Let’s take a walk through the automation landscape and look at 7 different examples of technologies in use today to sense where the future is headed. McDonald’s Announces Kiosks. Facing rising human costs, McDonald’s reduces the need for front-line staff with kiosk-based ordering. Eatsa expands. In San Francisco, a city famed for an insanely high…
What’s the difference between leadership vs. management? Imagine you’ve got a patch of woods that’s brambles, thorns, trees, and brush. You need to move yourself and your group through the woods safely and quickly. The Leader is the person in front, hacking away at the foliage, making the trail for others to follow. The Manager is the person who…
As I do at the end of each quarter, let’s take a look at how the markets are faring. What could be on tap as we close out the year? How might we want to structure our B2B and B2C marketing efforts? Markets First, let’s check the broad markets. DJIA: S&P 500: NASDAQ: All three…
A tough challenge some marketers face is when the customer thinks we are one thing, and we think we are something different. At the DCX conference, I showed what attendees thought customer experience, or CX, was about: Above, I summarized 226,000 tweets about CX and clustered them by their most common words. The top word…
In this series, we’ll examine the first 90 days from a variety of perspectives and provide lots of links to different resources for more in-depth looks at individual topics. Once we understand the overall business strategic landscape, the next major immersion is in the people of our organization. To best understand the people we’ll be…
In this series, we’ll examine the first 90 days from a variety of perspectives and provide lots of links to different resources for more in-depth looks at individual topics. New Hire Fundamentals The first week or so of your new role is straightforward stuff: orientation to the company, filling out reams of paperwork for human…
Seth Godin asked recently, “Why scale?”, with his response implying that scaling may not be in the best interests of customers, that you may not choose to scale if you want to provide the best service to your customers. Seth is wrong that scale is a choice. Scale – growth – is not a choice…
Jason Falls wrote a blog post recently about originality, plagiarism, and synthesis. If you haven’t read it, go read it first. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. If you need legal assistance, contact a real lawyer! The concern on the Internet isn’t about plagiarism per se. While it’s unethical, it’s not illegal in its own…
I’ve been watching Julien Smith’s new startup, Breather, with interest ever since it launched in June of 2013. If you’re unfamiliar with Breather, it’s basically rentable quiet space for business. Some people have called it room-sharing (similar to ridesharing) or other slightly clumsy comparisons. I had a chance to use the Flatiron 2 space in…
Last night at the Boston Martial Arts Center I had an interesting experience while coaching one of the green belt students on some avoidance techniques. The drill was simple: I swung at the student with a foam-padded bopper and after avoiding a relatively slow swing, they had to hit a padded target. It’s a drill…
