impact on the remaining elements. The same holds true for individuals, who can use the Business Model Canvas to prototype changes to their personal business model.

Before any changes however, the book advises reflection and self-discovery. The reality is that a dream career is usually created and not found – and this demands considerable self-knowledge. There are a number of tools the author uses to allow readers to discover their interests, skills and personality. You may choose to use some or all of these, or tools from other sources – but there is no disputing that creating your dream career requires a high level of self-knowledge which must be acquired in some way.

Reinventing

With this self-knowledge in hand, the next step is to reinvent one’s personal business model by coming up with a brand new Business Model Canvas. Changes to any one of the nine elements may require changes in others, so this is an iterative process. For example, if one determined that the Revenue block needed to change in order to generate more income, this could be accomplished by choosing a different set of Customers, or offering a different Value. This in turn would require changes to the Key Activities. With several iterations to refine this, one can arrive at a new personal business model.

The book emphasizes the need for testing the business model, and the necessity to take action based on it. But one of the most insightful chapters has to do with calculating the value that one brings to the organization, and understanding what this means in terms of increased sales to the company. For example – if you are paid a certain amount, you may need to bring in least 2 to 3 times that amount in additional revenue for the company for it to be worth hiring you – possibly more depending on the industry. Most people do not think in these terms – yet there is great value in doing so.

The Business Model You Community

Beyond the book, there is also a online community of Business Model You users at www.businessmodelyou.com. Many of the examples in the book were crowdsourced from the community.  Readers who are looking to connect with other users of the method, looking for inspiration or interested in seeing how others in their domain have used the model may find the community a useful resource. There are also seminars and workshops on the method advertised on the site, which may be of interest to some.

Even if all you get from this book is an understanding of your personal business model and how you  bring value to your customers, it’s well worth the price and the time spent. If it actually does help reinvent your career – that would be an incredible return on your investment.

Amazon’s Kindle DX – A Kindle in Every Backpack?

On Wednesday, May 6, 2009 Amazon unveiled the latest iteration of the Kindle e-reader, the Kindle DX. The DX is the third revision of the Kindle since the original release in November 2007, and features a larger 9.7-inch display, PDF support and increased storage at a $489 price point.

The larger display on the DX is particularly suited to reading newspapers, magazines and textbooks, and Amazon is focusing especially on this with the DX.

Could the Kindle DX help save the dying newspaper industry? Clearly the industry hopes it will – both the New York Times Company and the Washington Post Company will pilot a program where they subsidize the cost of a Kindle for consumers who live in areas where they cannot get home delivery. Presumably these consumers are used to getting their news from other sources – many of them online and for free – so the impact of these programs on subscription numbers may be fairly limited.

What really caught my eye about the Kindle DX announcement, however, was the announcement of collaborations with textbook publishers and universities. Till now, the Kindle has been very much the early adopter’s product. At $359, it’s a purchase hard to justify for most. But adoption by the student community could be the tipping point, and could help make the Kindle the iPod of the publishing industry.

The iPod made it easy for music lovers to carry large parts of their music collections with them – an extremely liberating experience! For students especially, the ability to carry around thousands of books with them on one device would be even more liberating.

Here are just a few scenarios which come to mind:

1) Schools and colleges hand out or subsidize the cost of a Kindle for every student. Textbooks for all courses are available as lists on the Kindle for easy purchase.

2) Instructor-created material such as reading lists, notes and presentations are made available as PDFs and can be downloaded by each student onto their Kindle.

3) School library access configured on each student’s Kindle. The library pays for a certain number of licenses for each book; students can browse through books, check them out and back in, all without having to visit the library.

4) A subscription-based model for textbooks and reference books – think Netflix meets Kindle. For a fixed monthly fee - which could be built into the tuition fees - students can “rent” a certain number of books a month.

The possibilities are endless. And the “catch them young” strategy means that Amazon is creating customers who will likely stay with them as they move from being students to members of the workforce.

A few other thoughts on the future of the Kindle:

Pricing

$489 for the Kindle DX and $359 for the regular Kindle is beyond reach for many potential customers - we can look at this as being the “early adopter tax”. However, prices will inevitably come down as volumes increase and the technology improves, bringing down manufacturing costs. We will likely see more affordable versions with a reduced feature set at some point, kind of like a “Kindle Nano”.

3G Connection

Part of the cost of the device is the lifetime Sprint 3G wireless connectivity built into every Kindle. With ubiquitous wi-fi availability in the home, at school and at work, this is not really necessary. Amazon could easily cut this feature and drop the price.

Color Display

While current technology and manufacturing costs limit the display to 16 shades of grey, consumers want color! It is inevitable that we will see versions with a colored display once this becomes economically viable.

Subscription-Based Services

I touched upon the subscription-based model in the context of educational institutions earlier, but there’s no reason this could not be extended to all users. Subscription-based music services such as Rhapsody offer music “rentals” for a fixed monthly fee, which lets users download songs and listen to them for as long as they maintain their subscription. Similarly, Amazon could offer book “rentals” for a monthly subscription.

Taking this a step further, the cost of the device could be subsidized with a contract for a particular length of time, similar to how mobile providers will subsidize the cost of a mobile phone with a one or two year contract.


Digital Rights Management

One of the concerns consumers have with e-readers in general has to do with the Digital Rights Management (DRM) on them. Should I spend my money buying books on the Kindle when these books will only work on the Kindle? What if they drop support for the Kindle someday? What if another reader like the Sony Reader Digital Book becomes the dominant e-reader on the market and makes all my Kindle books obsolete?

The addition of PDF support to the Kindle DX is a step in the right direction. This opens the Kindle up to non-DRM content, as well as content from sources other than Amazon, and makes it a more useful and versatile device for consumers.

The digital music industry has acknowledged that consumers prefer non-DRM content; there is evidence to show that removing DRM increases music sales. In January 2009, Apple announced that it would be making its iTunes Music Store completely DRM-free. All the digital music downloads which Amazon sells are non-DRM MP3s.

Whether Amazon will go the same way with the Kindle some day remains to be seen.