Technology and analytics

They cost something, mean something, and have permanence.

As Facebook has grown to more than 600 million users, many companies have been struggling to figure out how to leverage it to help their businesses. Most have limited themselves to advertising or establishing company pages on the platform only to discover that while these methods allow them to engage their Facebook fans in a […]

A source of customer complaints became a source of revenue.

Lessons from the head of McKinsey's negotiation practice.

He could have been the president of any one of a number of successful and growing medium-sized companies in the electronics industry. He had spent the previous day working to salt away the acquisition of a small company that fitted an important position in the product line strategy he had evolved for his organization. Most […]

How does a customer-service expert in Seattle catch the attention of a hot San Francisco startup in San Francisco, 700 miles away? The answer these days is likely to involve networking and brand-building on social media’s “fun” sites — even the ones best known for their tweets, pokes and cat videos. It’s been obvious since […]

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, got flack recently because he took special interest in a page about somone he was dating. The Wikipedia community will get over it, but the kerfuffle calls into question reputation, quality, and the very veracity of the site itself. This would be a salacious detail only of interest to […]

Five communications lessons from the biggest corporate turnaround.

Analytics can't replace intuition.

In the rush to automate, the marketing and sales function is the next frontier. As everybody knows, over the past decade information systems have been making great inroads in engineering and manufacturing. Automation has cut direct labor to a small fraction of production costs—an average of 8% to 12% in manufacturing companies. Therefore, wringing yet […]

There may be fewer, but they'll be more useful.

And making reorgs more effective.

Eliminating algorithmic bias can unlock value for your company.

“Smart” objects offer advertisers new opportunities.

As commercials migrate from television to the Internet, marketers need to use different techniques to keep viewers watching--and to encourage them to...

Are you in control of your content experience?

Contrary to popular belief, social media is not naturally more resistant to marketing tricks. It can be gamed. On Twitter, services exist to boost your follower count and give the impression that you’ve got a vast high-quality network. Bloggers can write articles rich with links that draw the attention of others who would hopefully link […]

In the latest Harvard Business Review, I made the argument that failures can be useful in that they teach us where our assumptions are wrong, expose dead ends, and generally can give us something of an education. In highly uncertain environments, failures are both useful and unavoidable. It was interesting, therefore, to run across an […]

It may soon be standard practice for AI tools — such as GPT-3 and DALL-E — to provide first drafts of emails, articles, reports, blog posts, presentations, videos, and more.

Femtosecond lasers emit pulses of light that last just a millionth of a billionth of a second. These lasers enable surgery so precise that a single mitochondrion can be removed without harming the rest of the cell, and machining so controlled that structures can be micromachined within a piece of glass. Eric Mazur, a professor […]