Organizations need to be anti-fragile

Many large, successful organizations are more fragile than they seem. They break under stress. Remember the travails of Kodak, Digital Equipment Corp., and Washington Mutual? In their heyday, they were dominant players in their sectors. All disappeared. Why do relatively few companies prove resilient and withstand stress? And why are even fewer “anti-fragile” — that is, […]

Thinking about money

I read this Seth Godin post today as we left Paris for the US with my sleeping daughter next to me It’s very good and if there’s anything my new daughter should know about money when she grows up, this is it. The following is reposted from Seth Godin’s blog from today: Thinking about money […]

Oops! — The week social media exposed lies in Texas and Florida

We’ve had a big week for political news and no matter what side of the aisle you sit on, it’s clear that no one can hide from social media. While we think of social media as a wave of sentiment, it is also a remarkable fact checker in itself, as saw. Gosh, look at the […]

Event-driven marketing makes it all relevant

Marketers have a challenge on their hands: The public that they need to reach and convince to buy is increasingly using PCs and laptops, mobile devices, and social platforms to decide when and where to shop. That puts enormous pressure on brands to understand the changing nature of exactly why, where, and how customers make […]

6 warning signs that your technology is headed south

A recent blog talked about how technology is creating a sharper divide between the haves and have-nots in an increasingly global, increasingly data-focused economy. For some companies, the cloud, social, mobile and big data are bringing the best of times. For those trapped on the wrong side of change, it will be the worst of […]

Companies deliver extreme value or face extreme pain

The challenge of managing more data across nearly every sector of the market has companies scrambling as business picks up without a corresponding rise in hiring. We’re doing more with less and in a more complicated environment. Welcome to 2013…it won’t get better. The solution comes down to information efficiency and organizational productivity. We’re going […]

The new DNA of B2B marketing is Customer Experience

We usually think of customer experience (CX) as a consumer-facing concept. In most retail companies, it is a full-time position that puts heavy focus on the physical interfaces to the customer (Web, social, stores, support). It becomes easy to believe that customer experience is a combination of marketing, sales and service. CX has an identity […]

Scoping a benchmarking project is the first step

I’m often asked what the first step should be once you decide you need to benchmark. I’m assuming that you have already done the vital steps of understanding the value this benchmarking effort will bring to your organization, aligned it with a current strategy or business issue, and have common agreement within your organization that […]

Williams can flow!

The following is a guest post by Rickey Williams, a talented teacher and leader who lives in LA and works for SEA Charter Schools. He works in a very tough environment and has a higher graduation rate than the LA public schools. His work is an inspiration to many.  While “Roasting” is an art, it […]

Snowden awakens the world to reign of Big Data

Thank you, Edward Snowden, for making my job easier. I’m withholding judgement on whether you made the world a safer or better place, but you’ve certainly awakened it to the concept of Big Data. I’ve spent the better part of the past few years involved in Big Data projects and writing about its power and […]

Integration is everything in a mobile, social, cloud and big data world

We live in a world where business is moving faster each and every day. The time frames of the pre-Internet age where phones and fax were the norm would seem impossibly slow today. Unfortunately, it’s worse than that. While the speed of business picks up, there are new challenges that make managing information and decisions […]

The irony, cost and process hell of Software as a Service

Woe unto you if you don’t think through your decisions to buy and use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). That’s right…woe unto you. As more and more organizations use SaaS applications (in 2011, Forrester projected 18 by 2013 and said we were at 9.6 by Fall 2012), the complexity of integrating all of those silo’d applications is rising […]

Big Data must focus on operational outcome

Transform 2013 took place in London last week and included an interview between technology maven and raconteur Dennis Howlett and TIBCO CTO Matt Quinn on the topic of Big Data. When asked his position on Big Data, Quinn started off with the following: We see the big challenge with Big Data at the moment is that it […]

Don’t punish me for using your process

I just had a 2 and a half hour hole blown in what had started out as a massively productive day. Indeed, I’m so frustrated as I write that I’m going to grab a quick bite and try to squeeze in a run during lunch hour.  Here’s the story and here’s why it matters for […]

Email is Tyrannosaurus Rex: feared and soon to be extinct

We all use email whether we want to or not. Nearly everyone relies on it as much as many of us hate it and we mostly use it because everyone else does. An interactive presentation in Harvard Business Review this month by Barry Gill made the statement, “Email: Not Dead, Evolving.” Being in the ’email […]

“Come here free sexe inside”

Does your marketing message align with your product and is it delivered in the right voice and best medium? Is your team creative and enthusiastic? All too often, great products are limited by poor choices in marketing. We walked the cliffs of Belle-île-en-Mer, France today and took in sights that had great parallels to product […]