http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/growing-your-business-how-do-you-define-good-enough/?ref=smallbusiness

The article, posted to the NY Times this weekend, discusses the challenges of growing a business.  There are many factors to consider, including infrastructure, the right employees, expanding resources and training, and the overall focus/goal of the company.  Alexandra Mayzler owns Thinking Caps Group, a company that offers an array of study and educational tools for students of all ages.  She has a company that just passed its 10 year anniversary and has been able to expand into 5 different cities.

This article brought me back to how we participated in our activity of planning out a wedding via a Project Plan chart.  As we saw, there were many different versions of order in what we thought was important and how we defined our Critical Path.  Since we didn’t have cost involved with each activity, it came down to our personal preference of what we felt would be important to us in a wedding, and weighed our decisions on how long we thought activities would be, and a logical order (obviously you have to send out invitations before you can finalize a total count for dinner!).

After reading this article, I reflected on how all companies come to a point during a project that they aren’t quite sure what their critical path should be.  If we are talking more on the operations side, as we did with the Rock Bands activity, it’s a little easier to see since that’s based on financial decisions.  But when looking at a business, there are so many critical paths to consider, including financial, operational, special projects, and the right people.

But as we get more involved with our charity projects and raising money, there are a lot of different outlets and tools we can use in order to reach our goal.  How can we know for sure we are taking the right path?

For our group, we first needed to have a clear idea of who we were targeting for donations, which was going to be friends and family through social media. From there, we needed to put the right tools in place to make this as easy as possible.  This came by us using numerous social media outlets, including Link’d In, Facebook, Twitter, and of course personal e-mails.

Coming back to the article, it’s up to Alexandra to continue to figure out where her focus should lie, and how to create the right momentum in her business to grow and change.

After reading the article, what other ideas would you have for her outside of hiring the right people and expanding leadership skills in order to help her increase her growth?

In this month’s Fast Company magazine, it covered the 100 most creative people in business.  After reading through some fascinating stuff, I came across an article on Graham Hill.  The 42-year-old entrepreneur launched LifeEdited, “a socially conscious real estate start-up.”  His vision is to help create living spaces that a small but multi-purpose.  His own apartment was the company’s first project; a 420-square-foot-room in which the living room turns into his bedroom, his office into a guest room, and the guest room into a dining room area.

“Making due with less” is brought to a whole new level!  As we talk in class of how business is continuing to change how it’s being done, such as Apple pushing for the 80/20 rule with employees to enhance creativity, and Toyota having a big event each year in order to bring new ideas, it’s imperative for us as business students to stay ahead  of the curve.  This new way of business could very well change how Project Managers typically work within companies; they could become more of the creative thinkers versus simply starting and finishing a project in entirety.  We will need to continue to learn about how not only our own industry is changing, but others.  We must think outside the box in how things can be done.  Another company covered in the article was CityGrit, a restaurant in New York’s Nolita neighborhood.  Due to high rent in the city, the own, Sarah Simmons, partnered with WRK, an interior design firm that uses the restaurant as a showroom.  Pretty cool huh?  Two companies working together within the same space!

I also enjoyed the article because of how it tied into a few things we spoke about in class.  Not to skip ahead, but looking into chapter 4, I do think that the article ties into Defining the Project Scope.  Being able to be flexible and creative in this area while looking at a company such as LifeEdited, a Project Manager who was working on a new multi-purpose apartment would need to apply this!  You would not only have to think of the overall lay-out, but also how you could alter each room in order to have it become a new room.  A project like this would take on many different professionals, which leads to different professions and deadlines, bringing back to what we worked on in the Rock’N’Bands game.

Looking at the CityGrit area of the article, actually shows two different cultures, coming back to some of the concepts discussed in Chapter 3.  More than likely since there are consultants and project managers working with WRK and CirtGrit, they must work together in order to ensure both companies move their goals forward.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3009434/most-creative-people-2013/49-57-urban-outfitters