Feature
Issue No. 30 - August/September 2006
Scanning
by John Doughty
The smart business owner is always looking around to try to anticipate what the market may require them to change about their product or service.
This practice of broadly reviewing factors affecting the future of the businesses is called 'scanning'.
Warren Buffet, the noted American investor who has just pledged $37billion to the Gates Foundation, has spent most of his time scanning. He used the knowledge gained in scanning to refine his investment techniques.
Scanning is the technique of filtering large amounts of information and data for particular pieces of information that can be converted into knowledge and then into action.
Improving your ability to scan enables you to review ever-larger amounts of information for those insights into where the market is heading.
Here is how you do it.
(To get a succinct understanding of what business you are in, see Understanding Your USP - next issue in-business):
Review newspapers, magazine articles, websites, documentaries, libraries etc
Talk and listen to your customers, suppliers, competitors and their customers, suppliers, competitors
Involve yourself in other industries and groups to find out how they work and what affects them
Be genuinely interested in what other people are doing and express that interest. If you can't be genuine, employ someone to do this for you!
Two things to scan for:
Incremental improvement - seeking opportunities to do what you do faster, more efficiently, with a larger profit, for more people, with greater recognition, more innovatively and 'better'.
Discontinuous improvement - seeking opportunities to do something to enhance your offering by stopping what you are doing and doing something else (reinvention) or adding much more value or developing other (unrelated) income streams.
Some ...
