Toys “R” Us, one of the world’s largest toy store chains, has filed for bankruptcy protection, becoming the latest casualty of the pressures facing brick-and-mortar retailers.
 
The company made the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing late Monday night in federal court in Richmond, Va., acknowledging that it needed to revamp its long-term debt totalling more than $5 billion.
 
The retailer, which also owns Babies “R” Us, has struggled to compete with Amazon and stores like Walmart.
 
But the financial plight of Toys “R” Us was exacerbated by a heavy debt load that has weighed on the company for years. The private equity firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Bain Capital, as well as the real estate firm Vornado Realty Trust, purchased the company in a leveraged buyout for about $6 billion in 2005.
 
Toys “R” Us joins a wave of retail bankruptcies this year, including the children’s clothing retailer Gymboree, Payless ShoeSource and rue21, which sells clothing for teenagers. Other retailers have closed thousands of stores and laid off tens of thousands of workers as they try to cut costs and compete with e-commerce.
 
The company said its roughly 1,600 Toys “R” Us and Babies “R” Us stores around the world would continue to operate “as usual.”
 
“Today marks the dawn of a new era at Toys “R” Us, where we expect that the financial constraints that have held us back will be addressed in a lasting and effective way,” Dave Brandon, the company’s cChairman and Chief Executive, said in a statement.

The quality of our questions determines the quality of our lives.

The common trait of successful people in all walks of life is that they mastered the skill of asking really good questions.

Instead of asking “Why is this happening to me?” ask:  “How can I improve this situation”.

Here are the top 10 questions:
 

1. What would this look like if it were easy?
2. What can you do to reach your ten year goal in the next six months?
3. If this was my last day on Earth, will I be proud of this?
4. What’s on the other side of fear?
5. Is this a ‘Hell Yeah’?
6. What’s the one thing I could do that if completed, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?
7. If not now, when?
8. How do I protect the downside?
9. Is this what actually happened or is this my own story?
10. What if I did the opposite?

​You can read more here.

This is a rather interesting article by Jeroen ter Heerdt.

"Data Science is dead. It is quickly getting replaced by stuff great data scientists built. Every big cloud vendor is doing it. Need to do a churn analysis? Done. Need to predict energy efficiency? Done. Want a recommendation engine? Done. Need to process genders, age and emotion from images? Done. From video? Done. Need to recognize certain logo's in images? Done. Need to understand sentiment? Done. Need to translate text or summarize text? Done.

What do you need to use these solutions? Just programming skills. Being able to talk to a REST API, that is all you need. Any programmer can do this. Behind this REST API is a algorithm built by the best and brightest of data scientists in the world that made themselves (and their fellow data scientists) obsolete".

​You can join the "debate" here.

The Japanese practice of forest bathing is proven to lower heart rate and blood pressure, reduce stress hormone production, boost the immune system, and improve overall feelings of wellbeing.

Forest bathing, basically just being in the presence of trees, became part of a national public health program in Japan in 1982 when the forestry ministry coined the phrase shinrin-yoku and promoted topiary as therapy.

Just be with trees. No hiking, no counting steps on a Fitbit. You can sit or meander, but the point is to relax rather than accomplish anything.

Forest air doesn’t just feel fresher and better, inhaling phytoncide seems to actually improve immune system function.

Read more here or just enjoy the video.
​

Aeon Vietnam is planning to open 500 grocery stores across the nation by 2025.

It is part of a strategy by the Japanese supermarket group to open small stores in emerging Asian markets, also including Cambodia and Myanmar, the Nikkei Asian Review says.

The plan is to boost its stores in Vietnam almost ninefold to 500, and has teamed up with two local chains for the expansion. It has held a 30 per cent stake in Hanoi-based supermarket chain Fivimart and 49 per cent of Ho Chi Minh City-based Citimart, since early 2015.

As well as providing its Top Value products for the two partners, Aeon is co-operating with them to promote those products as well as consolidate and expand distribution.

Meanwhile, Aeon has partnered with Japan’s Sojitz Corporation to develop Ministop convenience stores throughout Vietnam. The two firms aim to raise the number of their joint outlets to 800 in the next eight years.

Aeon has four shopping malls, in Binh Duong, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and plans to build another in the capital plus one in Haiphong in the short run. It aims to have 20 malls across Vietnam by 2020.
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Aeon Vietnam early this year launched an e-commerce website offering such products as cosmetics, furniture, electronics, household appliances, bicycles and stationery.

The most critical trait is "psychological safety".  The term was coined by Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmonson.

How can leaders create psychological safety in their organizations? Edmondson outlines three paths:

1. Frame work as learning problems, as opposed to execution problems.
“Make explicit that there is enormous uncertainty ahead and enormous interdependence,” Edmondson says. In other words, be clear that there are areas that still require explanation and that each team member’s input matters: “We’ve never been here before; we can’t know what will happen; we’ve got to have everybody’s brains and voices in the game.”

2. Acknowledge your own fallibility.
Make simple statements that encourage peers and subordinates to speak up, such as, “I may miss something — I need to hear from you.”
​
3. Model curiosity by asking a lot of questions.
“That actually creates a necessity for voice,” Edmondson says, because team members need to generate answers.

A combination of psychological safety and accountability is vital for teams to achieve their full potential. Watch the video below.

If big data really is the “new oil,” does this mean that countries will fight over it?
 
This is what Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, suggested in a speech at the company’s Google Cloud Next conference in March 2017.
 
“I think big data is so powerful that nation stats will fight over how much data matters,” he told attendees.
 
“He who has the data can do the analytics and the algorithms … the scale that we talked about will provide huge nation state benefits, in terms of global companies and benefits for their citizens, and so on.” (You can watch Schmidt’s full keynote speech below.)
 
Like artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR), big data is pretty hyped — but even so, this is still a bold prediction.
 
It came in the middle of Schmidt’s keynote — essentially a sales pitch to attendees telling them why they need to hurry up and move all their data and systems to Google’s cloud services. “Just get to the cloud now,” he said. “Just go there now. There’s no time to waste any more.”
 
His argument is that Google, with its tens of billions of dollars of investment, can build the underlying infrastructure better than any single smaller company could hope to, so it doesn’t make sense for them to build their own data centres when their resources could be freed up by using Google Cloud and allocated elsewhere.
 
By using Google’s cloud services, he went on, it allows companies to scale their businesses rapidly — citing Niantic’s “Pokémon Go” smartphone game and Snapchat as two examples.
 
And once in the cloud, it gives customers access to Google’s tools to access and analyse their all their data in ways they couldn’t do by themselves.
 
Sweet, sweet data.
“I’ll bet the rest of my professional career that the future of your business is big data and machine learning [a form of AI] applied to the business opportunities, customer challenges, and things before you.”
 
When people say data is the “new oil,” they tend to mean there are massive opportunities there, making it hugely valuable. With sufficiently advanced technology, you can analyse huge data sets to discover trends and actionable information that would be impossible to figure out before the internet age.
 
Google, with its AI expertise, is presenting itself as the cloud industry player best positioned to help ordinary companies to unlock these benefits — benefits that could be of interest to nation states too.

Source: Rob Price, Business Insider

This is a great article by Matt Allington on the top 30 reasons why you should be considering Power BI (a self service business intelligence tool by Microsoft). 

You can read more about it here.

For me, these 5 reasons are good enough to start using Power BI:

1. It is from the (new) Microsoft (hint: it has deep pocket and know how to win with business)

2. Power BI can collect data from virtually any source (you can use any ERP system)

3. It is in the cloud and have mobile apps (can access anywhere using any device)

4. It is built for users familiar with Excel (self-service, fast and easy to learn)

5. Power BI is very cheap to buy / subscribe (USD9.90 per month per user or use it for free)

Starting a business can be a daunting prospect for many would-be entrepreneurs. If you look for reasons not to, you’ll find hundreds. Why sacrifice the stability of a job for the uncertainty of entrepreneurship? How do you juggle the demands of a business with the demands of your personal life? How can you reasonably afford the start up costs?

But while these are valid concerns, they’ve never been valid excuses. Being an entrepreneur is always about two things: having the idea and wanting it enough. And where work-life balance, buy-in costs, and time-consuming processes were once enough to put off prospective business leaders, technology has either smoothed over these problems, or eliminated them entirely.
 
In South Africa today, we have millennials starting businesses alongside their 9-5 jobs and retirement-aged baby boomers launching new ventures in their twilight years. Enhanced flexibility is encouraging superior innovation and empowering newbie entrepreneurs to take risks.
In short, starting a business has never been easier.

Here are three reasons why.  

1. Lower initial costs
Starting a business used to be an expensive process involving courting investors and saving enough cash to secure equipment, personnel, and an office to put them in. Rather than growing your new business, you would have to spend your time developing a compelling pitch to attract the necessary finance.

However, the idea that you need investors to launch a business in 2017 is a myth that can distract entrepreneurs from their end goal. Today, if you want to start a retail business, you can set up an ecommerce website for a lot less than the cost of a brick-and-mortar shop. You can even take pre-orders for stock so that most of it is paid for before it arrives. Starting lean not only allows you to get off the ground straight away, it gives you greater control over the future direction of your company. I’ve never had an investor in my company, and I’ve never regretted that; my business isn’t beholden to milestones, obligations, or anything but my own vision.

2. Cloudy with a chance of success
As revolutionary as technology has been for businesses, in some respects, it has become something of a crutch. When you tether too many systems to the office server, it can leave you without access to vital information and applications on the move.

But the advent of mobile technology has changed the way we work. Cloud platforms have made it possible to maintain multiple systems without physical servers. This means that entrepreneurs can access their information from anywhere in the country (or indeed the world) and on any device.
With 37% of South African adults between 35 and 53 owning a smartphone with 4G coverage, the flexibility this adds for you and your business shouldn’t be understated. Real-time access to information, such as your business’ financial data, can give you deeper insight into your business’ health and enable you to make more informed strategic decisions.

3. Streamlining processes
Starting a business puts a lot of responsibility on an entrepreneur. You have to wear many hats and keep a lot of balls in the air. Your expertise and passion might lie in product development, but you’re effectively in charge of finance, sales, HR, customer service, and everything else. Time consuming admin and manual data entry could weigh you down and prevent you from looking at the bigger picture.
​
Fortunately, cloud technology once again comes to the rescue. Using certain software tools, it’s possible to fully automate all or part of your HR, payroll, and accounting functions. When you talk to an accountant in 2017, it should be for expert financial advice — not low-level administrative work.

Being an entrepreneur requires a considerable investment of time and energy, and it’s never going to be easy. That said, it’s easier than it’s ever been. If you want to start a business, the best advice is to simply do it — and make full use of the tools at your disposal.
​
By Marnus Broodryk, Shark Tank SA Investor

Change what can be changeable, Accept what can't and Rise above the unacceptable.

Enjoy your new CAR ...

During the Computing Conference 2016 held in Hangzhou on 13 October, Jack Ma, founder and CEO of Alibaba, reviewed the technological progress in the past few years and predicted that the future would be mainly about new type of retailing, manufacturing, finance, technology and resource. Development in these five areas will impact not only China, the world beyond, but also every one of us.

1. New type of retailing. Traditional retailing face rising challenge from e-commerce in modern metropolis because it fails to seize the opportunity and adapt to the future trend. Traditional business only dwells on the past, but don’t know how to adapt to new technologies, how to cooperate with internet companies and how to make us of big data technologies, etc. Whether we admit it or not, traditional retailing business, featured by real estate, will certainly be challenged in the future. If it is not today, then it will be someday in the future.

2. New type of manufacturing. For the past two or three decades, scale and standard are attached high importance to; in the next three decades, however, customized, personalized and smart service will be the new trend. The second wave of technological revolution will occur in IoT field. In the future, machines depend not on electricity, but on data. Besides, as retailing industry evolves, manufacturing industry will also gradually transform from B2C-based to C2B-based.

3. New type of finance. Finance industry was the very support for industrial growth in the past two centuries. In the past, development of 20% of small and mid-sized companies could promote development of 80% of world economy. In the future, however, the core focus of finance industry should become how to facilitate development of 80% of small and mid-sized companies. After the birth of internet finance, equality and transparency will be valued more, thus traditional finance industry will certainly face some challenge.

4. New type of technologies. After the emerge of mobile internet, PC chips evolved into mobile chips, while PC operating system also evolved into mobile operating system. In the past, machines depend on electricity; in the future, data will be at the core of any new type of technology. New technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data will only broaden the room of imagination for the mankind.

5. New type of resources. In the past, petrol and coal were the foundation of development; in the future, new energy and data will be at the core of any development. Dr Wang Jian once said that this was the first time human kind created a new type of resources. In the past, resources others had used would become useless; today, however, data other people used would only become more valuable if we use it well.
​

Source: tmtpost

What does Nevada's USD35 billion fund manager do all day? Nothing.

Steve Edmundson has no co-workers, rarely takes meetings and often eats leftovers at his desk. With that dynamic workday, the investment chief for the Nevada Public Employees’ Retirement System is out-earning pension funds that have hundreds on staff.
​
His daily trading strategy: Do as little as possible, usually nothing.

The Nevada system’s stocks and bonds are all in low-cost funds that mimic indexes. 

“Doing nothing is harder than it looks,” says Ken Lambert, Mr. Edmundson’s predecessor and only outside investment-strategy consultant. Harder, he says, because of the restraint needed to practice inaction.

Even Mr. Edmundson can’t resist studying investment strategies. “I spend a lot of time researching things we ultimately don’t do.”

Read more: Wall Street Journal, Oct 2016

Xero is easy to use online accounting software that’s designed specifically for small businesses. The Xero content pack for Power BI allows you to visualize and monitor the accounting data from within each Xero business. The out of box solution includes information such as cash position, top customers, invoices due and many more. The interactive reports allow you to easily explore your data to understand even more.

Xero Content Pack
With the Xero content pack for Power BI, you can see your data in a format that makes sense, and can analyze it with greater speed, efficiency, and understanding. You can create visualizations for the most commonly tracked small business metrics including cash position, revenue vs. expenses, profit/loss trend, and return on investment.

You can drill down more specifically to uncover insights like your best performing products or services, or see where your time is best spent, with important actionable items being presented front and centre. All the information in Power BI is dynamic, surfacing what’s important and giving you the power to dive into the detail.

Using Power BI - Action items
The Xero Content pack in Power BI has a tile dedicated to Action items. Action Items allow you, at a glance, to get a sense of where things are, and help you understand what things you can do in Xero to bring things up to date. Action Items help you keep your accounting data up to date, so you maximize the value of real time information to impact your business.

With Messages highlighting what you can action, and direct links into Xero, it’s quick and easy to “tick” things off and bring things up to date. And get back to running your business, completely up to date.

Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools to analyze data and share insights. Power BI dashboards provide a 360-degree view for business users with their most important metrics in one place, updated in real time, and available on all of their devices. With one click, users can explore the data behind their dashboard using intuitive tools that make finding answers easy.

​Creating a dashboard is simple thanks to over 50 connections to popular business applications, complete with pre-built dashboards crafted by experts that help you get up and running quickly. And you can access your data and reports from anywhere with the Power BI Mobile apps, which update automatically with any changes to your data.
​
If you are a data analyst delivering reporting and analytics to your organization, Power BI lets you be productive and creative with what you build. Power BI Desktop is a feature-rich data mashup and report authoring tool. Combine data from disparate databases, files, and web services with visual tools that help you understand and fix data quality and formatting issues automatically. With over 20 built-in visuals and a vibrant community of custom visualizations, create stunning reports that communicate your message effectively. With the Power BI service, publish reports securely to your organization and setup automatic data refresh so everyone has the latest information.

Power BI can unify all of your organization’s data, whether in the cloud or on-premises. Using the Power BI gateways, you can connect SQL Server databases, Analysis Services models, and many other data sources to your same dashboards in Power BI. If you already have reporting portals or applications, embed Power BI reports and dashboards for a unified experience.

Any professional, whether it be an accountant, CFO or financial advisor, who is advising a business on the state of its financial health relies heavily on accurate real-time data.

To obtain clean data, verifying and recording the information is vital. Having a qualified professional bookkeeper to either assist or manage the process makes a big difference to achieving this end result. A bookkeeper will make sure that there are no gaps or duplication in the data (especially if they’re using the Assurance Dashboard) and that each transaction is coded to the right income or expense category. Only then will the figures and reports you get be accurate and reliable.

What is clean data?
Clean financial data is the outcome of a systematized process that verifies and records data from source documents and transactions. This process makes sure the data is free of errors, verifying and checking that the information contained is free from corruption.

Seamless connectivity to banks and add-ons means the data flows in, clients code it, and you periodically check they’re on track. It’s data oversight and approval rather than data entry, which means it takes less time and there are fewer errors.

Clean data = clear advice
So how are business achieving clean data?
The keys to really making it effortless are having a well-defined process and using the right tools. Accountants, bookkeepers and small businesses around the globe are jumping at the opportunity to work in the cloud and benefit from the efficiencies it offers. Many are choosing Xero as the focal point for a web of data flowing between banks, accountants, suppliers and government agencies.

Crunching the numbers
Many bookkeepers are specializing in particular industry verticals or niches to streamline the process and make it razor-focused.

Cafe Bookkeepers
Nick from Cafe Bookkeepers in the hip suburb of Newtown in Sydney decided to focus on working just with cafes. He got really good at it at, really fast. Specializing enabled him to implement one system, and simply rinse and repeat. Having a deep understanding of a specific industry strengthens the bookkeeper’s ability to ensure clean data – an essential ingredient for small business success – and means increased profitability for the bookkeeper.

Cafe Bookkeepers has taken the step to cloud accounting. Using the now clean data, they can tell the client the story of what is happening in the life of their business. They’re able to put the words behind the numbers in conversations with the client. Nick says to clients, “On top of the usual number crunching, we want to add value to your business. We’ll help guide your business by showing you where you are placed within industry benchmarks.“

So Nick’s recipe for success is creating the right system to deliver clean data, using the best tools available. Nick’s tool of choice to provide the story of the business is Crunchboards – you can read more about Nick’s Aussie success story here.

Number Nerds
Heading to the other side of the globe, in the UK, Mark Wallis from Numbers Nerds was on a mission to add value to his clients. He wanted to be able to create a visual representation to show monthly KPIs and forecast cash flow. Mark has implemented Crunchboards as his tool of choice as well. Clean data is vital to the process and Crunchboards pulls live data from Xero to display a compelling visual story that shows what’s happening in the business. He finds that Crunchboards is a brilliant tool for starting a conversation with a client and demonstrating the crucial role of clean data.

Conversations with our clients
As a professional wanting to talk to a client and relay the story of what’s happening in their business, we need to think about how we want to communicate and the style that our clients feel comfortable with. My advice is stick to just a few points, discover what is important to the client and what you identify is vital to the business success.

Some clients will be focused on the numbers, others will be visual.

Source: Xero Blog

"No names are mentioned in the article of The Star, but a friendly tip pointed at the possibility that this relates to the research report by CIMB on Instacom Group."  You can read the rest of the article here.

A rather bullish projection? Revenue projected to grow from RM66 million in 2014 to RM195 million in 2015 and a whopping RM572 million in 2016. In 2017, it is projected to achieve RM3.23 billion. The detailed research paper dated 18 November 2015 is here.

Unleashing the giant? Time will tell.

The year 2015 is nearly in the books. The team at Xero wants to wish all of our small business customers and accounting and bookkeeping partners a very Happy Holiday and a productive start to 2016.

Xero entered 2015 laser-focused on delivering new features that add value for our customers.

This year we took things to the next level. We’re innovating faster than any other player in the industry and releasing updates continually (we delivered 400 updates in 2014 and have nearly doubled that total in 2015).

This last year saw a number of useful new features that top anything other cloud accounting solutions have to offer. If you’re not already using these tools to turbo-charge your business, you should make it your resolution to give them a try in 2016:

Clean your clients’ books in seconds
Find and Recode transforms how bookkeepers and accountants clean up clients’ books. What previously took hours, now only takes seconds. Advisors can search for a set of transactions and update thousands of line items at once – everything from accounts and tax rates to tracking and contacts.  Truly awesome.

Get paid faster
Invoice Reminders takes a lot of the pain out of the collections process. We hope you’ve tried it and it helped you avoid an awkward phone call or two!  This feature lets you automatically send clients a fully customizable email reminder about their invoice either before or after it’s due.  You can set up the service for repeated mailing.

Make better business decisions
Our Business Performance Dashboard is the simplest way for businesses and their advisors to get a snapshot of their business. Use simple graphs of metrics and identify trends that would otherwise be difficult and time consuming to derive.  When combined with our highly-customizable, best-in-class reporting, we’re setting our customers up for a successful 2016 and beyond.

Find what you need fast
Xero Search is a huge time-saver for new customers and power users alike.  Customers can instantly search both contacts and transactions from anywhere in Xero. You can also get previews of your search results (without leaving the screen they’re working on!). Search also lets you quickly add a new contact, invoice, bill, quote, or purchase order using shortcuts from right inside the search bar.

To stay on top of all the latest updates happening at Xero, visit Timeline.

Happy Holidays and here’s to a great 2016!

During this challenging time, this is a good reminder to you and your team.

​There are always opportunities in crisis. Just keep on looking and most importantly, stop complaining.

​You are read more about it at Digital News Asia.

Over the past couple of decades, The Chasm Model has been the centrepiece of nearly every conversation I’ve had about launching new technology.

While its merits are many, lately I’ve been wondering how applicable it is in business-to-business markets. Sure there are early adopters. Perhaps even an early majority. It’s the late majority that seems to be in trouble.

Having sat around harvesting revenue from their customer base, the late majority wake up one day to face a revenue precipice. In short, the early adopters and majority reach a tipping point and start acquiring their customer base en-masse. Powered by the economics of the cloud (not just technology but also business) these new players scale at speed – achieving continuous growth rates in the high double and even triple digits.

We see a couple of shifts driving the acceleration of the new players. For instance, cloud technology and business models on the supply side, and then mobile on the demand side. Entrepreneurs emerge from both sides presenting the late majority with an impossible force to counter – and their brand advantage and customer relationships are quickly weakened.

Look at what happened to booksellers, record stores, and others. We are seeing the same in accounting where new disruptive value propositions are being built on cloud platforms like ours. What’s important is that these new players aren’t just using new technology – they are reshaping their brands, service offerings, price points and more.
​
The message is clear. Rather than wait for the late majority, fuel the high-growth early adopters and watch them grow. Who would you rather be (or be backing)? The eater or the eaten?
​

Reproduced from Xero Small Business Guides.