Classic movies are a wondrous window into a bygone era. They ordered beer at drive throughs, smoked in the office, and didn’t dial phone numbers. When someone wanted to reach Elizabeth Taylor, “The most desirable woman in town” they had only to ask the operator for “Butterfield 8”. As more and more phone numbers were created, those numbers got more complicated.  Lucy and Ricky Ricardo could be reached at “Murray Hill 5-9975”, which is a bit more of a mouthful. Eventually, people came to the conclusion that this system was not going to scale very well so Bell decided to introduce the futu ..read more

Anuj Anand is the VP for Technology Services and Solutions at Ausenco, a global leader in providing consulting, engineering, project delivery and optimisation services for large scale, resources, energy and industrial projects.   If a mine needs to be built, or a recycling plant designed, or a bridge constructed, Ausenco is brought in to provide expertise in design, engineering,  project delivery and commissioning. Anuj is responsible for ensuring that Ausenco’s people have the best technical tools available so that they can stay cutting edge and serve their clients efficiently ..read more

Every Monday, I take my kids Alex and Vivian to their Jiu Jitsu class. The martial arts club conveniently offers an adult fitness class during the kid Jiu Jitsu session, so that us parents can get in a workout instead of spending the next 45 minutes fiddling with our phones. When the three of us emerge hungry, sweaty, and thirsty from class, we cross the street to go to the Lebanese bakery and pick up a week’s supply of cheese bread.  Low carb diet be damned. Since I’m something of a regular there (enough to ask for “the usual”), I often chat with the owner and exchange pleasantries. Last ..read more

Many years ago, my husband Geoff worked with a Brazilian government agency in Rio de Janiero (I know, he’s had a rough life).  Although they were very advanced in many ways, they had some surprising deficiencies when it came to making sure employees were productive.  For instance, Geoff couldn’t find a chair to sit on.  Like none.  Desperately, he wandered the hallways peering into other rooms trying to find something to sit on.  No luck. He is not one to let such a minor setback deter him from work that needs to be done. Eventually, he grabbed a garbage can, turned it ..read more

Mark Templeton retired from his role as CEO of Citrix on Back to the Future Day (October 21, 2015, for those of you not in the know). During his 20 year long tenure, he oversaw a transformation that created a customer-first culture at Citrix. By focusing on creating value for customers first, he also created a lot of shareholder value, skyrocketing Citrix revenues from $15 million to over $3 billion.  Sixteen years ago he created a vision of the “virtual workplace” which presciently lays out much of how we work today. I asked him to share his thoughts on leading a customer-first transform ..read more

Pop quiz time! What shape is the planet earth? a.   Round b.  Flat If you answered (b) I’m sorry but we can’t be friends.  If you answered (a), phew! There is a dismayingly large group of people who think that the earth is flat.  They don’t believe the photos from outer space, or anything else for that matter.  The more evidence they see, the more it confirms a massive conspiracy of the “round earthers”. The community has developed an unlikely spokesperson of sorts in the person of rapper B.o.B. He has decided to take the unprecedented step of launching a satellite in ..read more

Marat Stary has done just about everything. From consulting to media, tech and beyond, he’s seen a lot. Like many company founders, his business idea (and current success) had a lot to do with what he experienced firsthand while working with larger companies. GetPartnered solves a really interesting problem for large companies with lots of partners. Typically, companies will quite rightly focus on providing their customers with a great experience.  Even small businesses will use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management software) to manage those critical relationships. However, for many org ..read more

“Users might want to customize their font”   “If I was the user, I would want to order things by process ID”   “Users want to see a high-level dashboard of the finances”   “Users are going to want to put things on SharePoint with one click”   “Our users need to be able to create different roles for access to SharePoint”   These were all phrases I heard about “the user” for a single product. Do you notice anything a little odd about these? Do they sound like they are talking about different people?    That’s because they are. The problem with talking abou ..read more

Pradeep is the Director of Product Management at Microsoft Yammer. He wears many hats: product champion, strategist, and team builder, just to name a few. His product (which now is part of Microsoft’s collaboration suite), has a clear mission:  It helps teams “work out in the open.” I got on the phone with Pradeep to learn more. Here’s what he said…  Don’t mistake customer feedback for customer insights. Feedback, which is simply the raw data, is easy to get. Insights are much harder to obtain. These come from understanding how to get that data and how to interpret the results.Remem ..read more

“I was terrified. I thought she was going to die in front of me.” Those were the words of a research participant as she described her experience during a medical crisis with her daughter. Then she burst into tears. As we passed the tissues, we had to grab a few for ourselves. Rewind a bit. We were doing a customer journey project for a large Health Care Provider to determine how to improve the customer experience on their website. We had been following the usual protocol for journey mapping: prompting users to tell us about a specific healthcare experience they’d had recently, and then asking ..read more