The Best of This Week

Rebuilding Consumer Confidence in the COVID-19 Era The coronavirus pandemic has clobbered consumer confidence, creating both challenges and opportunities for businesses and brand owners, who must now identify meaningful confidence-building experiences. The consumer experience is critical, and a successful brand provides value across every interaction....

8h

Motivating Your Workers With Opportunity Marketplaces

The COVID-19 crisis has made organizations vastly more aware of the need for greater flexibility, adaptability, and communications in the distributed workplace. Getting work done well and on time is job one, but what needs to come next? How do you quickly, cheaply, adaptively, and thoughtfully set yourself up for a future requiring unprecedented workplace...

1d

The Cost of Confidence

The COVID-19 pandemic has knocked consumer confidence hard, with profound and far-reaching implications. It has disrupted every aspect of daily life, including employment, consumption, and freedom of movement, creating uncertainty about what is safe and what lies ahead. Standard business has been upended, vaporizing certain norms consumers have always...

1d

Why Data Scientists Are a Breed Apart

A survey of more than 300 analytics professionals in the U.S. found that data scientists more often consider themselves entrepreneurial and explorers of new ideas than other quantitative analysts do. “The recent emergence of the digital enterprise has created a seemingly insatiable management appetite to amass and analyze data,” write Jeanne G....

2d

The Great Innovation Deceleration

The rise of the West is often traced back to the Black Death of the mid-1300s, which killed over 40% of Europe’s population. For example, some historians think that the resulting labor scarcity increased the bargaining power of peasants in the West, which led to the end of serfdom and to higher standards of living but failed to bring about institutional...

2d

Solving the Problem of Siloed IT in Organizations

A CEO of a real estate services company came to us recently with a problem. The whole company was waiting anxiously for a new system that the technology team had been working on for over a year. The CEO lamented that the team now needed to do a complete rewrite with a different technology — pushing the project out at least another six months and putting...

3d

Reviving High-Touch Business Models for the Social Distancing Era

The demand for many products and services has evaporated over the past several months as consumers have altered their typical patterns while adhering to stay-at-home orders and social distancing practices. But a unique set of businesses that may evoke feelings of nostalgia for some — including milk and frozen-food delivery services, and drive-in theaters...

4d

The Best of This Week

Why Some Retailers Are Thriving Amid Disruption A growing number of retailers that were struggling before the coronavirus crisis are now crumbling amid social distancing requirements — yet other companies are thriving despite months of shutdown. The resilience of these successful retailers is due to their transformation of traditional business models....

1w

12 Essential Strategy Insights

“Strategy, at its heart, is about choice,” write the authors of “Turning Strategy Into Results,” an article featured below, which takes a keen look at how leaders translate the complexity of strategy into guidelines that are simple and flexible enough to execute. A winning strategy for an organization is not based on an individual choice but an expansive,...

2w

Maximizing the Benefits of B2B Supplier Diversification

As America’s population becomes more diverse and social movements highlighting the need for inclusion have taken center stage, governments, nonprofits, and large companies from a wide variety of industries (for example, Nike, Nordstrom, Pfizer, IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Coca-Cola, Fox News) have responded to these demographic changes with initiatives to...

2w