Be it Angry Birds or Galaga, Fallout or Call of Duty, knowing what good likes like is pretty easy. You gain an achievement, rack up three stars or land on a leaderboard. In the pre-social gaming days, it was a local leaderboard, the one on the game you were playing at Shakey’s Pizza during lunch from your sys op job on a HP 3000. Today your achievements are splattered across screens around the world. Good is easy to find, excellence not so much.
Unilateralism – And What To Do About It
Unilateralism abounds in the workplace: individuals or groups taking decisions without regard to the needs, feelings or concerns of others. Unilateralism often contributes to disengagement, pique, frustration, low morale and learned helplessness.
Three types of innovation
I talk a lot about disruption and disruptive innovation. Often it is hard to tell the difference between them. To my mind there are three types of innovation that businesses commonly use.
The State of Omni-Channel in Mexico
Mexico is a unique opportunity for both eCommerce and omni-channel. It’s the second-largest economy in Latin America, but nearly 80% of the population is located in urban areas — and one large urban area in particular, centered on Mexico City in the interior of the country. eCommerce is a small percentage of overall retail sales — only 2-3%, based on multiple estimates. But, typical these days, there is a high penetration of smartphones, encompassing nearly 60% of the population.
The Orchestra – different parts same outcome
I typically use the metaphor of an orchestra with Testers across different teams/products/squads within an organisation to help the understanding of how different testers can offer value within their teams.
The idea being, that the argument “I test websites & they test data” is redundant when you’re thinking of the product or system as a whole.
The Future Of Software-Intensive Product Development
In a nutshell, the issues that plague SIPD seem obvious. They’re mostly the same issues that plague all forms of collaborative knowledge work. Issues compounded by the gulf between conventional or traditional work and the new world of work (i.e. the world of collaborative knowledge work) – a new world distinctly unfamiliar to most in the world of work today.
The Fallacy Of Retail’s Cost To Serve
A couple of weeks ago I was talking to a technology company sales executive, who at the time was trying to make the case that retailers needed to do a better job of managing their cost to serve. Basically, if a shopper engages with a retailer in, for example, the store channel, the retailer should be doing everything in their power to incent the customer to stay in that channel and not use any others, because the more channels a customer uses, the more expensive the transaction is.
The Core Components Of Retail Transformation
Microsoft has historically been very product-focused, as Chris readily admitted. But the company’s success doesn’t depend on its products, it depends on its customers. Sound familiar? Chris talked about focusing on earning fans. I have the feeling those are two deliberately chosen words.
The Concept Of Value
Many folks talk about value. I have a distinct suspicion that few have any clear idea of what they themselves mean by the term. And of those few, I suspect each might have a different meaning in mind. I myself attempted to define the term some years ago.
The Amazon Effect &Home Delivery
It can really only be called the “Amazon Effect”: Consumers want what they want – quick, cheap and (most importantly) delivered directly to their door.
In that environment, what’s a retailer to do? Align their delivery offerings with their customers’ wants, of course! According to new research from Retail Systems Research, however, true alignment remains a “future state” of the industry.
