Ian MacMillan – författare

This is the eBook version of the printed book. If the print book includes a CD-ROM, this content is not included within the eBook version.

“This book is a must for any Business Development Manager, Corporate Strategist, R&D Director, and anyone else who is accountable for growth in a corporation. It is an easy read that is practical and not fraught with useless academic theories.”

Ron Pierantozzi, Ph.D., CEO of PPT Research and Former Director, Business Development, Air Products & Chemicals, Inc.

 

A Breakthrough Approach to Investing in Business Innovation

 

Most companies analyze investments using tools that bias them against real innovation and lead them to avoid their best opportunities. This book introduces a breakthrough alternative: Opportunity Engineering.

 

Drawing upon recent advances in financial analysis, but without requiring a lot of math, the authors show how to engineer the risk out of uncertain opportunities so you can pursue more high-payoff innovations. You’ll learn how to escape from the “go/no-go vise” and implement more flexible decision-making that considers all the business alternatives, models, and opportunities associated with each project. You’ll learn how to systematically structure high-potential projects to limit downside exposure and boost your potential upside.

 

The authors show how to define the scope of investment opportunities, identify key drivers of potential profits, document assumptions, design out major risks, and tease out key challenges and vulnerabilities.

 

Using these techniques, you can escape the mindset that limits you to low-impact innovations and begin pursuing serious growth opportunities--and make business uncertainty work for you, not against you.

 

Why companies avoid their best opportunities for innovation

Getting past risk-averse analysis that snuffs out experimentation and innovation

 

Systematically engineering your opportunities

Capturing the upside, slicing out the downside

 

Beyond rigid “go/no-go” decisions

How flexible, staged innovation creates more opportunities for delivering value

 

Constructing an engineered growth portfolio of innovation investments

Optimizing your mix of core-enhancing investments and high potential “long shots”

 

Employing a multidisciplinary approach, the chapters cover all aspects of current entrepreneurship theory in multinational, economics, organizational sociology, marketing and finance. Other issues discussed include gender and networking, strategies in entrepreneurial growth, job satisfaction and franchising.

Employing a multidisciplinary approach, the chapters cover all aspects of current entrepreneurship theory in multinational, economics, organizational sociology, marketing and finance. Other issues discussed include gender and networking, strategies in entrepreneurial growth, job satisfaction and franchising.

Employing a multidisciplinary approach, the chapters cover all aspects of current entrepreneurship theory in multinational, economics, organizational sociology, marketing and finance. Other issues discussed include gender and networking, strategies in entrepreneurial growth, job satisfaction and franchising.

The Entrepreneurial Mindset offers a refreshingly practical blueprint for thinking and acting in environments that are fast-paced, rapidly changing, and highly uncertain. It provides both a guide to energizing the organization to find tomorrow''s opportunities and a set of entrepreneurial principles you can use personally to transform the arenas in which you compete. The authors present simple but powerful ways to stop thinking and acting by the old rules and start thinking with the discipline of a habitual entrepreneur.They show how to: eliminate paralyzing uncertainty by creating an entrepreneurial frame that shapes a shared understanding of what is to be accomplished; create a richly stocked opportunity register to redesign existing products, find new sources of differentiation, resegment existing markets, reconfigure market spaces, and seize the huge upside potential of breakthroughs; build a dynamic portfolio of businesses and options that continuously move your organization toward the future while simultaneously leaving the past behind; execute dynamically your ideas so that you can move fast, with confidence and without undue risk; and develop your own way of leading with an entrepreneurial mindset to create a vibrant entrepreneurial climate within your organization.

The Blind Fiddler is a fictional tale inter-weaved with real events in history. It is set during the 1700s mainly in the North-West Highlands of Scotland and is about the history of the Jacobites. We follow a family of MacMillans who live by Loch Arkaig just north of Fort William. They are tenants of Cameron of Lochiel and follow that clan chief in attempts to replace the British monarchy with a Jacobite who they describe as Scotlands rightful king.Our main character Ross MacMillan follows his father Duncans example by fighting with fellow Highland clansmen for this cause. We join him in a number of battles and campaigns ending with that of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, Bonny Prince Charlie who in 1745 travels from France to raise the clans in his fathers cause. After major successes this comes to an end with the tragedy of the battle of Culloden.Ross goes into hiding from the Government troops seeking vengeance against Charlies supporters who they see as both traitors and savages. He becomes blind which encourages him to continue learning to play a fiddle which Cameron of Lochiel had presented to him. It belonged to Sir John Cope who was in charge of the Government troops, who were soundly defeated at Prestonpans, the first major success for Charlies army. Ross becomes a very skilled fiddler.Towards the end of his life we join Ross and his son Colin who encourages him to look back over his time supporting the Jacobites and think about what might have been.The inspiration for the book is explained in the dedication. Ian has researched the fascinating history of the Jacobites and visited most of the battlefields and locations mentioned in The Blind Fiddler.

Charon is a thriller set in occupied Crete during WWII. It tells the story of heroism ‘against all the odds’ through the eyes of a young Greek boy who adopts the pseudonym Charon – the Greek mythological ferryman of the dead. Charon single-handedly, wages his own war of resistance against the German Nazi forces who have brutally occupied his island and turned it into an Axis fortress between Europe and North Africa.The opening tells of his assassination of the enemy’s commander. It then takes us back to the air-borne invasion of Crete in May 1941, the first and only large scale invasion of enemy held territory in history. Charon, a 17-year-old boy is mourning the loss of both his parents and only brother in Greece when the Nazis attacked. One morning he rushes outside at the sound of bombs and gunfire to see a sky black with falling paratroopers and gliders. When the Nazis then execute his grandfather leading to the death of his grandmother, his last surviving relative, Charon swears his campaign of vengeance which causes increasing terror to the occupying forces.The book is designed to appeal to any thriller lover or reader of war history.