Stories, Storytelling, Story-Selling in Business

"Good stories fascinate us all. They always have. They always will. At this moment in our nation’s history, we are seeing two epic stories evolving—in terms of our new President, and in the state of our economy.

The story of Obama many believe is epic, and certainly the story of our nation’s recession and economic downfall is also a burgeoning epic tale.

Stories move societies forward. They inspire, engage and initiate change through their telling and re-telling. Basically, there are two types of stories: Truth Stories and True Stories."

- Tom Nies

Read the entire Story here

Given A Choice Of A Bail-Out or Knock-Out, Let’s Help Our Customers Deliver The Latter

Just watching the companies fighting their way through the challenges of this economic downturn one can appreciate what it means to go after intelligence aggressively.  There is a small healthcare products manufacturing company in Los Angeles for example that has decided to throw down the gauntlet of transforming its supply chain, sourcing and marketing systems to be more focused on rapid response times to customers.  They decided that in the midst of an economic downturn, getting aggressive about how they used intelligence could make a huge difference in their ability to survive and grow. 

As it turns out their strategy of aggressive intelligence is paying off with increased orders from e-commerce sites the business development teams had been working with for years.  One of the senior managers of this firm is in my graduate-level course in International Business. Paradoxically, the recession forces his retailing customers to go multi-channel much faster than they had anticipated.  The result: an entirely new channel for his company as well.

Coming Out Swinging…With Knowledge

It’s time for more companies to get up and dust themselves off from this recession and start fighting back – with knowledge.  The easy strategies of using continuously dropping prices, sacrificing margins or even bundling products to the point of unprofitability are, to be blunt, weak.  How much better to fight the good fight of bringing the knowledge in our companies to the forefront of our customers’ unmet needs and knocking out their problems for them?  That’s the plan at this manufacturer and it is working.

Instead of complaining about how about how bad this recession is, there are those courageous companies who instead look at their customers’ knowledge and process problems as their own.  They attack these problems with an intensity they would in their own company.  The use intelligence aggressively to serve their customers.  That’s the key take-away from the small manufacturer I’ve gotten to know in L.A. from one of my students. 

Key Lessons Learned

After visiting my students’ company last Friday and hearing how pervasive the mission they are on is getting engrained into their culture, a few key take-aways emerged:

• Everyone sees themselves as fighting for their customers’ victories, not just their own. This pervaded the assembly areas, and certainly included sales and service.  Every person I talked to, from the manufacturing supervisors to the sales managers, directors and VPs saw the recession as a fight they would help their customers win.  It wasn’t about them; it was about helping their customers get through this too.  The term “we got their back” came up several times.

• Using data mining to find patterns in special orders to create new build-to-order product configuration.  This manufacturer is taking their histories of special orders and looking for patterns in the data to create entirely new combinations of special order products.  While these special orders were costly to produce at the time, they do provide a glimpse of what is selling.  The result has been product line extensions quickly created with an increased probability of success. 

• Looking for new ways to help their customers be successful in multi-channel management strategies including increasing emphasis in e-commerce.  This was a big one as the company acts as a light manufacturer for trading partners in China and Taiwan and has better availability on specific healthcare products than their competitors globally.  As a result of the decision to get aggressive about how they manage data, they can now provide price and availability across all healthcare products on a 24/7 basis in three languages, and two Chinese dialects.  This has been one of the key areas where they are helping their distribution partners open websites in specific Chinese provinces and throughout the Pacific Rim.  The result is their sales are growing in the midst of this recession.

• Product catalogs customizable within hours for any given reseller’s needs in three languages and two Chinese dialects. The online product catalogs are organized in an enterprise content management system so they can create specific subset catalogs and push them to a partners’ website within less than 72 hours if needed.  This is a major competitive advantage and further shows how aggressively this company is using intelligence.

Conclusion
What’s so unique about this company is that while the recession is certainly a major concern, there is no dwelling on it.  There is instead a mindset of using the recession as a reason to fight harder than ever for customers and get aggressive in their use of intelligence.

Above all, this company and the ones fighting back with knowledge exemplify this quote:

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

President Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States. "Citizenship in a Republic," Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910.

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7320687@N02/3278783949/sizes/m/

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29210138@N04/2730152863/sizes/m/

Courtesy – Louis Columbus at Perfect CEM

1000 Machines Find the Results for a Google Query

How many servers process a Google query and serve the top search results? Google Fellow Jeff Dean says that more than a thousand machines are necessary to obtain the search results in less than 200 milliseconds.
"Their performance gains are also impressive, now serving pages in under 200ms. Jeff credited the vast majority of that to their switch to holding indexes completely in memory a few years back. While that now means that a thousand machines need to handle each query rather than just a couple dozen, Jeff said it is worth it to make searchers see search results nearly instantaneously."

Courtesy – Google Systems

The Importance of the Customer Experience in a Down Economy

Overcoming the Recession

Advocates of a focus on the customer experience argue that it is the major source of competitive differentiation. It takes the focus off of price and enhances the value customers perceive in the relationship. In short, it is a business strategy that is essential to sustainable profits and growth.
Yet, as financial markets are in turmoil, consumer prices rise, and the

re is fear of a declining market place, business executives are scrambling to devise a timely strategy. Some will gravitate towards a cost-cutting and retrenchment process to ride out the storm. Others will look to protect their core customer base. For many executives, leading in a down economy will be a new experience and they will be seeking perspective, insights and guidance—thought leadership.

The Importance of the Customer Experience in a Down Economy An 84-page report that is a must read for anyone trying to figure out how to cut budget yet maintain profitable relationships with customers.

Download Here

Developing Trust Leads to Results

A long article however a highly recommended read. Articulated  by Mr. Thomas Nies, an entrepreneur, a leader, a visionary, and the longest serving CEO of computer industry, with whom I had the honor of working with.  Among many other achievements of Mr. Nies and Cincom, In 2007-2008 Cincom and Mr. Nies were the focus of a Harvard Business School Case Study to be taught in Harvard's MBA Program. Today, thousands of clients around the world rely on Tom Nies and Cincom's four decades of experience to provide innovative solutions to simplify some of their toughest and most complex business problems.

Coming back to the article :-

Overcoming Hidden Agendas in Business

Agendas grow out of motive and intent. So, when motives and intentions are not open and transparent to all involved, "hidden agendas" inevitably develop. These hidden agendas are often buried or disguised within the subtext or context of many situations. This tendency to camouflage motives is especially prevalent in too many complex sales cycles.

"The meeting is at 2 p.m. I'll e-mail you a copy of the agenda, your personal agenda and the hidden agenda."

– Anon

What's Best?

Quite frankly, the agenda that usually inspires the greatest trust, and therefore helps to produce the best results, is the seeking of greatest mutual benefit for all involved. But in such situations, one must genuinely and sincerely want what's best for all. Those who recognize the truth that all life is interdependent realize that they must truly seek to discover solutions that build trust, value, mutual benefit and satisfaction for everyone involved in order to best serve their own self-interests.

"No man can sincerely help another without also helping himself."

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those who become optimally successful try to always act in ways that support their beliefs. The maxim "actions speak louder than words" is profound. It is also true. "Trust is established through action(s)."

Four Factors of Success for Business

In business, success depends on the following four factors:

1. Relationships
2. Trust
3. Execution
4. Results

Positive relationship-building fosters and stimulates mutual trust. Mutual trust facilitates the successful actions and executions that deliver the results and values that benefit all. The interlinking of these concepts are expressed in a poster that we display at every location of our company, Cincom, that states:

"Relationships build trust; execution builds results."

This brief maxim seeks to draw attention to the interrelationships and interdependencies among these four success factors.

Relationships

Good relationships do help to build trust; this we all surely know. But, relationships are also built through trust, of trust and upon trust. So, it might also be even more correctly said that, "Trust builds relationships."

Trust

Trust is one of the most powerful forms of both motivation and inspiration. We want to be trusted. We thrive on trust. We respond positively to trust. We perform better when trusted. Trust acts as a type of psychological steroid on human development. And, as we act better, we become better.

Execution

When we are trusted, we do all that we can to behave, act and execute in ways that confirm our appreciation for the trust bestowed on us by another. Our very great desire to not disappoint those who honor us with their trust in us causes us to quite often perform at levels far beyond reasonable expectations, because trust is inevitably tested by results. Whatever our situation or role, we must become very good at establishing, extending and restoring trust as one of the most effective means of generating results.

Results

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that it is the results that truly matter. Trust in economic, and other areas as well, is given, to some degree, in the expectation of results. But, trust is not naive. It insists that whatever it gives must be earned. To maintain trust, one must not just try, one must also deliver the results expected and promised, yet with a high degree of integrity.

Winston Churchill stresses a results-oriented focus that is a way of thinking, of behaving and of acting.

"It's no use saying 'we are doing our best.' You have got to succeed in doing what's necessary."

– Winston Churchill

Jedi Master Yoda says it this way:

"No! Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try."

Actions – Not Activities

This actions/results orientation is quite different from an activity-based approach. Trust demands performance. It is as simple as that. But, performance increases trust. Trust and results are the yin and yang of high achievers. Craig Weatherop, a former CEO of PepsiCo, said this quite emphatically when he stated: "You can't create a high-trust culture unless people perform." Experience everywhere proves the wisdom of Weatherop's observation.

Promises build hope.

Hope encourages trust.

But, ongoing trust demands performance.

Demons of Doubt

No matter how deep or idyllically happy a warm, trusting relationship may be, failures to perform as promised, or deliver the results expected, invites doubt into the situation. And, the perfidious demons of doubt are the abiding and toxic enemies of trust in every relationship.

Drive Downward Spiral

So, where doubt prevails, effort and results will seldom be optimal. And as performance declines, trust will deteriorate further.

This downward spiral eventually destroys relationships. A Harvard professor once emphasized the overriding importance of top-notch expectation in these words: "It is better to have a grade-B strategy and grade-A execution than the other way around."

Character and Commitment

In business, gaining and maintaining trust is essential to winning support. So, everyone involved in such environments must perform very well if the necessary trust is to be achieved and kept. But, in order to so operate, it's also important to understand how trust works. The first such understanding is that trust is gained as a function of both character and commitment that produces the promised or expected results. Most certainly, the character considerations of integrity, ethical standards, honesty, reliability and the other such factors, which combine necessarily together to create what is often called "character," are absolutely foundational and essential.

Competency

However, high moral and ethical character alone is not enough. One also must be competent and capable in the area of interest to be worthy of trust, or to be trustworthy. Competency is built upon such considerations as talent, attitude, skills, knowledge, expertise and other such task-related capabilities.

"Untutored courage is useless in the face of educated bullets."

General George S. Patton, Jr.

(Courtesy of Cliff1066)

During business sales cycles, both of these aspects of the character and trustworthiness are being carefully assessed by the prospect along with the various features, functions, costs and other suitability factors of the offerings, which include quality and expertise, or the competency of the service and support. Objective and subjective analysis of all these factors will typically consider the seller's apparent agenda and behavior, along with the verbalized statements and claims made.

Where's the Proof?

But, since comments and claims may be suspect, prospects need to be assured by behaviors, by references and by personal involvements that a provider can be trusted.

Prospects realize they may become very dependent on the provider. Therefore, they will be placing themselves at risk. Of course, no one wants to be placed at any more risk than the minimum absolutely necessary to gain the result or reward desired. This is why anxieties and emotional fears, doubts and apprehensions rise as prospects reach critical decision points.

Decisions that are not easily and readily reversible, and include risk, always cause apprehensions and anxieties.

Yes and No

Yes! We do want results.

But, no! We do not want to take inordinate risks.

Relationships of Trust

Even if the potential rewards may be very significant, if there are any doubts remaining unresolved, we are all usually reluctant to move into higher-risk situations. Typically, one's ongoing behavior and the cumulative effects and perceptions that their interactions and behaviors have built into relationships of trust are the best ways to gain the confidence and credibility necessary to gain favor.

To best succeed in gaining relationships of trust, one must also operate in ways that seek to achieve the greatest mutual benefit for all involved. But, like promises and assurances, commitments made build only hope; commitments and promises kept is what builds trust. Such trust gained helps to assure the other that whatever the risks, one has a trusted and proven ally to help carry them safely and securely forward to successfully gain the results and values sought. Considering these above ideas as parts of an integrated whole, one better sees and understands that trust, truth, relationships, execution, results, promises kept and value realized are all intimately interrelated and interdependent.

"Promises made must be promises kept."

– Steven M.R. Covey

Stephen M.R. Covey offers good insights on the importance of this maxim in his book, "The Speed of Trust." Covey writes, "In almost any discussion of trust, keeping commitments comes up as the number-one influencing behavior.

Do

In the AMA/HRI study on business ethics, "keeping promises" was ranked as the number-one behavior in creating an ethical culture.

Or Do Not

On the other hand, a survey on leaders for the World Economic Forum identified "not doing what they say" as the number-one trust breaker.

Trust

Gaining and maintaining trust during complex sales cycles is so important that it might quite rightly be considered among the key competencies for value-based sales reps.

Nothing Good

In the words of Jim Burke, a former CEO of Johnson & Johnson, "Nothing good happens without trust."

Happens Without It

Surely this is so in all businesses.

Happy Valentine

We imagine it, we celebrate it, we wait for it, we love it but do we know it.

Valentine's Day or rather Saint Valentine’s Day is a holiday celebrated on February 14 by many people throughout the world. In the West, it is the traditional day on which lovers express their love for each other by sending Valentine's cards, presenting flowers, or offering confectionery.

Historical archives make mention of at least three different individuals (and perhaps as many as seven) credited with the name of Saint Valentine (or Valentinus). In 496 A.D., Pope Gelasius declared February 14 to be the Feast Day of Saint Valentine...Patron Saint of Lovers and Engaged Couples, with particular jurisdiction over the quarrels which arise between sweethearts. Additionally there are Saint Valentine: Holy Priest of Rome and Saint Valentine: Bishop of Interamna.

While there are no definitive written accounts of any of the aforementioned Saint Valentines, all of whom lived in the Third Century and apparently died on exactly the same day, there is a more recent and documented connection to Ireland. There has been some speculation in modern times that the name of Valentine was originally "Galantine," signifying "gallant," which is a word with obvious associations to courtship. The shift in consonant to "V" is explained by the way Medieval French peasants pronounced the letter "G."

Enough knowledge about it. Well I must admit that you can google the above mentioned. Hence I have done the same and the information above is courtesy Wikipedia & Novarinna. Hence not much work on it, then.

So why I am wasting my time for this. The time wastage is due to the fact that I am waiting for my Valentine and discovering what love is. After so much of love research the finding is ….Well…… love defines is own definition and mostly defies itself. When we love we just love and wishes that the other loves the same way.  Love is something we all can only feel and can let others feel. Yes, one finding that I came across is that a true love defies all logic and love is just love. So, still no definition of love.

While on my trip from Hotel to the Airport in Philippines, the driver and me started chatting and he was sharing that due to lack of jobs in the country he went on a cargo ship as one of the workers. He stayed there for more than 10 months at a stretch without any hesitations, besides the fact  that internally he is afraid of water till now. That was the love, and the money he wanted to earn to marry his girlfriend (his valentine). So here the love was strong to overcome his own fears. But when the same person went to India for a six months truck driver (the work he liked) had to return within two months because he was not able to stay away from his kids. So here the love was his weakness.

Now he hopes to become big, not for himself, may be not for his wife, but for his children. He wanted to die with one voice in his ears that his children had the greatest dad. So this somewhat proves my hypothesis of love has no definition and no boundaries. You cannot quantify what love is. It is a feeling, it is an emotion, it is a strength and it is a weakness. For me that’s what love his.      

On this day when love is just love I would like to wish you a very Happy Valentine. Enjoy the day with someone special, while I wait to celebrate my valentine day, one day.

Fighting the Knowledge Recession

Companies who once freely shared information with their customers, suppliers and channel partners are becoming more elusive and closed.  They are locking down knowledge as if it were cash, not sharing nearly as much anymore.  This is hurting them and everyone they do business with pretty quickly.  As a result entire groups of companies risk coming to a grinding halt.

If anything, opening up and sharing even more knowledge, and sharing it aggressively, freely and fluidly is what’s needed. What’s going on today however is a blind focus only on efficiency to the exclusion of anything else.  Efficiency will not save any company from a recession but a strong network of knowledge sharing can help.

Efficiency without relationships is worthless.  Efficiency in the context of relationships is priceless.

Antidote for the Knowledge Recession

Let’s face it, many of our customers, companies we partner with and even our suppliers have a crisis of confidence going on.  What’s the best path of a lack of confidence?  Knowledge and lots of it. 

All of us can point back in our past and recite those teachers and professors who took an exceptional interest in our success.  They were known for their passion for knowledge and for freely sharing it.  My sixth grade social studies teacher showed how research could unshackle you and take you places you could never go as an 11 year old, yet you could go to the farthest reaches of the globe through research.  There was a statistics professor in college who showed how what many students see as arcane and dry science was actually fascinating and alive with insights just waiting to be discovered when applied to mountains of data.  These teachers were on a mission, and they succeed.

 

Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.
Japanese proverb

While websites, content management or knowledge management systems can’t match the impact these committed teachers had on so many lives, their worth ethic and values need to be the foundation of how your company averts a knowledge recession.  We all need to step up and freely share knowledge to make our customers stronger by making them more informed.  They will be more capable of weathering this economic downturn as a result.

Bottom line: Re-think how you are making your customers, suppliers and partners stronger by sharing knowledge.  From the most simplistic portal to the most sophisticated knowledge management systems, averting a knowledge recession takes a deliberate effort to break down the walls of fear that are starting to freeze companies from working with each other. 

Flickr credits:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sanchome/525890022/sizes/l/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/genewolf/147722422/sizes/m/

Courtesy – Louis Columbus at Perfect CEM

Building a Bridge of Trust With Customers

As bridges go the one above is not the best example. But it might be for a lot of businesses when it comes to building bridges of trust with their customers.

Selling is all about building a bridge of trust with your customers.

Your company's reputation gets defined with every interaction, every expectation set and fulfilled, every product launched, and every promotional and marketing campaign launched. All of these strategies, tactics and programs define a company's brand and identity. Companies get defined by how they attract, sell and serve customers. Selling is as much about branding as are advertising and promotion – think of the last positive buying experience and you'll see my point.

What's the Most Precious Commodity?

Gold? Wrong. It's trust. With trust being the most precious commodity there is in any customer relationship, it's time to start thinking about how your company's selling strategies influence how it is seen by the outside world.

What do your selling strategies say about your company? In a word, everything. From the stereotypical pushy car salesman who has to check with his manager to give you a good deal and makes you sit for 30 minutes or more to the flight attendant that takes mercy on you and upgrades you even when a flight is 90% full, selling is all about delivering an experience.

Lessons Learned

In looking at how companies are approaching selling online, there are a few lessons learned.

Selling With Honesty Makes You Stronger.

Now before you think I am jumping on a moralistic soap box, consider the fact that social networking is making fallacies, inaccuracies and flat-out lies reverberate around the world in seconds, not days, not weeks – but in the click of a mouse. One only has to reflect on Belkin and their paying for positive reviews to see how transparent the world has become. Buying online using guided selling that delivers on what it promises is actually a competitive advantage – and that is a great strength today.

Exceeding Expectations Online Is All That Matters.

During the projects I've been involved in to create Web-based guided selling applications the tedious, difficult tasks of managing integration to order management, pricing, logistics and ERP systems proved pivotal to ensuring customer responsiveness. It was a ton of work but worth it because customers had a better understanding of when their orders would ship. No, it wasn't perfect but Order Status was the most popular Web-based app created at one electronics distributor. It did make a huge difference in freeing up telemarketers' times.

Buying Experience Trumps Buying Velocity.

When guided selling apps get funded internally there is a strong anticipation that transaction velocity will skyrocket. Sales increase first on convenience items that get sold based on price and availability. Products with historically longer purchase cycles get traction from more efficiently educating customers. Concentrating on making the buying experience transparent is critical so that customers can quickly get to price, availability, and use product configurators to create their own customized versions of products. Delivering on the experience paradoxically drives up velocity over time.

Bottom line:

You are how you sell, and your reputation online is made or broken in second, not weeks or months. Making your guided selling applications deliver beyond expectations is much work but worth the effort.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus

Of to Philippines..…

I am of to Philippines for some work, hence may not be able to post any new post this week.

The Republic of the Philippines, commonly known as the Philippines, is an archipelagic country located in Southeast Asia with Manila as its capital city. The Philippine archipelago comprises 7,107 islands in the western Pacific Ocean, sharing maritime borders with Indonesia, Malaysia, Palau, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Vietnam. The Philippines is the world's 12th most populous country with a population of about 91 million people.Its national economy is the 46th largest in the world with an estimated 2008 gross domestic product (GDP) of over US$154.073 billion.There are more than 11 million overseas Filipinos worldwide, about 11% of the total population of the Philippines. Ecologically, Philippines is considered to be among 17 of the most megadiverse countries in the world.

Prior to the arrival of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan on March 16, 1521, the Philippines were inhabited by Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) peoples, who traded with other Asian peoples such as those from China, India, Japan, and the Malay Archipelago. The Philippines became a Spanish colony in the 16th century, and an American territory at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1896, Katipunan led the Philippine Revolution that gained independence from Spain. American occupation of the Philippines during the Spanish-American War led to the outbreak of the Philippine-American War. A Commonwealth government were established in 1935, which allowed self-governance. The Philippines achieved its independence from the United States on July 4, 1946 after the Pacific Theatre of the Second World War. Martial law was declared in 1972 by Ferdinand Marcos, which led to the insurgencies of the New People's Army and the Moro National Liberation Front. Ninoy Aquino's assassination would soon inspire his widow, Corazon Aquino, as well as the country's former Roman Catholic priest Jaime Cardinal Sin to lead the People Power Revolution of 1986, which would bring the Philippines back to democracy

Modern Philippines has many affinities with the Western world, derived mainly from the cultures of Spain, Latin America, and the United States. Roman Catholicism is the country's predominant religion, although pre-Hispanic indigenous religious practices still exist; there are also followers of Islam. Spanish was an official language of the Philippines until 1973. Since then, the two official languages are Filipino and English.

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Opportunities Are Wide Open to Differentiate through Customer Experience

A recent Ventana Research report titled, "Customer Experience Management: Improving the Consistency and Quality of Customer Interactions," found that only “12 percent of organizations provide optimal [Customer Experience Management] CEM.”

In an era where “customers may be one annoying phone conversation or frustrating experience at a poorly functioning website away from defecting to a competitor,” this seems virtually unthinkable. However, it presents an exceptional opportunity for companies to gain ground on competitors by focusing on the customer experience.

The report also revealed that of those that measure customer satisfaction with handling calls (59%), nearly half (49%) were less than satisfied with the results of their calls! The bulk of this dissatisfaction can be traced back to the desktop and the agent’s interaction with the desktop.

Lack of initiative
Yet despite these facts, barely one in three respondents intends to upgrade their desktop in the next 12 months. And of those, nearly half intend to build a system in-house rather than considering the viable solutions currently available. With proven desktop technology readily available and quick to implement, the choice to wait or to build in-house could be a costly one. 

So what to do next if you’re serious about differentiating on customer experience? The executive summary offers eight key steps.

1. Increase awareness of how CEM can promote business goals.
2. Assess your maturity and take steps to improve.
3. Invest in technologies that help you understand your customers better.
4. Invest further and differently in training and coaching agents.
5. Consider desktop technology to help agents handle interactions more effectively.
6. Review and improve customer self-service.
7. Transition to an integrated, multichannel customer service environment.
8. Create a single view of the customer.

To learn more about the benefits of a smarter agent desktop, download the complimentary Ventana Research benchmark report at www.cincom.com/CEMresearch.

Courtesy – Randy Saunders at Perfect CEM

Why Some Ideas Stick … and Others Stink

Featuring an interview with Dan Heath, Co-Author of the New York Times bestselling book, “Made to Stick.”

Why do some ideas spread like wildfire while others sprout and die out?

Why do some great ideas, with world-altering potential, die on the vine–never to grace us with their fruit? When, if communicated properly, they might have turned our world upside down?

We’ll explore those questions with Dan Heath, co-author of the bestselling book, “Made to Stick.”

But first …

I pitched an idea for a new product and promotional campaign to our company Leadership Board. It’s titled …

The Terrible Tumultuous Terrestrial Total Tipover

The scene:  The world is struck by an electromagnetic storm of apocalyptic proportion. It’s causing the earth to tip over on its axis.

All life will be wiped out in a flash. Unimaginable horrors.

But wait! Read More of this by my dear friend Steve Kayser