SuccessfulWorkplace

There’s nothing quite like being on the desperately wrong side of history and angering the public in the process. That’s exactly where London cabbies are at the moment in their fight against the Uber car service. Their argument that Uber’s app violates the rules for how cab fares are metered seems an issue for the […]

The issue with Big Data isn’t its hype – there are certainly enormous benefits in capturing the data being generated by a rapidly digitizing world. The issue has been and continues to be how we approach the problem of having too much data, accumulating too rapidly and in too many forms for organizations to handle. Big Data has […]

The battleground for mobility isn’t the phone — it hasn’t been for a while — but it isn’t the app anymore, either. Round 3 of Apple versus Android (the only real fight worth watching) will be fought to make the mobile device a personal digital hub with a seamless user experience. In that fight, Apple […]

Toilets at Heathrow’s Terminal 2 are have sensors that count the number of times someone uses their services. Counting the number of times someone uses a urinal may seem like a small thing, but the outcome is disruptive — the cleaning of the toilet has always been tied to a cleaning schedule. That schedule requires […]

Data stopped being the sole property of the IT department the moment business users realized that technology existed that allowed them to feed themselves. If that wasn’t enough, the cloud came into vogue and mobile and social media use exploded, putting enormous amounts of data within reach of those who needed it most, without having […]

Customer expectations have always been tough to match, but never has the challenge been as great as right now, in our always-on world. CMOs face the daunting task of striking the perfect balance between being relevant and safeguarding a customer’s privacy—a tough job when relevance involves leveraging customer data. A brand can only disappoint a […]

With a son going off to college in a couple of months, the topic of future-proofed careers has been a hot one. He’s chosen well with mining engineering: an incessant drive toward miniaturization and an explosion of connected sensors will guarantee employment for decades to come. The next wave of technology is going to constrain […]

Innovation is a funny thing…there are lots of awesome innovative ideas that give us the chance to do things in better ways. Coming up with an innovative idea, however, isn’t nearly the same thing as true innovation. There’s a significant disconnect, in fact, between developing new ideas and changing the landscape in meaningful, measurable ways. […]

GE is an icon of management best practices. Under CEO Jack Welch in the 1980s and 1990s, they adopted operational efficiency approaches (“Workout,” “Six Sigma,” and “Lean”) that reinforced their success and that many companies emulated. But, as befits a company that has been around for 130 years, GE is moving on. While Lean and […]

Tractors can now talk. They send and receive signals to adjust how they operate and optimize how they perform. Location, weather and other factors are being processed in the moment (during the tractor’s operation) at the point on the planet (in the field) and in the timeframe (perhaps the only timeframe) that it matters. Remarkable. […]

Marketers, it is 2014 and seriously time to get creative with your customer engagement strategies. Here’s a great example of why. Just yesterday I was in one of my favorite stores, a nationally known co-op. The benefits of membership at this retailer are very straightforward—the more I spend, the more I can expect to receive […]

In an interesting article today on Tech Crunch, Alexis Tsotsis describes the Fourth Internet as “Get Mine.” What she means is that the other three Internets, “Getting Information Online,” “Getting the Information Organized,” and, “Getting Everyone Connected,” were distinctly different from where we are today. That makes sense so far. By “Get Mine,” she means […]

Yesterday was Day 1 of Venture Beat’s DataBeat 2014 at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco. I had the pleasure of being a last-minute moderator for the afternoon panel on Data Driving Ad Targeting & Personalization. My panelists were Vikram Somaya of WeatherFX, a division of the Weather Company (think: WeatherChannel.com and much more), Mark […]

It would be really hard to overstate the changes happening in marketing as our world is immersed in burgeoning amounts of all types of data. We suddenly have data that allows us to measure marketing performance through platforms that accumulate historical and real-time data from mobile, web and in-store sources like never before in history. […]