Essential Keys to Export Success
And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.
—The late Steve Jobs, founder of Apple1
Getting to the future first is not just about outrunning competitors bent on reaching the same prize. It is also about having one’s own view of what the prize is. There can be as many prizes as runners; imagination is the only limiting factor.
—Management consultants Gary Hamel and the late C. K. Prahalad2
The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.
—Arie De Geus, Head of Planning, Royal Dutch/Shell3
In this chapter, I introduce you to a new group I established at LinkedIn and provide my twelve basic truths to achieving export success. Each one represents the culmination of the learnings and insights in this book. There are many more, but I have found that by paying attention to these twelve, you are pretty close to export nirvana.
If you aspire to act on these key points, you are guaranteed to succeed with your export business. They will allow you to get to the top and stay there.
Summary
Success in exporting largely boils down to you. You must want to export and then take the initiative to do so. At this point, based on the knowledge you have acquired, you should be at the 99.9 percent ready to export state. Now go make the world your business.
And One More Thing . . .
I want to leave you with an invitation to join the Export Guide Group (MOOD), a massive open online dialog that I established on LinkedIn. It’s where you will find me and everyone else, like you, who has read this book and has a relentless desire to keep learning and growing. There, we connect and answer questions, process new ideas, and exchange best practices in exporting. I liken this practice to a radical export revolution. Come join the conversation: http://tinyurl.com/kpgbdwf. See you there!
Note: Should you get stuck, feel free to e-mail me at [email protected]. I may not be able to get to and answer every question you pose, but I most certainly will try.
1 Steve Jobs, “‘You’ve Got to Find What You Love,’ Jobs Says,” Stanford commencement address, June 2005, http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html.
2 Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, Competing for the Future (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 1996), 27.
3 As quoted in Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Doubleday Currency, 1990), 4.
4 Patricia B. Seybold, with Ronni T. Marshak and Jeffrey M. Lewis, The Customer Revolution (New York, Crown Business, 2001), 77.
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