The Keys to Prosperity in 2007

In case you missed it, the Jan/Feb issue of Business 2.0 features the thoughts of 50 bright minds on how to be successful in 2007. It offers words of wisdom from Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, Digg founder Michael Rose, and of course, The Donald. Here are the best three posts in the feature from three business sages. 

Google Co-founder Sergey Brin:
"Succeed With Simplicity - Simplicity is an important trend we are focused on. Technology has this way of becoming overly complex, but simplicity was one of the reasons that people gravitated to Google initially. This complexity is an issue that has to be solved for online technologies, for devices, for computers, and it's very difficult. Success will come from simplicity. Look at Apple, the success they have had, and what they are doing.We are focused on features, not products. We eliminated future products that would have made the complexity problem worse. We don't want to have 20 different products that work in 20 different ways. I was getting lost at our site keeping track of everything. I would rather have a smaller set of products that have a shared set of features."

Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark:
"Trust Your Customers and They'll Love You in Return: American corporate culture seems to devalue customer service in a big way. I say, go the other way. Do it right. Trust your customers. Give them power to do things right. Service costs will drop, and customers will become more devoted to your products and services. This ain't rocket science."

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff:
"Be an Industry Disruptor: My four rules are: Build a great product, build demand in any way you can, make sure you have a distribution organization to fulfill the demand, and make sure your customers are happy - and that is the first rule, by the way. Those are the four elements. Is your product better than anyone else's - is it easier, more efficient, simpler? Can you explain to people how it's better? Can you position it correctly in their minds? That's what you're talking about - consciousness. When you talk about disruption, a market is just a group of people. Can you sell it, distribute it, get people to try it? Can you get it adopted? Then if you get that customer satisfaction, it starts all over again."