Netflix: Make More Customer Magic with Your People and Your Data

April 26, 2010

I’ve often thought my older relatives should try Netflix. But they don’t have a computer at home and I just didn’t see how it could work for them. They use the library computers in their home town, but I know they wouldn’t be comfortable doing the credit card thing online, much less at the library. [...]

Read the full article →

How startups can out-execute the big guys

April 7, 2010

I couldn’t miss an event billed “How I beat my competition by out-executing them with Gurbaksh Chahal and Lyle Fong “, a VLAB Emerging Business Event in their “Entrepreneurs Uncensored” series. Gurbaksh and Lyle are two very inspiring entrepreneurs. Just hearing their stories made for a great event.  But they were there with a message [...]

Read the full article →

Zappos: Make Me Happier with Business Analytics

March 30, 2010

I love a lot about Zappos: the customer-centered service, the way Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, evangelizes and models the competitive advantage of emergent and sustained corporate values. I love the way they call me a VIP for really what is a modest number of transactions.  Yet many of those transactions are returns. Again today, for [...]

Read the full article →

Innovation in Entrepreneurship – A Case Study on Keen Mobility

March 10, 2010

This post first appeared on Blogging Innovation as Helping Others Go Vertical on 3/7/2010 Keen Mobility is a story of innovation, invention and entrepreneurship. Innovation is often focused on inventions and new products, but innovation is also a new way of thinking about conventional wisdom.  Jeffrey Phillips wrote an insightful post “Innovation, Invention and Entrepreneurs”, [...]

Read the full article →

Emergent Intelligence: SocialText and Baynote

January 25, 2010

What does an Emergent Business Execution Platform look like? I asked this question in my last post of 2009. Building up to this question, I had argued that “excellence in execution is infrastructure, because processes and tools can incorporate and model best practices in execution to a degree and with a speed and flexibility not [...]

Read the full article →

Human Capital x Social Capital = Productivity and Innovation

December 14, 2009

My guest post on Blogging Innovation 12/10/09: As a culture we like to think of our achievements as the triumph of the individual. But last week I used a memorable chicken breeding example to show you that group performance outweighs individual performance in a group environment because a focus on individual performance comes at a [...]

Read the full article →

Let’s talk about chickens and e2.0

December 1, 2009

While it might seem that there is no possible link between chickens and Enterprise 2.0, it turns out that there is a really good story about group versus personal productivity involving chickens: William Muir, an animal breeder at Purdue University, wanted to increase egg production by selective breeding, and he tried to do it in [...]

Read the full article →

3 Engaging Platforms

November 24, 2009

Last week in “Engagement by Design” I wrote about how marketers can use Funware – game mechanics in non-game contexts – to motivate and engage customers and create sustainable customer loyalty. Today I want to tell you about three software companies – Seriosity, Spigit and Lithium Technologies – that are integrating game mechanics in their [...]

Read the full article →

Engagement by Design

November 16, 2009

Game developers know how to create an immersive, engaging game experience. Why  not use these same game mechanics to create an immersive and engaging customer experience? Juho Hamari and  Vili Lehdonvirta of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology studied game mechanics in virtual economies in “Game design as marketing: How game mechanics create demand for [...]

Read the full article →

Excellence in Execution is Infrastructure

November 9, 2009

My guest post on SuccessFactors Business Execution blog 11/6/09: CEO’s continue to rate execution excellence as their top challenge. But what does “excellence in execution” actually mean? The CEO wants to turn the wheel and have the ship respond, but according to extensive research repeated year after year, only 10-15% of wheel turns get the [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →