Successful Workplace

Editor’s note: Faced with declining IT budgets during the recent economic downturn, many CMO’s turned to Software as a Service (SaaS) to fill the gap left by an underfunded and overloaded IT department. This kicked off a battle for budget, strategy and control that continues to heat up in most enterprises. In this piece, Brad […]

I’m a technology guy who tries to keep up with every booming tech startup, acquisition by a major player, and new version of top-selling software. I’ve watched waves of technology crash on the shore of commerce and government. Why am I telling you this? The conversation we’re not having I’m confident I’ve been left with […]

One of my friends thinks ‘Sales’ is about talking. Another person I follow on Twitter thinks it is about ‘convincing’ the customer. I wince every time I hear someone characterize an engaging, fluent, fast talking, bloke as ‘sales material’. Sales, as you might agree(especially if you are in sales yourself), is really not any of […]

The public wants both a seamless shopping experience across any retail channel (mobile, online, in store) and is happy to research online (AKA ‘webrooming’) and buy from a brick and mortar store. These were two of the strongest conclusions in the Seamless Retail Research released by Accenture on April 15th. This isn’t a shocker for […]

The following is a guest post by Lilian Sohn. Most companies don’t give this topic the required attention. Start-up entrepreneurs and successful business leaders are often too caught up in their day-to-day tasks to take a step back and look at important, strategic decisions that could prove vital for their company, such as ways to […]

This blog post looks at the promise of new entrants into the UK retail banking sector. It also discusses in general where retail banks should focus on in order to stay competitive in an industry that is marked by ever more assertive customers and disruptive technology changes. There is always a sense of expectation when […]

What type of company makes a good target to be acquired? There are the obvious revenue, strategic, market, product, and R&D considerations. Those are all opportunity plays and are in themselves good reasons, but what about the risk? How do you decide in advance which companies can be acquired without being destroyed? For that, there […]

I’m a bit of a comic book geek; I read them, collect them and chase the writer and artists to sign them. Everyone has a vice, that’s one of mine. But it got me thinking about how many lessons from comics could be translated into business life. Technology can be your superpower Look at how […]

A year is a lot of time given the pace with which things are happening on Social Media. Yet, 2013 is likely to be the year when more organizations than ever in the past, got a sense of the great potential Social Media holds – both  in terms of establishing and fanning that powerful relationship […]

“Please do not vote for Obama.” That was the post that went up supposedly from Gaston Memorial Hospital in Gaston County, North Carolina. It wasn’t their post, and in fact, Gaston Memorial Hospital didn’t have a Facebook account of their own. Therein lies the problem: If we don’t claim our own identity, someone will happily claim […]

At the recent Gartner Summit they talked about the Nexus of Forces which are changing the face of business: “A Nexus of converging forces — social, mobile, cloud and information — is building upon and transforming user behavior while creating new business opportunities.” I covered this in more detail in a recent blog Gartner Nexus […]

I am exposed to organizations doing some very innovative things with their organizational processes. They are state-of-the-art in managing leveraging process-improvement tools, such as Lean, Six Sigma, or other homegrown or hybrid improvement methodologies. They focus a great deal of effort in refining processes, better managing processes, and/or reducing waste from their organizational processes. I […]

When it comes to operational improvement, organizations today are light years ahead of where they were two decades ago, but there’s no time to celebrate yesterday’s wins. They won’t immunize your organization against this decade’s march of ongoing progress. That’s because information technology — not just the Internet, but also mobile devices, “big data” for […]

A recent blog post by Seth Godin (@ThisIsSethsBlog) created one of the “POW!” moments for me. The writeup was about organizations that always deal with “problems,” and what happens when there are no more problems to solve. Problem solvers don’t function well when they don’t have any problems to solve. They often seem lost. We’re […]

Earlier this month, a Facebook user, Richard Neill put up a post that suddenly went viral. The post was a rant against Maxipad maker Bodyform alleging that they lied in their advertisements. Rather than just let it go and hope the 84,000 or so ‘likes’ would be forgotten with the next viral wave, Bodyform put up […]

A book summary of Why Killer Products Don’t Sell by Ian Gotts and Dominic Rowsell on Amazon as hardback or Kindle You’re a major corporation with a track record of strong sales for your current product range. You’ve worked long and hard to produce a unique, innovative product that you know the market needs. It […]