March 2021: Business Strategy Masterclass for Top Executives with Prof. Costas Markides

Dear world-changer,

We have exciting news!

BRAND MINDS is launching Business Strategy Masterclass for Top Executives with London Business School professor Costas Markides.

The masterclass is scheduled for March 23rd, 2021 and will take place online. It starts at 9 am and ends at 5 pm with a Q&A session which is a great opportunity to get answers to your questions. 

Check the agenda to find what you will learn at this masterclass:

Session 1: Strategy in a volatile world

Session 2: Strategic agility in today’s world

Session 3: Mobilizing the whole organisation for strategy execution

Session 4: New challenges for leaders

6 benefits of attending Business Strategy Masterclass for Top Executives

BUILD CUSTOM BUSINESS MODELS

Learn to develop custom business models and drive success through innovation.

WORLD-CLASS EXECUTIVE EDUCATION

Acquire a premium learning experience from the former Executive Education Director of London Business School.

EXPAND YOUR COMPANY

Drive growth by exploring new business opportunities through networking with other Top Executive participants.

BECOME THE ARCHITECT OF YOUR BUSINESS

Acquire the necessary business tools to plan your company’s future efficiently.

LEARN BUSINESS INNOVATION PRINCIPLES

Upgrade your knowledge on innovation and disruption to drive business success.

IMPROVE YOUR DECISION-MAKING PROCESS

In today’s fast-paced environment, making good decisions fast is an invaluable skill.    

Are you a CEO, investor, business owner, sales expert, marketing manager, HR director or strategy specialist?

Then this masterclass is for you!

Discover additional benefits for you and your business

Prof Costas Markides – One of the world’s foremost experts on strategy & innovation

A business author and strategic thinker, Costas Markides has been a professor at London Business School for the past 30 years teaching Strategy & Entrepreneurship.

As the holder of the Robert P. Bauman Chair of Strategic Leadership at London Business School, Costas Markides’ role is to create innovative educational approaches that shape the next generation of strategic leaders. 

He received his MBA and DBA from Harvard Business School and served as the Faculty Director of Executive Education at London Business School until 2016. 

His expertise includes strategic innovation, business model innovation, diversification and international acquisitions. 

A skilful professor, he won 5 awards recognizing his excellence in teaching and innovation in learning over the past ten years. 

He is the bestselling author of Fast Second: How Smart Companies Bypass Radical Innovation to Enter and Dominate New Markets and Game-Changing Strategies: How to Create New Market Space in Established Industries by Breaking the Rules.

Fast Second illustrates how to determine which new markets have the potential to be successful and how to move into them before the competition does, when to make a move into a new market, how to scale up a market, where to position a company in the market, and whether to be a colonizer or a consolidator.

Game-Changing Strategies presents practical ideas on how established firms could not only discover new radical business models but also grow them next to their existing business models.

His forthcoming book is entitled Architects of Change and is set to launch in April 2021. The new book explores how individuals could design innovative solutions to social problems in ways that make them easily scalable.

Costas is currently serving on several editorial boards of strategic management journals among which is Sloan Management Review, the research-based magazine published at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Have a long term strategy, especially in a fast-changing world; listen to the customer, but don’t always do what they say; don’t feel threatened by disruptive innovation; promote innovation in the face of core resistance; and, finally, do your best to bridge the know-do gap.

COSTAS MARKIDES

Do you want to get your company ready for an amazing 2021?

Access now BRAND MINDS Business Strategy Masterclass for Top Executives with prof Costas Markides!

Join the Conversation

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How to choose the best antivirus software for you – Part II

We continue the list of pieces of advice that will help you take a very documented and precise decision while choosing your antivirus software, after last week’s article.

According to pcworld.com, to find out about the biggest names in antivirus, you should visit  AV-Test’s Windows home users page. Here, you’ll find a breakdown by Windows version, with each program rated on three criteria: protection, performance, and usability. The companies are listed in alphabetical order, but you can click on any of the criteria points to get a ranking based on that (performance, for example). Each category is rated on a six-point scale represented by a group of circles. More colored-in circles means a better score.

According to  heimdalsecurity.com, 3 ways you can find the best free or paid antivirus for you are through: user opinions, expert reviews and independent testing.

Cybersecurity forums are still some of the best places you can check to find good and trustworthy reviews and comparisons of antivirus software. You may also use Quora (The website is designed so you can quickly access your areas of interest. You can ask a question or just simply browse it looking for your areas of interest), yahoo answers (centers on the experience and knowledge of everyday users rather than the knowledge of experts), reddit (Ask Reddit users to compare various antivirus software and you will end up with a very lively conversation among users that covers almost every antivirus program imaginable. ‘Redditors’ will talk at length about the pros and cons of one antivirus or another.), trustpilot (Reviews of antivirus programs are another way to choose the product that fits your needs. Most people read the reviews on the developer’s page, but it’s impossible to be sure which review is real and which isn’t.).

The next step would be looking for the experts’ opinions, that are well-documented.

Paid-for antivirus software

Many people keep their computer safe by paying for a security suite, which will usually include antivirus software, protection against scams and a firewall. Most brands have options for just one device or, for more money, multi-user licences so you can install the same protection on two or more computers in your home. Some also allow you to pay extra up-front for a further year or two of cover.

Pros: Provides an all-round security solution accessed through a single interface. Individual components are automatically updated at the same time so you get protection against the latest threats. Cons: They can be expensive and you’ll also face ongoing costs, usually in the form of an annual subscription, to receive updates after the initial period of protection is over (usually a year). Some security suites can place a drain on system resources, too, potentially slowing down your computer.

Pay attention to the performance

Security products are, by nature, programs that require quite a bit of computing resources in order to do their job. They will definitely use more computing power than your media player, for example. If your computer is not the most powerful on the market, you should take into consideration the performance aspect:

• Have a small impact on the boot timings of your computer. Your Windows should start almost as fast as it did before you installed your security product.

• Have a small impact on your computer’s performance. A very effective security solution is no good if it bogs down your computer. A good security product will know how to use your computer’s resources in a way that doesn’t negatively impact your computing experience in terms of performance and responsiveness.
• Be fast in scanning your computer for malware. Good antiviruses tend to be faster than others when it comes to scanning your computer for malware threats.

When choosing the right security product for you, you should check whether the additional tools are:

• Security-oriented. If a security product gives you for free additional tools that are not security oriented, we believe that they are not worth buying. Those tools are probably just a means to a marketing end.
• Useful. Whatever they do, the additional tools you get when buying a security product should be useful to you. They shouldn’t be just clones of tools that are already found in Windows.
• Don’t harm your security or your privacy. Some vendors choose to bundle additional tools that are not helpful in increasing your security or privacy. On the contrary, they are harming it. If a security solution includes shady toolbars, web browsers, browser add-ons or any other tools that lower your security or privacy, you should stay away from that product.
• Don’t involve additional costs. If you need to pay more money in addition to what you already paid for the security suite, they’re not worth it.

Usability is key 

According to Digital Citizen, a good security product must be easy to use both by knowledgeable users as well as casual users with little to no knowledge about security. Here are some of the facts that they are pointing out:

• Be easy to navigate. A good security solution should provide you with an intuitive way of navigating through its various windows, tabs, menus and settings.
• Be easy to use on devices with touchscreens. The era of the plain old monitor is dead. These days, the number of PCs with a touchscreen on them is increasing at a very fast rate. Thus, more and more people use touch in order to control how software works. A good security product should have large buttons, tiles, switches of all kinds, check marks and so on – control elements that are easy to touch with your finger too, not only with a mouse’s cursor.
• Be easy to understand. No matter how easy it is to navigate through a user interface, it’s no good if you don’t understand what each and every item and setting means. The configuration options that are offered should be easy to understand by all users.
• Be easy to configure. Good products are products which are easy to set… not like those at IKEA :). Security products should be easy to configure.
• Provide you with easy to find documentation. Just like any good product, good security products must provide an easy way to access their documentation. If Help documentation is available but you can’t find it, what’s the point?
• Give you complete control of how it works. Many people look for security products that don’t require any special configuration. But there are also people who want to set each and every detail of how a security product works. If that’s the case for you, a good security product must provide you with complete control.

According to heimdalsecurity.com, “ no single antivirus solution is enough to keep you safe. Even antivirus developers encourage you use multiple security software programs to keep you safe. If malware passes one software, they will have to face another, and with each new step chances of infection drop dramatically”.

And last, but not least, your attention and your smarts are some of the best antiviruses out there. Pay attention before opening any mail or links received on social media websites, delete the suspicious ones.

Best Marketing Ideas in 2017

Finding inspiration is something a marketer and creator should always be interested in.  We have some ideas that might give you a push to try something new and help your brand even more.

Paid marketing on untapped channels

Differentiation is key and clients need to understand that using only Facebook and Google for promoting themselves, even they bring huge volumes, is not enough anymore for achieving success. In an ever changing market, being among the first to tap into less used platforms and discover the ones that have the biggest change to rise (Snapchat, Instagram) is what brands’ representatives should do.

photo: wearevillage.com

Advertising is most successful when there is market inefficiency.

Choosing to communicate smartly on a channel that isn’t very used or not put to its true value, may be the key to success. Moreover, the advantages occur on channels where there’s a lot of volume, but less competition or no competition.

Content Multiplier Marketing and cross promotion

It’s the time of the multi-channel communication, instead of using just one or two channels. Finding the perfect mix for the brand is a very important step to take. The content is one of the most important aspects these days and can take the brand in the direction you want it to. At the same time, the content can be produced in several ways of expression (articles, videos, audio recordings, a blog post) and by using different shapes and channels it will help the brand increase its awareness.

Moreover, it’s really important for the brand’s target to be able to find the content on several mediums and see its versatility. Also, it’s another manner of gaining new fans that love different types of content.

Create content that’s easy to replicate.

Making a smart and easy content can also help the fans create their own twist on it, share it and show their personality along. Who doesn’t want a target involved in the brand’s growth?

Go mobile

More than ever it’s the mobile phones’ time. Most of the people are using Facebook on the mobile phone instead of the desktop or the tablet, as well as checking and answering their emails and other important conversations and messages. Therefore, the brands’ messages must the adapted to the medium, in order to create the best user experience possible.

Appeal to visual strategies

People understand better the messages and feel more connected to the visual side of the stories. By using video recordings and live-streaming, the brands are growing faster than ever. Recently live-streaming has taken the social media world by storm, Facebook reporting last year that 100 million hours per day of video are watched on their site. Therefore, the marketers should engage their audience with live-streaming at events or conferences that highlight them and their product.  It’s a quick and effective way to connect with customers and build the brand.

Visual marketing effectiveness will also rely on engaging graphics. While graphic design has always been important, it will need more attention this year. Viewer engagement durations are shorter and social feeds are getting more crowded. Stand out with powerful graphic content.

Create an expertize blog

Making sure to optimize the brand’s website for search engines and mobile, with quality blog posts, we’ll have as a result the business’ appearance at the top of search results for topics related to your service offering. The result will be definitely a larger number of visitors accessing the website, an increase in leads, etc. The effectiveness of the blogging will be based on exciting and informative content, therefore hiring an expert in your industry or scheduling your own time to draft a quality post each month might be exactly what the doctor ordered.