As I recently posted on Instagram, I bought my family a lockpicking training set. Lockpicking is an essential skill that every child and parent should know. From accidentally locking your keys in the house to ensuring our children have the skills to escape a bad situation, lockpicking literally opens doors. Obviously, some folks are uncomfortable…
I love coffee. It’s one of my favorite beverages along with sparkling water, and as vices go, it’s relatively harmless. The best coffee is coffee that’s made properly, and the Italians have a great expression for that, which Alton Brown covered on a fabulous Good Eats episode back in the day: La Miscela La Macinazione…
We often hear management consultants reference the phrase, “People, Process, Technology” as a way of explaining the critical success factors for organizational change. How does this framework apply? How does it integrate with strategy? Definition of Strategy Before we leap into the model, let’s set some fundamentals. What is strategy? I’ve written about this many…
At the start of each year, I follow the exercise that my friend Chris Brogan first instituted over a decade ago, the tradition of writing down 3 words that guide our year. It’s something of a mantra, something of a phrase we used to remind ourselves what we are supposed to be focused on at…
What is Valuable in the Age of Generative AI? One of the most persistent questions in business, and in life, remains: “what is valuable?” In 2017, we explored this question and concluded that value is often tied to scarcity and necessity. This foundational principle still holds true, but the business landscape has shifted dramatically, especially…
At this time of year – meaning year’s end – I often see marketers in search of “new ideas” and “fresh ideas”, especially when looking for new agencies or employees. Knowing what kind of organization we’re dealing with determines what kinds of new ideas we should be bringing to the table. Three Kinds of New…
One of the promises of artificial intelligence is taking tasks that humans do and scaling them massively, while adhering to defined best practices. This promise will help companies and brands achieve automatic minimum competence, with gigantic implications. Let’s dig into what these are. The Human Experience Consider the average human experience – that is, the…
As much as people may express distrust or discomfort with artificial intelligence and robots today, the reality is that we’ve wanted robots (powered by AI) as significant parts of our lives all along. Consider the standards we hold people to for attractiveness. We demand nearly impossible standards of beauty that takes a full-time fitness career…
If you read any amount of online material about emoji written by someone older than the age of 25, much ink is spilled lamenting the state of modern language and the infiltration of emoji and emoticons into it. “I don’t know what these kids are saying!”, “They’re not using real words any more!” and variations thereof…
For many of us in marketing technology, a “one-off” task quickly becomes a standard, and if that one-off task is labor-intensive, we end up creating a lot of work for ourselves. How do we avoid creating unnecessary work? The answer lies in a mindset change, from “how do I do this?” to “how can this…
