SuccessfulWorkplace

Just today PayPal announced that they added more retailers to their in-store payments application and are now at 18,000 retail outlets in the US. Amazing how technology that everyone expected would help break us free from brick and mortar is now squarely (pun intended) on making mobile payments to local stores much easier. If you’re […]

A few years back we were walking through London’s Heathrow and just happened to run into a good friend we never expected to see. Millions pass through that airport every year and we’re certain that we’ve narrowly missed an acquaintance many times before. Coincidence was king before our modern times. The world is increasingly becoming […]

Real-time means something a little different to everyone. The term is too-often used to describe getting information on what happened up to the moment, a rolling report of the history of something – like customer purchases, staffing costs or inventory levels. It’s like asking what time it is. There’s only an accurate answer for that one-dimensional question at […]

The naysayers became a deafening roar from the moment Facebook’s IPO failed to skyrocket in May of this year. It was stunning how quickly the darling of Wall Street became trailer trash. But look no further than yesterday, when the lockup period ended and insiders could sell 850 million shares. Some did but the stock […]

Ben Zoldan wrote an interesting viewpoint on the effect of the mobility trend, in that becoming social and mobile is eroding the art of connection and communication. On the flipside, Brian Solis, a recognised marketing expert called the latest generation of consumers Gen C in a recent article, C standing for Connected. The truth is […]

We’re heading into Columbus Day Weekend in the U.S., giving us a great chance to look at the fundamental changes that technology is bringing to retail. The new game is event-based marketing. Big Sale! A quick look at the LA Times shows who’s in the old game. The pages are full of merchants using discounting as […]

I recently wrote about a great customer service experience. It isn’t always quite that good… It seems every year I get to experience at least one business process that goes horribly wrong. Here’s the latest, with names removed to protect the guilty. I purchased a new laptop back in June. At the same time, I […]

I’m sitting at the Denver International Airport with a big smile on my face. I flew into a large, unfamiliar airport and could have had a tough time. Keep in mind my airport of choice is John Wayne in Orange County with just 12 gates and in and out in 20 minutes. I’m spoiled. My […]

The bigger the enterprise, the more the division of labor between various departments. These divisions end up being enormous barriers to efficient exchange of information and ideas for ways to improve the way is business done. What happens instead is smaller, less-effective changes at low levels of process or information flow. This is a timeless […]

Unless you’re turned off to the media world, you know that Square received $25M investment from Starbucks yesterday and very soon will be processing your credit or debit card at over half the Starbucks in the US. If Forbes has it right, Square and Starbucks will let you mention your name to the cashier and by knowing […]

Retail has gone through enormous stresses in the past decade, with more to come. Just the normal ups and downs of local and global economies, supply chains and personal taste are a huge challenge. Add to that mix the increasing maturation of concepts like e-Commerce, Big Data, RFID and mobile. Each of these would be […]

The simple act of making an offer to a prospective buyer is as old as commerce itself, but with the help of information technology, is taking an enormous turn. The disruption will be enormous. My wife and I go to the grocery store quite a bit. Sure, we need to eat, but also love to […]

When we think of the word loyalty, it has a noble sound. Knights were loyal to their king and people are loyal to their countries and their football teams. We offer our loyalty because we believe it makes us part of something bigger than ourselves. The object of our loyalty, if doing things right, gives […]

Big Data is advertised as the secret to unlocking actionable intelligence. Collecting and sifting through vast amounts of data finds the patterns that change everything. But is elusive ‘data in combination’ the answer that we should expect from analytics? Not necessarily. More and more often, crunching large amounts of data gets to the opposite result: […]