Design has never and will never be a finished thought. It is always a conversation.
Read more on Medium about the implications.
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As the end of the year approaches, it is the perfect time to take a step back, evaluate the past year, and look to the future.
There are a myriad of ways that companies take on strategic planning, while others just ignore it (yikes!).
The important thing is that it is done and everyone in the organization understands where they are going, what’s expected in 2019, and how they will get there.
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Recently, I have been challenged to take a look at my productivity and through some self-evaluation, it’s clear that complexity is taking a toll on me too — and I work alone most of the time!
Read MoreIt’s time to practice the mind meld in business. But you might recognize it by a different name: Corporate offsite, leadership retreat, innovation workshops.
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On a recent, hot Monday morning in Texas, I showed up at the headquarters of Volusion, a leading e-commerce platform for small businesses. A while earlier, Volusion had reached out to me to with an interesting proposition: facilitate a Design Sprint for an implementation of the Salesforce Service Cloud — with a long-term goal of delivering a new customer experience platform for the entire organization.
One of the great benefits of Salesforce is its flexibility to be customized to the organization’s needs, but this also represents a great challenge because of the high implementation costs, the breadth of a possibilities, and difficulty building a solution that works for the organization. Enter the Design Sprint, a new option for outsmarting the typical Salesforce implementation challenges.
Read MoreWhen you consider developing a new vision statement, instead of writing a sentence that won’t do anything, think about ways to forge a vision that is compelling and important enough that it must be shared.
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One of the most common reasons that organizations struggle to develop a powerful vision is that their vision casting process has little or no structure, or is otherwise highly ineffective. It doesn’t have to be this way, though.
Read MoreOne of the biggest benefits I get as an independent consultant working from home is that I’m able to attack problems and create strategic value with great efficiency. That’s good for me and good for my clients.
But there’s a problem with this setup—I don’t want to be productive all the time.
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As part of a new series I’m calling “90 Minute Brand Strategy”, I’m going to apply some of my Brand Mountain Framework (BMF) to the classic brand, Ace Hardware (Ace). You most likely have seen their retail stores around the country. Their website says they have 4,700 stores around the world, most of which are independently owned.
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A practical guide for running your own Design Sprints.
Sprint is the rare business book that effectively combines compelling storytelling with a practical how-to guide, to the great benefit of the reader. It is the hands-on manual for a relatively new business practice called “Design Sprints”.
How Capital One’s new cafés provide a real-time case study into the innovation imperative in banking.
Read MoreRecently I was having a conversation with the CEO of a local media broadcast organization and I was outlining what a rebranding process should look like for their organization. I thought it would make for a great blog post, so here goes (By the way, I’m sorry in advance for the length of this post— I’m only skimming the surface of all of these ideas and issues, but as you can see it is an incredibly complex process).
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I'm a big fan of Tim Ferriss' best-selling title, the 4 Hour Workweek and I like a lot of what he has to say. I don't agree with everything he endorses, but I love his approach to lifestyle design. I also loved the book, Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull, President of Pixar and Disney Animation. So this episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast with Catmull as his guest is a no-brainer. If you are interested at all in what makes Pixar and Disney Animation so successful, interested in some more Ed's personal insight into the life of Steve Jobs or if you just liked the book, take a listen.
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