It isn’t enough to consider your customer a guest In the early 1990’s Target started calling their customers, ‘guests’. It was a practice lifted from Disney. Words have power. Calling your customer a: user, consumer, buyer, client, subscriber, or sh...
“I now know why the king on the chessboard can only move one space at a time." My good friend and mentor Paul Singer said to me when he became CIO of Target. “I thought when I got to this position, that I would be able to make sweeping changes. But I...
“Resistance creates inefficiency." The professor of my first circuit design class said. His next comment stayed with me for years: “This is true both for electronics and teams." Our goal is to eliminate resistance, because all it does is slow things d...
Effective enterprise innovation requires: a shared vision, a supportive environment the ability to say YES and more importantly to say NO But I think, it is more like Know than NO, Know what you are doing, know the risks, know the returns, know ...
My 8 year old daughter's eyes sparkled when she lifted the cup to reveal the ball had disappeared. What kid doesn’t want to be in on a secret that confounds adults? I think all children should learn magic. At her age I loved magic, though I stopped d...
This made me laugh, seen on a whiteboard recently. I have found the use of QRCodes a constant UX debate, they are ugly and kludgy but useful, there should be better ways to connect physical to digital but if you need global ubiquity today, you are kin...
Power in your pocket For years as a young geek I dreamed of having a Cray YMP, with its 'custom leather couch’. In the 80's this was the super computer to have. Back then the Cray YMP boasted processing power of more than 2 Gflops, in comparison an ...
No matter how you build a team, around great work, talented people, an awesome environment…. people leave. You are happy for them; if you did your job right, your friends are running to something great and not running from something awful (you?). But t...